UpdateAI – Zoom meeting assistant

Episode #88 Customer-Centric Operations at the Heart of Customer Delight ft. Jonathan Corbin (former Global VP of CS & Strategy HubSpot)

Building customer relationships is a foundational pillar of ensuring business success. Over time, as the company’s business grows, maintaining this initial touchpoint with each of the customers from a widespread pool of customers serves as a challenge. Dealing with such an issue needs the backing and support of people who form a close-knit team.

 Jonathan Corbin, former Global Vice President of Customer Success & Strategy at HubSpot joins Josh to have an unchurned conversation about 

  • How Hubspot identifies different categories of customers
  • Engaging and nurturing relationships to deliver a great customer experience
  • Team segmentation & secrets to the motivating and progressive culture at Hubspot 
  • Aligning cross-functionality in team

 

“Providing customers a delightful experience is deliberate, it doesn’t happen by accident. A lot of people say, – We are going to create a CS team and they are going to solve all the problems. That’s NOT true.” – Jonathan Corbin

 

Timestamps

0:00- Preview & Intro

2:30 – HubSpot, as a holistic solution for GTM teams

4:27 – Fostering relations with customers across different segments

11:00 – Maintaining company culture

17:00 – Using Hubspot internally

19:00 – Aligning teams cross-functionally

29:42 – Closing

#updateai #customersuccess #saas #business

______________________ Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI About UpdateAI At UpdateAI our mission is to empower CS teams to build great customer relationships. We work with early & growth-stage B2B SaaS companies to help them scale CS outcomes. Everything we do is devoted to removing the overwhelm of back-to-back customer meetings so that CSMs can focus on the bigger picture: building relationships.

___________________________

👉 Follow the podcast

Youtube: ⁠https://youtu.be/H6mnKkpU2lI?feature=shared⁠
Apple Podcast: ⁠https://apple.co/3dfWXmD⁠
Spotify: ⁠https://spoti.fi/3KD3Ehl⁠

👉 Connect with the guest Jonathan Corbin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcorbin01/

👉 Connect with hosts
Jon Johnson: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonwilliamjohnson/⁠
Kristi Faltorusso: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristiserrano/⁠
Josh Schachter: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/⁠

👉 ⁠Sign up for ⁠UpdateA⁠I⁠ – the only Zoom virtual assistant for customer-facing teams.
👉 Be the first to know when a new episode of Unchurned is dropped. Sign up for our newsletter at ⁠⁠https://blog.update.ai/⁠⁠
👉 Get the advice and insights you need to thrive in Customer Success. ⁠Subscribe to the ⁠CS Insider Newsletter⁠

👉 Check out the most loved episodes

👉 Past guests on The Unchurned Podcast include ⁠Nick Mehta (GainSight)⁠⁠Mike Molinet (Branch)⁠⁠Edward Chiu (Catalyst)⁠,⁠ Kristi Faltorusso (Client Success)⁠, and customer success leaders and CCOs from top companies like  ⁠Cloudflare⁠⁠Google⁠⁠ Totango⁠,⁠  Zoura⁠, ⁠Workday⁠⁠Zendesk⁠⁠Braze⁠⁠BMC Software⁠⁠Monday.com⁠, and best-selling authors like ⁠Geoffrey Moore⁠ and ⁠Kelly Leonard⁠.

Listening to Unchurned will lower your churn and increase your conversions.

Unchurned is presented by UpdateAI.

Jonathan Corbin:
And so I know for a lot of CS teams, they have a lot of different metrics. Some might have product usage and and others might have things like, you know, CSAT. There’s a whole bunch of kind of different metrics that are thrown out there. But I think the more that you can align on a single metric and say, this is the one thing that we want to drive as a team, the more powerful your outcome can become. We want our customers to grow HubSpot.

Josh Schachter:
Hey, everybody. I’m Josh Schechter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI and host of Unchurned. Joining me today is Jonathan Corbin. Jonathan leads a team of over 700 in his role as global vice president of strategy and customer success at HubSpot. HubSpot was founded in 2006. We all know HubSpot, one of the world’s preeminent SaaS companies, the the category king and definer of inbound marketing, currently with over 6,000 employees, hundreds of ecosystem partners, a major annual conference, a market cap of over 16,000,000,000 as I speak today. It’s such an honor, Jonathan, to have you on the show. You and and the entire team at HubSpot have done so much for SaaS, so I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Jonathan Corbin:
It’s a pleasure to be here, Josh. Appreciate you having me, and looking forward to the conversation. I think there’s so much that goes on within the scope of CS organization, within a SaaS organization. Looking forward to chatting a little bit about it with you today.

Josh Schachter:
We call this podcast Unchurn because we wanna go raw. We wanna get authentic and and know the real you and get the best real insights from you. So let’s start out with that. You got 700 people that that work in your group. So lots of people looking up to you. What’s one thing that might surprise them or others to learn about you?

Jonathan Corbin:
You know, I’m I’m I’m fresh from LA, Josh. And the reason why I bring that up is, I have a sibling who’s a movie director. Her movie just premiered on Wednesday. It’s a movie called breaking, and I was fortunate enough to be able to be there with her, and sit through it. It’s amazing story, about a veteran and some challenges that he went through. And so if you get a chance to check that out, do it. I think that’s something that would probably surprise a lot of people that I work with and that work on my team.

Josh Schachter:
That’s amazing. Okay. HubSpot spans a great deal of feature functionality and and and and use cases and journeys. What’s one that you’ve been there for a while now. What’s what’s a a part of HubSpot from the product perspective that really stands out to you?

Jonathan Corbin:
I I think what really stands out to me, and this is one of the reasons why I joined HubSpot actually, Josh, is that I’ve been through the startup journey myself. I left Adobe. I started a company. And one of the things that I wished I had when I started that company was a easy to use CRM, that allowed me to attract customers, engage with them, convert them, and continue to engage with them as their customer. I think that’s what I love about HubSpot. It’s a holistic solution for go to market teams. And if I had that, I would have had a lot less spreadsheets, a lot less, kind of fabricated systems, and, things that I was trying to cobble together. So that’s my love about HubSpot.

Jonathan Corbin:
The simplicity of it and how it brings all the different teams. They’re focused on a single thing of bringing customers together and delivering a great experience to them all in one place.

Josh Schachter:
And I’m glad you referenced Adobe because I did forget to to bring up your your pedigree in customer success. I mean, you’ve had an incredible run. Now, of course, you’re you’re at at one of the most wonderful places to to be leading CS. Prior to that, you were at at at Sprinklr, which is another premier company leading their CS, Marketo, and and prior to that, Adobe. So some really we’re talking b to b SaaS customer success. I’m talking to the right person here. I’m really excited about the conversation. You know, I one of my foundational theories and thoughts about customer success is that it all comes down to relationships with the customers.

Josh Schachter:
It’s it’s, of course, table 6 that you have to have a product that’s serving value. But, really, when you think about companies and products that people stay on board with, I think it it all comes down to the relationship, the emotional connection that they have to those companies and the relationships that they build with those companies. What are the types of relationships that you’ve developed, or not you personally, but HubSpot has with its customers. How would you describe the culture of relationships?

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. I think you touched on a good area, Josh, that building a relationship that’s meaningful with your customer is so important to whether they’re using, whether they’re whether they’re getting value out of your product. And, you know, it’s very easy when you’re a small start up and you have 20 customers. Becomes a lot more challenging when you have a 150,000 plus customers, who are paying you, and they want that same relationship with you. And so what we’ve done at HubSpot is we’ve gone up. We’ve had conversations with our customers. And we said, what is it that you would like to have from us to help you along your journey? What are the interaction points that you would like to be able to engage with HubSpot around? What we found is that there’s 3 different types of customers that we had an opportunity to interact with. And the first one is a customer who said, I’m really busy.

Jonathan Corbin:
Using HubSpot is not my full time job. When I have a question, I don’t wanna hop on a phone call with someone. I don’t wanna send an email. I wanna be able to just type in a Google query. I wanna be able to look for the solution, and I wanna keep doing whatever I’m doing. So there’s this customer who wants to, like, self serve. Right? Like, they want access to information when they need it. And that’s that’s great.

Jonathan Corbin:
Right? Like, we we try to do that, and HubSpot has so much, information that’s available online. It’s very easy for those customer to be able to find what they’re looking for and can perform. The second category of customer was one where they said, I want all the stuff that that first customer had. I wanna be able to Google. I wanna be able to find the the solution to answer, but I wanna be able to have a conversation with somebody and make sure I’m going down the right track. I’ve spent money on this offer. I wanna make sure that I’m using it right. I’m getting the maximum amount of value out of the product that I can get.

Jonathan Corbin:
The 3rd category of customers, what is this? Listen. I’m relying on this technology for my business. I’m relying on it to attract customers, to grow my install base, to engage with those customers, to make sure they’re using our product and getting what they they deserve from it. I wanna make sure this is perfect, and I want someone who’s going to hold my hand, and they’re going to lead me down this path, of go to market. Right? Like, how should I be using it? How should I be thinking about my customers? What’s the best way to do that? And so those are the 3 distinct types of customers that we’ve uncovered during the conversations with our customers. And that’s how we’ve gone about trying to create an experience for those customers. And I think the really important thing to surface around, you know, kind of that journey that you’re taking customers down, that experience, if you will, is that it’s deliberate. Right? It doesn’t happen by accident.

Jonathan Corbin:
And I think for a lot of people, they say, hey. You know what? Like, we’re gonna create a CS team, and they’re gonna just solve all the problems. That’s not true. Right? Like, making sure that you’re creating a great experience for customers is a concerted effort. It has to go across every customer facing team, and everyone has to have a great understanding of what is the end part that we’re trying to deliver that great experience, and how do we go about doing it?

Josh Schachter:
Okay. So so you get your 3 categories of customers. There’s the the one that’s kinda like, get out of my way. Let me do it myself. It reminds me of the the smart aleck at work where if I ask the person a question, hey. How do I do this? They send me back a Slack message that’s just the link to let let me Google it for you. Right? You know that person at work. Right? So you’ve got you’ve got that power user.

Josh Schachter:
They’re they’re they’re likely though, I would imagine highly valuable customers to you because they’re they’re self they’re self learning and they’re they’re probably a node, a connection point to other users. So so I am I’m now Joe Smith. I’ve just onboarded into HubSpot, and I’m getting going. How do you know which category I fall into? Maybe you don’t know that immediately in day 1. How do you learn that over time? What are some of the signals and processes there?

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. It’s interesting because, you know, part of it is their willingness to engage. The other is, you know, a a byproduct. Some of the the the things that they signed up for. And so there’s kind of a variety of signals that we’re using in order to understand that, Josh. But I think what was important for us in formulating those 3 distinct aspects of the journey was saying, we actually wanna deliver that great experience, the same experience across all of those 3 different types of customers. And so it becomes really, really challenging. You’re like, wait.

Jonathan Corbin:
Hold on. So you have a 150,000 plus customers, and you’re gonna deliver a great experience across all of them. You have the same experience that you get in that one to one interaction, that one to one engagement that you’re having with them. You’re gonna deliver that to the customers who are, you know, out there looking to Google, answer their responses and answers to the questions that they have.

Josh Schachter:
So are you saying it didn’t didn’t necessarily matter as much to define the the category they fall into because you’re you you know there’s 3 different segments, but you’re gonna deliver all of them to each person. So identifying exactly where somebody falls didn’t matter necessarily as much.

Jonathan Corbin:
I think it it it does matter, Josh. But the thing is is that you have a variation of that journey that occurs, and so your touch points that might not involve a person, for those people who want to be able to Google and find those answers, need to be as similar in nature as it would be if they were talking to a person.

Josh Schachter:
So so so help me visualize that a little bit. What what exactly what’s an example of how that manifests?

Jonathan Corbin:
Sure. So, you know, you would have a a customer who would have a challenge that they’re facing as they’re going through setting up workflow in in, our marketing hub, for example. And they’re it’s like, hey. You know, I’ve reached the point where I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to move forward from this. And so you could have, you know, a conversation with somebody. You could do the phone. You could send an email to our support team, or you Google it, and you would be taken through the same steps that you would be if you were engaging with someone, if you were talking to them in person.

Jonathan Corbin:
So I I think that’s the difference, you know, where you create that human aspect of it, of understanding the challenges that the user is facing, helping them to move past.

Josh Schachter:
And then and then that’s a shared resource that your team can can review in the in the background, and it can go or the customer can go through the steps on their own.

Jonathan Corbin:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
And so you’re you’re building consistency there is what you’re saying also right across all different all those different channels.

Jonathan Corbin:
That’s right.

Josh Schachter:
You have 700 people that work within your org, and maybe you can actually help us break that down to understand exactly what that means. And I wanna talk a little bit about the culture that you’ve built at HubSpot and and not just you personally. Obviously, the entire, organization has built this amazing culture for itself. We we are on HubSpot, UpdateAI, and I’ve had wonderful experiences with your team. In fact, my initial CSM guy by the name of Sam Jackson was so amazing. Great. Yeah. Yeah.

Josh Schachter:
Wonderful. And just went above and beyond, you know, for this SMB to to help us out and and give us additional resources. And it it does, like I said earlier, like, that relationship really makes a difference. So first, let’s let’s break down your team, your group for those that are just curious. And then let’s talk a little bit about how to build culture.

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. So my team is broken down into 3 distinct categories. I have the, customer success team, like, you have CSM team, and they’re involved with engaging with direct customers. And then we have the partner success team. So they work with our partners. They help them to get onboarded. They help them to understand how they continue to evolve with HubSpot and grow their business on it. And then we have our contract management team.

Jonathan Corbin:
We’re responsible for helping our customers as they’re making mid contract changes as they’re renewing, our products with us. So those are the 3 kind of categories that my team fall under. And then your other question was around how do we continue to lean into creating a great culture within the team and within HubSpot? I think what’s really interesting, Josh, and I I’m sure everyone has read Darnesh’s, PowerPoint. You know, a heart, right, which is the kind of the aspect of of our culture, that is so meaningful, and I think it’s something that is probably required reading for any startup. But the interesting thing is is that helps to frame the culture. A culture is owned by the people who are in the company. Right? And I think that’s something that, you know, it it’s a little bit of a burden to people who are coming in of understanding that it’s up to you to continue to uphold what we have and continue to shape it. And, you know, how do you continue to maintain that over a 15 year period? It becomes really important, the people that you invite in to continue to uphold that, to continue to maintain that culture.

Jonathan Corbin:
And so, you know, it’s one of the things that we actually interview people for. We say, you know, we call it it’s an acronym called HEART, and we interview people for HEART. We want people who are going to be humble and empathetic, and they’re going to be remarkable. We want them to continue to, uphold that with our customers. People like, you know, your your own experience with Sam Jackson. We want people who are going to think of our customers as, someone that we want to partner with, that we want to help, that we want to help continue to grow. And so that’s that’s kind of the central aspect of how we continue to maintain that culture, and I hope move it a little bit further along. How do

Josh Schachter:
you look for that in an interview process?

Jonathan Corbin:
You know, it’s a series of questions that we ask people. So we ask them, you know, the things like when you were talking to a customer, when you’re working with the customer, give us an example of the time when you went above and beyond for, you know, I I know that, there’s a there’s a number of CSMs, especially over the past couple of years, where they were just doing these remarkable things to help their customers. You know, there was one one amazing woman who was working from her car because she was home without childcare, and she was cared so deeply and passionately about her customers. And she said, I have to help them kinda get through these challenging times that they’re going through. And some of the stories that we had, Josh, were just heartbreaking and, you know, just made you really appreciate, the impact that we had. You know, there was someone who sent us an email. It was a partner, and they said, you don’t understand the impact that you the CSM Oregon HubSpot had on my life. Because of the help that you’ve given me, I continue to afford my mortgage.

Jonathan Corbin:
I continue to send my kids to school, and it makes you feel amazing about the work that you’re doing.

Josh Schachter:
That that is amazing, and that continues to motivate.

Interlude:
Did someone say chat gpt for customer success for free? Update dotai has you covered. CSMs get automated summaries of every customer call. That’s real time savings that adds up. There’s no bot. An update even works alongside other tools like Gong. Sign up today at www.update. Ai. That’s update.ai.

Josh Schachter:
What else is inserted into the culture? So to create that culture, it starts upstream with bringing in the right people who you know are gonna embody those values and that heart. But how do you maintain that throughout the organization?

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. Since the the process that we go through, you know, as an organization is when someone comes in, like, actually talking about those attributes and talking about those characteristics that we love for our employees, is a component of their onboarding, and it’s continued to be reiterated throughout the employee experience that they go through. And we have ongoing training sessions around that, you know, one that we just launched around psychological safety. I’m the the CS executive, who’s helping to to lead that charge along with the ops team. And, you know, making sure that those things are are top of mind for people. You know, we wanna create an environment. We wanna maintain an environment where people are able to speak their mind. They’re able to say, I don’t know if we should be doing this survey.

Jonathan Corbin:
We should think about a different way of doing it. So it’s it’s not a onetime thing, and I think that’s a really good question that, thanks for pointing that out. It’s it’s ongoing. It continues to be something that you have to work at. Just like anything, if you wanna be great at it, you have to continue to work at it.

Josh Schachter:
HubSpot is not specifically a customer success platform. Right? It’s it’s a little bit more in the realm of of of marketing and sales, but there is a service and support component to it, and it is there is a large overlap with customer success. And if I’m getting my numbers right, there’s about 6,000 folks at HubSpot. It makes you one of the largest customers of HubSpot yourself, your own team. What I’m really interested is because my background is in product management. My I’m interested in how you’re able to use the product yourself on your team to really help reinforce

Jonathan Corbin:
You know, we we’ve, we’ve continued to kind of iterate on on, you know, what’s publicly available, and, you know, I I have to express some thanks to our product team. We have this internal product team that just, works hand in hand with us to continue to evolve our use cases. And it’s what’s great is that, you know, we’re able to say, hey. Here’s the things that we wanna be able to do it. You know, we wanna be able to do forecasting. We wanna associate that with risk, and we wanna create these, like, AI, ML features, and and things like that that, like, haven’t existed. And so, you know, we we continue to push each other in a very healthy way, where, you know, we’re providing feedback. We’re constantly asking for more stuff, and they’re like, hold on.

Jonathan Corbin:
But, like, they devote our customers, and maybe we should be doing it a different way. And so they give us, you know, some some really healthy feedback in terms of ways that we can iterate on the ways that we’re doing things, and we also try to push the envelope in terms of our product. You know, it it’s interesting because, you know, HubSpotter is continuing to grow and to evolve in terms of of features and functionality required for our larger customers to be able to use our products. And so being one of those larger companies that are using their product, is very can be challenging at times. Right? Like, we break things. And so it’s a it’s a good thing and a bad thing where, you know, the the team is is helping to beta test and to, issue those kind of suggestions in terms of how we can get better from a success perspective. And, of course, you know, the other teams are all using, the variations of HubSpot as well in the different hubs. So, I think together, we’re we’re giving our our product team a bit of a challenge.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. I I know firsthand the perils of being the the beta tester yourself. It’s fun to break things, but then there there’s a responsibility that comes along with that. The the last piece here I wanna touch on with you is aligning cross functionally. So you’ve got a myriad of different roles in your organization. You mentioned it before. You’ve got customer success, partner success, your your, was it contact management? It was the 3rd group, I think.

Jonathan Corbin:
Contract management.

Josh Schachter:
Excuse me. Contract management. How internally within your team and then as it interface interfaces externally with other groups, how do you keep it all on track? Like, how do you align these teams cross functionally?

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. It’s a good question. So internally within my teams, what’s what’s great is that they all have a single metric. They’re focused on revenue retention. They want our customers to continue to use our products and to continue to grow. You know, when you think about kind of, like, mission and vision, that is exactly what we’re trying to do. We want our customers to grow HubSpot. That is, you know, kind of what HubSpot’s mantra is.

Jonathan Corbin:
Right? It’s the reason why HubSpot is bound. It’s, like, helping customers grow better is what we’re all about. And so we’ve adopted that. And we said, you know, if we have these three teams that are about 700 people strong and we focus them all on helping our customers continue to grow, that can be incredibly powerful. And I think the challenge for a lot of CS organizations is they don’t have a lot of clarity in terms of where their impact should be, where they should be focused. And so once you create that focus, it allows you to say everything we do, every decision we make, every investment that occurs, everything that we’re doing has to be aligned with that outcome that we want for our customers. Like, help our customers continue to grow with your companies. And so I know for a lot of CS teams, they have a lot of different metrics.

Jonathan Corbin:
Some might have product usage and and others might have things like, you know, CSAT. There’s a whole bunch of kind of different metrics that are thrown out there. But I think the more that you can align on a single metric and say, this is the one thing that we want to drive as a team, the more powerful your outcome can become.

Josh Schachter:
Do you guys have CS operations in the middle of that? Do you do you have certain folks holding together that We

Jonathan Corbin:
do. You know, CS operations, I appreciate you bringing that up, Josh, because you can’t have a conversation about, CES or, not, you know, unsure without, you know, bringing up operations. They really are a critical component of what we do, and they keep the lights on for us. So, you know, from things, as narrated as, our headcount models, as the number of customers that we have in terms of ratios, CSM to customer, systems that we have, continuing to iterate on those. Yeah, the forecasting. There’s so many different ways that they they make us, an incredibly capable organization.

Josh Schachter:
How long have you had CS ops in the mix? Because I know that’s still an evolving function that that that folks are are just, you know, fighting for budget to have on their team. So how long has it been mixed into HubSpot?

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. So we started off with CS ops, and we’ve kind of evolved because we realized that, you know, CS ops in isolation kind of isn’t related to the rest of your company. And so you think about kind of the other, areas that you interface with most frequently. It’s like marketing, sales, really important. So we’ve actually created something called rev ops. And so we merged CS ops with sales ops and marketing ops, create one new powerful operations team. Now when I first started here, I had 2 analysts, and they were amazing. We’ve since thrown that out.

Jonathan Corbin:
I think we’re about, 12, 14 people at this point in the in the ops team that’s related to to CS. And so it’s, just really grown by leaps and bounds along with us. And the things that they’ve taken on, things they’ve enabled us to do have been, really, really great.

Josh Schachter:
So it sounds like operations the the rev ops sits into its own group, and you have you’ve got within that CS ops, sales ops, all the marketing ops, all the ops. Is that that’s how it works? So it’s a central center

Jonathan Corbin:
of excellence. How it works in yeah. And so what we do is we have the let’s say, for example, you know, we have a a leader for the CS ops team, and they’re in rev ops, but they they’re like they’re like my COO, I think, is probably the best way to put it, where, you know, they sit in my leadership team meetings. They have 1 on ones with, my directors. And so they’re very much an extension of my own leadership, and they play, like, I guess, a critical role there. And so that embedded model means they understand what’s going on with the business. They’re able to have better insight in terms of why we do the things that we do and and, and they play a critical role in terms of, you know, how we continue to evolve. And so when we’re going through and we’re planning for next year, for example, they’re part of that, you know, idea generation phase.

Jonathan Corbin:
You know, they when we go through and and look at the opportunities for us to continue to, make investments and change the way that we’re doing things, they’re right there with the rest of the team.

Josh Schachter:
And and are they sitting is their extension of their team also the other operations of other groups like marketing and sales ops? Or is it is it a Absolutely. As on a daily basis. Same model across the board. Okay. So so I imagine that that really helps tether together the different functions too. You’ve got all the operations folks that are communicating with each other, sitting in the same group themselves each day that are bringing together those different functions.

Jonathan Corbin:
That’s right. Yeah. And I think that that’s one of the things that as your organization continues to grow and become more fragmented, and so bringing together those different operations functions is something that’s actually become very meaningful for us in terms of making sure there’s that fiber, interconnectivity still, still there.

Josh Schachter:
What do your interactions look like with the other heads of the different groups of functions at HubSpot? Sales, marketing Yes.

Jonathan Corbin:
We have we have regular interactions. And and one of the things that that, you know, at at HubSpot that we’ve created is something called the flywheel team. And the flywheel team, you know, it it’s, you know, kind of this virtuous circle. It it means that, you know, we’re attracting customers through marketing. We’re engaging with them through sales, and we’re delighting them through the CS organization. And so, you know, each each of us, the things that we do are impacting together, And so making sure there’s regular touch points, and they’re all kind of aligned underneath, you know, one central leader, who’s our CCO. And so, the reason why we have a CCO leading those functions is that we wanna put our customer in the center of everything that we do. And so whether you’re in sales, whether you’re in marketing, whether you’re in CS, you know, your first stop should be above

Josh Schachter:
the customer. Interesting. So at HubSpot, sales, marketing, and CS all bubble up to the chief customer officer.

Jonathan Corbin:
And rev ops.

Josh Schachter:
And and rev ops. So those are the 4 pillars under the chief customer officer. That’s right. I mean, everything commercial effectively, which is, Yep. Which is really interesting. And and it it almost sounds a little unique for for such a large company.

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. It it really is unique. You know, I’ve I’ve talked to a whole bunch of leaders, around the world. And every time I say, yeah. Yeah. No. We have a CCO who owns these different functions. Like, oh, Mark, say that again.

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. And I think it is pretty unique to us.

Josh Schachter:
Yeah. And I I think well, so, obviously, we can’t have this conversation without then, talking about, Yamini. Right? And am am I pronouncing her name correctly? I wanna make sure I

Jonathan Corbin:
am. Yes.

Josh Schachter:
Yep. Who who was recently, promoted to to chief executive officer. She was the CCO of HubSpot. And she’s making quite the the the positive splash impact in the organization. I see her LinkedIn post. I see the approach. You could you can tell from a bird’s eye her style is is very personable, and she’s a great culture builder. But now it makes sense to me because I you know, we in the customer success world, people are are quite excited to have a CCO having, you know, be promoted to CEO.

Josh Schachter:
Now it makes sense. It it it was a CCO that was responsible for the entire go to market, which which is remarkable. Yeah. And I think am am I correct that that there’s a new CCO that was recently brought in?

Jonathan Corbin:
There is. Yeah. We we actually, brought in someone, Rob Tiglio, who’s, who who has a really great background as well. And he has some experience in each of the different areas, that I mentioned that kind of report up to him. So it’s been great having him on board, continue to learn from him. I, you know, I have to say that, you know, you mentioned the Omni, that, you know, the time that I got to spend with her, was incredibly insightful. I learned a ton from her, about, you know, how to continue to manage, how to scale communication, so many different aspects that she’s excelled in. So it’s been great having her in that role and seeing community evolve has certainly been something where, you know, you look at CS organizations as seeing how she’s continued to rise and continue to bring customers to the forefront of what we do as a company.

Jonathan Corbin:
And I think, you know, it’s given a lot of us, hope for the future of saying, you know, you could put your customer first, and you can see the results of that at at at your own career as you continue to evolve.

Josh Schachter:
And what I love about Rob, Giglio, who’s the new CCO. Right? And I say new, but he’s been with you guys for about 6 months right now. But Yep. Of HubSpot is he didn’t come from being the CCO of a different company. He he came from being chief marketing officer of DocuSign. And prior to that, he was a a leader in in sales at Adobe. So so this is quite intentionally, the organization is bringing on folks that have that cross functional experience. So I’m getting a view now of of HubSpot that’s that that is really nice to see that you guys really are, you know, putting your money where your mouth is in in making sure that that the entire commercialization team is is holistic and cross functional in its approach.

Jonathan Corbin:
Yeah. I think we, you know, we we lean into a a concept, that I think fosters that kind of of, people who want to collaborate across functions who have that experience. And I think that you you look at, you know, how we brought those different functions together. And I think those functions, you know, again, going back to my own organization and the metric that we’re focused on, if you can bring those go to market functions together around, you know, a central thing for us as the customer, you can the thing that you create can be incredibly powerful. Right? And there’s these, like, you know, old adhesives of, you know, you have, you know, the one stick and it’s very easy to break. You have 3 and 4 together, and it becomes so much stronger than their individual parts. And that’s what we’re seeing as we continue to grow as a company. It is that the more aligned we are within our organizations, the more we can break down those silos of information and sharing, customer information.

Jonathan Corbin:
The one that we’re going to be able to deliver and re experience, continue to delight our customers.

Josh Schachter:
Jonathan, thank you so much for being with us on this episode. It was a really great conversation to learn about how you guys do segmentation, the culture that you’ve that you’ve helped build and been a part of at HubSpot, and then really seeing, in insightfully the cross functional collaborative approach that’s taken. Thank you so much.

Jonathan Corbin:
I appreciate the time, Josh. It was a real pleasure.

Josh Schachter:
Hey, guys. It’s Josh. Don’t hang up. If you enjoyed this episode you know what? Even if you didn’t, I’d love for you to give us a rating in iTunes or Spotify. I’d love to connect with each of our listeners. Send me a LinkedIn request, and I’ll accept it immediately.