Is that a sound strategy when you have a customer base that’s familiar with your existing product, but not with the incarnation that you’re introducing?
Even if you’re deeply familiar, you might not use a part of the product that you should be thinking about using. It’s more and more important to have clarity of message and clarity of story. Otherwise people will just get lost in feature land, and that’s not what we want to have happen.
There’s often a hesitancy among B2B marketers to go with a big-picture message and a preference for cramming as much information and data into a campaign as possible. What were some of the challenges that reintroducing the Sales Hub brand presented, and how did a broader strategy pay off?
We’ve spent the last couple years really focused on telling the platform story of HubSpot: That we’re not just marketing or sales or customer service. That we were a full front-office CRM.
That was an important story to tell, but with the reimagining of Sales Hub, the challenge that we faced was the sales audience is a little different, a little more skeptical, a little harder to reach than your marketers.
We [also] found an alignment between the audience and the campaign where the audience both deeply cares about Q4 and they’re high consumers of sports and live entertainment. It allowed us to get a really clear message across at scale and allowed us to do custom partnerships with DraftKings, some sponsorships with the [Dallas] Cowboys and [New York] Jets … allowed us to really get deep into the world of marketing and sports marketing.
When HubSpot gets the data back from spots on DraftKings or NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube, is it creating awareness among businesses an adequate result, or is HubSpot looking to convert potential partners?
You’re always going to get some conversions, but every media is designed to convert or increase consideration. This campaign was designed to increase awareness and consideration … [there are] no key metrics we’re looking at here.
Change is really what we’re looking at.
You relaunched Sales Hub and introduced HubSpot AI at Inbound in Boston amid a host of celebrity speakers. How does an event and supporting cast like that help a product’s debut?
It is one of the best investments we’ve ever made. All the key measures in terms of [net promoter score] exceeded our expectations.
It’s worked out really well, for a couple of reasons: One, we were deeply aligned as a company, our product team, our marketing team, our sales teams. Then, we really aligned well with the community …. it’s not just Reese, and Derek and Andrew Huberman and these great thought leaders. We had it down to product leaders, giving 50-person sessions on the latest and greatest of AI content generation.