Loading summary
Transcript28 lines
- [00:00]
Sam Anderson
Over time with AI, we're just going to end up having a bunch of very super specific agents that interconnect together and create like an army of agents that do everything. But you have to start one thing at a time. You cannot boil the ocean.
- [00:15]
Sarah McDevitt
Did you know that the opportunity to deliver customer success solutions is one of the biggest untapped markets out there? I bet you didn't. In fact, in the IDC analyst brief, defining HubSpot's own $30 billion partner opportunity, customer demand for AI services related to Service Hub is top of the list. Unlike me and maybe you too. Today's guest, Sam Anderson, CEO of Origin 63, already knew that. That's just one of the reasons why she made a big bet on Service Hub two years ago. Today, she's full steam ahead on readying customers for the AI first error. Unifying unstructured data to create centralized brains, creating agents for specific tasks and innovating in customer agents like you wouldn't believe. Lucky you. We're going to get into it all the detail in today's episode. I'm Sarah McDevitt and this is owning the outcome. Sam, welcome to the show.
- [01:19]
Sam Anderson
Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to talk to you today.
- [01:22]
Sarah McDevitt
Well, let's start at the start. Can you tell me what's question the. The Origin 63 story? Tell us about you and tell us about the company.
- [01:29]
Sam Anderson
So we actually started as HubSpot Partners back in 2014. This was when HubSpot was marketing and sales only. And I think sales was just a baby at that point. And I went to an inbound conference for one of my freelance clients and I basically drank the orange Kool Aid and never looked back. I was like, what? ROI for marketers? Are you kidding me? And so that year we, we came back, we became partners and, and we've been partners ever since. But in 2020, we pivoted pretty hard. Before that, we were doing marketing live events with HubSpot as the backbone. And obviously we all know it happened in 2020. So Origin 63 was born out of, you know, the ashes of that, that original business as a HubSpot implementation and adoption first company. We really took a harder stands about two years ago, as you said, on making sure that people are really using HubSpot for retention and growth. And so that was what led us to really specialize more in Service Hub. And that's our mission today, to make sure that People are using HubSpot across all three hubs. Marketing, sales service to create a unified customer journey and really make sure that they are growing their revenue, retaining their clients and creating that cohesive customer journey across their entire life cycle. The next three years are going to be a huge push because Service Hub is really just coming into its own just in the last like 612 months. And so we're really starting to see that opportunity open up and our big bet payoff.
- [03:04]
Sarah McDevitt
What was it that you saw that others did not see that focused you towards Service Hub? Well, what did others miss?
- [03:13]
Sam Anderson
When I was 15, my first job was at the world renowned hamburger shop In N Out. And you're like, okay, Sam, what does In N Out have to do with Service Hub? They taught us very, very early on customer service is more important than anything that they do. Like they just make burgers, right? And they're the same burgers as probably everyone else is used to eating. But what set in and out aside was the way that they treat their customers and their customer service overall. So I grew out of this customer service ecosystem. And when I got into B2B and I got into HubSpot, I was like, why are we not treating our B2B customers the same way that B2C companies treat their customers? Why are we leaving this massive opportunity on the table to put forward a differentiator by actually putting the customer journey, the customer experience first? And that's what led me into the Service Hub overall experience. Now what we really saw as the opportunity though, was this realization that service teams need help. They need a lot of help. Two years ago, we were still working with people who were in a shared inbox. There was no automation. They were coming in at the beginning of the day, picking out their tickets and then responding. There's such a huge opportunity for transformation in customer service and customer success, because now we can do both. In HubSpot, that it was just kind of a no brainer for us to build out this green space in the ecosystem and really stake a claim and put a flag in Service Hub.
- [04:52]
Sarah McDevitt
My heart almost skipped a beat there when you were talking about where that started and that focus on the customer. I just absolutely love that because that's the kind of core of what we're all here to do. What was the ownership moment behind your success? Was there maybe a decision or a bet or a mindset? Shift, shift that really changed the game for you.
- [05:13]
Sam Anderson
My original pdm, he had told me, look at what so many of the other elite partners have done. They've specialized, they've really made sure that they are experts in a specific area, specific niche marketing was Saturated sales had really become saturated and service was the only area that really had really nobody there to championing it, becoming experts in it and pushing it forward. And what I decided after doing the research and talking to service teams is that there was an opportunity here. Service teams also rely super heavily on it. And so what was happening was a lot of these service teams were getting stagnant in their tools because it did not want to manage them and they didn't have the expertise to manage the tools themselves. And so the opportunity with Service Hub, even today, or especially today I should say, is that it can now empower service teams to own their ecosystem and really actually work within it and expand upon it, customize it, make it theirs, without having to rely on a over taxed and super busy IT team. So why that matters as a partner is that service teams need our help and they are going to rely on us to support them in this journey of adoption, but potentially also beyond that as well.
- [06:42]
Sarah McDevitt
So you're speaking from a place of experience, but what was an early win that you saw that kind of validated your decision for you?
- [06:51]
Sam Anderson
One of the earlier wins that we had was with the parent company of Hoover Dirt Devil. They were working out of this very, very archaic system within Salesforce and they moved into HubSpot and found their way to really make sure that their agents were actually able to get answers that they need without having to jump from three or four different places. And the more we got into this type of project, the more we kind of had this moment where we were like, oh, this is the story. This is the transformation for service teams. The major, major aha is when we. This could lead to upsells and cross sells. So the opportunity for service teams to actually step in and no longer just be reactive to issues, but also use interactions to say, hey, I noticed you purchased this in about 10 years ago. There's been several models recently released. Why don't we look at some of the new models today and I could actually give you a discount if you purchase it today with me. And then it was like, what? Customer service can lead to revenue. That's really what made me go, okay, guys, it's time, let's triple down. Let's really make sure that we're telling this transformation story and that people understand what Service Hub can actually do.
- [08:15]
Sarah McDevitt
So when you think about where you are now and you think back even a year ago to what you were doing and how you were delivering for customers, what's the biggest way that you're kind of shifting in this AI First World as a partner.
- [08:31]
Sam Anderson
The biggest difference now between last year and this year is that we're really understanding that if you want to be able to provide the best possible customer service or customer success, your teams need all of your data in one place. And that's where AI is like really good at. Right? We've got so much unstructured data. We've got data in call recordings, we have data in notes. We've got data in one system over here for sales, another system over here for marketing. And so this idea of bringing everybody in and bringing all of their data together, unstructured data as well, is what leads AI to be able to have those contextualized conversations. So there's basically three things happening. One is where does all your data live and how do we get it into HubSpot? Whether that's integrations or whether that's just truly a migration of teams to bring them all under one roof. The second thing is, how do we use the AI tools that are in HubSpot, So tools like customer agents, knowledge base agents that are going to allow us to serve our customers better, but also enable our reps to serve our customers better. Then the third thing is, where do we even start? What we've been telling people is start small, start one place where you want to make an impact and test it and then grow on from there. But all of that is basically a mute point if you don't have the data in place. So TL. Dr. The biggest difference between last year and this year is that we are super aware of, of all the data points out there and how to get them into HubSpot.
- [10:14]
Sarah McDevitt
And so you're told me there really how you're thinking about it for customers, but when you think about a little bit closer to home and internally in your business, how are you thinking about it for your own business?
- [10:26]
Sam Anderson
Yeah, it's the same thing. All that unstructured data, basically our brain is fragmented and it's spread across all of our different tools. So one of the things that our team's been working on is a centralized brain is what I keep calling it. Using our data inside HubSpot, inside Slack, using our recordings inside of Grain, bringing all of that together to provide ourselves almost like a mini LLM that we can query for what are the ways that we've solved this in the past? What do we need to know about this customer? Like basically all the historical information that usually lives inside people's brains. And then of course, the second thing is AI is going to change the way that we all service just in general implementation, like the actual moving things around and touching things and, you know, plugging things into HubSpot. Those are going to be able to be done by agents very soon. The future of AI is really about humans doing the emotional intelligence work before the agents come in and do the actual tactical doing. And that's what I'm trying to think about for our own business is what does that look like and how do we get there from here to a year from now when we do have those agents as part of our team.
- [11:48]
Sarah McDevitt
So obviously customer agent, Knowledge base agent have been really transformative for Service hub customers. What's your playbook right now and how do you see it evolving in the next six months?
- [12:02]
Sam Anderson
First of all, customer agent's super, super cool because it can take not just information from your HubSpot knowledge base, but you can now feed it things like spreadsheets and blog articles, public websites, like you can build a huge database of content for the agent to pull from. And there's also actions that can be built into the agent. So, so previously when someone came to your site and they were chatting with your chatbot, you would have to build like your if then branches and, and all of that to get them to where you want them to go. Now you don't have to do that. But also now it's smart enough, the customer agent's now smart enough to do things like, hey, where's my order history? Where, where's the my order right now in terms of my shipments status? And it can go and it can query this information, which is super, super cool. And it also provides the ability to deflect those tickets from hitting a human being. And then of course, as the customer agent learns and interacts, it's feeding into Knowledge Base Agent. The knowledge base agent is saying, what gaps do we have in our knowledge here and what information do we need to fill that so that the customer agent can work better? So, so roadmap wise, the very first thing is making sure that we have enough data in the knowledge base agent as well as the customer agent to feed the information to the AI so that the answers are contextualized. So we're going through a lot of iterations with clients to make sure that they're moving their knowledge base into HubSpot, that they're looking at what gaps they might have in the knowledge base that customers might ask. So, so that we can make sure that we're providing those contextual conversations and then making sure that we are watching it and really Filling in the gaps. So that's where the knowledge base agent's going to be super cool. Because we don't have to do any kind of analysis anymore. It's going to do it for us. And bonus, it's going to draft that information and we just have to basically approve or edit it.
- [14:08]
Sarah McDevitt
I mean, I'm sorry, Sam, there's a couple of things there. It's like, did I ever think that I'd hear super cool and spreadsheets in the same sentence? You can't see it, but I'm curt. I am bowing to you under the table as your royal Highness of Service Hub at this point. It's just amazing to hear the passion you have for it and the way that you're translating that passion over to customers. It's awesome. It's super cool, as you said. It's really, really awesome. But what do you think is a misconception or maybe even kind of routine concern that you hear about AI that is holding partners and even customers back?
- [14:46]
Sam Anderson
This idea that, like, oh my gosh, I need to change everything overnight with AI. So I've been kind of giving my team. I don't know if this is a thing that's going to catch, but I've been calling it the three E's of AI. So basically, initiatives should align with one of the three E's. One would be efficiency. Does this make it easier and better for me? Second would be enablement. Does this help my team do things better, smarter, faster, to level up quicker? And the third is experience. Does this make it better for my customers? And so if you look at all the initiatives that you have on the board, which ones align with the most important E of the right, you know, of the time right now, and then work on that one thing over time with AI, we're just going to end up having a bunch of very super specific agents that interconnect together and create like an army of agents that do everything. But you have to start one thing at a time. You cannot boil the ocean because if you do try that, you're just gonna get overwhelmed and shut down. Like I was like seven months ago until I realized, like, wait a minute, let's just, let's just take this one step at a time. And then all of a sudden, things started to really open up and start to flow.
- [16:02]
Sarah McDevitt
And so does the fourth E become acceleration? Eventually that'll get rebranded. There'll be a fourth E eventually. I love it. So you build Origin 63 as a top tier partner in the HubSpot ecosystem, what's working in your opinion? What needs to evolve for partners like you to keep innovating?
- [16:20]
Sam Anderson
I think the one thing that's worked and it's going to continue to work for all of us even with AI, is the consultative approach and the very, very defined focus on change management and adoption. The reason being is those types of functions require emotional intelligence. You need to be able to read a room and be like, okay, we're sensing some fear here, let's take it a step back and, and explain it a little better or you know, pump people up. And I don't think AI is quite there yet. So I do think that that focus of consultation and training is definitely going to be a here and future component of what we do as a service based business. The parts that are changing is what humans no longer need to be able to do and the AI can do, augment, not replace, I think is what people have been saying, right? We need to be thinking about what are the components of our business today that AI can do that clients might be able to do themselves with AI, but specifically what they're not going to be able to do even with AI. Because that's really the future of our business and our revenue. If we aren't paying attention to that and protecting that and building a moat around what our differentiator is going to be against AI implementation, let's call it. I think that's where there's a huge potential for basically your business being commoditized in the next couple of years.
- [17:57]
Sarah McDevitt
What I do love is, you know, there is a thread in this conversation with you and as much as I hear about AI, I hear human as your kind of next connector. So you are very much thinking about that human and AI amplification more than it being replacement, which I 100% agree with. But if you were building Origin 63 today, again from total scratch and in this AI fused ecosystem, what do you think you'd do differently based on what you know now?
- [18:26]
Sam Anderson
I would have started with understanding what AI can do in terms of implementation and then looked at where the gaps are for what humans need to be doing. So what kind of information do we need to be gathering, what kind of service from that emotional intelligence standpoint? So really probably doubling, tripling down on the consultative approach on the training aspect. Because really I think that now with agents being where they are and pretending six months from now that they are much, much, much better, all we'll need to do is feed it the right information and it's going to go off and build all our properties, build our workflows, do this, do that. We're not there yet, but I think we will be. I think we will be much sooner than we all believe it. So that's what I would look at.
- [19:21]
Sarah McDevitt
You talk a lot about like emotional intelligence and you know, really like the, the full expanse of human intelligence that is different to AI. When you think about your team that you have today, do you think the hiring profile will change for you? We don't know. We're saying six months, 12 months down the road when some of those task driven stuff can obviously be done by the AI.
- [19:43]
Sam Anderson
I don't know if my approach to recruiting talent will change, but I will say my approach to building talent has already changed. We have already been putting a lot of focus on AI readiness, AI adoption, the knowledge transfer and building of prompts instead of like templates, for example. But from the emotional intelligence side, it's also really about investing more heavily into that education. So I think for me it's really going to be about screening for that self awareness and then building upon that as a baseline so that we are really making sure that we're building a team that does have that ability to read a room and to adjust what they're saying depending on how the client's doing. Are they excited, are they nervous? You know, those are the things that are going to make a huge difference in our experience as service providers that AI cannot really truly affect at this point in time.
- [20:46]
Sarah McDevitt
Yeah, I totally agree. If the HubSpot ecosystem had a North Star in this new AI era, what would you want that to be?
- [20:55]
Sam Anderson
I think HubSpot just needs to stay at its root, which was better together. Meaning that AI is not here to replace your job. AI is not here to cut your team in half. AI is going to augment the team, make it stronger, make it smart, smarter, make it faster. And in that way, yeah, you could probably build a more lean team. But we're better together with the software than without it. I think that's where the software is going to be still a differentiator for most teams and we'll see a better adoption of the AI features because they'll get. Makes sense. Because I need to use it to do my job and I want to use it because it makes my job better.
- [21:43]
Sarah McDevitt
It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, really. We've learned so much from you. Thank you so much. And remember, if you're enjoying our discussions on owning the outcome, you can subscribe for new episodes every week.