Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This Not That. And this is a special one. We got one of the people on this planet who said, 'Who could you have on the show? You pick anybody. This is who I'd pick.' It's true. Uh, don't tell my wife cuz I should pick her first. But no, I want Yamini. Who's Yamini? Who's Yamini Rangan? She is the CEO of HubSpot. You know her. And if you don't know HubSpot, that's epically weird. But I'll give you the quick rundown. Okay. HubSpot is the global CRM powerhouse, helping millions of people, over a quarter million customers in 135 countries. It's not just listed as like the best place to work and all this stuff. And Yamini has not only helped this thing grow like massively leading the charge, but I'm not just saying this because Yamini is here. It has to have the best corporate culture on the planet, the best community vibes. I don't know of another brand where people feel so connected to this thing and I love all things HubSpot. So, Yamini, thank you for being here.
I think we could end the show right there. That was perfect. But thank you Jay for having me and we've been huge fans. You add so much to our community. Uh our, you know, community of marketers learn from you so much. So it is an absolute delight to be on the show with you.
Wow, that's amazing. I'm going to clip that and use that. I'm going to get a tattoo of that. Um all right, so before we get into all this work stuff, I wanted to bring something up because you and I have gone through a similar life moment recently. We both dropped off our sons at college and I don't know about you, but this has been like totally I I wasn't fully prepared. How are you handling it? Are you doing well? How are all things going?
Oh my god. I know. I you know you that that's your first child as well, right? Yeah. It's all new to me and I didn't grow up in this country. So the whole process from college visit to application to like drop off and dorms. What do you need in a dorm? I like overordered everything and I and and you know when we went into the dorm it was like three people and they were like take everything back because there's no room for anything. So this whole process has been like new and I've been discovering this whole process but look it's like um it's exciting and emotional at the same time. Uh there was this moment where we literally like, you know, said bye and to my to my son when we dropped him off and um he is never emotional, but he looked like he had a half a tear and then then my dam like broke and I was like, you know, I could not I literally could not even stop it. And I think all the way from drop off to when we were driving to the airport as absolute basket case. My husband was a basket case and we both were like you know like you know it it was just an emotional moment and then you turn around you're like okay now two weeks later there was inbound so let's go. So I think like it's really hard to kind of you know pause for life moments like that while you're doing you know things. And you know, we still pass his room and we're like, 'Oh my god.' You know, he's he's not there and you know, but it's also exciting to launch an adult and hopefully a good human being and see, you know, him like take off and thrive in a new environment, make new friends, and, you know, figure out his passion. So, yeah, it's a it's all in one.
It's it's it's more than I expected to be. And I actually apologize. My daughter is a senior in high school right now and so I apologize her to her the other day because I realized like when we eat dinner now we ask her like double the amount of annoying questions and she's like carrying the load for him not being there.
I know. I I have a junior in high school and he's like he he sat us down and he said you guys this is enough like you are all over me and you see how I'm not coming out of my room. It's because you're all over me. Just back off. And we were like, 'Okay.'
Right. I know. It's not It's like you don't even realize. Oh, wait a minute. Um Well, it's amazing. I'm so happy that's going well because it is a big deal. Speaking of another big deal.
So, at this year's Inbound, so inbound is the massive conference that HubSpot puts on and it just happened recently. And this year's inbound, what was the the talk of everything was this idea of the funnel that marketers use, that sales people use, that business owners use to drive their business. The funnel is no longer the thing and now we're migrating to the loop. Okay. So, what's going on here? Is is the funnel dead? What's happening?
Well, I think the funnel is still the funnel, but the point we were trying to make is the shape of the funnel and what you do to progress the different stages within the funnel is changing really, really dramatically. And Jay, I mean, you've followed all of this, but even for us who live and breathe, you know, marketing every single day, if you just pause and kind of like reflect on how much change we have seen in the last like 18 months, it's pretty dramatic. And think about this at the at the top of the funnel, you know, we typically call this as awareness. And the awareness, you know, was always built on get your brand name out and get people to come and visit your website. And now it's absolutely not that. It is be where your customers are. And your customers are listening to podcasts like your podcast, Jay. They're on social, on Insta, on LinkedIn, on YouTube, and they are reading email newsletters. So I think where awareness is has completely changed and it's actually dispersed to where the customers are and then if you look at the consideration phase what we're we're seeing is that it's a lot fewer clicks coming into your website. It used to be that marketers were obsessed about the volume of traffic that's coming to the website and that has dramatically changed with AI overviews. AI overviews are now giving answers. And so this is like a stat that I saw last week which is eight out of 10 Google searches end up with no click. I mean that is massive. That is like absolutely massive where eight out of 10 clicks are not ending in search which means you know if you just have the content and you're waiting and optimizing for website traffic it's just not going to work. So the middle of the funnel in terms of consideration where people come to your website that has actually compressed quite a bit and then the bottom of uh the funnel which used to be the hardest thing which is conversion. How do you take someone who is looking at your brand your product your solution and convert them into the customer? Well, you can now use AI and you can actually have very hyperpersonalized conversations to drive much better conversion. So, if you step back, marketing has changed dramatically and we think that there is a need for a completely new playbook which is what we launched at inbound um the conference we had about a month ago.
So, okay. So, I'm listening. I'm out there and I'm a marketing manager, a small business owner, whatever I am, and I'm like, 'Okay, I got to change around my idea of the funnel.' But here I am trying to figure out, do I have the right content piece? I made this PDF. I made this report. I want to use this thing and get a boatload of leads. Is on a very basic level, does our content need to change or is it just how we are distributing our content? Like, what do we have to do if we're living and breathing this every day?
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's such a really important and specific question. If you are in marketing, you know, the first thing is the type of content that you are building does need to change and where you distribute that content needs to change. So those are the two things and let's type talk about the type of the content. Now, you know, we all optimize the heck out of SEO, which is search engine optimization. And the average number of words in a Google search is five. So, people would say, you know, what's the best marketing podcast? And then, you know, you would you would still show up in the in the top five blue links. And maybe someone clicks on that blue link, they get to kind of like your website, and then they begin to understand the kind of content that you generate. Well, that is not enough. Now, people are asking really specific questions and the average number of words in an LLM question is 23. So, they're not saying give me the, you know, the best uh marketing podcast. It's like I am trying to learn about very specific areas of marketing like content marketing and I want to use AI better. What should I do and who should I listen to and that's a very very different kind of approach and so what I tell content uh marketers is that content is more important than ever but specific content with better citations with better quotations with better more you know focused case studies and that can answer people's questions are going to be more important and so content is changing pretty dramatically but it's how you use that content. That's one. The second part is where the content shows up. We we've already talked about it. If you are sitting here waiting for someone to show up in your website, you're going to be waiting for a while because it's not the way pattern anymore. And that's because way back when internet got formed, it was pretty easy because the thing that happened with internet is it made information searchable. Of people searched and so people searched and landed on your website. Now information is ubiquitous everywhere in different platforms and no one's going to come to your website to search about your product. They're going to ask their friends on Reddit or maybe G2. They're going to go and look at something on Insta or Tik Tok and get influenced by that. They're going to listen to podcasts. And so where your content is needs to be where your customers are. And so if you are content marketer, get specific about your content. Drive much more personalization with that content and get that content everywhere before your customers get to your website.
I think it's a really important message because even as we approach end of year here and people have these like dashboards like how are we doing and we look at our web traffic, you know, year-over-year, oh it's down for them to understand it's not down because you've done something you're bad at what you do anymore. It's down because the world has changed. But now has has our jobs gotten harder as you know business people, marketers, sales people, especially on the marketing side about well I'm not big on YouTube or we don't have a presence on Reddit or we barely post on our company page on LinkedIn is the new thing heading into 2026. Listen, it's not about your website traffic. You actually need to have a presence there. It's not like you're checking a box in the past where oh yeah, we're there. Is this now a must-do uh for your business?
Absolutely. I I would say marketing just got fun. You know the last like five years if you actually you know talk to marketers almost everything that you do was just incremental. You got like point you know 0.5% improvement in conversion. You got like you know some small incremental gain. I think now it's a completely new playbook. And if if you know I were a marketer, I'd be like okay let's reinvent almost everything because the faster you move the bigger the gains and advantage you will get for your company. So I do think that it is a pretty you know uh fun moment for marketers. You do have to reinvent though you cannot you cannot like wait for you know someone to get to you know your page or wait there though. You know there's something interesting Jay about the channels that are beginning to work now. You know, we've talked about it. It is like podcast. Why do people listen to your podcast? You're a personality that
I I know. I know. Because you know it in general it is because people trust you know uh sources like you. You have higher credibility and people want high credibility sources. This is why you know um podcasts uh YouTube channels even email newsletters work because they are people and personality driven. It it used to be just content driven. Now content needs to also be people and personality driven. And so if you are looking for next year's like marketing plan and you're building strategy, you should be thinking about diversification. But you should be thinking about who within your company has high credibility, has high authority, can represent to customers and ideal customer profiles the right kind of messages and you have to start building that.
I think that's so valuable for people to hear from you because I fully believe that humanity is the algorithm, right? You know, and that's who we trust. We trust people and and it's this idea of especially leaders of organizations. It could be a tiny business, big business, doesn't matter that you need to have a personality, a human uh and humans showing that they're real. Like at Inbound, for example, you had Brian Halligan, one of the co-founders of of of HubSpot, sitting there doing the Hot Wings challenge. The Hot Ones challenge, right?
It was unbelievable. The dude I couldn't even watch. I watched like the Hot Wings like the whole thing. I watched maybe the first three or four and then I was like, 'Oh my god, this is going to hurt. I'm I'm done.'
