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- [00:00]
A
And so when I think about partners actually put them in exactly the same world that I came from. I think about partners as being like management consultants, you know, that are trying to shepherd, helping to shepherd our customers through this period of significant change. And so you know the role that partners are going to play going forward if they get their arms around what does this change mean for customers? What is, how do we adopt AI? How do we make sure that we deliver really great results? I think that there's an incredible opportunity there.
- [00:32]
B
David Cohen brings a builder's mindset to everything he does. With deep experience in scaling and maturing sales organizations and a background as an entrepreneur and consultant himself, he's motivated by a simple framework. Work with great people and do great work. Now a few months into his role as Chief Sales officer here at HubSpot, he he's more energized than ever. Just like in the shift from on Prem to SaaS, David believes we're at another inflection point with AI transformation where partners who guide customers through complex change will grow faster and go further. In today's episode, David shares where he sees the biggest opportunities for partners. What's changing in the joint sales motion and how we can grow better together. David, welcome to owning the outcome. Know you've had a chance to meet some of our partners, but I'd love to start by getting a sense of you a little bit about your background and who you are as a leader.
- [01:37]
A
Sarah, it's great to be here. Thank you for the invitation to the pod. Background is I. I started my career in the consulting world, management consultant. I worked for a company no longer known as Anderson Consulting to date myself and I was doing CRM implementations going back a number of days. I had more hair and it was, none of it was gray at the time. And from there started my own consulting firm which I ran for a few years and then moved over to become a salesperson LinkedIn where I spent 15 years left there leading the North American part of the talent solutions business. And then less than five months ago joined HubSpot to be the newest member of the executive team where I serve as the Chief Sales Officer.
- [02:30]
B
Awesome. I think it's fair to say that you do have a successful track record. I'm interested what made you excited about the opportunity to come to HubSpot?
- [02:40]
A
I would say there were probably three and a half or four things, broadly speaking. Like what my search was focused on was I wanted to join a world class leadership team, world class board. Just the talent had to be there that Was like number one. Number two, I have become very passionate about AI as I think a lot of people have. It's an incredible shift that's taking place in the industry right now. And so my product level focus was a company that was building a highly valuable and highly differentiated product on native AI. So that was the product piece. Third piece was a culture and a mission that aligns with my personal values. And so you kind of wrap those things up and, you know, it doesn't hurt that HubSpot is also a very fast growing company at scale with just an incredible opportunity to grow huge tam really, really passionate customers and all the things lined up.
- [03:43]
B
You talked about your aligning with your personal values. What are, what are the personal values that, that align so strongly with HubSpot? Because I'd agree, like, I'm probably in the same boat, like, that's why I remain here. Tell me a little bit about that.
- [03:55]
A
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. Like I've worked with in so many environments or so many organizations where I felt like, you know, they're, they're mission driven, but they don't believe necessarily in the way I don't have the same values in terms of how they work. And this has come up time and time again for me. Part of this is like being a management consultant, being a salesperson. For many years, you get exposure to so many different environments and you get a chance to see, like, how do companies work, how do leaders operate, what do they believe in, how do they lead, etc. And I have been blessed with having worked for, you know, incredible leaders whose values line up with my values and some that have taught me that the others are really valuable. And so, you know, when I met Yamini, it was very clear to me that she and I have a similar alignment when it comes to the way that we work, what we believe, how we want to go about doing work together. We had a great conversation in our first conversation. It was just a really, you know, kind of like felt like it was right. I felt like I was at home in some ways, but I think like, you know, culture plays out in different ways and personal values play out in a whole host of different ways. I think that if you were to boil it down, my two by two matrix is loving the work you do and loving the people with whom you do it. And if I find myself in the top right corner of that two by two, then I'm in the right place. And, you know, HubSpot really for me, matches on both of those axes because.
- [05:43]
B
That'S what I was actually going to ask you next. I mean, you've been here a couple of months now and sometimes people look from afar and then they get in and they. You see what's behind the curtain. Has your perspective changed since you joined us?
- [05:56]
A
It has been emboldened. I think I'm even more excited about the company that I joined and the work that I'm doing and the people with whom I'm doing it than my assessment. The challenge is when you're going through a recruiting process and you're interviewing, you can ask any question until the cows come home and all of the questions and you still don't really know what it's going to be like day to day. You just have to be there and you have to be there for a few months in order to say, you know, all right, the honeymoon period has passed. I'm still kind of feeling like it's a honeymoon period. Yeah, it does feel like what I thought I was signing up for is what I've. What I've actually purchased.
- [06:43]
B
That's amazing.
- [06:44]
A
It really is. Yeah, it's exciting. I mean, it's a complex business, don't get me wrong. You're, you know, you've got large number of hubs, you've got a whole bunch of different pricing models, you have different verticals, different segments, different regions, all of which carry nuance. You've got the partner ecosystem, the app ecosystem, and a fairly large and scaled team, many of whom are still early in their tenure. And so with each one of those things, they bring unique complexity. And so I'm finding that I'm learning at an accelerated pace right now. I'm always really passionate when I start learning. When I feel like my brain is tired at the end of the day, I'm like, is it good tired? You know, is it bad tired? For me, it's been really good tired. And I'm also doing work that I believe in. I come from, I come from entrepreneurs. My paternal grandfather had a failed startup, My maternal grandfather had a successful startup, my wife had a successful startup. I had a mixed review startup. And so I've been around SMB for every stage of my career and for all of my life. And so I've got a lot of passion for it. Love what we're doing.
- [08:02]
B
That's awesome. And I love that you bring it right back to our customers, which is so important and the challenges they have as well. I suppose something we talk about a lot in HubSpot is the we. So, like, we are a company Together, it doesn't matter like what department you work in, HubSpot, but I also would extend that to we in terms of our partner ecosystem. And so obviously for the audience at dc, I have to ask questions to represent that community and how I feel that they are the we in this as well. So how do you see the role of our partners and our partner ecosystem evolving in HubSpot's future go to market strategy, especially as we kind of see this shift towards AI and upmarket solutions.
- [08:50]
A
Yeah, yeah. Let me start, Sarah, by saying, like, you know, I've seen the data. The data is incredibly telling when it comes to when our partners are involved with our customers. We just see better results across the board. We see more sophisticated deals that solve bigger customer problems, we see higher retention rates, we see better usage, we see shorter sales cycles. You know, like almost any metric that you look at is improved when you look at it through the partner lens. And so for me, that, that's the baseline to, you know, where we're going right now is we're starting from a, I think, very solid foundation where things are evolving. To directly answer your question is, you know, we're, we're in another massive technical shift. Talked a little bit about the, the AI transformation that's taking place right now. When, when I joined the, you know, the working world, when I became a consultant, I saw the shift from on Prem to SaaS. I saw what happened specifically when consultants got involved. They saw that there was a transformation that was taking place technically and the impact that they were able to make and the way that that helped them grow. Specifically talking about the E and Ys of the world, the Accentures of the world, the PWCs of the world, they all grew massively through that first technical transformation. Right. It happened again when you moved from digital display ads to social media. Obviously that was a huge reason why HubSpot got started and had so much. You saw the shift take place during the cloud era, which is still taking place right now. Now you're just starting to see the beginning when it comes to AI in each one of those phases, those that are responsible for the advisory component, the implementation work, the technical transformation, the usage, the responsibility for usage, they benefit because it's an industry that is created basically to burgeon those types of companies. And so when I think about partners, I actually put them in exactly the same world that I came from. I think about partners as being like management consultants, you know, that are trying to shepherd, helping to shepherd our customers through this period of significant change. And so you know, the role that partners are going to play going forward if they get their arms around what does this change mean for customers? What is how do we adopt AI? How do we make sure that we deliver really great results? I think that there's an incredible opportunity there because so many companies don't really know how to do this themselves. There's a tremendous appetite for AI adoption, not for the sake of AI, but because of the results that it ultimately delivers. But the how, I think, is still a big question mark for a lot of companies.
- [12:04]
B
Absolutely. And that's something we're very focused on, is helping our partners and really helping drive more of a roadmap of how they can roll out AI and successfully grow their businesses, because we do want this to be the best place that they can grow their business. I suppose the other question I have for you is you're reflecting, I'm sure at this point on your journey, you mentioned looking at all the data and how there's no doubt when partners are involved, we see more success, success. Where do you think we could do a better job in HubSpot to bring partners and our sales team closer together in terms of a sales process?
- [12:47]
A
The thing that really jumps out to me, Sarah, is making sure that we're identifying the right partners for the job to be done. You know, I think like, we have such a robust partner community. We have a widely distributed sales team, widely distributed customer success team. It's impossible for a human being to know all of the areas of focus that our partners bring. And so what we need to do a better job of is helping our team, our internal team, with the identification of what's the right partner for the job to be done, whether that's industry specific, whether it's the use cases that they want to deploy, whether it's app enablement and integrations, whether it's scale. I think that, you know, it's just really hard to. For a lot of our reps who are asked to be focused on all verticals, all, you know, many different regions, many different size companies, et cetera, et cetera. How do I know, you know, who is the best partner for my customer? And so I, not surprisingly, has a role to play here, you know, trying to figure out how that matching should work. And I think, like, our partners doing a good job of helping us understand what they're great at. And so, you know, I remember one of my early mentors saying to me, focus drives excellence. I still believe that to be true. And so to the extent that our partners can say hey, you know, we can do lots of things, which I believe many of them can, but here's what we're really great at, and here's where we're investing a lot of our resources and our energy because we want to be the best on planet at fill in the blank.
- [14:37]
B
And I suppose then if I'm a partner, D.C. and I'm saying, right, I'm going to follow this advice and I'm going to really focus on what I'm good at, then how do I make sure that I get brought into those deals for HubSpot? Like, how do you think about creating more opportunity across our entire ecosystem so that we can bring more partners into the kind of opportunity cycle so that we can grow a healthy ecosystem?
- [15:06]
A
Yeah, show us, show us what you've done. Give us the stories, the anecdotes, the white papers, the case studies. It doesn't even have to be formalized to the extent that you can help our partner team understand, hey, we just delivered an incredible implementation or we just helped a company go through a massive transformation and here are the results that they're getting. And you know, this was the baseline before we got started. That really helps us. You know, for me, that gives me a sense for, like, this is a firm that knows how to deliver in a certain, you know, category. And the more specific it can be, I think the more helpful it is for us. That allows us not only to identify the right partner, but it's also going to help us with the sales process. Because if we can go and we can come with tangible examples and we can say we know how much it costs to do this, we know what the returns look like, we know specifically what the partners are going to want to engage on, the questions that they're going to want to ask when we should bring them into the process, it's going to speed up the sales cycle, it's going to result in better close rates and it's probably going to result in better outcomes for customers. So I think the more examples that we can bring to the team, the better.
- [16:27]
B
When you think about balancing the need for speed across the way that we work as HubSpot, because it is all about the need for speed and it is about showing customers that time to value when they purchase HubSpot, how do you balance that need with. With the need of most partners to do, you know, in depth scoping that really helps sometimes, like extend the opportunity for both us and them?
- [16:52]
A
Yeah, I think it's a really good question. I think it's a fair Question. And I will, you know, maybe caveat my answer by saying I'm not sure I know exactly what the right answer is right now. As I say this to you fewer than five months into my role.
- [17:08]
B
Yeah.
- [17:09]
A
What I generally say to most salespeople is that the way to win bigger deals is to solve bigger problems. How do you solve bigger problems? You start peeling back the onion until you've gotten to the core of the issue. And so often that means, hey, you know what? I think I've got a winnable, fast moving small deal here, totally fine to take that deal down, try and win that business. What you may be trading off in the process is getting to a much bigger customer pain, a much bigger customer need, which actually requires a lot more investigation. It requires a more thorough process, may require some additional resources that help you see the things that you can't see. Sometimes that's pre sales, sometimes that's bringing in the right partner. You get the idea that trade off is a, it's a real trade off and it's one that I don't think that we've nailed in terms of trying to figure out how to get to solving the biggest types of customer challenges and winning the best deals and winning the biggest solutions with also just moving quickly.
- [18:23]
B
I think the fact that culturally you're leading that change, I think, and sharing a message like that is so important for how we do go together in that joint motion, in our go to market and obviously in the sales methodology side of things, we are training our partners in that too in attempt to bring those two sides closer together. So it's wonderful progress, but it's something that we will always be working on as a company our size and as you said, the trade offs that we have to consider in that, I suppose on the flip side, because I've grilled you enough about what we could be doing. Right. So on the flip side, what do you need most from partners when it comes to kind of this AI first world? And if we get whimsical for a second, if you had a magic wand and you wanted partners to close a gap between kind of where HubSpot ends and where customers need their sales experience, where can partners show up for us.
- [19:18]
A
In the same way that, you know, we're asking all of HubSpot to go through an AI transformation, to become AI enabled, to become AI proficient, to redesign workflows, to, you know, put AI in place of where, you know, we would do administrative stuff or, or highly repeatable, medium to low value stuff that, that's what we need our partners to help do as well. And so to the extent that, you know, they're thinking about, hey, how do I get better at AI driven implementation? How do I create repeatable agentic use cases that I can deploy to customers? Those are the types of things. I spent time actually with a customer panel last week when I was in London and I heard some really interesting examples of the identification of workflows coupled with unique data sets that were built on top of HubSpot CRM. And that implementation and that integration was delivering unique value. That idea of, hey, we can bring some unique special sauce coupled with what we know HubSpot does well and deliver it in such a way that we know we can help you with the types of results that you're trying to get or overcoming a really interesting challenge that our customers often come to us with. And I listened to this partner and I said to myself, I remember thinking, they have figured it out. You know, they, they have taken the first step in becoming AI first, they're leading not only by example, but they're also creating a repetitive use case that they can go to multiple customers with and they're defining themselves by what that kind of sequence and that interplay between all the different components. And it's going to, I think it's going to create some, some unique competitive advantage for them.
- [21:27]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. Obviously, recently we announced that we were unifying our two partner programs, so our App Partner program and our solutions partner program. And obviously I'm very excited about this because I think this is just amazing. You talked about creating something and then making it repeatable and reselling onto other customers, which is exactly kind of like the app partner opportunity, you know. What are your thoughts on the app partner community? I like to say where there's a gap, there's an app. Right. Which I think my home open will catch on. Right. And many, many app partners would say, you know, we are the people who often turn a deal breaker into a deal maker. And I think that is like, you know, so, so true and so, so important. How are you thinking about how we support that GTM motion from the sales side?
- [22:19]
A
Yeah. Well, first starter, Sarah, you know, if you really want something to take off, you just put it on a T shirt. That's really neat.
- [22:27]
B
True. Let's announce someone about that.
- [22:32]
A
I don't believe to be, I guess, more direct, more serious. I don't believe that upmarket exists without the interplay between apps and partners. The complex needs of our upmarket customers are, they're indistinguishable for the need for, with the app ecosystem. And we have to have delivery mechanisms that can put those apps together, make sure that the data is unified across our system and their system and make sure that we're delivering fast and easy results. And so it's almost kind of like a duh moment if you think about it. Oh yeah, the app ecosystem and the partner ecosystem are going to be under the same umbrella. Yeah, that probably should have happened a long time ago. It totally makes sense. So I love the direction that it's going. I think, you know, when I look at what, what's possible within the app world and our ability to just do more beyond the HubSpot platform through the right types of integrations, it's, you know, I think it unlocks a lot more opportunity for us, upmarket in particular. So I'm excited. I don't think apps, it's not something that we would take on by ourselves. We really need, I think, the partner ecosystem in order to realize the potential of the app ecosystem. And so, yeah, I'm really excited about it. And I also think we're just scratching the surface. And yet at the same time, you look at the proliferation of new apps that are coming onto the fold as a result of AI, how do we make sure that we can quickly figure out which of those apps is really going to be meaningful from a results perspective? How do we build it into the ecosystem, how do we take it to market, how do we get it into our customers hands and how do we make sure that they're moving as quickly as we need them to? I think the agentic side of the world is going to be a huge part of what we're going to see from the app ecosystem expansion. And there's just like this feels like the first inning. Sorry to use an American baseball reference. Sarah.
- [24:54]
B
Big fan of baseball dc, big fan of baseball.
- [24:57]
A
Yeah. So it's the first inning and I think this is like, it's such an exciting time. Far more exciting than baseball.
- [25:06]
B
Well, for our comic book fans, I will say that I've marveled in this conversation with you, but I'm firmly in the DC universe today. I do want to thank you for joining us and I say to all of our listeners, if you enjoy what you're hearing, don't forget to hit the subscribe button.
- [25:23]
A
Thanks Sarah. Enjoyed being here.