The #1 Habit HubSpot’s CEO Uses to Stay Focused Under Pressure

If you look at the history and you look at a lot of companies that have been maybe at our scale and have, you know, grown, they don't do it by, you know, diversifying and becoming like, you know, peanut butter, spreading all of their resources. They get from good to great by being focused on a handful that you can truly win. We're paying attention to the things that we say no to. You have to be able to say no to good ideas in order for you to be able to execute great ideas. And that comes with this principle of fortune favors the focus.

Yeah, thank you for having me again. At HubSpot, we are really focused on helping millions of organizations grow better. That's the purpose. That's our mission. That's what we care about. That's our bread, butter, and jam. The way we do it is by providing a customer platform. So, think about this, David. If you want to connect to your end customers, you need to be able to look at their entire journey. Whether they're coming to your website, they're buying something online, or they're interacting with your support, you got to be able to connect. That's what we enable small and medium businesses to do. We're about a 17-year-old company, 2.2 billion almost in revenue, and we are all over the world, and we're passionate people that are mission-driven about helping customers grow.

Yeah, you know, this will resonate deeply with you. I'm an accidental CEO in many ways. You know, I've been in the tech industry for about a few decades and I joined HubSpot as their first chief customer officer. And the reason I was the first chief customer officer is that HubSpot really believes in building and bringing together marketing, sales, and service in service of the end customer. So my job was to come in and bring together marketing, sales, and service and really help focus on the customers. And I joined at a very cool time, January 2020.

And I didn't know what the world was going to be. But I still remember Brian, who was the CEO, co-founder, phenomenal leader, mentor, coach. He said, "Well, take your time, Yamini. Take a lot of time and spend the time knowing our team, knowing our culture." And then March hit and he's like, "Move fast. Give me answers today. I can't wait one more day. What are the changes we need to do to really go into this mode of dealing with COVID?" And so I was thrust into this position of reinventing what we needed to do during the pandemic and help our small and medium businesses who at that time were honestly churning. They were closing down and shuttering. There was a question of how they were going to survive and we said we need to do our part to help them get digital and help them get digital really quickly. And so we changed a lot of what we did for customers in a matter of days. We went to the board and we said that we are slashing our price, we're helping our customers, we're giving them a relief fund, and we are going to help them survive during the pandemic. And turns out that was a good call because three months later all small and medium businesses needed a way to digitally connect, digitally grow, and they came to us and we earned their trust in that period.

Then what happened the next March, so I'd kind of gone through one March to the next March, I got another call from Brian and this time he was calling me unfortunately from his hospital bed. He had met with a snowmobile accident and had broken a lot of big bones and thankfully all the organs survived. And he said, "You're going to have to step up and you're going to have to run the company until I recover and get back." And my first thought was, wow, pretty big shoes and wow, no playbook. He basically called from the hospital and said, "Don't mess this up." And I said, "Okay, I'll try my best." The good part is that we had clear guiding principles as a company, we had a great leadership team, and we did that. And six months later he came back, again a call, and he said, "Well, do it. You're doing a reasonable job. Keep doing it and become the CEO." My first reaction was, no, no, no, this is not what I had planned for. I planned to take a month off after, you know, kind of helping shepherd the company over this period. And I'm not really the person. I never ever thought of becoming a CEO. And he said, "Well, it's you or I'll hire someone else and you might not like that person. What do you want to do?"

Right, exactly. I was like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me think about this." And in 24 hours, I got back to him and I said, "Well, I will do it, but I think I have big shoes to fill and I'll need your coaching, mentoring, and support." And he has been a phenomenal coach, mentor, guide for me throughout this process. And it's now been about two and a half years since I got that first call in March.

100%. 100%. And for me, words matter. You stand in commitment to every word you say and what you drive. And so the chief customer officer conveys that customer is at the center. Now you could have called that chief business officer, chief commercial officer, chief operating officer. You could have called any of those things, but it signals that the job of that C-level leader is to put the customer at the center and then make sure everything else works in order to serve that customer. And 10 years ago that title was not existent and I think the industry is embracing it for the right reasons, which is the focus on the customer. It's probably the most important thing in terms of a business.

It's funny because again this time he had like a one-liner which is be the driver of the bus was the conversation that we had. And so I thought about that a lot. What does being a driver actually mean? And how does one go from being a go-to-market leader to a company leader? And it really starts with who are your constituents and who are your key stakeholders. Of course, all employees within the company. Of course, all of the customers, partners, investors, board members, and overall stakeholders. So, it really broadens who you're communicating. But it starts with the mindset of how do I learn what is important for every one of these stakeholders. I think from my perspective, I started as an engineer, then became a sales leader, and then became a customer-focused executive, and I've always put the customer at the center. Now I had more stakeholders and understanding the motivations, the key priorities for each of these stakeholders is where I started in terms of my journey as a CEO.

First of all, you start with impostor syndrome. Not a lot of CEOs actually talk about this. Not a lot of C-suite leaders talk about this. But you know, when he said, hey, take this on, the first thing was, am I the right person for this and how do I actually fit in? Then the next question is, well, he's done a phenomenal job, you know, do I step into his shoes or do I create different shoes for myself? And I think from my perspective, I started with saying, what is the future that I want to help create as a leader? One of the lessons that I have learned as a leader is not to focus on the past and where you're coming from, but really focus on the future and work backwards. I had to make that choice, David, because I could be sitting there and I could be thinking about what shoes am I filling, how am I going to get this role, you know, to be where it needs to be, and do I have the capability, the credibility to be able to lead this company. But that's not where I started. I made a choice. I made a choice and I thought about 2030 and where HubSpot can be as a company and what would be my role in getting the organization to where it needed to be in the next decade and what would a great leader do and how could I be part of that journey. So I started in the future and then the answer became clear. I wanted to be the best CEO that the company and the employees and the customers deserved. Not where I was coming from, but where it needed to be in the future. And so working backwards from the future really helped create a vision for where I can go with this company.

That's a fantastic question. I think we've made a lot of changes over the last couple of years, but nothing dramatic. And I always say that a CEO's role is much easier when it's a turnaround role because you can come in and you know you're at the bottom and then you start slashing, burning, making changes. HubSpot is not that. We are going from good to great, which means you really need to be curious. You need to be open. You need to deeply, keenly listen to know what changes are necessary in order to scale the company versus making changes quickly for the sake of you being a leader there. So part of my process was going on a 90-day listening tour. I listened to our employees all across the board. I listened to investors. I listened to our board members. And then I created a plan. And part of that evolved naturally. The changes that we needed to do was investments in, you know, certain areas within the organization to bring a leadership team together much more closely and be very clear that we're building a company for the future. So more of those changes versus a drastic, dramatic change that we needed to make day one.

I love this. So, I grew up in India and I grew up in a super small town. My mom was a homemaker and my dad was a mechanical engineer who had a small business. The town did not have a high school that went up to 12th grade in the English medium. It had it in the local language but not in English medium. So part of the conversations at dinner tables was, what am I going to do? Where am I going to finish high school? You know, it was interesting. One of those days my mom gave me an article about a woman who was attempting to climb Mount Everest. And I said, "Well, I want to do that." And we were literally having this conversation of how could I complete my high school degree, high school graduation. And at the same time, I was like, "I want to climb Mount Everest." My mom was like, "Yeah, you can do it." And then the next week, I'd come and say, "I want to become a lawyer." And she'd be like, "Yeah, you can do it." And literally, I had so many different ideas of what I wanted to do living in this super small town that didn't even have a high school. And my parents encouraged me every step of the way. They believed in me as a human being, not as a woman growing up in the 80s in rural India, but as a person with potential. And to me, that power of someone believing in my ability when I didn't have any at the time — certainly didn't have rock climbing or mountain climbing abilities — but someone believed in me. And I think that has propelled me over so many ups, downs, failures, successes. I just believe in myself. I just have a level of perseverance and the ability to dust it off and start back again. And probably those dinner table conversations had a lot to do with the grit that I now have.

Yes. Oh, absolutely. You have to be defiant. And you're absolutely right. My parents, you know, said that I could do anything but really secretly wished I became a doctor just like my elder sister. And I chose not even to go take the exam. That was how defiant I was. I was like, well, I'm not going to take the exam, which means I'll never have any probability of becoming a doctor. That's how defiant I was. And you got to be, you know, somewhat defiant that way. Later on I'll tell you a couple different places that it happened. I graduated from business school at Berkeley and the first job that I got was accidental in the sales organization. When I joined the sales organization, I'd been an engineer for a few years, then went into business school and got into sales, and people looked at me and they looked at how I was approaching sales and said, "Wow, she's just not going to make it. Maybe at the end of the first year we're going to give her a performance plan. She's probably going to leave." Because I approached, you know, sales like an engineer. And then I looked at people around me, they approached sales like the art of sales, and I was like, "No, I'm going to do the science of sales." Part of the defiance came from knowing that I was strong analytically and I was strong in getting customers to talk to me about their business. I was curious and I was a learner and all of that came from my engineering background. And so I said, I'm going to lean in on that. I don't play golf. I certainly don't know how to banter about, you know, Sunday night football, but I know how to analyze a 10-K. And I was really defiant. And at the end of the first year, I'd crushed, you know, my goals for the year and gained a level of confidence in how I can present myself in front of customers. And yeah, almost every time someone says you can't do it, I say, "Well, I will."

It was really rough. And by the way, I don't think my role in sales was like that easy. I had to prove every step of the way. But when I first got into management, I did what every individual contributor that moves into a manager role does, which is like my way or the highway. It is, I know exactly how to do this, I've done it for so many years, so here is a playbook and giving answers. One of the first lessons that I learned in those early days is that people don't want answers, they want questions. People want to get to answers themselves. And one of the first skills that I had to learn as a manager was asking better questions, more thoughtful questions that would lead someone to get to their answers themselves. And that really meant that I had to go from being someone with a sprinter mindset, go fast, to being a cross-country coach, coaching them to last, to pace, to get to where they needed to, and to feel a sense of success themselves. I still recall one of the first performance reviews that I got as a manager was brutal. Here I was thinking I've done this role. I know how to do this role. Here's this amazing playbook. So all I have to do is give this playbook to others and they're all going to be successful. And it absolutely did not work. And I had to completely reinvent and have a playbook for asking more questions, enrolling people, helping them see their potential, and ultimately slowing down in order for the team to go far. It was huge, huge lessons there.

This is one of my favorite lessons. So T-zone, and the way I think about it is that you have functional leadership. So you can be an engineering leader, a sales leader, and you know your function really well, and that is the I, you know, or the vertical. The T-zone is your ability to connect across multiple functions. That is what gets you to break through from being a director-level, VP-level position into the C-suite and beyond. And I learned this the really hard way. One of the first things that I did as I was working with sales and marketing was try to bring sales and marketing together. And if you worked in high-tech organizations, sales and marketing are notorious for pointing fingers at each other. "You're not good enough. You're just not good enough. You didn't give me the right leads. No, you didn't follow this through." How many sales and marketing organizations sit in the same place? So one of my jobs was to bring sales and marketing together as a strategy leader. And the way I did it is connected the dots across both of these teams. And I said, what is your focus? What do you care about? You all care about winning customers, acquiring customers, and making them successful. So let's start with what is common and let's connect the dots across all of this. And turns out it was exceptionally important, that dot connecting across functions. Then the relationships across marketing and sales at the time that I was working in the organization improved quite a bit to the point where people started trusting me. Then I took it to product and engineering and I said, this is what we're trying to do in the go-to-market side and here's what you can do to help us and here's what we can do to help you. And so as I grew in my career, I stopped being a functional leader and started being much more of a T-zone leader, connecting the dots. That's when I started seeing breakthroughs in terms of my career and progress.

Be authentic, operate with high integrity, and be customer obsessed. I would say those are probably foundational for me. I'll say on authenticity, it's — I joined tech when there were not that many women and there were certainly not that many Asian women in the go-to-market parts of the organization. And for a number of years, as I was growing up in tech, I tried to be someone else. I tried to be the person who played amazing golf, but I really was terrible at golf. I tried to be the person that had this amazing banter in the first five minutes of a conversation. I was an introvert and didn't quite do that well. And I started embracing who I was. And I'm a first-principles thinker. I'm a problem solver. I really focus on customers and I want the company to win. And when I started being just authentic and embracing what I was good at and just calling it as it is, I started seeing more people resonate with my style and resonate with my leadership. And so authenticity has been just so important in terms of my journey of finding my own voice. When you grow up in India, most of the time Indian women are asked to kind of keep their opinions to themselves. And part of being authentic and figuring out who I am is to be able to voice out my opinions in the most authentic manner, in the most high-integrity manner. And I've had to find that voice as I've grown as a leader. And then the customer obsession, that just comes from being, you know, in the sales organization, talking to customers and solving for customers and seeing how if you truly wanted to be successful, it had to come to making your customers champions and making them win in their career. So I'd say those three are probably my north stars as a leader.