Yamini, thank you. You know me better than... Oh, this is Friday five o'clock, so we must all be die-hard AI and technology fans, otherwise we are not going to be here. So, so, um, I'm between you and dinner, and I want to try and make this as, uh, valuable as possible. And obviously, we'll leave some time for Q&A at the end. You know, uh, Mr. Um invited me here, and he said talk about AI and, uh, talk about anything within AI. And the only thing that I'm really, really passionate about is go-to-market in AI. And so I want to spend a little bit of time, uh, sharing kind of what we have learned in the last year and a half. I would say probably learned more in the last year and a half than I have in the last 15 years. And so I want to share a little bit of that. Um, I'm Yam, and it's so exciting to be here with all of you. Thank you so much for the time, and especially on a Friday evening. And, uh, I think I'll jump straight into it.
And I couldn't agree more, uh, with Chandra in terms of his whole, you know, presentation on where we are going in terms of the world. But, uh, this year, you could not have read any newspaper, any magazine, any article without getting hit with AI hot takes, right? Uh, just look at the headlines that we've gone through in the last 18 months. This is 2023. Wall Street Journal said, you know, generative AI is causing a huge revolution. Washington Post basically said there's an AI gold rush, just announced a big gold rush last year. And then, uh, this is my favorite, which is New York Times, which says that how could AI destroy humanity? This was the question that they were posing last year. And, uh, if you just look at it, year after, the headlines have completely changed. You know, at the beginning of this year, Wall Street Journal said the whole economic revolution is losing steam, and Washington Post basically said, uh, the AI bubble is deflating already. And you have New York Magazine which asks questions like, what happened to the AI apocalypse? Really, we're asking about AI apocalypse. I mean, in, in just a matter of like 18 months, we've gone from this, uh, huge gold rush to deflating gold rush. So, um, what really is the truth? And I like the framing of this: is it just like hype, or is this a true revolution that we are in the middle of? And, uh, every time we go through this, we do go through a hype cycle, and we're spending a lot of time asking: is it at the peak of the hype cycle? Is it the, the trough of the hype cycle? And where are we in all of this?
And here's my answer to this: these are not even the right questions to ask, and these are not the right questions to answer, because these headlines, even though they get a lot of, like, eyeballs, and we look at these headlines, but these are not the lines within your heads. You know, when you're running a company, or you are in a go-to-market function, or you're a leader, you're not waking up in the morning, you know, with a big sweeping reflection about, about the state of AI. How many of you do that? Not many. You know, you're thinking about your team, you're thinking about your next milestone, you're thinking about who you need to hire and how you need to grow. In fact, that is the biggest question: you know, how do you grow from here? That is the most important question. And, uh, I don't know about many of you, but the last couple of years, it has been really, really hard to grow. And it's been hard to, to grow because of the changes within the economy, but there are other changes that are happening within our landscape that we need to care about. So the real question is: how do I drive growth, and how can we grow from here? That is the real question. I think we're spending a lot of time as an industry, a lot of time as executives, asking all the wrong questions, and we should be focusing on the right one, which is: how do we grow from here?
And in order to answer this question, we have to understand what has changed within the landscape, and therefore how can we leverage technology to be able to solve it. And here's the simple truth: the growth formula that we have known and that we have used to be able to grow our companies is broken. It is just much harder to get visitors to your website. It is much harder to convert them when they engage in your website, and it is super hard to retain your customers even after you have won them. So have we asked ourselves the question: why is this the case? Well, I'm, you know, I studied engineering. For me, everything has to come down into some kind of formula, and this is the formula. The reason growth is broken today is because, because the growth formula is completely broken. We have lower traffic. Number one challenge for marketeers today is that they're generating very little traffic, and there's no growth in terms of qualified leads. Conversion is down. In fact, win rates have declined from 23% to 19% in the last 18 months. That's actually pretty big. And retention is down. We're retaining customers, you know, at a lower and lower rate. And if you just put that together, you don't have as many visitors coming to your website, you are winning less, and you are retaining fewer customers. That means growth is slower. It's just no wonder that this is the case. So the question we have to ask ourselves is: what has changed? Now, this stat is really appalling to me: only 50% of sales reps are actually making their number today. Now, I grew up in sales, and I have one of my mentors, uh, right here who, you know, got me into sales. And there's a simple rule in sales: if there are four people sitting around a table at dinner, three should have made their quota. If not, you don't have a winning culture. And this is a really, really tough stat. And so all of this means that something has really dramatically changed within our go-to-market landscape. And if you step back and peel the onion of what changed: search has changed, social has changed, and all of the customer channels that we have have changed. Those are pretty dramatic shifts within the landscape. So while there is AI and all of the hype and all of the questions that we have on this side, there's a huge set of market-changing, uh, you know, trends that are happening. So let's actually peel back each of those. Search has fundamentally changed, and it is going to change pretty dramatically over the next three years. Now, think about how search worked: your customers would ask questions, and search engines would serve up these clean blue links, you know, the 10 blue links. They would click on one of those links, and they would get to your website. And there are professionals that have made incredible careers out of it. How do you optimize for that content? How do you get that content out there? I have my friend there, Caddy, uh, who I worked with, and she is just a master at that. And we've mastered the craft of being able to get that content out there so that they can then come to your website. But you know what? It's completely changed. Just last year, Google launched AI Overviews, and so now when a customer asks a question, they don't get blue links. They, they actually get an answer in the form of an AI overview. Next time you search something on, on search, look at what happens. It's not links that they now offer; it's answers that they're now offering, and that means you have fewer visitors coming to your website. That's a massively dramatic shift. And SearchGPT has not even come out yet, and AI Overviews have been rolled out just to 15% of the world's population. And then, get your entire marketing needs to transform. So that's a big shift. The same thing is happening in social. Now, think about social. Social is now all about holding on to you, you know, as customers. And you all know this is true: that their jobs have gone from distributing your content to becoming customer destinations themselves. And you know this is true because just look at your screen time. How much time are you spending on social platforms? There are PhDs out there that all they do is to make sure that you're spending even more time by giving the right kinds of content out there. Something doesn't like social platforms. Now, you know, if you really dare, you should actually look at your kids' social time. I have to say this is the scariest data for me because I have two boys, teen boys, and they're wonderful boys, but they spend a lot of time actually watching Minecraft. They're playing Minecraft. They're watching Shark Tank on the big screen, and they're streaming MrBeast or something, Hacker News or something on at the same time. So, you know, this is, this is the scariest data. And so there's a huge change that's happening within social, where they're spending all their time and attention to hanging on to you as customers and not sending your customers to your website. That's a pretty big shift. So all of this actually means everything that you have been doing in the last decade to get people to come to your website has literally changed in the last 18 months, and it's going to change even more in the next 18 months. In fact, all of this, uh, the work that we've done says that you're going to see less than 25% traffic in the next 18 months coming to your website. That's massive change in terms of your go-to-market strategies. But that's not all. There's another big change that's happening, which is people want to talk to people, not brands. In fact, seven in 10 customers will trust companies over, or they will trust people over companies. They trust funny people. They trust aspirational people. They trust relatable people. People, they just, just don't trust you. And they go to Reddit because they can get answers from other people. They go to G2, they can get answers from other people. They watch YouTube videos because it's from other people. And by the time they do all of this and finally get to your website, your customers know more about you than you know about them. Now, I don't know how many of you have been here and go-to-market for a while, but that is the scary thing for us to figure out: your customers know more about you than what you know about your customers. And that means when your sales rep picks up the phone and talks to your customer, that bar is just incredibly high because their answers have to be insightful and thoughtful and meaningful. And if it's not, conversion will drop. The same is true with service. And if you have a support rep and they get on the call, most of the easy questions are already answered by search, but chatbots, ChatGPT, all of those. So by the time they get to your support rep, the answers need to be highly targeted and insightful. And if it's not, retention is going to go down. So the old go-to-market formula is broken. This is not a surprise at all with the amount of change that we have seen in the industry in just the last 18 months. So now what? What are we going to do? Well, technology is profound only when it solves old problems in new ways. And now we need access to new insights to be able to solve the age-old problem of growth. How are you going to do that? Well, AI has the potential. AI has the potential to help us change this growth formula. Now, HubSpot has 250,000 customers globally, and over the last six months, we spent time surveying thousands of our customers. I spoke to hundreds of our customers. I absolutely enjoy talking to customers. Any of our customers here? Okay, I want to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I love talking to our customers. I learn from customers, and we spent a lot of time talking to our customers on their use cases, their mindsets, their fears. There's a lot of fear out there, and their hopes and dreams on what to do with AI. And we learned a few things. And here's exactly what we learned from hundreds and hundreds of hours of conversation. Today, all customers are using AI for acceleration, and tomorrow, they're all planning to use it for transformation, and it's coming fast. So what's the question? You know, what is acceleration? Acceleration is the easiest thing to understand. It means taking what you're doing today and making it fast with AI. It means just making your task much easier in drafting an email, summarizing a call. These are all examples of acceleration with AI. And AI is working with you to help you grow, and it's happening now. When we spoke to our customers, we found example after example of growth professionals who are already using AI, and they're getting very tangible results. I'll talk about a few of these results today. But transformation, this is what I'm really excited about. A transformation is taking what is impossible today and making that possible. It means you are reimagining goals, and you are stringing together new tasks to be able to accomplish those reimagined goals. And AI is going to be working for you, not with you. And AI is going to be working for you in order to be driving growth. And if acceleration has already happened in the last couple of years, transformation is going to immediately happen, starting now and going into the future. I think Chandra already talked about that. So great, there is now a new technology. We can use it to accelerate or transform. How does this solve the problems that we have within marketing, sales, and service? Let's actually start with marketing because this is all about attracting customers. Fundamentally, that is what it is. And the best way to do it is to have great content to be able to do that. That's one of the logical places for us to look for in terms of AI. And there are tons of examples. When we surveyed our customers, three use cases were at the top. One is using AI to create content. Second is using AI to personalize content. And three is using AI to distribute content. Now, probably none of these are surprising, but how prevalent it is is actually quite surprising. 65% of our surveyed customers were already using AI to create content. The question is, how do you do it well? How can you be great at it? Now, it starts with understanding what AI is good at. AI is good at researching topics. AI is really good at creating drafts and iterating for different audiences. But humans, we are much better at taking those drafts from good to great with authentic or original insights that AI just cannot provide, right? Now, what we also found is that AI is really good at personalizing content. This has been a dream for marketers for many decades, and AI is really good at it. Our marketing team actually started using AI, and they've been able to improve the conversion rate on our website by 82%. So when someone came to our website and they filled out a form, we just didn't send back a generic message back to them. We actually used AI to do a RAG and research the company where they came from, research the role they had, and then we mapped all of our content from Academy and from knowledge bases, and we mapped that content and sent a personal message to them. That's why the conversion actually went up by 82%. That's not surprising at all because every single person who got that email now felt like it was written for them, and it was written for them by AI. So there's huge potential in how you can personalize content to drive much better conversion with AI. Okay, once you've created the content and you've personalized it, you've got to distribute it. Now, remember we talked about the problem where we used to have amazingly well-written content on your website waiting for customers to get to your website? It's not going to work anymore. So now you have to take the content that's well-written and find where your customers are, and that's exactly where AI can help as well. So one feature that we saw huge adoption this year, it was quite surprising for us. We launched it, and the next month it became one of our top three use cases, which is Content Remix. You take a piece of content, can be a blog, and AI will immediately, in a matter of seconds, convert it into a social post, into a short-form video that you can put on TikTok, or into an email campaign. Literally a matter of seconds. This is how you take great content and get it to where your customers are, and don't wait for your customers to get to where you are. So huge value. So what does this all mean? You know, is AI driving tangible results? We spoke to customers, and one of our customers is Sandler. They're an education provider, and they shared a couple of stats which was mind-blowing to me. They've been using content marketing with AI, and they've been able to reduce the overall sales cycle time from 90 days to 30 days by having better content, by having better personalization, and driving much better conversion. And their website properties, when people do come to their website, it used to take 45 seconds, 60 seconds for people to move from their site. Now they're spending three to four minutes. That's huge. If you're a marketer and you want to drive a level of attention, so incredible results. So what's the next step that's happening? Well, I think, you know, we just heard from Chandra in terms of the agentic world that we're going to, and it is all about agents. And to me, agents are pretty simple. It's just like any other piece of software, but now it uses AI and it uses the tools that AI can work with, and it can accomplish goals that have multiple steps. That's all it is, but it's so powerful and can do the work for you. And what we've found are agents now in marketing that can drive the next level of transformation. Think about a content agent. It can work for you to create the content, to personalize the content, to distribute the content. Social agent can analyze all of your social posts and tell you when, where, and how to amplify those posts. And a campaign agent can and is now taking all of your campaigns and analyzing those campaigns and telling you which ones to amplify on which channels. This is happening right now. This is going to be transformative for the entire industry in marketing. So 18 months, what have we learned within marketing? It's pretty simple. AI creates and people curate. The counterintuitive insight that we have learned here is that AI is not just for creating spam and more content. It is actually for better quality content that drives much better conversion. Okay, so let's talk about sales now. I've been in the industry for more than three decades, or close to three decades, and the one job, I've worn a lot of hats over the last couple decades, the one that I absolutely love the most is sales, and that's because it is this beautiful art of engaging with customers. You just get, you know, if I, anytime I have to get on the phone, talk to customers and ask them about what their goals are and help them in their career, I am personally fulfilled, and it's such a high for me. Now, if you think about what is happening in sales over the last couple of decades, there's one metric in sales that we have not been able to move as an industry. It is time in front of the customer. That is the single metric that we've not been able to move as an industry because most of us spend a lot of time on a whole bunch of activities that is just not in front of our customers. I've spent personally time trying to move the single metric, and if we can get 5% improvement in productivity in a single year, it will be a phenomenal year, but it's just not been possible. And the reason is this: the average rep spends just two hours a day in front of customer selling. And yeah, maybe you can say, are they playing golf or are they drinking martinis? Maybe on a Friday evening at 5:30 they do that, but really most of the time they are spending the time preparing for a call with all of the discovery that they need to do, or they're following up with all of the tasks that they need to do. It is just so time-consuming, the level of work in and the level of work in follow-up and all the admin tasks that we just, you know, drown them with. No wonder they've never been able to get much more productive than that, and it's been really hard to kind of shrink that time until now. That's why this is so powerful at this point. You know, there are clear ways in which our customers are seeing value with AI. They've been able to shorten the discovery time, and they've been able to shorten the follow-up time. And here's how they're doing it. Our customers are using AI for research. Everybody should be using AI for prospecting and understanding your customers. It used to take, when I started in sales, it used to take me two, three hours to put a briefing document to then share with someone, some executive that was getting ready. Now it takes two seconds to look at a particular company and analyze all of that. Our customers are doing that. Then they are using it to score high-intent prospects, and then they are using AI-generated personal messages to connect those prospects with reps across our customers. And within HubSpot, we've been using this use case internally. We've been able to shrink the discovery time by 30% in just one year. This is, we've not been able to do this before. The same thing with streamlining all of the follow-ups. Our customers are summarizing the calls, figuring out what the objections are within those calls, sending personal messages, and reducing the time for faster follow-ups by nearly 20%. It's just been incredible to see. I've not seen this in the last couple of decades. Here's an example: Aerotech, one of our customers, started using all of the AI agents for prospecting research. They've been able to cut down the time spent in discovery significantly. And here's the stat that is mind-blowing: they were able to improve their win rates from 15% to 25%. I don't think in the last, you know, 10, 15 years I've been able to do any single initiative that has improved the win rates significantly by this level. So pretty impressive to see in, again, in a very short period of time. So then the question is, what happens next within sales? Well, it's easy to imagine a prospecting agent. Imagine you're logging in on Monday morning and your prospecting agent has already found promising leads for you that week. And your agent asks you, do you want me to add these leads with you? Do you want me to write a message for each of these leads? Do you want me to be able to get a meeting for you with these leads? And of course, your answer is going to be yes. You want to do each of those so that you can take your time and spend it on the most valuable part, which is connecting. So what have we learned within sales? AI offers context and people offer connection. There's almost nothing that we can do better than to leverage AI for all of that busy work so that we can really focus on connecting with customers. And that's exactly what AI is enabling right now. All right, let's talk about customer service. This is, is this beautiful art of delighting customers. Customers that are just delighted become advocates and help you get even more customers. And the North Star in terms of customer service has always been the same thing, which is we all want to be strategic partners for our customers. We just want them to think about us as the strategic thought partner. But you know what? We end up being human band-aids. That's what we are. We mostly are reactive. We're trying to solve problems reactively, trying, trying to do very little things, too little, too late. And we all know how it is to be on the other side of the call of a poor customer service experience. You know, for me, this happened when we were on vacation. My wonderful husband, Cash, is here. We both were on vacation last summer with our family in Johannesburg, and we take this long flight from here to Johannesburg, and we get there, but our bags did not get there. You know, any of you experienced that? It's super painful. So we get there, our bags are not there at the airport, and so I get on this call with Kathy from customer care, and she's such a lovely person. You know, she's very chirpy, but had no answers. Where are our bags? Well, don't know. When are we going to get them? Don't know. What should we do next? Don't know. And here we are, you know, we bought all of these oversized clothes that we got from the airport gift shop, and we're like, you know, sitting there, and I'm also thinking about what this person's job is, and I'm feeling really bad for her because I've been in CRM for multiple years, and I'm like thinking, why does she not have the basic information about us as customers that she can help with? Why can't she answer basic questions? And I'm also thinking, what CRM are they using? But can I upsell her? No, I won't go there. But I want to get my clothes back. And it's so, as customers, we can all relate to this. When we have a problem and when we try to talk to someone, we just want our answers now, and we want them to get the context of who we are as customers right now. That's all there is to service, and we've not been able to do that. Now that that airline is off our list, we're not going to travel on that airline. And just like that, every conversation is make or break when it comes to service. And so the question is, how can AI help? Well, AI is helping answer customer questions faster, and it is providing the ability to accelerate self-service right now. And we're seeing exactly this with our customers. One of our customers, Kaplan, took all of the knowledge bases, put that into a much more structured, unstructured knowledge base that AI can now use, and they've been able to reduce the average response time by 30%. I'm still waiting for the kinds of results that you just showed, but this is exactly what they've seen. They've been able to reduce the average response time significantly, and 30% of their, all of their tickets are now managed by AI. So these are real results from companies that we are working with every single day. In fact, you know, across the board of customers that are using AI for resolving tickets, between 30 to 60% of tickets are already being managed by AI. So it's pretty incredible to see how quickly we have come so far, and this has just been in the last 18 months. So then the question is, what about agents? What are the agents that are coming up next in service? And absolutely, the, the case, there are support agents. So imagine you have an agent just for you as a customer, and it knows the context of all of your support cases. It knows the context of exactly what you bought and why you bought, what questions you asked before, and can answer questions 24/7. This is happening right now and very quickly. Knowledge-based agents. One of the things that we have found, you know, within service is that it's not about answering tickets, it's about having all of the answers documented somewhere. And it's interesting that AI now can actually look at those answers, update the results, and improve your knowledge base pretty significantly. And when, when it does that, then you're going to be able to take your agents and help them do higher level and higher value-added tasks. So it's that this is what is coming next. So the question, what did we learn? AI handles simplicity and people handle subtlety, and that is how we can actually drive a level of higher retention within our businesses. So if we step back and put all of this together, you know, the way to think about AI is not to overhype AI or underplay AI. It is to understand it and co-create with AI because co-creation is what can drive growth across all of the go-to-market functions that we've been working with. If you put this together, AI creates and people curate. AI offers context and people offer connection. AI handles simplicity and people handle subtlety. The way to think about AI is how it can power people and make us better in the jobs that we do to drive growth. And now with this context, if you reimagine that growth formula that we started to talk about, and you reimagine and raise it to the power of AI, that's how you drive growth. You can get all of the content that can drive much better traffic. You can get all of the insights that improves your conversion and improves the retention. And if we can just be focused on that, we can fix that growth formula, and that's what we should care about right now. It's not the hype. It's not the questions that we ask every day. It's not the headlines that matter. It is how do we use a very powerful technology to be able to drive growth. And I think we have great ways to do that. I think with AI, all businesses can now play big, and I hope you all leverage it as well. Thank you so much for the time.
