The Evolution of HubSpot, a Fireside Chat with Kyle Jepson + George B. Thomas

If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the rapid pace of innovation within HubSpot, buckle up, folks!

This episode is just for you. Today’s discussion — a fireside chat between George B. Thomas and HubSpot's very own all-star, Kyle Jepson (who joined us for the HubSpot Sales Hub episode way back when!) — is not just about the “how” but also the “why” behind HubSpot’s relentless evolution and how you can leverage it to supercharge your business operations.

Now, if you're not familiar with Kyle, let's get you caught up! Kyle bridges the gap between HubSpot’s development teams and its users. He’s the guy who ensures that the tools and updates HubSpot rolls out are not only innovative but also practical and user-friendly. Kyle shares his insights on how HubSpot listens to its users and continuously evolves to meet their needs, making the case for why HubSpot remains a leader in the CRM space for small to mid-sized businesses.

Basically, Kyle is the man. 

💥 Related HubHeroes Podcast Episodes:

• What the HubSpot Content Hub Is (+ Isn't) in This New AI World
• HubSpot Is Now a Customer Platform ... But What Does That Mean?

Now, this conversation is a big one, because so much has changed with HubSpot. Which begs a number of super critical questions we all need to consider:

• How did we get here?
• How do we need to be thinking about HubSpot differently?
• How are many of us still thinking about HubSpot incorrectly?

We answer these questions through a comprehensive discussion of the following:

• The Evolution of HubSpot: From its humble beginnings as a marketing automation tool to a comprehensive platform that now includes sales, service, and more, HubSpot has transformed the way businesses operate. We’ll discuss how this evolution is not just about adding new features, but about creating a truly integrated experience.

• Customer Platform and Smart CRM: I challenged Kyle and George dig into what it means to have a “customer platform” and how the concept of a smart CRM is reshaping the way businesses think about customer data and interaction.

• Innovation and Continuous Improvement: HubSpot’s commitment to innovation is unparalleled. We’ll hear about the latest updates and betas that are pushing the envelope, ensuring that HubSpot remains at the cutting edge of technology.

• Future of SEO and AI: With the rise of AI and changes in how people search for information, what does the future hold for SEO? We’ll discuss how HubSpot is preparing to help businesses navigate these changes and stay ahead of the curve.

Whether you’re a seasoned HubSpot user or someone considering it for your business, this episode is packed with insights and practical advice. We’ll touch on the importance of education, the need for continuous learning, and the benefits of experimenting with new tools and features. 

So grab your headphones, settle in, and get ready to become the HubHero your organization needs. This episode promises to be a thrilling ride through the past, present, and future of HubSpot, and you won’t want to miss a minute of it.

Keywords

AI, content creation, assistant, replacement, inputs, outputs, audience, creative brief, AI, content creation, human-powered, AI-assisted, research, optimization, getting started, leadership, challenges, funny moments

Key Takeaways

• View AI as an assistant rather than a replacement for human creativity.
• Clear inputs are essential for meaningful outputs from AI.
• Understand your audience and their needs to create effective content with AI.
• Use AI as a creative brief to enhance content creation. Embrace AI as a tool to enhance and optimize content creation
• Take a human-powered, AI-assisted approach
• Leaders should lead by example and bring their teams along on the AI journey
• AI can be used for research and optimization
• Start with small, incremental asks to see outsized ROI
• Consider the human element and the people who need to come on the AI journey
• Be open to learning and iterating as you go
• Don't ignore AI, but rather embrace it and put the right mindset to it

And so much more ... 

Additional Resources

• Why Go HubSpot? Your Free Ultimate Business Growth Guide
• Why Go HubSpot Service Hub?
• What Is Customer Delight + Who Is Responsible?
• How Have Inbound + HubSpot Changed?

Episode Transcript

George B. Thomas: Which, by the way, let's just replace Devin with Kyle. So that legalese knows that Kyle works at HubSpot, and that he, Believe it or not, has his own thoughts. Kyle, you have your own thoughts today,

right? 

Kyle Jepson: Yes, but today, maybe today I will just play the part of Devin. 

George B. Thomas: There you go. 

Kyle Jepson: uh, 

Liz Moorehead: I love that. Well, George, you know what? I have some remarks to lead off this incredible discussion we're about to have today. No, no, no. 

George B. Thomas: Okay. 

Liz Moorehead: Maybe you should be scared.

No, I'm just 

kidding, George. 

George B. Thomas: I I usually

Liz Moorehead: Thank you. That's like the nicest thing anybody has ever said to me. Thank you. No, but we're here. Obviously. We've got Kyle here from HubSpot.

George, I feel, I don't feel like it's appropriate for me to introduce this guy. You two go way back.

Like, take us through who's here today. What's going

on?

Kyle Jepson: actually, actually, I know I'm, I'm breaking the show order here, but I'm pretty sure I met Liz before I met George.

Liz Moorehead: That's right, it's the Annapolis Hug In like 2016?

Kyle Jepson: was at, yeah, the very first Hug I ever spoke at. I was a brand new HubSpot Academy professor, and she organized it. She was there, and I was like this, uh, nervous. I don't know what I'm gonna say, but talk about the CRM and it's brand new. Um, and so. Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Wow. I don't know if I should be happy for Liz or jealous for 

Liz Moorehead: You can be jealous and then tell me about it in great detail.

George B. Thomas: I'll have to tell you after the show is over in great detail, but that's amazing. Like, so here's, here's the fun part about this though. Like Kyle, uh, we've had an interesting past as far as like content creation.

We've done multiple interviews. Um, Kyle is the man, the myth, the legend when it comes to, uh, content creation. Uh, creating HubSpot updates on the fly. And the, the orange hat is freaking amazing. Like it should probably have its own MC when it enters the room. Uh, listen, Liz, what episode are we actually on this week?

Is it 

Liz Moorehead: We're at 89 or 90.

George B. Thomas: or eight, 89 or 90. And Kyle was literally on the show back on 

episode 12, where 

Liz Moorehead: I wasn't even on here yet.

George B. Thomas: no. no. Yeah. So see, like he was on the podcast before you were on the pot. I'm not so jealous anymore. So, uh, and, and he talked about why go HubSpot sales hub. And so like, when you think of somebody that is.

Um, HubSpot evangelist, literally his title by the way, somebody who loves to help humans. Uh, that's Kyle Jepsen, which by the way, one of the most amazing, and I'm super excited for this year too, one of the most amazing inbound sessions last year that I went to was Kyle's session where he was flying all over the place and just being Kyle, uh, in his deck, out of his deck, showing HubSpot, so like.

It is a pleasure to be sitting here with another true HubSpot nerd, uh, like myself. So I'm 

I'm excited Kyle, for 

the conversation we're going to be able to have today.

Kyle Jepson: Yeah, I'm excited to be here too. And I mean, while we're talking about firsts, I, the first time I ever met you, George Liz, the first time I ever met George, probably 

not very

Liz Moorehead: were already best friends at that 

Kyle Jepson: I, He 

Liz Moorehead: Sleepovers and everything. 

Kyle Jepson: Whoa. He came 

over. 

Liz Moorehead: No, 

that's not, God, I met like with pizza, like when we were middle 

Kyle Jepson: He, George came to the HubSpot offices and wanted to interview HubSpot Academy people. And Mark Killens, who had founded the HubSpot Academy was like, George Thomas is coming. He's going to record interviews with us. And we had like this fancy two camera set up. So there's like a cam and B cam on George and on the birth and each HubSpot Academy professor.

There was only like five of us then came in one at a time and sat down and got interviewed by George. I had no idea who he was. I was just like, George, okay. All right. And I sat down and we just had so much fun. Um, but honestly, yeah. So, uh, I think, I think it's, it's appropriate that our relationship started with the creation of some 

content. 

George B. Thomas: Yes. Yes. Without a doubt. I love it. Content creators and, uh, brothers in HubSpot 

Liz Moorehead: I'm here, the mastermind behind this little fireside chat today, because we need to talk about how this came together. So normally George and I are very strategic. What do we want to be talking about? What do we do that? This actually happened because I ambushed both of you on a LinkedIn thread. You two chuckle heads were going back and forth talking about something smart.

And I'm sitting there going, I'm the hub heroes. Strategist here. What, what are you two talking about? What's going on here? How you doing fellow kids? Have you heard about this podcast thing we've got going on here? Do you want to come and talk to me and buy? Do you want to, will you? Yes. Fantastic. Cause we're having a really important conversation today and there's a reason why I wanted to interview the both of you because what's for our listeners at home, you know, typically when we have, um, typically when we have guests on, it's a little bit, I have a really friendly firing squad where the hub heroes are peppering our guests with questions.

But in this case, I brought these two HubSpot geniuses together so I could pepper them with questions. Right? Because on one end of the spectrum, you have Kyle, right? You, you know, your introduction speaks for itself. You are an evangelist for the platform. People look to you as one of the top internal educators from HubSpot, especially as the platform has become much more diverse and complex.

Like at my first inbound, we were still like, but what are we going to do? We have email marketing and blogging in one place. We're What? And now it's like, I'm sorry. Is, I sneezed. Is there a new hub? Oh, I just, I threw my like, it's, there's so much going on. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we have you, George, you have been, you know, Dan Tyra has called you inbound in human form, but you've almost kind of been like a man of the people, so to speak from the inbound ecosystem.

Right. So we have the internal person here from HubSpot. And we have our man of the people who has been watching HubSpot evolve for over a decade.

George B. Thomas: yeah, twelve years now, which is crazy,

Liz Moorehead: Don't look a day over 75.

So proud of you. 

George B. Thomas: uh, thanks, that's why, that's why I decided I 

should keep shaving, because as soon as I grow the beard, I look like ninety two. 

Kyle Jepson: So while we're talking about age, um, I, I got a Slack just today from a CSM. I think here at HubSpot, someone on our customer facing teams. I was like, Hey, I got this message from a customer. Do you think this is you? And I, it was like, Hey, can you get me in contact with the guy? He's like, he does all the weekly meetup things.

He's got short gray hair. Do you know the one I'm talking about? 

It's like, Oh, is that, is that me? I guess. Uh,

George B. Thomas: man, yep, see my beard, it's got grey, and 

it's like, nope, let's just keep it shaved, and I wear a hat. So I'd be 

Kyle Jepson: Well, what I realized is 

it's, it's my

sideburns that have gone white.

So where, when I wear my orange hat, 

probably all you can see is the white. You probably think of just, um, some old 

George B. Thomas: The joys of getting older. I'll tell you, I'd like to tell you, Kyle, it gets better, but you 

Liz Moorehead: before I ship you both off to the home, can I ask you some

questions? 

George B. Thomas: yeah, absolutely.

Liz Moorehead: So we're the reason why I have gathered you two under duress here today is I want to have a conversation that we're going to say is for everybody else at home, but really it's for me. I have questions. Right? We've been watching.

Over the past few years, but in, in many ways in rapid acceleration, now, over the past six to nine months, HubSpot's scope and depth is rapidly expanding, right? And we have, we also have this language and positioning now, right? It's, it's a customer platform, which for me, the word nerd and the messaging person, like, I don't just do content strategy.

I do brand messaging. I'm like, that was a purposeful shift. I see you, right? And so I wanted to have a conversation with both of you. For our listeners at home, because we talk a lot on the show about mindsets, right? And if you're going to be using HubSpot effectively now and into the future, you have to understand that how you look at HubSpot now should shift, but I'm not sure that conversation is one that's really particularly being had.

So today, my goal is really to have a conversation with both of you, which, which is to acknowledge what changes have occurred, what the changes are and why they've happened and what they really mean. And how they should be influencing the people at home who are listening to this, whether they're just day to day users or the big decision makers who are in charge of making these decisions.

Like, there's a lot of change happening really fast within a tool that we all rely on every day. So I'm going to ask if you're game for this, but the only answer I will accept is yes.

George B. Thomas: guess I'll say yes

then. 

Liz Moorehead: Compliance. 

Kyle Jepson: above.

Liz Moorehead: Compliance is beautiful. Isn't it, friends? All right. You know what? Let's start. We're gonna start with you, Kyle. So we've seen a lot of changes in the HubSpot platform over the past couple of years. Again, like I said, how HubSpot talks about itself, as well as the expansion of services.

But I want us to take a step from, from talking about this nitty gritty. Um, getting into the details of like, what's the new hub? Is it a CMS deal? Like all, and said, what do these changes and expansions mean in terms of what

HubSpot is seeking to become? 

Kyle Jepson: Yeah. So it's, it's interesting. I love this question. I love answering this question because I, this is the journey I've been on with HubSpot, right? When I joined the company almost 10 years ago, they had just made the leap from having just marketing tools. To having a little free CRM and a couple of sales tools on top of it, which was a huge, huge leap for us, right?

And there's still people trying to catch up. Some people still think Hubsan is still just marketing somehow. I don't know. Um, but what we, I was on the support team that was supporting these new sales, sales tools. So I was with the product team a lot that built them. And the reason for that decision was we had these customers, we were trying to be the best marketing tools in the world at for the small and mid sized businesses.

And we were shocked to learn The number one CRM for small and midsize businesses was Microsoft Excel and Google spreadsheets, right? Like people didn't have a CRM at all, period, nothing. And so we wanted to give them something better than that, right? We already were all your marketing data is coming into HubSpot.

We know all the people. So why don't we just give you a place to store that and to do your sales process off of it? So we did it great. Now we're going to own marketing and sales for small and midsize businesses. But it's an incomplete story, right? What happens after the sale closes? What, how are you servicing your customers?

Well, we better solve that too. Now we are owning the front office for small and mid sized businesses, right? Marketing, sales, service. That's it. That's the whole story. That's everything, right? Well, no, there's lots of operational things that need to happen. And now like we're thinking about commerce sorts of things.

And as we look at the definition of small and mid sized businesses, and as we want to help you with your growth goals. We don't want you to outgrow HubSpot. So we keep nudging up that definition of what mid market means, because it turns out mid market is vast. And there's a big difference in the needs of a company that has 1, 500 or 2, 000 employees versus the one that has five, right?

And so if we're really going to meet those needs, man, we got to go deep on data. We got to go deep on integrations. We got to go, we got to have commerce. We got to have all this stuff. And so I, I think the story of HubSpot, Has never really changed. We love small and mid sized businesses. I don't ever foresee a day, no matter how, how we define mid market, we're never going to want like Boeing as a customer, right?

Like other, other CRM companies can keep those. We really want to help the small and mid sized businesses succeed. We want to do that by enabling their customer facing teams to succeed, but we will go as deep and broad as we have to, to fulfill that mission. And, um, it happens incrementally, right? Um, and I don't know.

Five, 10 years from now, how many hubs there will be? What additional things we'll do. But as our customers continue to tell us HubSpot, you're doing great. You're enabling us through all these things. But what we really need is this thing or like, man, you've got a gap here. Like, Oh, we have this really nasty integration with this system over there.

We're going to continue to expand and evolve and, and open and, and, and become flexible, uh, so that we can, we can plug all those gaps and, and help these businesses grow.

George B. Thomas: You know, Liz, it's, it's funny to hear Kyle talk because I too have been on this journey. And what's interesting is. I go back to, and I believe it was 2012, the first inbound that I was at. It might've been 2013, but I remember Dharmesh talking about the Franken system and back in the day, how you had to really kind of take things and combine them together, and you almost had to be a little bit like part wizard, part developer, part like business strategist.

And so immediately in my mind, when, when HubSpot, even back then was talking about marketing, I was like, Oh, there's, there's this, there's this feeling that we're trying to get it all in one place instead of having to build this Franken system. And I remember what Kyle was talking about is like the little set of sales tools, because I don't know how many listeners will remember when it was.

Sidekick. That was literally the name was sidekick to these like set of tools that you could use. And, and obviously we've grown from that. And, but it was like, Oh, so now it's like not really all in one place on marketing, but it's now it's becoming sales. And like Kyle said, service and operations. And, and so the word that I think HubSpot has always been trying to go after is this word that is holistic.

Sick. It's a place where you can run your entire business. It's a place where all of your team members can be efficient. It's a place where data and integrity and hygiene and customer experience and user experience and buyers journeys can happen. And so when you, when I think about HubSpot in this journey, and I've preached this from the mountaintops, especially in the super admin training that we do, sometimes I feel like HubSpot is headed in the right direction, but we've hubbed ourself to death.

And so the thing that I love about the fact that the messaging was changing, going back to kind of your question of customer platform. Is it allows us to have less of a per hub conversation and more of a holistic customer platform with sets of tools that anybody from your organization could use.

Anybody can use templates. Anybody can use snippets. Everybody should be using automation. Everybody can get augmented from the AI features, right? So that, when I think about the journey, it's from this, like. Independent conversation of Franken systems to we've created like marketing, sales, service operations, commerce, and who knows whatever section we add in, in the near future, heaven, like here's your business nirvana, enjoy, sign up, use the pieces you need.

Like that's 

Liz Moorehead: If we wake up tomorrow and go to HubSpot. com and say, here's your business, Nervada, George, you

need to charge them.

George B. Thomas: I know, right? 

Kyle Jepson: but on that, on

that topic of Franken 

systems to something that was so unique, so groundbreaking when, when HubSwap made that shift and built a little free CRM to go with their marketing tools, uh, as a support rep for that system, all the time, people would ask me, what's the integration like between the marketing contacts database and the CRM.

And, uh, there, there is no integration, right? It is, it is the same database, just access through two different interfaces. And that is sort of wild in a world where huge enterprise systems are typically built through acquisition. And you have a lot of different systems that are integrated sometimes well, sometimes poorly HubSpot.

And to get to Nick's question, how does Kyle define the customer platform? I think the reason a customer platform is the right. Word is because yes, we have a CRM a smart CRM, uh down at the foundation of this Uh, but if you think about the different hubs whether it's sales hub or marketing hub or whichever one you want to choose If you try to imagine that hub Separated from the CRM.

It doesn't make any sense. Like it's unclear What you would even have, right? They are all built on that unified, unified set of databases for your contacts, companies, deals, tickets, custom objects, whatever. Um, the features are built on top of that. And so it really is just a single platform and yeah, you're turning different tools on and off.

And you might interface with those databases in different ways. Um, but there's no, there is no integration. There is no, no chewing gum and bailing wire, holding it together. Right. It's all a single piece. Um, and that's, that's 

pretty cool. 

George B. Thomas: And I love this because, and I want to double click on the listeners to pay attention to. The fact that you said smart CRM, and by the way, too, that you've mentioned CRM a couple of times, because that is the foundational piece. And I believe that we're going to be talking on the, um, hug that we've created around customer platform about smart CRM.

So listeners, if you want to dive into that. A little bit more, make sure that you check out the hug, get registered. Uh, we've got a good amount of people that are already registered, but speaking of that, one of the things that I think is very interesting around CRM is kind of the way that that might even be changing when you start to talk about a smart CRM and earlier today, a good buddy of mine, Chris Carrolyn, who we do the hug together for the, um, for the customer platform, hug.

He literally messaged me and he said something along the lines of like, what if CRM wasn't customer relationship manager? What if it was communication and relationship manager or management? And I was like, dude, I would heart the heck out of that because it does come down to having the smart data. It does have a come down to having the smart segmentation to have the smart communication to actually provide the smart experience that the modern buyer wants, like, no, not even once they need it because if they don't find it, they're going to hit the back button, go somewhere else.

So just everybody that's listening, pay attention to the terms customer platform, pay attention, moving forward to smart CRM. And be willing to, like, identify what those actually mean for you and your organization.

Liz Moorehead: I want to actually keep you on the mic here for a minute, George, we've heard a lot from Kyle. About, you know, where the story of HubSpot started, how it's evolved, and from the inside, why. But now I'd like to hear from you, from the outsider perspective, right? Our inbound everyman, our man of the people, what is no longer true about HubSpot today for you?

George B. Thomas: Yeah, I, I, I think a couple of things, and Kyle was kind of joking, not joking, when he said that there are still humans, there are still 

Liz Moorehead: Oh, 

yeah. There we

George B. Thomas: humans on this planet that believe HubSpot is still about just marketing. I'm like, you're, you're killing me. Um, the other thing though, that, that I think is interesting, cause there's this whole other, uh, class of people that have historically tried HubSpot. But back in the day, went away and still believe that HubSpot is HubSpot. Heck HubSpot isn't HubSpot that it was six months ago. So like, you got to realize that HubSpot is ever evolving, ever changing. And so one of the things that is a belief out there is that it has, Um, inefficiencies or things that you can't do because you once couldn't do them, but now you can like the, the mass amount of things that once were impossible that now are possible in HubSpot.

Like if you're happen to be listening to this and you're not using HubSpot right now. And, and it's because, Hey, we've been there, done that, tried that. I would say to you, it's probably time to come back to the watering trough and see what's. Actual, uh, possible for the things that we're doing. So like it is about marketing.

It is about sales. It is about rev ops. It is about service. It is about commerce. And then it is about whatever you want to add from the marketplace and whatever you want to add. By the way, I should mention we content hub. We've said hub several times. We didn't even bring up content hub. It is about podcasting.

It is about, uh, embeds. It is about resource libraries. It is about a CMS. Like, so there's just so much that you can do that this historical mindset of it having these like limitations, no more, no more, because like, I can't think of anything that is a massive piece that a business would need that HubSpot probably cannot achieve at 

this point in time.

Liz Moorehead: Kyle. Yeah.

Kyle Jepson: And if I, if I, if I can 

speak 

Liz Moorehead: That was literally what I was going to turn to you and say, what do you think, Kyle?

Kyle Jepson: yeah, so I, I mean, it pains me, it drives me crazy. Nine years in as a HubSpot employee that people still, I think a fair number of people still think of us as a marketing automation platform primarily, and I'm always pushing against that, but I don't want to in my efforts to do that, lose the fact.

That HubSpot has incredible marketing tools, right? And I, you know, as the guy who is always talking about and, and evangelizing and sharing and, and packaging up, uh, product updates in various ways, I am blown away at the level of innovation going on in Marketing Hub. If, if any hub had a right to rest on its laurels and say, we've, we've, uh, achieved maturation and now, you know, we're going to focus on, you know, Marketing Hub could do it.

And they're not, if anything, marketing hub is continuing to accelerate. And, um, as I, as, as I see what's coming out and as I hear what's, what's coming still, uh, I am just amazed that marketing hub has not tapped out HubSpot innovation yet, which I think is a very optimistic story for all these other hubs, right?

Like, uh, that still are a few years behind marketing hub. Um, HubSpot's ability to continue to find new ways to innovate and do new things is really exciting. And so, yes. To most of the world, anyone who's like not a HubSpot user who is shocked to hear we have something that's not marketing tools. Oh, you gotta come on, get with it.

Like you're way behind. Um, but to everyone within, uh, the HubSpot ecosystem who knows that, um, I, I would say, uh, Marketing Hub in a lot of ways is still a young product. It's got a long, exciting life ahead of it. Uh, we are nowhere near tapped out on innovation in that product. Which to me is just wild. I, I can scarcely believe, uh, how, all the different ways Hubslot can use to find new ways to, to approach things.

Which, uh, which is, is what makes Hubslot Hubslot, right? And I think Hubslot's going to keep being Hubslot for a very 

long time. 

George B. Thomas: Yeah. I, I hope so. I pray so. I want HubSpot to be HubSpot till I'm no longer like able to use 

Liz Moorehead: And even then, you'll find a way to automate, you'll find a way to automate the Metamucil. I believe

in you.

George B. Thomas: I, I, I'm going to automate from heaven, ladies and gentlemen. So here, here's the thing. Um, I wanna double click on what Kyle's talking about, because by the way, the, the date of this recording is July 19th.

Okay. So from July 19th to July 9th, there has been 10 updates to just the Marketing Hub, enterprise Pro and starter package. There's also, since July 9th, four new betas that you could request to be part of. So the fact that in 10 days. There's ten updates and four betas shows you that even the one that Kyle said could rest on their laurels is still pushing the envelope to be the best world class marketing 

tool that you could, uh, use moving forward.

Kyle Jepson: And, I mean, yeah. It's July, right? This is HubSpot's quiet time. We're, we're, we're, we're busy polishing all the things we're 

gonna 

Liz Moorehead: What are they? Kyle?

Kyle Jepson: right? Like, 

Liz Moorehead: No one's here. No one's 

here. It's just you and me, buddy.

George B. Thomas: See, this is why We get cancelled We get 

cancelled because you ask questions like

Liz Moorehead: just being a good investigative journalist. Continue Kyle. 

Kyle Jepson: I, I, I am not, I don't know a lot of things about, uh, Inbound, uh, updates, honestly. I don't know if I'm trusted to keep a secret. But I'm just saying, historically, Looking at, uh, you know, the, the ebb and flow, the seasonality of it. Hubslot. Am I still here?

Liz Moorehead: No, you're here? 

Kyle Jepson: Am I 

George B. Thomas: Nah, you're still here. You're here. 

Kyle Jepson: My screen froze, uh, Hubslot launches stuff at inbound, 

right?

And we, we kind of build our whole annual production calendar around that big release. And so what you're seeing now are just like the, the little things that were not on the top priority roadmap that, uh, various, uh, engineering teams were able to build and ship themselves. But you're going to see a sudden damn burst of, uh, updates in September, as you do every year.

Um, and so if in the first half of July, right, and the first week of July, the entire Upsalot company took a vacation. So, you know, uh, if in the first, what, five or six days of July, uh, we were seeing all these releases and betas, um, that's, uh, That's, that's the low watermark, right? Um, 

HubSpot, HubSpot is, 

Liz Moorehead: I'm going to say what George has already heard me say once today at a client meeting earlier, which is like, I'm having that feeling of when I wake up in the morning and I'm trying to find coffee and consciousness and it's like 6am and I get an alert that my best friend, Jesse Lee has completed a 60 minute high and high intensity interval training workout.

It's like, all right. That's So you went on a whole week vacation and you're just rolling out betas and this is just your slow time and it's just, it's fine. It's fine. You know, it's fine. I'll just, I'll just show myself out. I'll just show myself out. All right. So I have a quick question here though.

Because we've talked a bit about what it is, what it isn't, how sometimes we just kind of want to, you know, sink into the floor and become one with the carpet and no longer feel feelings when we hear people just refer to it as marketing. So how should folks be thinking about HubSpot? And I'd like us to tackle it from two different directions unless the answer is the same.

The decision maker who's sitting there making business decisions that may or may not include HubSpot and the people who are in the tool every single day. What's shifted about how they should be looking at this? I'm going to call on someone.

I will 

do it. 

George B. Thomas: I can go, I can go and then Kyle can round it up. So it's funny because, uh, as you were asking that question, two words came to my brain for the business owners, the word enablement came to my brain and I'll get to that when you then mentioned the people who are actually working in the tool, the word efficiency.

Came to my brain. So if I'm a boss, an owner of a company, which by the way, I am, when I think of HubSpot, I think of being able to give my team the best tools possible to do the best job that they can and understanding that sometimes I'm going to be around to help and sometimes I'm not. But I know if I give them HubSpot, not only am I giving them the best tools, but I'm giving them a complete support system that they can tap into to help them do the best that they can do as well.

So I'm literally enabling my marketing team, my sales team, my service team to do this one important thing that I am so focused on as a business owner. And that is to create the humans. The best user experience that they can have across the entire journey. I want them to be delighted, excited, and talk about everything that has happened as the business owner.

Now, when I think about this from somebody who's in HubSpot every day, and especially I go back to like the super admin training that I'm doing and the super admins that are in there day in, day out, trying to like Help others and help themselves with HubSpot. It's about efficiency. It's having the tools like automation that save you a metric, but ton of time.

It's like having tools like snippets and templates that you don't have to rinse and repeat and do the same thing over and over and over and over again, because you can create these processes inside of HubSpot that make your life more efficient. And when I go to the employee side of this, it's because I would hope that you could spend more time with your family or golf, whichever you love most, like just go do the thing that you love because you've been able to be efficient.

at your job with the tools that we're providing to enable you to have a great day and our customers to have a 

great day. That's where my

brain goes as far as 

what you're asking, Liz.

Kyle Jepson: And I would say, um, uh, first of all, everything George said is true, but if you're suspicious, if you're like, ah, George, you know, he's biased in Hubslot, go check the review sites, right? We're halfway through 2024. G2 just released a bunch of new reviews. Hubslot received over a thousand badges from G2.

Which who knew we were even in so many categories. That's a lot of you in for HubSpot. But if you look at them, it's not just like leaders in a space. It's things like easiest to implement, fastest time to value, most best overall value, easiest to use. Right. And these are things that really matter, right?

If you're that decision maker and you're trying to figure out like, okay, is this going to work out? What, what, I forget which one of our hubs got a number one top best ROI. Right. And so like. That's the thing you should care about, right? That's a thing you should be looking at. And so, um, and we're not, we're, all these different categories Hubslot plays in, it's not like, It's not like we're the sole contender on G2, right?

Like, these are, these are crowded, saturated areas we're playing in, CRM and marketing and, and service and all that. Um, and so, uh, yeah, George is not lying to you, but if you don't trust him for whatever reason, go to, go look at the reviews. People love using HubSpot, and that's important for a system like this, because if people don't love using a system of record, they don't use the system of record.

And then you don't have records, right? Um, and so, this is, this is a thing that matters a lot. I think for both the decision maker and the end user, Um, you want happy end users. If you are that end user, you don't want to use a, a system that's death by a thousand paper cuts. And if you're that decision maker, you, you want a system that's going to help your, your, uh, employees be happy and productive and, and generate shiny reports for you to run your business off of.

And, and HubSpot does all those things. So, um, yeah. I mean, the data, the people have spoken. Um, and, uh, it's all good news 

for us. 

George B. Thomas: Yeah. So I had, I had to Google it, but literally HubSpot ranks number one in sales and marketing in G2's 2024 best software awards. So, y'all can Google it

too. Yeah, just a little thing.

Liz Moorehead: Well, I, I finished my whole thing of water today. So take that HubSpot.

Nice try. 

George B. Thomas: you gotta have goals.

Liz Moorehead: I see you with your betas, whatever. Kyle, I want to stick with you here for a moment though. I want us to shift gears. We've talked a lot about the shoulds, right? This is how you should be looking at this.

So you should be thinking about it, but I want to come at this from a different angle here for a moment, because in your conversations, what have you observed in terms of either what people are missing about the story with HubSpot right now, or they're just

coming at it the wrong way that you'd like to see shift?

Other than please stop just saying we're doing marketing.

Kyle Jepson: no, well, sure. I, I, but even, even for those, maybe accepting those folks, for everyone else, I am, I'm, I'm not quick to say anybody's coming at it the wrong way. One thing that I think is really remarkable about HubSpot, and an interesting side effect of our quick, uh, Uh, production, which, by the way, something that's pretty unique about HubSpot, I think, for a software company, especially of our size, is that we don't have Set sprint schedules.

There's no monthly or quarterly releases like inbound is a big event Every engineering team is fully autonomous and authorized to commit code to the part of the code base They are own whenever they want to and so new updates hit literally every business day Um, and so that that is that is a level of agility That's that's kind of boggling and kind of the the interesting side effect of that Is that people have gotten used to the fact, users have gotten used to the fact that if there's something they're unhappy about in HubSpot, that unhappiness doesn't last very long, right?

We fix it eventually. And, and plenty of times when I, I post things on, on uh, the internet, Hey, we now have this new feature. It's, it's a running joke now. A lot of my, a lot of my followers will say like, Are you sure you're not spying on me? I was just saying I needed this yesterday, right? Um, but because of that, Everybody's really open about the things they're unhappy with in HubSpot.

They will tell me like, man, yeah, that, that product update you talked about today, Kyle, that's nice. But what I really wanted was this. And what I really hoped for was this. And why doesn't it do this? And how is it 2024 and it doesn't do this other thing? Because there's an infinite number of things our users might want HubSpot to In the realm of marketing, or sales, or service, or operations, or content, or e commerce, right?

Um, and we're getting there as fast as we can, which is pretty fast. But when you're trying to fill infinite space, it takes an infinite amount of time. And so, I mean, there are always things people wish for. Um, and I don't think they're wrong for wishing for those things. Um, I think it makes HubSpot better.

Uh, and, uh, I don't, I mean, man. Now that, as of just earlier this week, you can create your own custom date time properties in the UI. I'm running out of things that I just point to, like, everybody wishes HubSwap would do this. It's crazy that we've made it this far and we don't let them do it. There are still things.

Um, and there always will be. But, I mean, our product team loves our ideas forum. Uh, I think some ideas for them are just a, a place you send your customers to make them leave you alone, but, uh, they, those idea forums, they, things get uploaded, they, they come to the top and Slack channels are spun up around them and meetings are happening and solutions are, are proposed and we, and we tick them off and there are always new ones coming in.

We'll never get to inbox zero, um, but we really are trying to build the things people want. And so for anyone who's listening. If there's something Hubslot doesn't do that you think it should do, you're not wrong. You're probably right. We probably should do that thing. We just haven't gotten to it yet.

George B. Thomas: It doesn't do your Laundry? It 

Kyle Jepson: Uh, 

Liz Moorehead: said to 

Kyle Jepson: but, put it on,

put it on the ideas forum,

and uh, and see how many people upvote a feature for Hubslot to do Liz Moorhead's 

Liz Moorehead: I was thinking laundry.

for all, but if we're 

Kyle Jepson: I don't know. 

Liz Moorehead: me, you know, if there's just a Liz Hubspot 

Kyle Jepson: ha ha ha. Ha 

Liz Moorehead: fall to Inbound 24, Hubspot Liz's Laundry

Hub.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, ideas. hubspot. com. Go vote it up, ladies and gentlemen. So, Liz, I wanna I wanna answer your question because immediately two things came to 

Liz Moorehead: I wanted

you to answer it. 

George B. Thomas: but let me but, but let me get to that, uh, here in a second, because I want to, again, double click or tap or upvote. However, you want to say this, the fact of what Kyle was talking about, because.

I love that about our culture, the HubSpot culture, the fact that ideas. hubspot. com, and you can vote it up, and the amount of HUMANS that I've asked to go, uh, hit up support And put it in ideas. hubspot. com. So we can get double hits on things that we want in the platform. Um, I, I can't even keep count over the last 12 years of how many humans that has been, but I love the openness and the agility and ability for HubSpot to pivot on that.

One of the other pieces that I love about this is when I get an email from a PM and they're like, Hey, can you meet, can we interview you? Can we, we want to dig into these certain functionalities and, and you literally as, as a little old me get to like brain dump into like, Possible future ideas of where they can take the tool.

And I know they're doing interviews with tons of people around that. That's voice of customer, ladies and gentlemen. If you don't have a fricking VOC in place at your organization, then guess what? That's something that you're doing wrong right now. Not even from the HubSpot side, but from your business side is having 

a voice of customer.

Now, Liz, 

let me go back to answering your 

Kyle Jepson: Actually, sorry,

if I can 

George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Jepson: right there. Uh, my, my, uh, 

LinkedIn 

channel, my LinkedIn page is called HubSpot Tips and Tricks. If you go and look at it, today's post is about a thing called the All Bound Timeline. It shows both inbound and outbound contact activities. It's a new card you can put on a contact record.

If you look at the comment thread, You will see this in action. You will see people saying, this is super cool. You'll see people saying, I like it, but the name doesn't make any sense. You'll see people who are like, this completely misses the point. What I actually need is this thing. But the thing all three of those comments have in common is that Catherine Mann, the leader of the product team who built that feature, has responded to all of them with follow up questions and an offer to speak individually with those people, right?

And that is what the product cycle in HubSpot is like. Uh, and we, we do have voice of the customer stuff, but also just organically here on social media, um, the product team wants to know, they want to get it right. They want to do right by you. Uh, these features are never just boxes. They're checking off a to do list.

They're, they're trying to make HubSpot truly a joy to use. And they know that the users are the secret to doing that. So I just want to mention this thing George is talking about. It's not hypothetical happening today, right now, go check it out. Um,

George B. Thomas: It's funny because three words pop into my brain when I hear you say that, Kyle. And again, it comes back to HubSpot culture and culture's always been a thing, but I think it's just kind of like enriched itself over time. When I hear you say that, what it is, is it's empathy. It's love and it's service, right?

Literally HubSpot and the people who work for HubSpot have empathy for the people who are trying to use the product. They love what they're doing. They love the people that they're doing it for. They, they love the direction that they're trying to get it. And so therefore they're in this route of service, which by the way, goes back to like, Hey, people can release updates anytime they want, because like they're super passionate about doing this thing.

Like it just is. It's bread from the culture. So, all right, let me get back to, um, amazing stuff by the way, but let me get back to, um, people doing it wrong. First of all, any hate mail, you can send it to George at GeorgeBThomas. com. I'll open them all. I'll read them all. I may or may not respond to you.

Here's the two big things that I see people doing wrong when it comes to HubSpot. Number one, they are not educating themselves enough on what the platform can do. The amount of people that I talk to and the lack of HubSpot Academy certifications, which, by the way, I don't care if you take the certification, I know Kyle does, I know the Academy does, I But if you watch the videos and you learn the knowledge, and it's like being a master at your craft, being able to get into that education and reading the knowledge articles and watching the academy videos and looking at the blog articles and literally Setting time each day for just to learn the next thing that you need to learn so that you can become 1 percent better at the marketing tools, the sales tools, the service tools, the commerce tools, like you have to focus in on education.

The next thing that I've seen historically is that people get in their lane and they stay in their lane. And so if you don't have a mindset of experimentation, like what can we use that we haven't used? What should we turn on that we haven't turned on? Like what are we testing or not testing? And I don't mean from a landing page standpoint, CTA standpoint, but I mean from a business standpoint with what you can do with these tools.

What could we be experimenting with? That we're paying for, but we're not using. And here's the last one that I'll mention is that the lack of people who go into the sidebar menu. So for me, it's like sidekick strategies for you. It's the name of your business. The lack of people that go in. And actually go to the product updates and look at what is happening on a daily basis inside the tool that they pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for, and the lack of people who then also enable the betas to get the most recent, like Juju juice of like being awesome at the organization is mind blowing.

So you've got to keep up with product and updates. You've got to have a mindset of experimenting and you've got to educate yourself. This is the way that you're gonna, I should just be like Mandalorian. This is the way, but this is the way that you're going to get the most. Out of what you've invested in HubSpot and truly get the elusive ROI that everybody's looking for.

Liz Moorehead: Mic drop. Anybody?

I'm just going to knock over a 

George B. Thomas: I mean, it's expensive. I don't want to drop it. I'll just leave it. Hang right 

here. 

Liz Moorehead: where is Hubspot headed? What, what do we see coming and what are we hoping for? Kyle, I want to start with you. 

Kyle Jepson: Um, 

Liz Moorehead: And to be fair, we understand that you're basically like Tom Holland's Spider Man of the Avengers who they had to stop telling secrets to because you would accidentally say them on Seth,

on Seth Meyers show, so, um,

George B. Thomas: Uh,

Kyle Jepson: well, so, um, uh, I stand by what I said earlier, HubSlot will continue going as broad and as deep as we need to, to solve front office issues for small to mid sized businesses. Um, I, I believe what that means over time will continue to evolve. Um, of course, it's 2024 and we almost made it, but AI, right? Like HubSlot is investing in that.

We're going to do more with it. Um, I'm really interested to see. What HubSpot does to make AI more palatable and less scary for small and mid sized business, uh, not just owners and leaders, but like the sales reps and the marketer, like every new technology that comes out, the headlines are sales reps are going to be out of a job, right?

We keep having sales reps. I think we'll continue to keep having sales reps, uh, because humans buy stuff from humans. Right. Um, but there are so many things we can automate and we can improve efficiency with, uh, with AI. And I expect HubSpot. Uh, not to, just to become a leader in that space, but to do a really thoughtful job of it and to build opinionated tools that you can rely on not to lead you astray.

Um, the thing I'm really curious about, uh, the thing I, I don't know if HubSpot is thinking about this, but if I think of opportunities for HubSpot that we should just own, um, it's the other side of AI. How AI is changing search, right? HubSpot started in 2006 because Brian and Dharmesh were like, hmm. The internet and this Google thing, it's really changing how the way people do business.

And, uh, and, uh, B2C is getting this, but B2B is not getting it. Let's, let's invent, we'll call it inbound marketing. And we will teach small and midsize businesses how to use the internet to compete against big enter businesses. Right. And that has propelled us to the current moment, but, uh, I was just helping a friend move, uh, a couple of weeks ago and the movers he chose.

He asked perplexity, not Google, who are the best movers in Boston? And he got a list of like four or five and went to the review sites and, uh, picked one. Um, that's a very different SEO game to be playing. That's a very different SEO game. Right. And, uh, and we've all been hearing the doom and gloom for years about, uh, traffic is decreasing.

AI is maybe accelerating that, but Google's been killing your traffic for years by giving previews and images. And people aren't clicking on web pages. People aren't reading blogs as much as they used to. Right. But the internet is still the place to do business. Uh, your, your buyer intent traffic probably hasn't gone down.

People who are going to buy from you. Still going to buy from you. And if they can find you through AI, then more, you get more people than you used to. Right. Um, I, I have not heard anyone solve this problem yet. But if anyone should, it's HubSpot, right? We solved the problem for Google. Let's solve it for chat GPT and perplexity, right?

Um, and so that's very different. Uh, you're hearing a lot from us. You're gonna probably continue hearing a lot from us about AI powered tools and smart this and that and that's great. That's gonna give you a lot more efficiency that's gonna help you use our tools better. But there's this whole other thing of how the world is changing and business is changing in results of people not using the internet at all directly, just asking their favorite uh, AI powered chatbot who they should do business with.

Um, and if we can help you figure out how to win that game, then, uh, then, uh, we're, we're gonna have a whole new rocket ship for HubSpot, right? Um, so, that's, uh, that's a thing, I, I don't know what the answer is, I don't know if HubSpot has figured it out yet, if they have, they haven't told me, but, uh, that's, that's a, that's an area I am, I am keeping an eye 

George B. Thomas: yeah, this excites me. By the way, if you're listening to this podcast, I know that you couldn't hear me shaking my head the entire time that Kyle was speaking of like, yes. Yes, yes. By the way, Hub Heroes is now on YouTube, so if you wanna go watch it and you can't see me, like, shaking my head, like, vigorously, yes, agreeing and everything that Kyle said, uh, but here's what I'm gonna throw out there.

Kyle, you don't know this. But over the last two weeks, I've watched probably 14 videos about how SEO is dead in 2024 because of clients pains that they're facing right now, as we're recording this, I have three tabs open and the information is about how to be found in large language models, because I'm literally trying to figure out how, what do we have to create, or what do we have to do, or what can we do so that Our business and businesses we serve can actually end up in these questions that are being asked in perplexity, in chat, GBT, in all of these tools that people are now using.

So I, I, yes, 

Liz Moorehead: Here's where SEO still 

George B. Thomas: all that is 

Liz Moorehead: because those, those large language learning models are not going to be able to pull your stuff in if you're not optimizing your site. Like, that's the thing. Like the other thing, and this is, you know, I'm hearing we have another episode, this is another episode that we need to talk about Kyle.

I may come find you. Um, but one of the things that's just immediately coming to mind that I want to get to before we close out today's conversation is this idea that like we're watching organic traffic. Sink a little

bit, but how much of that was traffic that was never going to convert into sales anyway.

I'm finding, I'm 

Kyle Jepson: Right, yeah. 

Liz Moorehead: the work I'm doing is refining a lot of the sales enablement content with clients. So here's the thing guys, is that like. Organic search is still important. I've seen websites where because they haven't gone out of their way to optimize their site for what it is that they do, let alone their content, we run into massive issues in terms of their ability to, to, to show up where they should let alone their inbound content.

But this idea that People are going to stop trying to find you online once they're ready to purchase or once they're ready to really start making decisions. It's it's

asinine. Anyway,

George B. Thomas: Okay. 

Kyle Jepson: Yeah.

George B. Thomas: you be 

Kyle Jepson: The commercial intent it's, it's, it's the information intent, right? It, the, the, the old days of write a blog post saying define what inbound marketing is. So when people search, what is inbound marketing? They find you, right? Like nobody's clicking on a website for that now, but the people are like, who can help me build my website?

Liz Moorehead: about it. That's 

Kyle Jepson: They're still looking to pay money to, uh,

to, to yeah. So 

George B. Thomas: all right. So, so before you move forward, Liz, I've got a couple of little things here. One, I would want the listeners to go to LinkedIn and they go to Dharmesh's LinkedIn. There's something that excites me about the future of HubSpot that he alluded to. And that is that since the beginning of HubSpot's journey, the idea was to turn everything into an object.

Now, if you're listening to this, you know what an object is. It's, it's a container for data and property, but a world where everything becomes an object. Cause now workflows is an object, lists is an object. 

Like if if you haven't 

looked under your HubSpot hood in settings, Shame on ya. They're now 

Kyle Jepson: have 

properties. 

George B. Thomas: like, so you, there's so much you can do once it becomes an object, so I'm excited for that, but I want to stand here and, and throw this out because I don't know anything, but if, if I were to dream for a second, which, by the way, that question makes me dream.

If there, if we were going to add another hub, or if there was going to be another piece of what would be the customer platform or the all encompassing holistic tool, I get real curious

about an HR hub where now you can do human resources in the same place that you're doing commerce in the same place that you're doing marketing, sales, service, Rev, like that to me gets real interesting in the future, but.

Who knows? I could be wrong, but if I'm right, I'm going right 

back to this episode. I'm clipping it and I'm going to be like, I told you 

so.

Kyle Jepson: I have zero insider information on that. So I feel totally comfortable just speculating here. I will say an interesting, fun fact, probably clear back. I would say 2017, 2018, about the time we launched service hub, um, there were people internally at HubSpot who were really advocating that they heard our next hub is going to be service.

And they're like, no, our next hub should be something around HR, something around people management. Um, and at the time I was like, that's. Why, why would we do that? Everything we do is customer facing stuff, right? But fast forward to today, where we have that full front office suite, uh, and operation stuff and commerce stuff and content stuff.

Um, look at what we're doing with users. We're, users have become an object. You can now, in enterprise, uh, you can put custom properties on them. You can, you can, uh, Track, uh, you know, work schedules and, and out of office and stuff. And now it doesn't seem crazy to think like we, we make that object fully grow up and then we give your HR people the tools they need to manage people in there.

Right. Like we could, it's not unthinkable. I don't expect it at inbound this year, probably next year, but like, I would never say never to that. Right. And if it turns out that we hear from our customers, like HubSpot, if you just gave this to us, it would solve us a lot of pain. That's what's gonna make it happen.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. And I love what Nick Fargo said in the chat pane. It's the human hub. Yeah, there we go.

Liz Moorehead: you step away. I want us to help you land this plane bring this conversation home for our listeners What do you want everyone to take from this conversation today between you and Kyle?

George B. Thomas: mean, for me, it's, it comes down to taking, whether you're using HubSpot now or not using HubSpot now, the thing that I would say is it's time to take a second look at HubSpot. Because again, the HubSpot that you've been using is not the HubSpot that you now have. And it won't be in two weeks. It won't be in two months.

It's ever changing. So I go back to use HubSpot as its freshest, latest possibilities for your business. And again, I'm going to double down on what I love doing and where I think the thing that needs to happen is. Definitely educate yourself around all of this, be willing to experiment with all of this and just free yourself and your team for that enablement and that efficiency is gonna end up with more conversations, conversion, and at the end of the day, cashflow.

That's what's important.

Liz Moorehead: I love it. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us today for today's conversation. Can you let

our listeners at home know where they Can

find you? 

Kyle Jepson: Yeah. So I am, I have a LinkedIn problem. I'm always there. Um, so, uh, find me, if you look for Kyle Jepson, you can connect with me personally. So tell me that you heard me on the Hub Heroes Podcast, so I know who you are and why we're friends. Um, HubSpot Tips and Tricks is the name of the page where I, I do my daily posts.

Uh, love, uh, love for you to gimme a follow there, but yeah, always. Anyone in and around the HubSpot ecosystem, happy to connect, happy to chat over LinkedIn DMs and help you however 

I

Liz Moorehead: Look at that, George. I made it through a whole other

episode without getting us canceled. Aren't you proud? 

George B. Thomas: I know. Oh, close, but 

Kyle Jepson: tried 

that one time. 

George B. Thomas: no 

Liz Moorehead: guys