Chris Miller: evaluation

Transcript context

…Absolute legend. And so after Brian had left HubSpot, it was a bit start and stop. And so when I joined and we sort of took another stab at it, I think there were a few things we did. One, in the beginning is we really had an aggressive mentality, an aggressive approach I think. And by we, I mean the team, the actual really small initial growth team. We tried not to be pedantic about where we were spending our time. And so we sort of tossed our mission and charter out of the window. We said, cool, maybe on paper we were, I think the sales tool, activation team. It was a very boutique mission and remit compared to I think a lot of the other teams at HubSpot's missions and remit at the time. But even though that's what we were supposed to be working on paper, we were sort of like, if we find something that looks like an opportunity and no one else in the business is thinking about it, we're just going to try to fix it. We're going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission and start to call some plays. And what that looked like was at the time, a very small percentage of, I think HubSpot's subscription revenue would be described as self-service, like people putting in their credit card and buying something. It was predominantly product driven leads like PQLs. And so we were literally sending everything to the sales team, which it was running revenue, but certainly opportunities for efficiency because it was the first time we'd really had a product at a price point that could be transactional and not a highly considered purchase. And so we were thinking about this and we were like, "Well, how does this work? Is there even a pricing page in the product that people could actually buy something?" And we found it, but it had been neglected. It was sort of like, I think no one was sort of committing any code to that repository. So we approached a team who owned it and we were like, "Are y'all working on this? Is this an active development?" And they were like, "Nah, we're working on a bunch of other stuff." We were like, "Can we take this?" And they were like, "Sure, if you want it, take it. It's one less code base for us to maintain." And so we took it and immediately blew it up. We redesigned the whole thing focused on discoverability, how are people getting to this page, focusing on desirability, like how are we talking about the value props of the things that we're wanting to sell to customers to help them grow better. And then thinking about doability or usability, how do we actually just remove the friction that's standing in the way? And so we did a mad dash towards this outcome we wanted to drive, and when we released it worked. It was actually a step function change in the way that the physics of the business and the funnel really looked. And I think that was probably a catalyst moment of everyone saying, "Oh wow, there might actually be something here." n change in the way that the physics of the business and the funnel really looked. And I think that was probably a catalyst moment of everyone saying, "Oh wow, there might actually be something here." And so that attitude of saying that every problem is our problem and being willing to really take a mentality of like, I think radical accountability and ownership mentality helped us find opportunities that maybe the business wasn't explicitly asking us to solve, but we were able to triangulate why it might be important for the business for us to solve it. And when you do that, I think the business, a business may get more comfortable putting more on your plate. Right? And so it's like we look hungry, so let's keep feeding us. And so over time our remit expands and there's other things that we think are opportunities to gain leverage for the business or deliver a delight to our customers in a more efficient way, and honestly in a way that they probably expected to engage with us at that point in time. It was quite odd that there were so many humans involved in every stage of the customer journey and some of our customers just like, "I just want to be able to try the thing and buy it if I want to be. I really don't want to be forced into a sales engagement." And so it was really kind of meeting the expectations of the modern software buyer in many ways.…

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