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Owning the Outcome
No Shortcuts: How BONANA Earned HubSpot’s Customer-First Award in Under 2 Years
00:27:21
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- [00:00]
A
What I see right now with upmarket deals, big companies, digital mature companies, they're all moving the same direction, right? And it's the orange army. So I think if you want to build an agency and you love doing it around tech, like build your business around HubSpot and all of the tools that are associated to HubSpot, right? Because it's not just only HubSpot, it's like all these app partners, like that app marketplace that has so much potential to build that business around HubSpot.
- [00:26]
B
On today's show we're talking about how you build the kind of trust and long term impact that most partners aspire to but rarely achieve. JC Teeling is the co founder of Banana. A rising business tech partner that is just two years has earned HubSpot's Customer First Award in EMEA. That means not only retaining the most revenue across the region, but defining what it means to be a partner who owns the ultimate outcome customer impact. What's even more impressive is that this wasn't part of some short term growth hack. JC built Banana on the belief that mature companies need strategic senior partners who can align people, processes, data and tech. Especially now as AI transforms how we work. He went from strategist to founder, from thinking about what agency should do to building one that actually does it and it does it differently. I'm Sarah McDevitt and this is Owning the Outcome. JC, welcome to the show. Let's get into it.
- [01:32]
A
Thank you Sarah, lovely to be here.
- [01:34]
B
So first of all, what is the Banana story? Tell us all about, you know, your business, tell us about you.
- [01:40]
A
I've been in the ecosystem, HubSpot ecosystem for eight plus years now as a user, then working at an agency and eventually as we all know, started with Banana. So as a marketer, as a CRM consultant, as eventually as a founder. Now in the beginning of Banana, I've always seen, let's say a gap in the ecosystem, right? So I've always seen like hey, we really moved from a different kind of ecosystem and that needed a different kind of partner which I didn't really see in our region specifically. Two years ago, together with Rohir, we founded the current form of Banana. We had such a fun project, we had a super good dynamic and at some point we kept calling with each other and we were like, hey, I have this idea, you want to start something new? Let's join forces and let's kick things off.
- [02:25]
B
What are the kind of main areas that the business focuses on?
- [02:28]
A
We have three pillars, so we have strategy, we have digital and we have revenue DevOps. The strategy one for me is really the one that's really different than what I've seen in the ecosystem in our region is that it's really focused on go to market strategy. So not necessarily on marketing strategy, it's obviously part of it, but we really focus on go to market motions. We see, hey, you have a PLG motion, do you have a sales lab motion? How does that look? How are the teams built? How does that really fit into your commercial strategy? And then we look at the marketing strategy, at the sales strategy, at the service strategy level. The second one, digital is building websites, building customer portals. If we don't do it natively enough, spot and building webshops and shopify. Right. So that's digital. And then the third one, which is the biggest one to be honest, in terms of like revenue, in terms of services, it's marketing ops, sales ops and service ops.
- [03:20]
B
How does that play out in terms of the different verticals? Is there different customers that are aligned to those different pillars? Like do you focus on a vertical repeller? Tell me a little bit about that.
- [03:29]
A
Yeah, so because we, when we started and the idea that we had like what I've seen is there wasn't necessarily a partner, like I mentioned, like a business tech agency, but there wasn't a partner either like that really focused on existing HubSpot clients, the more digital mature companies, because everybody was focusing on the more digital immature companies. So we started off with SaaS as our biggest focus because. Yeah. And then we went to services because services is leaning towards SaaS in terms of rev ops in terms of methodology. Right. And then we had the last one that was added was E commerce and retail. So if you look at the three pillars that we have, strategy is applicable to all three of them. Then digital is on the website side it's applicable to sales and services on the web shop side it's obviously applicable to E comm, retail and then the marketing ops, sales and service ops, it's applicable to all three of them.
- [04:23]
B
And I know we're only merely minutes into our conversation and I'm going to raise the topic of AI, but of the, of those pillars that you have, which of them do you think is the most resistance to AI automation and therefore maybe offer you the long, the longest term value for the company?
- [04:42]
A
Services is the most reluctant. Definitely. I think SaaS is the earlier adopter and in almost everything in terms of technological innovation. So they were the really, really fast movers with, with everything with AI. I think ecom Retail because of the heaviness, let's say, and the, the am. The importance of processes. They've been adopting it quite fast as well. But then services businesses comparison, which, like deep vertical, you, you zoom in. Right, because some are more digital mature, some are more digital immature. But I would say in general they're, they're more conservative, traditional and so less motivated to move with AI in a fast way.
- [05:24]
B
You mentioned earlier around the different kind of pillars that you bring kind of GTM expertise together with kind of ecosystem strategy. A lot of partners or potential partners who might be listening to this podcast right now are thinking to themselves, how can I balance the kind of short term needs to pay salaries and bring the money in with kind of what's immediately needed by customers and then how do I plan for kind of the next two, three years ahead in terms of the, the strategy? How do you balance that between what exists today in terms of opportunity and what your vision is for what might exist in two, three years down the road?
- [06:03]
A
Yeah, so we use the, the AOS model, Enterprise operating System. Right. To really define our one year, three year, seven year vision. We just implemented it. Yeah. Six months ago. Right. And that really helped us to be completely honest, and I would lie if I would tell something different in the beginning it's just, yeah, going with the flow and just doing your thing and doing what you know best. And eventually it went well. But then we had, at some point we had something like, okay, well now we need to align the vision, the future, with what we're really doing and focusing on right now. And that's what really the EOS model. It helped us tremendously in defining rocks based on those vision, on the one year vision, on the three year vision, on everything that's changing constantly. Why with AI, with the platform like HubSpot. So it helped us to get structure in the management team, but also give structure to the team and what they should focus on. Instead of just focusing on everything, eventually focus on nothing.
- [07:01]
B
And similarly with partners, there's lots of different platforms out there to focus on. And so some partners struggle with whether to build their expertise around HubSpot or other platforms. For you, what made HubSpot the right foundation for Banana?
- [07:18]
A
So I've worked with Salesforce, I've worked with Dynamics before, and then I got into the HubSpot world and eventually I think you fall in love at some point, right, with something. You just believe in the vision. I believe in the vision, but also really heavily in the people. I think that for me has been the Biggest thing in the HubSpot ecosystem. The product is amazing, right? There's no question. But I think the people that you get to work with every day in, day out, the salespeople, the, the customer success people, the partner people like our pdm, like everybody's so heavily involved, everybody's so nice. It's a completely different dynamic than the other ecosystems, which I won't name, but I just know a lot of people in those ecosystem. It's just a completely different dynamic. So that together with the fact that I as a consultant, I was heavily, heavily, heavily involved in the HubSpot from, for so long, I have standardized everything for myself, productized everything for myself. That together with the first remark that I made, it just didn't make sense to even remotely think about another platform to use.
- [08:20]
B
And you know, you talk about loving us, but we obviously love you. It's pretty remarkable to win HubSpot's Customer First Award, which means that you're at the very top of thousands of other partners in driving the highest revenue retention in emea, which means you're helping customers also fall in love with HubSpot. Tell me about that, Tell me, you know, how did you achieve that? What were the steps that you took to, to not just kind of as a business, but for your whole team to get behind that vision to want to do it.
- [08:49]
A
The funny thing is we didn't even know that we were going to win it until I would say like August or something. And then our PDM told us like, hey, you know, you're a number one on the customer first in the me. And we're like, oh wow, why is that? What are the KPIs, you know, so it suddenly happened in that way, but then we started focusing on it and I think if you look back at that period, because we focused so much on existing HubSpot clients getting more out of HubSpot, really building that Revops engine, I think organically they made more use out of HubSpot. They wanted more out of the platform, get more out of the platform, which eventually also increased the upsell, the cross sell within the platform. And I think that together with the fact that most of the people that work at Banana have been in the ecosystem for quite some time are their super experienced consultants, right? So we have a combination of people from the ecosystem or operators on the other side of the table. Those two, let's say, profiles combined then with that focus really helped us to keep clients in, but eventually also increase the value that they get out of HubSpot. Which meant that they would buy, buy more of HubSpot and use more of HubSpot. Right. So I think that together made, made sure that we, that we had all happy, most of our, let's say 99.9% happy clients.
- [10:02]
B
In the end, you're a partner that has made a very clean decision and that you are going to get into AI early rather than take a wait and see approach. Tell me why you are so sure. What are the things that you're doing to help drive that adoption with customers?
- [10:19]
A
I think that the main thing is that a lot of the people at Banana, they, we're all like a little bit of tech geeks. Right. So everything that appears new in the HubSpot, in the beta, we're like, oh, click it, click it. Say yes to everything. And the same goes with AI, you know, like everything that's new, we want to test it out, we want to see if it actually works, what it does. And then I think that in combination with our ICP that we choose which are the more digital mature companies, they challenge us as well. So it can't happen or it will happen, but it shouldn't happen, that they will tell us like, hey, did you know about that? That could really help us. Like we should know, we should be the trusted advisors to actually help them guide the way in their transformation. That AI will be right in the next few years. So that pushed us a little bit productizing some of the AI services, but again with out of the box solutions. Right. So we didn't reinvent the wheel. We, we haven't been building, we're actually building one now, but we haven't been building agents really. So we didn't do anything custom. But we looked at out of the box solutions that are complementary to the solutions that we, that we love like HubSpot and that we can use together to actually get that AI movement going without having too much friction of doing something custom for a client with long cycles and long development work. And so that's been key. And Martin, for example, the co founder in Belgium, like he, he has been really profound and actually testing everything with AI. He's constantly reading everything. So he's, he's completely up to date on everything. So that helps a lot as well.
- [11:48]
B
Absolutely. But there's a lot of stuff out there. Right. And there's a lot of confusion for customers. What's the what, what are they going to get the best value out of if they invest the time? So how do you help customers distinguish, distinguish between, you know, what's going to give them immediate value versus those that need to do kind of significant cleanup before they attempt to go near AI and all that. It does. Because, I mean, I think we've talked about this before. There's companies that are jumping kind of straight into those fancy, you know, AI demos without addressing the foundations. Tell me about how, what's your approach with customers on that front?
- [12:25]
A
Yeah, exactly. So if you look at what we just talked about with the existing customers that we, that we heavily productized after that, let's say project, we're super confident that we can start with implementing AI, right. But before that moment when their data is not. Their process is not there yet, their data is just not unclean if the basis is not set. It just doesn't make sense to start with AI too much because it really heavily plugs into a process that plugs into your data, obviously. So that baseline needs to be there. But then again, looking at what we did, what we did as well with the solutions or the platforms that we chose, we look at every industry, we look at SaaS, we look at our service industry, E commerce or retail, and we just look at different applications. So the same goes for, for example, HubSpot and Shopify together. Yeah, that's obviously a golden combination. But for E commerce and retail, it's not applicable to SaaS or to services, give or take. Right. And maybe in some cases it will, but in most cases it wouldn't be. So that's the same with AI. Like if you look at our AI solutions that we, for some ICPs, it will be relevant, for others it will just be irrelevant. So we try to map it out on the install base, the amount of clients that we have, and then try to introduce it. And honestly for us as well, because they want to work with AI, they want to fix the foundations, which for us is that project that we productize. So for us, AI is also again, a sort of like commercial incentive for, for us to a client that they want to fix everything and then they can start off with the nice stuff, which as AI.
- [14:00]
B
Could we kind of just zoom in on that a little bit? Could you give me some industries that you feel like, you know, or one industry you feel like you've been particularly successful in kind of pulling those bits together for a customer. Do you have any examples that you could bring to life me that one?
- [14:17]
A
SaaS is really, if you look at sales, so we always use a framework like sales strategy, sales process, sales methodology, sales coaching, and in that order. Right. So what we can fix we can help with everything, but we can fix is a sales strategy, the sales process and the sales methodology. What you've seen there is often they did something with sales methodology in SaaS, they did something with sales strategy, but it was never really interconnected with each other. But SaaS always had sales methodology. So what you saw is when you actually had a CRO or maybe a CSO that really wanted to push that methodology, there was maybe 10, 20% of the reps that actually completed all of the fields in that process. And at some point with what I, we saw something in use case. It was so easy but so, so powerful that we, that we saw conversational intelligence. Like you have hundreds of different solutions obviously of them. But we did. The promise that we could make was like, okay, if you, you're fully remote. Yes. Okay. That means that we can record and transcript everything. And these tools that we've chosen for conversational intelligence, they connect with the CRM. Yeah, they can, Fine. So that means that basically if all of your reps have those conversations, like we can just make sure that the whole sales methodology framework and HubSpot is automatically updated based on that conversation that they had. And that was not only for the methodology part, but just in close dates, amount of the deal. Right. Everything was applicable. So in big sales teams has such a big impact, especially on the reporting side for management and leadership, in the end that they can actually report on those numbers in a clear and truthful way instead of hunting people to actually do the numbers and do the admin.
- [16:03]
B
You saw Dharmesh's post yesterday around mcp. This is obviously going to strengthen that position.
- [16:10]
A
Exactly. Yeah, I saw it. So for me it's still. I need to dive in a little bit more. It's still quite new. I know it's like more. It will be more open, right. It will open up a lot of of bridges. So I think that's amazing. But even now with the possibilities that you have right now, I think, and we talked about it before, but I still feel even in SaaS, with what AI can do now out of the box, which is super easy to implement, I would say like maybe 10% of our clients are really doing it and the other ones, they are thinking about it, but they're doing the thinking part, not the doer part, let's say.
- [16:43]
B
And when you think about even HubSpot's AI roadmap, right. And there's different elements. What made you, you think, hey, this is something that we need to own as, as a partner.
- [16:54]
A
Yeah, it's it's tough because it's going so fast, right. So I think with what has been released in the beginning with Breeze AI, we're, we're adopting, we're using all of that ourselves as Banana, but also for most of our clients because it's super easy, it's practical, you know, enriching data, buyer intent, for example. So it's super, it's, it's HubSpot, it's out of the box, it's super practical, it's easy to use. So I think we're owning all of those let's more basic functionality. If you look at the more advanced functionality that's now really coming and I really feel it's been, it's going really fast now, right, that for example, the agents, but also the other things that are coming on the roadmap, I think we will need some time to really test it out ourselves and then eventually implement it at our clients. We have some clients that mention like, hey, we're fine if you do the testing with us, right? Just test it around with our portal, that's great. But not everybody feels that way obviously, so we should know first hundred percent ourselves how it works, what the pros are, what maybe the cons are in the beginning and if the client feels comfortable with it. And then eventually we'll try to implement it in our productized services catalog to run it at different clients.
- [18:09]
B
So when you think about HubSpot's kind of approach to AI in the future, which part of it do you think aligns? And I say future with absolute, a pinch of salt here because today we're talking, tomorrow something else might be true. So I use the word future very loosely. What part of it do you think aligns with Banana's future?
- [18:34]
A
The collaboration between human and agent? Because we focus so much on really go to market teams, you just see especially in more transactional businesses, enterprise sales for me still feels a little bit different, I would say. But then on transactional business with low deal values, I think the collaboration between agents for which commercial team, for marketing, for service, for sales, the collaboration between those agents and humans, that will be our big focus in the next six months. 100%. If we can make sure that people are still the, let's say quality assurance and they can still give that human touch, but they can do the work together with an agent, which just makes their life easier, more efficient, but also more effective. If we can reach that in the next six months and we have really real practical use cases with clients that we can use as Case studies as well for us, but also for HubSpot, that would be great.
- [19:26]
B
I mean, we've talked a little bit about kind of the work you're doing with the early AI implementations. What's your blueprint for helping customers to start small but think big when it comes to AI?
- [19:38]
A
Yeah. So we show a roadmap in which we have three phases, like implement, learn, optimize, and then eventually we just show them like, hey, this is a roadmap, this is the V1, the same as we do it with HubSpot implementations. Right. So we have like a V1 and MVP. And then we have the future, which eventually we need to start with the mvp, we need to start with the change management, we need to teach everybody how it really works. But then eventually we can show them the roadmap. And that roadmap is constantly changing. It keeps expanding that roadmap. So for us, it's also really easy retainer. Right. If we have that roadmap, we have a strategic plan for this year. If we are able to reach all of those goals, the collaboration is just going smooth and nicely, then eventually, when we reach the end of the year, we'll have 20,000 things more for next year because it's so, so rapidly advancing at this point.
- [20:30]
B
But that's obviously a successful sale to the customer of this AI roadmap. When it comes to your own team, did they have to make a shift to how they effectively sold AI to those customers? So what's that mind shift they went through?
- [20:46]
A
It's definitely a mind shift, because I think it's about trust, right? Like AI can, obviously in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, the potential is huge. But then they need to trust it. And when you're selling something, our services or maybe HubSpot, together with HubSpot, like, you need to sell the trust in HubSpot. Sometimes AI gives you credibility to sell the product, right? But at some other case, they feel, especially again, the more traditional industries, they feel like it's maybe a risk or dependency maybe. So I think now we're in the process of the new sales methodology and I think what I really remember is like what they said, you have the human, you have the chimpanzee, right? In which the chimp is really just like from back there, right? Like, and the human is super rational, but the chimp is super emotional. So if you can really talk to people and talk to their identity and talk to their emotions, how it can benefit them, their business. And I think that's really what we need to shift to because together with AI it will be more about emotions instead of the rational of, of a person. Right.
- [21:51]
B
And then what about, you know, some of the more practical elements when it comes to, you know, your packaging of services and the pricing of services. Now that AI is part of that equation, what have you had to shift there?
- [22:03]
A
It's a work in progress. So to be honest, like we productized, if you look at the implement, learn and optimize, we productize the implement for a couple of AI services that we, we talked about one use case, right. So we can, in terms of scoping, we can definitely scope that in a really good way. But then they're learning optimized phase. It has to do with the amount of users, how fast they want to go again. Right. So we're constantly changing that based on feedback of the client. So every phase that we have we try to ask for feedback like, hey, how did you like this? Because we are super experienced in scoping the other stuff like implementations, optimizations, integrations, but this is something completely new. It's really hard to estimate like how much time will it really take us to change this, to optimize this. So I think, and it will remain to be so for the remainder of this year, like we will need to optimize our packaging and the pricing associated to that. So I would, yeah, I would lie if I would say like, hey, it's written in stone and it's working 100%. We definitely need to iterate step by step.
- [23:07]
B
I think that's an honest answer and I think that's the journey that a lot of partner businesses are going through right now. The follow up question I have for you that you maybe will answer and go, I still don't know, Sarah, I still don't know. I'm working on it is how are you quantifying and demonstrating the ROI of your kind of standard V1 implementations to justifying your value based price modeling maybe of the future, especially for clients who might be more used to that traditional billing they're at this concept of outcome is quite different. You know how you know, have you thought about how you're going to quantify that?
- [23:43]
A
While the business case was a little bit harder to make before with a CRM like operational efficiency, you know, how much time does it really save you? But still a little bit hard to, to really make that business case while now with AI it's easier to make that business case, right? Because you just say, hey, you were, I'm saying like somebody in sdr, you're scraping a List, you're cold calling like you, you map out that process and like, hey, this costs you like how much time? One and a half day, a week. Now this will cost you an hour per week because AI will do the work for you at some point. What I'm thinking about is calculating, if you look at the average hourly rate that an employee has at that company, you just multiply with the amount of time that they will save and that will be one of the parts of your business case. If you look at AI software together with CRM like HubSpot, as we, you.
- [24:32]
B
Know, you think about kind of your own journey, what you've been through in the past, what you're currently, you know, which is a lived experience for you as you go through this AI evolution and shift. For kind of any aspiring entrepreneurs that are looking to build from scratch, what's your advice to them?
- [24:50]
A
You need to do what you like, right? Because like entrepreneurship, it's just I underestimated it heavily. So in terms of, I think when you really like what you do, you have passion about it. Just go do it right, because in the end it will always be worth it. Together with AI, it will just, it will create more gaps between who is going in the right direction, who's maybe still a little bit caught up in the past. Right. So I think choosing that right direction from the get go is really important. To be honest, that we were super lucky. What we chose to be a business tech agency, most of the direction that we chose is actually really matching now with what's happening with AI, Right. Because it really ties into each other really heavily. So I think when there's people that have passion with processes, with go to market, go to market engineers, how much a lot of them call themselves, if you really feel that passion, I would just deep dive in the ecosystem and just build that agency. Because you can do more than you actually think that you can do at this point. Because if you have the knowledge, if you have the expertise of being in the field, that's a super, super strong point. If you actually build that agency, you can teach the people that join the agency first and how they should do the work. And I think there's a lot more people out there that they can actually be part of the HubSpot ecosystem and can grow together with HubSpot. But they might be in the phase that I was before of like thinking about it but not doing it.
- [26:13]
B
So do you think HubSpot is one of the best places in the world.
- [26:15]
A
To grow your business as a partner? 100% what I know and I've again the other ecosystem in the ECRM space, I know all of them. I'm 100% confident that HubSpot is the best place to grow your business. Again, what I said in the beginning, I really believe in the division and the future of HubSpot. And I think what I see right now with upmarket deals, big companies, digital mature companies, they're all moving the same direction. If you want to build an agency and you love doing it around tech like build your business around HubSpot and all of the tools that are associated to HubSpot. Right. Because it's not just only HubSpot, it's like all these app partners like that app marketplace. It has so much potential to build that business around HubSpot, especially even in the Benelux, but also in general in emea. There's so much potential still there and especially looking at the growth for the next few years. So yeah, that would be my biggest advice.
- [27:06]
B
Well, thanks for joining us on the show, jc really appreciate having you here. And remember, if you like what you're hearing on own the outcome, make sure you subscribe. Subscribe for new episodes that drop every week.