Steve Brown 0:00
Jim Tata! Welcome to the ROI online podcast. Thanks for having me, Steve. I appreciate it. So you know your channel account manager at HubSpot, and you're my channel account manager actually, we're a HubSpot agency. And we've worked together and gotten to know each other. So I'm really appreciate you coming on today. I appreciate you having me. I am a big fan of what you've been doing in terms of creating content that's really easy to consume and digest from the book to the podcast. And as you just said, we've been working together for a few years, and I think we've been pretty successful in helping businesses scale. So thanks for having me. Yeah, this is fun. And I appreciate you very much. So. So Jim, people listening this they're entrepreneurs or small business owners, they're, you know, they're building businesses, and they're confronting the things like, you know, now I'm getting ready to scale but I got to get some technology put into this thing. And I don't know which technology there's so many out there. And, and there's some good ones out there. And people ask me, well, Steve, why did you choose HubSpot?
And, you know, we decided we're going to be experts in HubSpot, because I love their culture, and it's really feels right to our agency. Tell us a little bit about the HubSpot culture. How long have you been with HubSpot? Why did you start working there, etc.
Jim Tata 1:26
Yeah, so this is a this is a good question. I have a little fun story about HubSpot, which I think translates into what your your audience is looking to accomplish. So yeah, I've been with HubSpot for just under three years now. I started in mid 2018. My three year anniversary is coming up in just a few weeks. So it's been an awesome time here at HubSpot. I've been a channel account manager the whole time. So what that means is I work with agencies like ROI online, when they have their clients that are looking to scale their business, you know, we're kind of the tech side and you know, ROI online and agencies like yours are the ones who are kind of taking that tech and, and crafting the message I always use. You've probably heard this Steve on all the demos. We've done. The limo analogy, where you know HubSpot is the vehicle hub spots, the mechanics behind what you want to accomplish, and agencies like ROI online or the chauffeurs that that take that vehicle and drive it. Yeah. But how do I get to HubSpot, that. This is a fun little story. So I spent the vast majority of my career actually selling office supply contracts b2b office supply contracts. That was That was great. But I knew I wanted to get into the software world. And in 2016, I made the jump to FinTech and I worked for I actually worked for a financial software company that would take traditional media payments, and converted those to digital payments. Think of like your one time virtual cards that you see. But, you know, at that company, we were using another we were using kind of a cobbled together set of martech between marketing and sales. And we brought on a director of marketing and she said, No, no, we need to bring on HubSpot. And we brought on HubSpot in this this is me working for a FinTech startup in the Boston area and HubSpot changed my life. You know, I remember I was I was smiling and dialing right like the company had great messaging had had a great, you know, value prop great mission statement, but I was still doing traditional outbound marketing, you know, calling. And then all of a sudden we introduced HubSpot, and I got, you know, workflows my meeting like and I remember one Friday morning, I walked into the office and I opened my computer and I to meetings booked for me on my calendar. And I was like, Yeah, I was like, wait, no, I'm a salesperson. I'm supposed to get rejected eight times before I get it. And yeah, all and then and thus was born my love for HubSpot. Fast forward a year from then that company got bought out by a company a bigger version of the same company doing the same thing on the west coast. And I actually had a colleague at HubSpot who said, Hey, I can recommend you in and I said, Yeah, I need to stay local. I want to stay in the Boston area. And the rest, as they say is history. I always joke. It's like the Hair Club for men. I'm not just selling I was also a client before I started working for HubSpot. So that's kind of my history and what brought me here.
Steve Brown 4:28
It's hard to get a job at HubSpot, and then
Jim Tata 4:31
it is I mean, you know, I, I had to get recommended and you know, I had tried to apply the old fashioned way before but you know, you better write a good cover letter. It always helps to know a couple of people get referred in but yeah, it's a it's a difficult spot to get a job. It's a coveted job regionally, and now it's starting become a coveted job nationally. And yeah, I feel very lucky to be here.
Steve Brown 4:56
I just want you to know on the ROI online podcast, we've had JD Sherman as a guest, I've had Christopher O'Donnell. Oh, wow. And now we've got Jim Tada. slot. Well,
Jim Tata 5:09
definitely not up to the caliber of those folks. But they are they are really, really amazing people to have in the podcast. And so it's it's always good to get different levels of the HubSpot family. And it's good to see that you've had such prestigious names on the podcast so
Steve Brown 5:25
far. I think one of the things value that I've gotten from HubSpot is all of the education all of the introductions to forward thinking, ways that marketing is going that sales is going in the world right now. And why why is HubSpot so tuned in to the pulse of all of that?
Jim Tata 5:48
Yeah, I think that's a phenomenal question. Those who are familiar with HubSpot, probably are familiar with our blog and all of the great content we put out. That is that is not even it's not even like a veiled advertisement. Right. It's it's kind of like, we like to be thought leaders. Right. So I think the reason HubSpot is so successful, especially among growing scaling companies, is that not only are we offering a superb product, you know, the the best CRM, the number one CRM if you're scaling, but we're also going to give you some thought leadership. I remember once again, tying back to my former life. I remember reading the HubSpot blog to get email templates for cold outreach or lines when I was making these calls. So yeah, it's it's not we're not just a tech company. We're thought leaders in the industry.
Steve Brown 6:39
So I've got a list of questions I'm I want to ask because I hear them all the time. So we're going to run through these and we're going to test you we're going to grade you to see how you do. Okay, and no, I'm teasing, you're gonna do great. But here, here we go. So, like, what can HubSpot do for me? As a business owner, right?
Jim Tata 7:02
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I'm gonna do my best to not sound like I'm just spewing company lines here and give Ryan a, my, my opinion on it. You know, you're gonna hear me say a lot of two things a lot on this podcast, you're gonna hear the best CRM or the number one CRM for scaling companies, and going to hear me say, crafted, not cobbled. And the reason this relates to your question is that if you are a if you are a company, and you're looking to set up your tech stack, not just Mar tech, not just CRM, not just you know, customer service, HubSpot is really like a one stop shop for you to set up a platform and a single source of truth for all the departments in your business to work out of. So there's no friction and confusion, especially when your team selling or you're trying to delight a customer.
Steve Brown 7:48
So when you say, just one stop, there's all these different technologies that people want to use. Right. But the thing it's exciting to me is that I'm sponsoring open platform. Correct?
Jim Tata 8:01
Yeah. And that's why it's, it's so funny, a lot of people who come to HubSpot, you know, expecting, hey, I need, you know, I need I need an email blasting tool, we can do that, oh, I need a customer service tool, I need a chat bot, you know, I need to I need to measure my revenue for my sales team. So and this is the reason we have these hubs HubSpot is that you have these different hubs that can take care of these different aspects of your business. But the truth of the matter is, we're most successful when we're used as a platform, from the top of the funnel, strangers hitting your website to you delighting your customers post sale and keeping them happy and keeping them referring new business in. So yeah, it's, you know, I spend a lot of my first discovery calls with clients, sorting that out. All right, what are you looking for? What are your goals? What are your challenges? Okay, here's my prescription. And what's funny is as I've my tenure at HubSpot is grown, I found that more and more the entire platform becomes the answer versus just one piece, right? And then to your original point of there's so much out there, you know, you can create an inbound marketing strategy with with a bunch of different disparate tools, but you get you get like a Frankenstein of systems, and it can be good and it can be cost effective, but you're going to spend a lot of soft cost labor hours trying to connect those systems. So the benefit of HubSpot is is the fact that it's all in one spot.
Steve Brown 9:18
And it's extremely scalable to I, I can see, you know, US companies, you have to make decisions on technology, but it's costly, and it's change management and getting people acclimated and oriented. And then later you figure out, you've outgrown it, and you have to start over but the beauty about HubSpot. It's extremely scalable.
Jim Tata 9:41
I would agree I what's interesting is you could hear the different types of zoom calls I'm on all day. I you know, I'll give you an example. I was just on a call yesterday with a bootstrap startup. That's two people and they're trying to start a hard seltzer company. And then fast forward two hours later, I'm talking to a you know, a 2000 person You know, commercial real estate lender that needs an enterprise solution. And I think that's one of the things that's about HubSpot is exactly right. Is it scalable? Whether you are a solopreneur, or you are that enterprise multinational company, we can now be that solution. And I would say 510 years ago, that may not have been the case. And we might have been thought of as not being able to handle that. But But we definitely can now and that that's been a goal of ours.
Steve Brown 10:24
So the next question I hear much is what can I do with HubSpot?
Jim Tata 10:30
Yeah, that is that's a loaded, vague question in a good way. Because I mean, really, you can do you know, we have our we hit we have our funnel. Well, now we have our flywheel, right, where you have people who are searching for the first time or strangers that are hitting your website for the first time. Right? HubSpot can help you at that front, where you're converting those leads, you're you're gaining business, Intel, you're gaining traction, all the way through the entire customer acquisition process, to the end, where you have happy customers, and you're sending out surveys, or you're having them referred new business and, and really, we can do everything in between. So what HubSpot can do when someone asked me that I usually say well, we need to take a step back. What do you want HubSpot? What are your goals? And then let's go from there because it's so powerful. And if you really want me to talk about everything HubSpot, can do I need about a four to five hour meeting with you?
Steve Brown 11:26
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd like to, I like to answer that is this, we, we think that our website is supposed to, like, get us some leads. And so that's kind of where we're stuck as a business owners like this is where the world is going to revolve around this website that's getting us leads. But what you, but what you realize after a little bit is that let's assume it's successful, a lead comes in, was coming into your organization, who's it going to? What are we going to do with this lead? Who's going to follow up? Are we going to document conversations? Right? Right? What are the resources that we're going to use in that process? And then then how do we communicate with them? If they become a client? And
Jim Tata 12:09
then if if there's if there's change in our company, or our team selling? Where do we go to find out, you know, the tail of the tape? Where do we get that recorded history from when they first filled out a form on our website, all the way through to when they first engaged with us one on one in our sales team? Oh, and then after that, when they were assigned, and maybe they were on boarded onto our product, or then they were assigned a customer service? Rep. You know, where can we go to get a single source of truth there? And yeah, to your point, the outreach, the streamlining, and the recorded history of that can all be done within our tool.
Steve Brown 12:40
Yeah, imagine a centralized place that everybody looked at a client's contact record, and could see the history of, of communications from your team, the history of visits, documents, viewed downloaded pages on your website viewed all these things, they're right there. And it's a cohesive tool that year, coordinate your team to better serve the people that you develop a relationship and bring into your organization.
Jim Tata 13:12
Yeah, and another phrase we hear a lot in that same vein is reducing friction, right? Because, you know, when marketing is handing off leads to sales, you know, HubSpot can reduce that friction, because it's all in one spot, or when sales are saying, Okay, this is great. I'm about to close this deal. But what actually brought them to our product was at a blog post, you know, was it? Did they convert on a form? Was it a webinar that we did, all of that can be tracked, I always, I always joke that there's always the, it's like the brother and sister fighting, it's marketing and sales pointing the finger at each other. You know, marketing's like, I gave you all these great leads, how come you're not giving us credit and sales thing I sourced this lead, you didn't give it to us. And by having a single place where the alignment of marketing and sales is there, and you use reporting, and you use things like, you know, attribution to find that out, you stop that finger pointing, and you realize that they start working together, and they start to value each other more. So yeah, I think I think that that's the reduction, you know, not only the great streamlining of external communication, but the reduction of friction internally among teams has been a huge benefit.
Steve Brown 14:18
Huge. Yeah. I love that. So here's the next question I get often. So what does HubSpot do for marketing?
Jim Tata 14:27
Wow, that is that is once again, a very loaded question because HubSpot, you know, started out as a marketing platform, right? So I mean, if we're rattling off features, right, we can we can create your content through you know, we can have your blog, we can, we can actually host your social media. We can do your email marketing that in and of itself can replace three or four disparate tools, right. But really, what what I like to say if I'm simplifying it for marketing is we can streamline your top of the funnel activities from conversion, all the way to handing it off to a one to one conversation, whether it's sales or account management. So it's it's not only about the creation of content, it's about measuring the conversion, and making sure that your communication is effective.
Steve Brown 15:11
You know, think about what you're expecting of your marketing person in your in house. Okay, so I want you to like write this great article. Let's get it on our blog. Let's push it out to social media, but then let's measure to see if it's any good. And then let's, let's document who's looking at it. And if they filled out a form, and what did we follow up to nurture them a little further to where we do you get to have a sales conversation? That's a huge expectation.
Jim Tata 15:40
And I think the key word you said there was measure, right? Because when you have everything in one place versus a cobbled together, martec platform, it's tough to measure. You know, I I've seen people who have a cobbled together martec platform who are trying to measure in an Excel spreadsheet or a Google Sheet, they're like, well, they hit this and then this is the conversion. Whereas I say, hey, if you move to HubSpot, you know, we have this kind of reporting out of the box. So So measuring, measuring that effectiveness doesn't disrupt your team from creating great content, and doesn't disrupt the sales team from having to put together numbers in terms of leads coming in. So yeah, I think I think if you're talking about the platform play, we're talking about consolidation of tools measures is a big part of that.
Steve Brown 16:24
So you're listening or watching we're having a great conversation with Jim Tata. He's a channel account manager with HubSpot. He's my channel account manager, and we're successful together. So I tell you what, Jim, here's another question I get is like, what is HubSpot sales?
Jim Tata 16:45
Yes, so HubSpot, so you talked about marketing, right, and funnel funnels kind of a dirty, bad word. Because we've retired the funnel, we moved on to the flywheel, but just for today's podcast demonstration purposes, I want you to visualize the funnel. So you talked about HubSpot marketing that's like that top of the funnel, I'm talking about right conversion. Get them you know, nurture those folks. Now, HubSpot sales is when you take that top of the funnel, and you change that one to many marketing conversation to a one to one sales conversation. So that's where you have Okay, great marketing, qualified lead they've met, they're now a sales qualified lead, let's talk to them one to one. And however your organization decides to transition, that conversation, that's where HubSpot sales can help you know, if someone hits the pricing page on your company's website, or fills out a certain form, right? That's where you can say, Okay, time to assign this to a salesperson and have a salesperson act and try to get that that first meeting with them or whatever, get the first step in your sales processes.
Steve Brown 17:44
So it's a set of tools to actually what is sales? Yeah, yeah. What is HubSpot sales?
Jim Tata 17:51
sales, is that is are those one to one sets of tools that we're talking about? You know, so early on in this conversation, I talked about the the idea of when I walked in all of a sudden I had meetings, right? So the idea of someone filling out a form being converted, getting an email from me a one to one email for me and getting my meetings link. Those are some examples of the sets of tools that come in with HubSpot sales. And oh, by the way, you know, HubSpot has a free CRM, which I know we're going to talk about in a bit. But a lot of the sales tools are enhancing the free CRM with your one to one outreach, and you can, on top of that, now, I'm really talking with that first Chevron in the funnel transition. Now, on top of that, you can measure your revenue, you can create your opportunities, you can make sure that your sales team is following the processes through playbooks and through measuring, you know, deal records. So So really, it's it's to your point, it's a set of one to one tools, to not only start the conversations on a one to one basis, deepen those relationships, and then you can manage and measure the pipeline on a one to one basis.
Steve Brown 18:56
Yeah, and you know, imagine, so you're you have a salesperson, right? And so you're expecting this salesperson to document their activities, because you're trying to get an idea of whether they're being effective, how you can support them, maybe you trying to figure out what they need as far as a template or, or some materials that they could send on that would support them in their sales process. You've you've set a schedule on a calendar with a salesperson before and so if these things are you have to Frankenstein a system together generally to coordinate that and empower the salesperson be more effective online. And that sales hub has them all nicely integrated so that actually, we're not expecting that sales person to do extra documentation we're actually supporting and facilitating that sales person with with helpful materials and technology. If are you trying to say that salespeople avoid admin Mark I I hate it right? I always here's what as a salesperson is like when they want me to fill out a report will you know if you're wrong or you didn't put the right time or whatever it was like it will Steve you're Are you being honest here? Dude, I'm you're asking me to do report but report on myself give you a cudgel to hit me with because I'm not hitting my quota when I am hitting my quota, and it's like, you want to avoid these inherently as a salesperson, just because it's hard enough just to sell.
Jim Tata 20:30
I would agree. I think another thing that's great about our sales tools is that sales is a science of numbers. And this is long before my time at HubSpot, I believe that if you can reverse engineer you know your revenue goals from Alright, if I need to hit X amount of dollars in my quota, that means I need to close X number of deals, which means I need to have X number of proposals X number of meetings X number of calls and you reverse engineer that. I think with HubSpot, what's great about that is once you have those numbers, established in terms of what's effective, as a salesperson, you can focus on selling, my emails are automatically being logged. If I'm creating enough deals, and I know I'm hitting my deal creation numbers, I can feel good that it's automatically being measured. And my my manager, my director, whoever I'm reporting to, as an individual sales contributor, knows what I'm doing without me feeling like I'm doing data entry. You know, I would say that's been the biggest thing. And then two other aspects that are huge are the playbooks. So if I'm conducting the meeting, for the first time, oh, man, this is my first time selling this really complex deal. I have a playbook that I can follow. And then on top of that, okay, if I'm moving this deal through our stages, as we have it set up as an organization. Okay, I'm gonna move this from discovery to negotiation, Oh, nope, I actually have to have these aspects feel that I need to know this information. So I always joke that these tools, these one to one sales tools, keep sales leaders from having to micromanage by just instilling a process that they don't always have to be checking in on, it's just there. And in order to move the deal forward, you need to have the right pieces of information.
Steve Brown 22:06
So here's another question I get is like is HubSpot a good CRM?
Jim Tata 22:13
I mean, I would say we are the number one CRM for scaling companies. And what I mean, and what we mean by that is that if you you know, you started off by saying, if I'm an entrepreneur, if I'm someone who's establishing something, from a business standpoint, we are the best choice for that. And clearly, I'm biased. But what I mean by that is that we because we can handle these businesses of all these different, you know, sizes and industries, we are probably the best CRM, especially if it's your first foray into looking into this tool. And because of the the different levels from our free to our starter to our professional to our enterprise, you know, and you know, once again, biased answer, we have a stellar sales team that can help discover, prescribe and diagnose based on your needs. So yeah, I would say we are the best if your company is scaling.
Steve Brown 23:09
I've worked with a bunch of CRMs. And when I ran into him spots, it's so intuitive. It's so easy. It's easy to customize. It's, there's so many things about it that really made my job as a salesperson. Easy. It's intimidating to adopt a new software.
Jim Tata 23:30
Oh, especially, especially if you're looking at some of the bigger players out there. You know, you know, you have your sales forces, your dynamics, all of those. I mean, I mean, I'm not going to deny those aren't powerful pieces of software. But the word intimidating, you know, is almost an understatement there, because there's there's when I was with that office supply company, and I was I was managing a sales team. I used to have to create reports. Yeah, and not in HubSpot, you know, in Salesforce, and I got pretty good at it. But then, you know, I was almost like the goat I almost became like an engineer. Because then other sales managers coming to me, Hey, can you make this report for me, because I knew that I knew how to do it. Whereas HubSpot to your point, the UX is just as powerful, but it's much much easier for someone. I mean, you don't have to hire an admin to use our software. I think that says everything.
Steve Brown 24:18
You know, as a salesperson, I was really impressed at the quality and the act like the sales acumen that the HubSpot sales team has I was it was really apparent that enlightened sales was in play at HubSpot. And then they design this CRM that their salespeople use. On top of that, it's like if you think about you're wanting to implement some sort of sales CRM and your your company, why are you thinking that? Well, I need data. I need to help my sales people more effective I need to create kind of a system so that everyone's selling at a higher level. Level just because we're following a system. And then I need the document site. What can I predict my revenue with? There you go. That's the HubSpot CRM.
Jim Tata 25:10
Yeah. I think you're exactly right in terms of sales enlightenment, and you know, just to you Yes. It's funny how everything's coming full circle because you said it's hard to get a job at HubSpot. And, you know, I'm a channel account manager for for all intents and purposes. I'm an individual sales contributor at HubSpot, but I'm a former manager of sales manager of a fortune 500 company. A lot of a lot of the people in my role at HubSpot are not your usual sales journey men or journey women it's it's a lot of people who, you know, were former managers were former sales trainers and came back to be an individual contributor because being an individual contributor at HubSpot involves a lot of consulting involves a lot of almost you need that management style experience to talk through that. So yeah, makes me happy to hear that you've seen that because a lot of the colleagues I work at who are individual sales contributors are former sales managers at other organizations.
Steve Brown 26:05
So next question I get is like, why is HubSpot CRM free?
Jim Tata 26:12
So we have our CRM that is free, because because it's a lot like Spotify, and it's so funny when I first got hired by HubSpot, that was the first analogy they taught me was he said, it's like Spotify. And HubSpot, like Spotify. We're talking about a business CRM, and a music streaming service. And he said, Well, think about this. You know, if you want Spotify free, you can get your core goals done in listening to music, pick your artists, right? You can, you can, you know, you can save some things but not everything can't download you know, it's it's you can do what you need to get done. But it's very manual and not streamlined. And then all of a sudden, you get a Spotify membership. You get unlimited skips, you can save more, you know, you get the higher quality streaming, same idea with HubSpot is that you know, our free CRM is an excellent tool, especially if you're a solopreneur. Or you know, you're very strapped. It's an excellent digital Rolodex, and we have some excellent free tools that come along with that now, as you start to hit that ceiling of streamlining, okay, now I want to send more emails because I want to start doing you know, proper email marketing, or I want to replace a MailChimp and Okay, these leads are excellent that I have with HubSpot starter level. But now I actually need some automation because I don't have the bandwidth to follow up, Okay, time to go to professional and get some automation. So it's free. Because if you're scaling, we want to scale with you. And I always use Spotify, the Spotify analogy tends to have people understand it the most. But I would say, you know, I get on a lot of sales calls where folks are like, I love HubSpot. This is awesome. And but we're just starting out, I said no matter what, sign up for a free CRM and get in there and use that as your system of record. And then ideally, you'll get the ROI on the level you're at. And you'll start seeing the return on that investment. Pun intended with this podcast. And you'll start to you know, scale up as you need to. And that's kind of the idea of the the freemium as we call it.
You know, I when when they rolled out the CRM and and said it was free, I thought about it for a while. It's like for a couple of months I'm I kept asking myself, but what was the strategy of rolling out such a great tool that they can legitimately charge for? I mean, it's competitive was Salesforce and others, right? And why, but why are they giving it for free, I kept asking myself, and then then it kind of hit me, as an agency. My challenge working with a business owner is moving them from a marketing centric, website centric mindset into that we're actually empowering your sales process by designing assets across your platform to support your sales process. And it just dawned on me that by going sales first getting set up in a CRM, you've just helped me set my business owners up for success, because now we're thinking right, what assets should we create to support the sales process? Well, that wouldn't be something they would fill out a form and download. What would that be? Well, that's coming from a landing page. Now we're walking in backwards. And we're actually set our team up for success. Even better, because we're thinking sales first, instead of marketing first,
right? And I talked about almost reverse engineering that funnel from what we do. And it's almost like, it's almost like you're reverse engineering and then you're like, oh, okay, this is where we need help. So we know what our goals are, we know what we need to do to be a profitable business. let's reverse engineer that with a number of meetings and then and then Okay, we have our one to one metrics down. But how many leads can how many conversions how many marketing qualified leads Do we have coming in? How can we fill the top of that funnel? And then once it's full, how do we turn that funnel into a fly? We'll so it's constantly feeding itself. And we're delighting customers, and there's referrals. So yeah, I think I think that's spot on in terms of, you know, a good reason why we probably made that shift in recent years.
Steve Brown 30:12
Yeah, so smart. And, you know, it just helps you think about what the activities and we're helping your team do is grow the value of your business, not just get leads, you know, it's like, we're, there's all these other activities, we're actually building an asset that's going to be evergreen and valuable. And at some point, if you, if you sell your company, think about this conversation, the person is buying, your company is going to go, Well, how am I going to pay for this? Well, let me show you, right here in our CRM, look at this data here, look at all these contacts, that we have contact records that are generated at least three or four a day, then that drops into this follow up system. And not everybody's at the same stage. So they're gonna hang back and evaluate. Perfect, we've got emails, nurturing, keeping them up to date on what's going on, so that when they're ready, what do they do, they're gonna raise their hand. And then when they raise their hand, it gets delegated to sales person be.
Jim Tata 31:14
And that process is automated through the workflow like that, that that process is there. It's not like you're relying on someone to move those levers manually. It's It's so funny to talk about those metrics and what you need, and you're someone buying your business. I always watch Shark Tank. And I can tell you know, it's almost like it almost so simple. You can tell who has a CRM and who doesn't, because they know their numbers. And Mr. Wonderful is always like, Well, you know, you know, he's like, what, what's your average margin, you know, how many, how many customers do you have? What's your existing client? And you know, what's your attrition, and I'm just like, when the people are rattling off numbers like, oh, they're measuring that they know. And it all comes down to what you've chosen to measure that. And if you know it, and I think a tool like a CRM and HubSpot specifically, is excellent at getting you started, and perfecting that for you.
Steve Brown 32:03
So if if you could describe the perfect person, perfect business owner, that's a perfect fit to take advantage and exploit the tools that HubSpot offers, what would that person look like to you? What would their company look like to you? Yeah?
Jim Tata 32:24
Well, it's I almost don't want to put it in too much of a box from a come from a size but when I say that, I find the companies that are most successful with HubSpot, specifically, the decision makers or the owners are the ones who are open minded. Yes, sense that they are not too hung up on previous processes or previous pieces of software. it you know, obviously, we can handle you know, we replace the the big names all the time. But in terms of getting yourself set up, I find it's it's companies who want a crafted solution that's there for them. They don't want to be using duct tape to take old pieces of software and connect it to this and do that. It's It's It's an it's an open mindedness to your tech stack, that will allow you to really streamline everything I find. CRM or marketing implement implementations that don't succeed, are when companies are too hung up on previous software, or outdated software or piece of software that just won't connect. Yeah, I would. So I would say it's, it's, if I just use one phrase, it's open mindedness.
Steve Brown 33:27
Isn't that the mindset? And I agree, because I always think they people ask, well, Steve, what's, you know, what's the segment that you you specialize in? And, and I, I finally landed on it. And it's a progressive minded business leader who's recognized that if they're going to scale, they need to get their technology stack, the foundation, solidified and in place, and that means they have to choose technology that be able to grow and scale and adopt other unique technologies that unique to their industry. And so what are they doing? They're searching for that platform that's open, and that can scale. And guess where that is? That's HubSpot.
Jim Tata 34:11
Yeah. Yeah. And I it's so funny. We didn't even rehearse that, that we both thought open mindedness was the answer. It's almost like it gets as a business owner, it gets to a point where I love using car shopping as an analogy. It's just as you can tell by doing the limo analogy earlier, but like, if you're a business owner, it almost gets to a point where like, Okay, I'm done buying aftermarket parts for this vehicle. I need a new vehicle. And that's kind of where HubSpot comes in is when you're finally at that decision as a business owner, say, I need a vehicle that was crafted intentionally all together, versus one that was put together after the fact. Yeah, and that's the simplest way to put it.
Steve Brown 34:47
Excellent. So, Jim, you're in a band, is that right?
Jim Tata 34:52
Well, yeah, I mean, I am in a band. I've I've dabbled in a bunch of bands between cover and original and and COVID. You know, disclosure COVID has definitely decimated a lot of musical prospects. But right now I'm kind of a free agent. But I'm still playing and I'm, I think I'm looking to get back into the cover band scene here in the Boston area. Yeah.
Steve Brown 35:13
Seems like all the bands, all the great bands come out of Boston. Why is that?
Jim Tata 35:18
I think what happens is we all get very miserable and these long, cold winters and write beautiful music about it, as seen by the it's negative 10 with a windshield today? No, I think I think I think Boston's really a cultural hub for America, along with many others. But I think you know, you'll see a lot of great music coming out of Boston because of kind of the it's a great mix of progressive folks, as you can see with our colleges and our medicine, but then you also have a lot of blue collar folks, and we all are miserable to a sense because you know, before the year 2000, our sports team sucked and we have terrible winters. And I think, yeah, I think it's a combination of misery. And hardheadedness and progressiveness creating art. So that's my opinion on it.
Steve Brown 36:02
So you're watching or you're listening to Jim Todd, we're having a great conversation. He's channel account manager at HubSpot. Jim, what's one question that I didn't ask that you would love to answer?
Jim Tata 36:20
Yeah, one question that I'd love to answer. I put me on the spot here with this one. Every time about HubSpot or about life in general,
Steve Brown 36:29
life in general HubSpot, whatever it is. We're more digging here.
Unknown Speaker 36:34
Um
Jim Tata 36:37
I would say probably one question I'd love I would love for you to ask that I could answer is how is HubSpot handling COVID right now,
Steve Brown 36:47
how is HubSpot handling COVID
Jim Tata 36:50
and I'm speaking more or less from a personal standpoint cuz I can't speak for the company. Um, that's that's but you know, for me I was really it's really interesting. I live about an hour outside of Boston North I live in Southern New Hampshire and I was what they called a semi remote employee before COVID hit. I would go in once or twice a week important dates because I'm like it's an hour drive. But I would work from home three to four days a week. And I haven't it's all in in I think two weeks it'll be officially a year since I've set foot in the HubSpot offices.
Steve Brown 37:19
Wow.
Jim Tata 37:20
Which is which has been which has been odd and different and strange for me because I I like working from home guy got two young kids but I need to go in and recharge and like plug into the mainframe for a bit. Yeah. So that's that's been that's been tough. HubSpot has allowed us to go fully remote, which has been such a blessing with you know, the kids being home, at least for part of 2020. Now they're back in school. But I think HubSpot has done such a phenomenal job in adapting with COVID. As you can see, by our results. I mean, I think a big reason for that. There are so many businesses that are remote now that didn't plan on being remote. Yeah. And they need a sales tool or a marketing tool like HubSpot because they need a centralized single source of truth. So I would say both internally and how we're handling things at HubSpot allowing employees to go remote and then externally allowing companies who are having a tough time navigating COVID I think, you know, you never want to say there's a silver lining to this terrible year we've had. But I think you know, the silver lining we're going to get out of this as as a society is that remote work isn't as difficult as we thought. And I think HubSpot has been an exemplary example or exemplary kind of player in that game.
Steve Brown 38:33
How many employees does HubSpot have now?
Jim Tata 38:37
Let me let me verify because it's changing because we're hiring so much. I want to say it's around 3000. But let me make sure. Let me see. Oh, yeah, three, right as of 2020 to 3387. So my guess my mind was right there. Yeah. So 3000 worldwide. And you know, headquarters is in Cambridge, Mass. And I feel very lucky to be within an hour of there.
Steve Brown 38:59
So I'm spots like this international company has locations around the globe, they have 30, over 3300 employees. And one day, they just transition to full remote.
Jim Tata 39:13
And we've always had fully remote employees even prior to the pandemic because you know, great peep. There are certain great people who can't be within striking distance of an office. But it's just now even folks like me or you know, there's a lot of folks who live right in downtown Boston or at least in surrounding areas, who all of a sudden can't go to the office and the HubSpot offices are awesome. They were you know, can't the candy wall, the coffee garden, the beer garden. It was an awesome place. I actually feel bad for the folks who actually didn't rely on the office space five days a week you can't I it's been a tougher transition for them.
Steve Brown 39:46
Yeah. So think about the technology that has to be in place to continue on communicating, documenting, growing, communicating the vision, communicating outcomes, design All this all this stuff going on and in HubSpot had actually positioned themselves to excel in that, that environment. And consequently the tools that they design help you to do the same with your company.
Jim Tata 40:15
I think that's very clearly and succinctly put, that's exactly it. And I think that's why we were able to navigate this pandemic in such a smooth as we could, I wouldn't call it smooth, it's in a fairly smooth manner.
Steve Brown 40:27
Yeah, even my organization were, were way more remote now, just even people that usually would come in to HQ, we're working from home more and, and things are like, you worry about the culture, you worry about the momentum, you worry about all the little side conversations and all the value that that brings. But somehow, actually, we've, we've replaced it, not that we don't want to see each other, but, but it's like, where we're synched in.
Jim Tata 41:02
Let me ask you this, I'm going to turn to ask you a question. As a business owner, it seems like you're open minded and you're ready to adapt. Have you have you what are some of the benefits you've seen as a business owner to this pain and what's what's your silver lining,
Steve Brown 41:18
so that there's a cost of travel that to and from the office and caring, and so you have expenses, but you're a little bit disconnected, or maybe that's a lot more time away from your family, that you could hang up from work, document the outcome, do whatever, and then turn around and be immediately engaged in with your family. The other thing is, like, used to be like, Oh, be quiet in there, because I'm on a call. But now it's like, you know, the kids run through the background, the dog walks through, and everybody's like, oh, you're a real human.
Jim Tata 41:56
I it's so funny. You know, being in sales, we learn a lot about you know, sales tactics. And to your point, what used to be seen as a detriment is now endearment. It's like, Hey, we're all human. We're all going through this Sorry, my dogs barking Sorry, my three year olds crying, they're like, no. And then you get this human connection, and it makes the sale easier.
Steve Brown 42:12
Yeah, yeah, I
Jim Tata 42:13
get I get what you're saying there.
Steve Brown 42:14
I've been on calls where like, you know, the kid pops in and ask if they can have candy. I've been on a call where you could hear the chicken, marking in orange chirping whatever a chicken does outside the window, you know, it's like, we have these really funny, funny things that happened. But it makes work more fun.
Jim Tata 42:38
It does, it does. And it's so funny. I, when I was going into the office, I would leave my house at you know, 630 or seven in the morning and get home get home at 630 or seven at night. But you know, two hours of each book end was traveling to your point, the cost of travel, not just in hard dollars, but in time, and now. I'm on my computer starting at 7am. I'm signing off at 7pm. But I'm but I'm still doing things for my house in my family in between. So I would argue net net, my Corporation and my company is getting more hours out of me now. Yeah. And then one last funny story, that one other silver lining of this pandemic for me is I i leased a brand new truck in October of 2019. And I was so excited. And I was like okay, but I drive a lot. So I negotiate, you know, 15,000 miles a year lease, and then pandemic it.
So in almost two years, a year and a half realistically, I've only done 8000 miles on the truck and I should be at around 20 or 25.
Steve Brown 43:37
Wow.
Jim Tata 43:38
So it's it's, it's to your point, it's you hate to put it in such rigid terms, but there's literally a cost, there's literally cost savings that if you can step back, realize and take advantage of it, you can you can make the best of this crappy crappy past year we've had.
Steve Brown 43:53
Totally. And the other thing you know, as a sales person, like we used to be able to go shake hands with people and meet them and have coffee and those things and I missed those. But the flip side of that is I've actually taught a lot of business owners how to start using zoom, seeing the opportunities, remote technology can empower the team as as opposed to being a barrier or this intimidating technology.
Jim Tata 44:22
I would agree. I think if you're doing like, you know, your training on the old school bond and report, they used to say sit across the table and mirror and match and match their tone. And you can't do that anymore. So it's so funny. You have to learn almost zoom bond and rapport. And like I very intentionally put this guitar back here because it's a great conversation piece, especially people who are interested. Or you know, sometimes I'll have you know, like I'm wearing a Guns and Roses shirt I've ordered I wear this shirt a couple months ago and someone's like I love Guns and Roses and it started off a great sales conversation and it's that human element. So yeah, I would say it's, you can still use those same sales tactics but you got to change the etiquette for zoom.
Steve Brown 44:59
That's a good Tire I thought it was a ukulele.
Unknown Speaker 45:01
Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, this is an old school and old school.
Steve Brown 45:08
Jim, this has been fun man, I'm really enjoying this conversation. I think the folks that and listen to that that are you know, thinking about, you know marketing automation Sales Automation? How do I, how do I move my company to be more effective online to be more relevant to compete? It's HubSpot a beautiful option for a lot of companies.
Jim Tata 45:30
You know, we we understand there's a lot of competition out there, which is why we feel we're the best for scaling companies. And that's kind of what we've been focused on. And I think I think, you know, it's it's an excellent tool I can tell you before I was even an employee, and before I became very biased, it changed my life as a as an individual sales contributor. So I'm a believer in it and and you know, if, if, if I'm ever not working for HubSpot down the line, I'm sure I'm going to try to use it wherever I go. Because of because of the the friction, it's reduced and the time and the stress. It's saved me.
Steve Brown 46:06
All right. Jim, you're great guest on the ROI online podcast, man.
Jim Tata 46:11
Well, Steve, thanks for having me this. I think this is like my first official business. But I mean, I've been on like fun music podcasts, but this is my first official business podcast. So thanks. Thanks for having me. And, and I know you and I have a lot of conversations ahead of us and we'll be continuing to work together.
Steve Brown 46:26
Right. Awesome. Thanks. And that's a wrap.
Jim Tata 46:29
All right.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
