The Exchanges

Q A hundred percent. The, the element that's interesting and slightly nuanced, though, is the element of accountability and attribution, and it's, should marketing be held accountable to a number tied directly to revenue? Leads alone ain't worth much, actually, if they don't convert. Um, so how do you think about creating frameworks of accountability and attribution around The initiatives that marketing does to prove the effectiveness.

A Yeah. So, so look, you're talking about a problem of attribution, which is, has always been a problem as long as marketing exists, will always be a problem as long as marketing exists. And it kind of ebbs and flows. And like, honestly, it's going to get kind of worse in the short term because data from Google and Facebook and other channels is getting worse, not better. For example, email data getting worse, not better. And so What you have to do is measuring something is more of an internal alignment exercise than it is an analytic exercise. You have to understand on the puts and takes of between marketing sales, CFO, CEO, what do we agree on? So for example, Harry, there's overlap across marketing and sales and across marketing channels. So how are you going to account for overlap? Like in your attribution is like a big thing that you have to figure out. And there's. Endless ways that you could rationalize to do it right. So it matters less what you decide and matters more that the business agrees that, oh, this way we're doing it is good and fair to everyone and is an accurate representation of what we think is going to grow and scale this company, you know? And so when, when I think about it, I think every marketer in the future should have, should be directly accountable to revenue, both inbound and outbound, whatever that may be. For your business, you know, and in SaaS e…

AI assessment note: “every marketer in the future should have, should be directly accountable to revenue”

Q Is that not hard to get that promotion CMO though? If you move between different roles, constantly kind of flatlined, do you not need to show a spike of excellence and you won't show the spike of excellence unless you concentrate in some way?

A So the question I think we're asking is, Oh, cool. If I have one spike of excellence, is that enough to get me to be a CMO in an average organization? Maybe what I'm advocating for is multiple spikes of excellence, which is like, Hey, I I've got a spike of excellence in marketing automation. And then I went and did 18 months in product marketing and killed it. This is the progress and success we had. And then I did 18 months in acquisition, demand generation marketing. We grew demand a hundred percent year over year. Now, let me talk to you about how I also built the teams that I made to accomplish those things and how I think about hiring people. And then you're, then you're off. That's the ideal candidate. It's a hard thing to do in practice, but that is the person that a founder really wants.

AI assessment note: “Maybe what I'm advocating for is multiple spikes of excellence”

Q We spoke about the changing hats there, and the challenge in moving to GM. I totally get you, and I spoke to Kieran on your team before this, and he said, I always wonder, is the role of CMO lonely? Um, and I thought the same when he said it. Do you find the role of CMO lonely, and what's the most challenging aspect for you?

A It's super lonely, right? Like, think about it. You Have a pretty broad sense and go, we get to the second part of your question, right, which is the challenging part. I don't know that there's another business discipline that requires as much context switching and broad knowledge than marketing. So for example, what I mean by that is like, you need to understand like the depths of like distribution on Google and, uh, Facebook. You got to understand email score deliverability and GDPR and data privacy regulations, but you need to understand what great design looks like. And what a perfect event experience looks like. And oh, oh, by the way, how to model and attribute all of that so that you can do what you need to do for your sales team. Oh, and also, and then what's the story we're going to package for product for the product team and how are we going to take that product to market? Once you start stacking all the very different things that are actually fundamentally very different skills, it's a very broad job. And that's what makes it lonely because. At any month, you're doing, you're kind of focused on one part of it, and every, and so the vast majority of your team is like off doing other things that you're not thinking about and doing because you're trying to fix the one of those many parts that is broken in that moment.

AI assessment note: “It's super lonely, right? Like, think about it.”

Q Can I, can I ask, can you take me to a time when you thought one was working, double down on it, and it didn't work?

A So in the early days of HubSpot, we had a free tool called website greater. You put your, you put your website in and it returned a report. Awesome. Like people were sharing it on social, like really grew big part of how we kind of generated leads emails for automation, all of that kind of stuff. Still, still do, but man, it had a peak and then really trough down. And I think we actually made a bigger mistake than the one you're asking, which was. We spent a bunch of time trying to redo it, do the product re redo website greater to re accelerate that growth. And we didn't realize that actually it had a point in time and then it has a new steady state after that initial like point in time where websites really got mitigated through the diverse diversification of the web, the import rise of different social channels, people consuming across different media types, websites are still important, but they weren't like the thing like they were in the late 2000, early 2000 teens, you know, and so I think the mistake that we made there is thinking, oh, you can salvage that and get back to that peak. You know, we spent a while, like a couple of years trying to do that, and I think we would have been much, much better off, for example, if I had a time machine, I would have said, no, no, no, our job is to like get the best steady run rate, and we should go and conquer a new channel with th…

AI assessment note: “We spent a bunch of time trying to redo it... to re accelerate that growth.”

Q I need to see, but I need a CEO to really run the day-to-day processes. I have the feeling that I want someone young, hungry, who's not done it before, but is a complete fucking hustler. But then I'm also worried that actually I need a seasoned CEO who's run big media companies before. How do you think about the stretch VP versus the seasoned exec from a big firm?

A Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll broaden this up to just founders overall. Right. And if you're, if you're found, I get this question all the time. Do I, am I good with like a junior director of marketing for awhile? Do I need a VP? Like, what do I need a CMO? What, what, what is it? What is it that I need? Right. And what you have to say is. Balanced teams win teams with a balance of perspective and skills win at the end of the day. And so if you're a CEO, for example, on the startup side, who's passionate about marketing, it's been doing a lot of the company's marketing in the early days. Well, then you can, you know, what's up. You can probably get by with a stretch candidate, right? Because you know, a lot of it, if you are a super product driven CEO and you are crushing on the product, but you don't know shit about marketing. Then stretching is not going to be a good thing. So just on the media company side, Harry, if you are awesome at operations and you are process driven, you know how to scale stuff, then you can go and stretch somebody. If you are not those things and you want to bring in somebody to be those things, then you need to have somebody with those skills more established.

AI assessment note: “if you are awesome at operations... you can go and stretch somebody.”

Q I'm sure, respectfully. Um, and so, like, when you review the mistakes you've made as a CMO with HubSpot, what was the most significant to you, and what would you say was the big lesson that you took away from it?

A I will tell you what the most significant is. It's one of the things I talk with founders or companies I invest in constantly, and it's the mistakes, always people related. People are much harder than strategy. Turns out strategy is often much clearer. The people side of it. Do you have the right people with the right skills for the right stage of your company is actually the hard thing. The biggest mistakes I have made is not hiring The right person or not knowing that I needed a person with a new level of skill set at that stage and scale of the company or holding on to somebody who was really good for that last stage of growth, but isn't good for this next stage of growth too long. Right. And being, being too close to that.

AI assessment note: “The biggest mistakes I have made is not hiring The right person”

Q It is going to be a great show, but I want to start with a little bit on you. I love a bit of context setting. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups? And then how did you come to really leave one of the most powerful marketing and growth talks in HubSpot today?

A Look, um, I wish I had some master plan. I didn't. Uh, I was, I'm somebody who's just a really, really curious and obsessive person. I love to learn. And in the early 2000, I saw the internet happening and I was doing marketing at a bunch of different marketing agencies. And I was like, wow, this internet is going to change how people do marketing. And I didn't know what I was doing, but I realized one really important thing that when something's new, everybody has the same baseline of knowledge, right? It's not like somebody has been doing it for 30 years and has some advantage. I was like, Great. So all I have to do is learn faster than everybody else. And I can, I can be successful. And so it's all I did is I read, I networked, I went to events. I did a blog. I had a blog called, uh, social media B to B, which was all about just like how social in the web, we're going to impact B to B boring kind of traditional companies. Nobody was talking about that then. Right. Cause they were all talking about the consumer stuff and all of that work. You know, I'd kind of wake up at five AM and grind out some blog posts and then go to work and then kind of do that every day. Let me to meet Brian Dermesh at HubSpot, which was amazing, kind of, and they were like, Hey, why don't you come help us? And, and I've met them and I was like, Oh, they believe the same thing I believe in the world.…

AI assessment note: “Let me to meet Brian Dermesh at HubSpot, which was amazing”

Q Can I ask brand marketing wise to be very clear? How do you define brand marketing one? And then what do you think you've done so well? That means thousands of people want to come to your conferences. People don't want to fucking go to conferences. Thousands want to go to yours. What have you done? Well, brown marketing wise to inspire that feeling within customers.

A So when I think about brand, Harry, I think it is the emotional benefit of not just your product, your service, But your company, like, why do you exist in the world? And what, what do you make people feel? You know, and from the very beginning at HubSpot, our, our goal was we want people to feel like we are there to help them, teach them, like guide them through this transformation. And so that just became the principle. And so in the early days, you know, I talked to startups all the time and they're like, look, I don't have a bunch of money for this expensive brand marketing. I'm like, cool. Yeah, no, we didn't either tell you what we did. We had a good story that resonated with people. We wrote a book. We spoke at conferences. We wrote a blog. All that stuff was actually pretty cheap. The hard part, the expensive part was getting the story and agreeing that that story was the right story to tell and having it really tight and everything. And so that, that whole message is kind of cascaded through and that becomes a movement that becomes an emotion. And so people want to come to our event, not because people, most conferences are marketed as like, oh, It's gonna be great networking. You're gonna get to learn from your peers, right? And I think that's like, if you think about most big conferences, like that's what it is. People come to our event, like we're having our event i…

AI assessment note: “we had a good story that resonated with people. We wrote a book. We spoke at conferences.”

Q We spoke about the changing hats there, and the challenge in moving to GM. I totally get you, and I spoke to Kieran on your team before this, and he said, I always wonder, is the role of CMO lonely? Um, and I thought the same when he said it. Do you find the role of CMO lonely, and what's the most challenging aspect for you?

A It's super lonely, right? Like, think about it. You Have a pretty broad sense and go, we get to the second part of your question, right, which is the challenging part. I don't know that there's another business discipline that requires as much context switching and broad knowledge than marketing. So for example, what I mean by that is like, you need to understand like the depths of like distribution on Google and, uh, Facebook. You got to understand email score deliverability and GDPR and data privacy regulations, but you need to understand what great design looks like. And what a perfect event experience looks like. And oh, oh, by the way, how to model and attribute all of that so that you can do what you need to do for your sales team. Oh, and also, and then what's the story we're going to package for product for the product team and how are we going to take that product to market? Once you start stacking all the very different things that are actually fundamentally very different skills, it's a very broad job. And that's what makes it lonely because. At any month, you're doing, you're kind of focused on one part of it, and every, and so the vast majority of your team is like off doing other things that you're not thinking about and doing because you're trying to fix the one of those many parts that is broken in that moment.

AI assessment note: “It's super lonely, right? Like, think about it.”

Q Can I, can I ask, can you take me to a time when you thought one was working, double down on it, and it didn't work?

A So in the early days of HubSpot, we had a free tool called website greater. You put your, you put your website in and it returned a report. Awesome. Like people were sharing it on social, like really grew big part of how we kind of generated leads emails for automation, all of that kind of stuff. Still, still do, but man, it had a peak and then really trough down. And I think we actually made a bigger mistake than the one you're asking, which was. We spent a bunch of time trying to redo it, do the product re redo website greater to re accelerate that growth. And we didn't realize that actually it had a point in time and then it has a new steady state after that initial like point in time where websites really got mitigated through the diverse diversification of the web, the import rise of different social channels, people consuming across different media types, websites are still important, but they weren't like the thing like they were in the late 2000, early 2000 teens, you know, and so I think the mistake that we made there is thinking, oh, you can salvage that and get back to that peak. You know, we spent a while, like a couple of years trying to do that, and I think we would have been much, much better off, for example, if I had a time machine, I would have said, no, no, no, our job is to like get the best steady run rate, and we should go and conquer a new channel with th…

AI assessment note: “So in the early days of HubSpot, we had a free tool called website greater.”

Q kind of the mix between organic and paid. And I find too many too earlier, like, no, I need diversification of channel. And I'm like, no, you don't. It's working on Facebook. It's working on paid. Just keep going. It's rare to have it working. How do you think about the diversification of channel, and then also how to transition between channel when you maybe see a denigration of effectiveness?

A If you are good at what you do in distributing things on the internet, every channel of any scale that I know of, you have years and years of runway. Sure. You know, I'll tell, I'll tell you this, what this Harry, I, I, my first job at HubSpot is I wrote the HubSpot blog. I wrote, I think we did like three posts a day for, you know, a year or whatever. And we did that to get organic search traffic. We're still doing that. We are. 14 years, 15 years into that blog grind and it's still working. We're still growing that traffic. Yeah. We've expanded topics. Yes, we have. We're optimizing the old stuff, all of that. But think about that. Like, I've made that work for over a decade and a half. If you're thinking you're going to run out of runway in 12 months, you're just kind of an idiot. Like, you just, you're not thinking about the real potential of what you have. Humanity's natural proclivity is to go do a new thing. You know, because they're bored of the old thing. The most successful people say, wait, wait, wait, I have this thing that's working really well. How do I make it better and better every day? And how do I be a top one percent person in the world at this thing? Like, if you look, you're a really smart, savvy investor, right? You've seen all kinds of companies at all kinds of stages. I think you're going to agree that the following is true. It startup that gets tractio…

AI assessment note: “startup that gets traction and really kicks off. They've got one predictable growth channel.”

Q with your customer. The challenge and the question I have for you is HubSpot is bought by a huge variety of customers, incredibly horizontal product. How do you think about resonance when it's anyone from a gardening company to a dentist to a mom and pop cookie store? When it's such a horizontal product, how do you think about that brand marketing story resonating across the Like horizontal customer base.

A All those people have the same problems. All of those people have the same, same problems. You have to find the unit. The best, best stories are when you can find the universal truths across your customer base that people are afraid to say out loud, but they believe and tell them to them. Right? Like that's what we did with inbound marketing. It's like people knew that they were sending out 10,000 direct mail, uh, you know, cards at work and then going home and throwing everything in the mailbox away. They knew that, but they didn't want to admit that to themselves, right? They needed somebody to tell them and not just tell them in a shameful way, but tell them in a, Hey, it's okay. There's a better way. You know, that is the universal truth here that I think Every business has to get to is, you know, we have this big, diverse group of customers. Yeah, we do, but they're all trying to grow. They're all trying to feel, feel to solve a crisis of disconnection with their own customers, right? They're, they feel like they're a mile away from their own customers, whether that be attracting them in keeping and retaining them. And so we can, I don't care if you're an architect, a manufacturing company, a software company, if I can talk to you in that way and give you real practical, um, ways to do that on top of that emotional benefit of doing that, then that, then that doesn't matter…

AI assessment note: “find the universal truths across your customer base that people are afraid to say out loud”

Q I need to see, but I need a CEO to really run the day-to-day processes. I have the feeling that I want someone young, hungry, who's not done it before, but is a complete fucking hustler. But then I'm also worried that actually I need a seasoned CEO who's run big media companies before. How do you think about the stretch VP versus the seasoned exec from a big firm?

A Yeah. I'll, I'll, I'll broaden this up to just founders overall. Right. And if you're, if you're found, I get this question all the time. Do I, am I good with like a junior director of marketing for awhile? Do I need a VP? Like, what do I need a CMO? What, what, what is it? What is it that I need? Right. And what you have to say is. Balanced teams win teams with a balance of perspective and skills win at the end of the day. And so if you're a CEO, for example, on the startup side, who's passionate about marketing, it's been doing a lot of the company's marketing in the early days. Well, then you can, you know, what's up. You can probably get by with a stretch candidate, right? Because you know, a lot of it, if you are a super product driven CEO and you are crushing on the product, but you don't know shit about marketing. Then stretching is not going to be a good thing. So just on the media company side, Harry, if you are awesome at operations and you are process driven, you know how to scale stuff, then you can go and stretch somebody. If you are not those things and you want to bring in somebody to be those things, then you need to have somebody with those skills more established.

AI assessment note: “if you are awesome at operations... then you can go and stretch somebody.”

Q I totally agree with you. Um, how do you know when to let someone go? I'm shit at letting someone go.

A You know when to let someone go when. It is clear that you you're clear on what you're trying to achieve. You have told them what you were trying to achieve, set expectations with them about what it takes to get there, and they have not been able to do it. For a period of time that you guys agree on. Normally, normally you would say, you know, you can normally see progress pretty quick in a month or two. And like, you can say, oh, this person's on the progress, progressive path. They're going to get there. You can say, this person is actually just not, this is actually just a fundamentally wrong job for them. They actually care about this other thing that I don't need right now. And they should go to another organization and go do that and be great at it.

AI assessment note: “You know when to let someone go when. It is clear that”

Q was funny, when we tweeted last night about your coming on the show, I got a load of DMs from aspiring marketers who want to be CMOs, and there was about 10 of them who said, hey, can you ask the question of what would you advise aspiring marketers who want to become CMOs in order to get that promotion and get that step up into the role of CMO?

A Yeah. So if you're, this works for CMO, but I think it works broader than CMO, right? You have to make some, if you want to be great at something, whether you want to be a CMO, whether you want to be CEO, found a successful company, you have to make a series of counterintuitive trade-offs that you wouldn't think you'd otherwise make. Most people that I know who, who want to be a CMO, but don't get there, don't make trade-offs. What I mean by that is like, cool. You know what, Kip? I really want to be a CMO. Great. Well, well, what's the next job you're going to take? Well, you know, I've been doing, you know, marketing automation. It's going really well for me, so I'm going to go take a director of marketing automation. They're going to pay me 20% more. It's going to be awesome. I'm like, great, but what if you just go learn a completely different part of marketing? And you go make 20% less in the short term, but while you, you get a real breadth of experience and now you're actually ready to be a CMO. And most people don't make those changes. You, if you want to be a CMO, you have to figure out how to get a breadth of knowledge and you have to figure out how to scale your leadership and get things done through others. Most really talented marketers are amazing individual contributors. They have a hard time delegating and scaling through others. And the magic of being a marketi…

AI assessment note: “you have to figure out how to get a breadth of knowledge”

Q How do you, how do you, I totally agree. How do you think about creating such great cross-functional relationships with sales, with product, with engineering, to really allow yourself to be kind of plastic across the different functional areas?

A Look, the thing everybody listens to this show needs to understand is that humans are incentive-based creatures, right? Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything. If you have a problem collaborating, it is because you have competing goals or you have competing incentives against those goals. And so job one is to be very clear on those goals and make sure the goals are, are aligned between whether it be marketing and product marketing and sales. We talked about attribution. Once you have your SLA, your attribution, all of that set up, it's actually very clear. The incentives are aligned and then you just come up with a check-in and like communication process around that. Most people fail because they don't set that foundation and instead they just go and kind of do a bunch of, a bunch of stuff and kind of over index on the relationship building side, which is really important, but the relationship part can be secondary if you've got the right foundation and infrastructure, uh, around goals and accountability.

AI assessment note: “Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything.”

Q Can I ask, when do you think the tide turned and the realization for everyone else became very apparent that what you were doing was right?

A I'd say about 20 14 ish, 2013 to 20 14. You know, basically what happened, Harry, is that Facebook ads, especially got real in that world. And basically Google, Facebook, all of the ad, those ad products got way mature. And then we got good enough. It's like organic search, for example, that like, oh, you could build a real business. And like Kieran and I were doing it at HubSpot. Right. And people were looking up and being like, oh, how did these guys have millions of people interested in this boring, boring, quote unquote, B to B software company. And I think Between that, the inbound marketing book, everything of that movement, it took, it took a while, but then that's when it really started, I think, happening for real.

AI assessment note: “I'd say about 20 14 ish, 2013 to 20 14.”

Q kind of the mix between organic and paid. And I find too many too earlier, like, no, I need diversification of channel. And I'm like, no, you don't. It's working on Facebook. It's working on paid. Just keep going. It's rare to have it working. How do you think about the diversification of channel, and then also how to transition between channel when you maybe see a denigration of effectiveness?

A If you are good at what you do in distributing things on the internet, every channel of any scale that I know of, you have years and years of runway. Sure. You know, I'll tell, I'll tell you this, what this Harry, I, I, my first job at HubSpot is I wrote the HubSpot blog. I wrote, I think we did like three posts a day for, you know, a year or whatever. And we did that to get organic search traffic. We're still doing that. We are. 14 years, 15 years into that blog grind and it's still working. We're still growing that traffic. Yeah. We've expanded topics. Yes, we have. We're optimizing the old stuff, all of that. But think about that. Like, I've made that work for over a decade and a half. If you're thinking you're going to run out of runway in 12 months, you're just kind of an idiot. Like, you just, you're not thinking about the real potential of what you have. Humanity's natural proclivity is to go do a new thing. You know, because they're bored of the old thing. The most successful people say, wait, wait, wait, I have this thing that's working really well. How do I make it better and better every day? And how do I be a top one percent person in the world at this thing? Like, if you look, you're a really smart, savvy investor, right? You've seen all kinds of companies at all kinds of stages. I think you're going to agree that the following is true. It startup that gets tractio…

AI assessment note: “every channel of any scale that I know of, you have years and years of runway.”

Q I'm sure, respectfully. Um, and so, like, when you review the mistakes you've made as a CMO with HubSpot, what was the most significant to you, and what would you say was the big lesson that you took away from it?

A I will tell you what the most significant is. It's one of the things I talk with founders or companies I invest in constantly, and it's the mistakes, always people related. People are much harder than strategy. Turns out strategy is often much clearer. The people side of it. Do you have the right people with the right skills for the right stage of your company is actually the hard thing. The biggest mistakes I have made is not hiring The right person or not knowing that I needed a person with a new level of skill set at that stage and scale of the company or holding on to somebody who was really good for that last stage of growth, but isn't good for this next stage of growth too long. Right. And being, being too close to that.

AI assessment note: “The biggest mistakes I have made is not hiring The right person”

Q Will you not only just then be mediocre at something that you were shit at?

A No. So, uh, so we, we have a couple minutes here. I'll tell you, I'll tell you a little bit about me and my approach to this, Harry. I'm a serial obsessive. I love learning things. I believe that anybody can get to like 80, 90% proficiency in something in three to six months of like learning something, maybe not necessarily doing something, but learning perspective, applying that knowledge. And I've done it across all kinds of things that you would, you know, whether it be marketing, whether it be personal hobbies, whatever that may be. And how you do that is you have to approach learning very differently. Most people go and they buy the most popular books and they follow, listen to the most popular podcasts and all of that. And that's a way to do it. How you actually go and do this is you find who are the people that the majority of, of the world think are smart at this topic. Great. We ha I've got that outlined. Who are the people that those people learn from? And I go straight to them. And there's normally like these background, less popular, less, less personality people that have all the fucking knowledge in the whole world. And you go straight to them and you are unabashed and you say, Hey, I will pay you for an hour of your time. I will pay you for a day every time. I don't care. I am trying to be the best in the world at this thing. Can you help me? And you flatter them…

AI assessment note: “No... anybody can get to like 80, 90% proficiency in something in three to six months”

Q you don't need to be on every channel. When people are on every channel, they do it poorly. But if you do, channels are so individual and specialist to win on YouTube is very different to winning on LinkedIn or Twitter. You need teams per channel. Do you agree with me? And how do you think about channel selection, prioritization, resource allocation? Love to hear how you think about that.

A Oh yeah. You're, you're, you're speaking my language. It's a hard problem, right? Cause founders want to do everything and They also want to track everything. And so first challenge here is tracking is getting harder every day. Data privacy is making track tracking attribution, ROI much harder every day. And I think if you're a founder out there, you're going to do some type of advertising that works well for you. It might be Google, might be Facebook, might be YouTube. You're going to have, but you're going to have some primary advertising channel and you're going to need one to two primary organic channels. And I think it depends, dependence on your scale and your competition. Like if I was doing a two by two to answer your question, I would say, you know, do I need a few people every month or do I need hundreds of thousands of people every month? And do I have no competition or do I have a lot of competition? Right. And so depending on which quadrant you fall in, I think depends what, what channel you would actually pick. So if you are going, I have a lot of competition and I need a lot of people, then you're probably doing YouTube. Right? Because classic Google search is the first place everybody goes. And so if you have less competition, then go to Google search. Text is easier, right? And the conversion rates are a little higher. If you have, if you're just entering a ver…

AI assessment note: “depending on which quadrant you fall in, I think depends what, what channel you would actually pick.”

Q it's a game of who can survive the longest. I've been doing this for seven, eight years. Yes. We have hundreds of thousands of listeners, But it's seven, eight years every weekend grind, but sometimes it still doesn't work. And so my question to you is like, how do you know when to give up on a new channel versus when to just keep persisting and the tide will turn?

A Oh, that's, you know, that's a great question. And so when I think about Enduring on a new channel. I think about like my moral imperatives. Like, do I have another choice? Sometimes you don't have another choice. Sometimes you're like, cool. If I can't make Google search work, then this business is just not going to work. I'm not going to be able to acquire customers at a low enough cost to make this business work, for example. And so if that's the case, then you gotta, then you gotta grind it out. If that's not the case, I look at it as like, are you able to make real predictable growth progress? You know, are you able to increase your subscribers and your distribution on that channel, even if it's small, but are the growth rates meaningful? Can you grow that thing? You know, four or five, six percent, seven, eight, nine, 10% month over month, even if the numbers are small, it's like, oh, I'm figuring this out. And can you point to clear things that you have learned? That are going to, that are driving that growth. If you have, then grind it out. If you don't know what the hell you're doing and your, your flat performance, and you're just kind of like throwing stuff at the wall, then it doesn't matter what you're doing. You're not going to be successful. Well, you have to understand is you have to think like a creator. You have to have a creator, either be one yourself or hav…

AI assessment note: “If you don't know what the hell you're doing and your flat performance”

Q this specific, and they go, oh no, no, I, I'm, content's not my thing, I'm not into a personal brand, and I'm like, fuck, no one goes to the gym and is like, oh, I feel at home, this is so me, no, it takes time, like, It's a muscle. You keep working it. Do you agree? And how do you advise founders today on that building that personal brand?

A Here's what you have to know. I'm, I'm a first principles driven person. I'm just logical to a fault for, for better or for worse. And so every company in the world is either distribution constrained or product constraint. Right. They don't have a product that's good enough to sell to their customers for the price that they want to sell it for, or they, they do, and they can't get that product out in front of customers for a low enough cost. Right. And normally what happens when you're early on in a business, there's those two things are kind of like S curves and the product S curve is always the first, right? You're trying to find product market fit. You kind of get middle of the way up that curve and you kind of found it and that's awesome. And then, then you start that second S curve, which is the distribution one. And most companies fail, not because of the product curve, but because of the distribution curve. And so you can, you could not want, not want to do content. What have you, you have to solve distribution. So what I would say to them is cool. You don't want to be a creator. You don't care about personal brand. Great. How are we going to get scalable distribution at a low cost? The content's one way, but if you tell me you have an awesome viral loop, cool, then I don't give a shit. If you care about content, you can make it work. If you have some repeat, uh, uh, rep…

AI assessment note: “So what I would say to them is cool. You don't want to be a creator.”

Q on Times Square, what would you put on it, put on it in 10 words or less? The amount of founders that can coherently say an answer, I'd say 10%, if that, five percent that are actually good. I find that appalling. I'm intrigued. How do you, do you agree with me on the state of product marketing today, and how do you think about the most effective product marketing?

A Yeah. I'll give you, I'll give you my, my rant on product marketing. Harry just gave us his rant. I'm going to give you mine. Um, well, most founders are inherently logical humans and they're often very product driven humans, right? So you know what they do? They go hire product marketing. It's one of the first functions they want to hire. And you're like, oh, this sounds great. You're going to help me tell a story around the product. That's never what happens. What happens is those people become Operators and like basically story like, like project story pushers around, you know, it's like, oh, I'm going to run from to this product leader to this business leader. And it becomes basically internal gymnastics versus external storytelling. And they pull these product marketers so close to them that their product markers are too close to the founder and not close enough to the customer. And when the product marketers do get closer to the customer, The companies often don't make the hard choice of saying, this is what my customer wants, but it's not what we're going to give them because they need something they do not yet know that they want. And they, I need to package a different story for them. I think the best companies that have the best story don't start with product marketing. They start with the problem that their customer has. So if we take the HubSpot story, for example, …

AI assessment note: “the best companies that have the best story don't start with product marketing”

Q Can I ask brand marketing wise to be very clear? How do you define brand marketing one? And then what do you think you've done so well? That means thousands of people want to come to your conferences. People don't want to fucking go to conferences. Thousands want to go to yours. What have you done? Well, brown marketing wise to inspire that feeling within customers.

A So when I think about brand, Harry, I think it is the emotional benefit of not just your product, your service, But your company, like, why do you exist in the world? And what, what do you make people feel? You know, and from the very beginning at HubSpot, our, our goal was we want people to feel like we are there to help them, teach them, like guide them through this transformation. And so that just became the principle. And so in the early days, you know, I talked to startups all the time and they're like, look, I don't have a bunch of money for this expensive brand marketing. I'm like, cool. Yeah, no, we didn't either tell you what we did. We had a good story that resonated with people. We wrote a book. We spoke at conferences. We wrote a blog. All that stuff was actually pretty cheap. The hard part, the expensive part was getting the story and agreeing that that story was the right story to tell and having it really tight and everything. And so that, that whole message is kind of cascaded through and that becomes a movement that becomes an emotion. And so people want to come to our event, not because people, most conferences are marketed as like, oh, It's gonna be great networking. You're gonna get to learn from your peers, right? And I think that's like, if you think about most big conferences, like that's what it is. People come to our event, like we're having our event i…

AI assessment note: “I think it is the emotional benefit of not just your product, your service”

Q with your customer. The challenge and the question I have for you is HubSpot is bought by a huge variety of customers, incredibly horizontal product. How do you think about resonance when it's anyone from a gardening company to a dentist to a mom and pop cookie store? When it's such a horizontal product, how do you think about that brand marketing story resonating across the Like horizontal customer base.

A All those people have the same problems. All of those people have the same, same problems. You have to find the unit. The best, best stories are when you can find the universal truths across your customer base that people are afraid to say out loud, but they believe and tell them to them. Right? Like that's what we did with inbound marketing. It's like people knew that they were sending out 10,000 direct mail, uh, you know, cards at work and then going home and throwing everything in the mailbox away. They knew that, but they didn't want to admit that to themselves, right? They needed somebody to tell them and not just tell them in a shameful way, but tell them in a, Hey, it's okay. There's a better way. You know, that is the universal truth here that I think Every business has to get to is, you know, we have this big, diverse group of customers. Yeah, we do, but they're all trying to grow. They're all trying to feel, feel to solve a crisis of disconnection with their own customers, right? They're, they feel like they're a mile away from their own customers, whether that be attracting them in keeping and retaining them. And so we can, I don't care if you're an architect, a manufacturing company, a software company, if I can talk to you in that way and give you real practical, um, ways to do that on top of that emotional benefit of doing that, then that, then that doesn't matter…

AI assessment note: “find the universal truths across your customer base that people are afraid to say out loud”

Q A hundred percent. The, the element that's interesting and slightly nuanced, though, is the element of accountability and attribution, and it's, should marketing be held accountable to a number tied directly to revenue? Leads alone ain't worth much, actually, if they don't convert. Um, so how do you think about creating frameworks of accountability and attribution around The initiatives that marketing does to prove the effectiveness.

A Yeah. So, so look, you're talking about a problem of attribution, which is, has always been a problem as long as marketing exists, will always be a problem as long as marketing exists. And it kind of ebbs and flows. And like, honestly, it's going to get kind of worse in the short term because data from Google and Facebook and other channels is getting worse, not better. For example, email data getting worse, not better. And so What you have to do is measuring something is more of an internal alignment exercise than it is an analytic exercise. You have to understand on the puts and takes of between marketing sales, CFO, CEO, what do we agree on? So for example, Harry, there's overlap across marketing and sales and across marketing channels. So how are you going to account for overlap? Like in your attribution is like a big thing that you have to figure out. And there's. Endless ways that you could rationalize to do it right. So it matters less what you decide and matters more that the business agrees that, oh, this way we're doing it is good and fair to everyone and is an accurate representation of what we think is going to grow and scale this company, you know? And so when, when I think about it, I think every marketer in the future should have, should be directly accountable to revenue, both inbound and outbound, whatever that may be. For your business, you know, and in SaaS e…

AI assessment note: “every marketer in the future should have, should be directly accountable to revenue”

Q So how, how do you actually do it? How do you form that detachment where you switch hats, put on the GM hat and take off, bluntly remove a bit of the humanity and go, this is not what we need.

A You have to be, you have to look at everything from like the principle and problem layer, right? You actually have to take The people in totality out and you have to say, okay, I am trying to grow. What are my constraints for growth based on those constraints for growth? What is it that I need to do and what is the success in doing those things look like? And you literally write it out. Like, this is what I need to do. This is the type of skills and activities that will happen to be successful. Once you have all that finished, then you can go and like overlay it on top of the people and be like, oh, great. Well, what we need to do is actually this person has the skills to do what we need to do. So that's fantastic. And we can go and March on to do it, or actually this person doesn't, but I think I could coach them because it's just a small gap or, oh, actually there's a big gap. And what I need to do is bring in somebody with a different set of skills to help us Get to that next stage of the problem.

AI assessment note: “You actually have to take The people in totality out”

Q I totally agree with you. Um, how do you know when to let someone go? I'm shit at letting someone go.

A You know when to let someone go when. It is clear that you you're clear on what you're trying to achieve. You have told them what you were trying to achieve, set expectations with them about what it takes to get there, and they have not been able to do it. For a period of time that you guys agree on. Normally, normally you would say, you know, you can normally see progress pretty quick in a month or two. And like, you can say, oh, this person's on the progress, progressive path. They're going to get there. You can say, this person is actually just not, this is actually just a fundamentally wrong job for them. They actually care about this other thing that I don't need right now. And they should go to another organization and go do that and be great at it.

AI assessment note: “You know when to let someone go when. It is clear that you you're clear”

Q How do you, how do you, I totally agree. How do you think about creating such great cross-functional relationships with sales, with product, with engineering, to really allow yourself to be kind of plastic across the different functional areas?

A Look, the thing everybody listens to this show needs to understand is that humans are incentive-based creatures, right? Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything. If you have a problem collaborating, it is because you have competing goals or you have competing incentives against those goals. And so job one is to be very clear on those goals and make sure the goals are, are aligned between whether it be marketing and product marketing and sales. We talked about attribution. Once you have your SLA, your attribution, all of that set up, it's actually very clear. The incentives are aligned and then you just come up with a check-in and like communication process around that. Most people fail because they don't set that foundation and instead they just go and kind of do a bunch of, a bunch of stuff and kind of over index on the relationship building side, which is really important, but the relationship part can be secondary if you've got the right foundation and infrastructure, uh, around goals and accountability.

AI assessment note: “Incentives and alignment around goals and incentives fix everything.”