hubspot saas case study

Inside Sales Best Practices: HubSpot – A Case Study

• by David Skok

HubSpot is a SaaS company selling Inbound Marketing software. HubSpot has grown revenue over 6,000% in the last four years, placing them #33 on the Inc 500 fastest growing companies list. They now employ about 300 people. I have always been very impressed with how Mark has run their inside sales organization, which has now grown to 110 people. In this interview, I talk to Mark about his strategy and tactics for running a successful SaaS sales organization. I believe Mark is at the forefront of using data and science to drive how he hires and manages his organization, and this article should bring out some interesting best practices.

Mark’s background is unusual for a VP of Sales. He trained as an engineer, and started life as a programmer at Accenture, and tried his own startup company before going to MIT’s Sloan School of Business, where he met Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah the founders of HubSpot. His engineering roots made him very process and metrics driven, which accounts for a lot of the ideas he has employed in managing the insides sales group at HubSpot.

How did MIT Sloan School influence the way you think about managing?

It taught me to seek out science and data whenever possible to understand the business and make decisions. It also helped teach me how to be an entrepreneurial leader. The key lessons there were to think big, make bold decisions, and constantly challenge the norm.

What are your goals as a sales exec, and what is your strategy for achieving them?

Goals are Predictable, Scalable Revenue Growth

My Strategy is best summed up as:

• Hire the same type of successful sales person
• Train each sales person in the same way
• Provide each sales person with the same quantity and quality of leads
• Ensure sales people work the leads using the same process

Starting with hiring: Tell us a bit about what attributes it takes to sell HubSpot?

HubSpot’s sales context is evangelistic. In the early days, few people had heard of HubSpot and Inbound Marketing. Over the years, market knowledge of both HubSpot and Inbound Marketing has dramatically improved. However, even folks that have heard of Inbound Marketing do not understand how to develop such a channel. In HubSpot sales, we need to educate people over the phone and literally convince them to turn their sales and marketing process on its head. To do so, our sales team needs to earn the prospect’s trust, gain a deep understanding of the prospect’s business goals, understand their sophistication with sales and marketing, and articulate an adoption plan of inbound marketing that aligns with the prospect’s context.

Our product is very broad in its capability. This breadth of functionality is good in one regard, as we can service a wide variety of prospects with a wide variety of business goals. However, this breadth of offering also adds complexity to the sale. A demo of the entire product would take hours and would overwhelm the prospect. Sales reps need to be sophisticated enough to tailor the demo to the prospect’s context.

How do you go about hiring the right kind of sales person?

We started off by writing down a set of attributes that we thought would be important, and used these during interviews to evaluate candidates. Then over time as we collected more data, we were able to go back and measure which of these attributes actually best correlated with success. If you look in the graphic below, you will see us looking at three criteria for the success of a rep:

• Average quota attainment %
• PPR – Productivity Per Rep
• LTV – Life Time Value of the customers that they signed up

The last metric we use to evaluate success, LTV, is interesting as it highlights a unique aspect of SaaS sales: sales reps can close deals by selling to the wrong customers or by using sales pressure tactics. However those deals will usually churn fast. So an important metric for success is whether the customers have a long life time.  LTV also takes into consideration the size of the monthly payment, which can indicated how well a rep prioritizes larger deals, and manages their overall funnel to get the best revenue out of a given set of small and large opportunities.

Once we had identified the attributes that mattered most, we set out to build a process around the way we did hiring to ensure we identified these. The process involves each interviewer using the form below to score each candidate:

When I show these slides on the road, the audience obsessively starts writing down the criteria. I would not advise that you do this. The important take away here is the process to get at the answer, not the answer shown above. Every sales context is different. Every buyer persona is different. As a result, the ideal sales person for your company’s context will likely be different than our profile at HubSpot.

Is there anything else interesting in the way you go about interviewing?

Here are three additional tips:

• Have the candidate conduct a number of role plays throughout your interview process. Make the role plays about your company and challenge the candidate to do lots of homework before these exercises.
• Coach the candidate throughout these processes. How the candidate responds to this coaching and adapts is very important to their potential in my opinion.
• If the candidate is interviewing for a phone sales role, be sure at least one of the role plays is done on the phone.

How do you go about On-boarding a new Sales rep?

What I saw going on at other companies is to take a rep and pair them up with a senior sales rep that they shadow for a month. I don’t believe that works, as what I have observed is that our most successful reps succeed in different ways. One might be extremely strong technically, and win over customers because of their ability to use that knowledge to help the customer. Another might have great charm and charisma, and use that to win over the customer. By having a new rep that has one style follow another senior rep that uses a different style, they will not have a successful learning experience.

The HubSpot approach is the following:

• Define the sales playbook (unique value proposition, target customer, competition, common objections, product information, etc.)
• Give sales people hands-on experience with your target persona’s job and all the pain that comes with it.
• Use exams and certification programs to ensure that you have a consistent product coming out of training.

The hands-on training is really important. We want to train our sales people to become consultants or experts that can understand a customer’s business, and use that understanding to become a trusted advisor to the customer. We think that the best way to do this is to have the rep experience the pain a customer feels, and then to use HubSpot to address that pain. So we make them create their own blog, and drive traffic to their blog.  This experience is invaluable. They get to understand what it feels like to have to drive traffic to their site, and how they can use HubSpot’s product to help them. It has the benefit of being a real life situation.  We think this is really important for their transition to becoming consultants.

What is the approach that you teach for approaching a new lead?

We want them to do extensive research on the customer before making the first call is placed. The rise of social media has made this stage so important. What is the prospect’s professional background? Does the prospect appear to be a decision maker? Who does the prospect report to? Who does the prospect know that I may know? What activities has the prospect been involved with lately? What are the prospect’s professional interests? The answers to these questions can be found before picking up the phone. This is great information to guide the strategy to the initial connect call.

How do you “Ensure sales people work the leads using the same process?”

(Note: HubSpot may be unusual compared to other companies in that their Inbound Marketing techniques generate enough lead flow, that they don’t need to use cold calling.)

I start by defining the process (see below) to make sure that everyone has a common terminology.

Then we use metrics to drive the behaviors that we are looking for. The chart below shows how we measure sales reps through the different stages in the process. (Note that the data has been modified and is not actual HubSpot data.)

In the illustration above, the charts on the left measure the number of activities at each stage; the charts on the right measure the conversion rates from one stage to another; and the graphs at the bottom show the overall conversion rate from two higher level stages to closed deals.

Take a look at the sample data above. If you look closely at the orange rep, you will see that they do a great job of taking a worked lead and turning it into a demo (second chart down on the right hand side). However they do a poor job of converting their demos into closed deals (third chart down on the right hand side).   This tells us that this rep does a good job on the phone, but is doing a poor job in their demos. Now look at the green rep. Here you see the opposite: great at converting demos into closed deals.

Peel back the onion on weak areas

When we see a weakness in an area, our first step is to see if we can “peel back the onion” on that metric to get a more detailed view on the specific area that is weak. For example, if a rep has a weak Worked Lead to Demo conversion rate, we can dig deeper (top right chart) to verify whether the rep is struggling to connect with the prospect, or if the rep is getting them on the phone but struggling to get the demo. My coaching strategy is very different depending on the finding.

On-going Coaching and Remedial training

This data can now be used to target the skill set that, if improved, will make the most significant difference in a rep’s success. I am a big believer that it is best to only work on one skill at a time. Determining which skill will move the needle the most is a key ability of great sales managers. A data approach to this diagnosis is very helpful.

Use Science, not Gut, to find the optimal attempts per lead

I believe in sales that both art and science are necessary for success. However, I believe science is under-utilized. There are a number of questions that are often left up to the art of the sales person that we have successfully answered in our funnel with science. How often should you call a lead? When should you give up? What should you say/send on the 1 st attempt, the 2 nd attempt, etc.? Does this information differ based on the lead attributes? These are all questions that can be answered with science.

The chart below is an example. Here we have used a scientific approach to figure out the optimum number of attempts that a rep should use for trying to contact our small business segment leads.

Note: that the data in the chart above has been modified, and is not the actual HubSpot data.

Hold Sales Reps Accountable to the Behavior You Want

Once the answers to the above questions are found, build them into your process. Train the reps that following these actions is statistically the best way to make the most money. And automate ways to hold the team accountable to these behaviors. For example, daily dashboards like the charts below can be produced to illustrate where reps are against these best practice behaviors. These charts should be mailed daily to the entire team. Managers need to be trained to read these charts and hold reps accountable to the desired behaviors.

How do you work with Marketing to ensure a consistently high quality of leads?

This is often one of the most problematic areas. In HubSpot’s case it works really smoothly. We have great communication between sales and marketing about what is needed to reach the number.  The way this works is that there is effectively a “contract” between sales and marketing. That “contract” defines the following things:

For Marketing:

• What qualities are needed in a lead before it is ready to hand over from marketing to sales
• How many qualified leads are needed each month
• How long they are allowed to take before attempting to contact a lead
• How many attempts they will make to contact that lead

Use Science, not Gut, to determine which leads are Sales-Ready

Let’s take a deeper look at the marketing side of this equation. The charts below demonstrate correlations between prospect behavior within our marketing program and success in the sales process. Do leads that originate from search engines or email campaigns tend to perform better? Are there specific search terms that make a lead very qualified? When a lead visits the site for the first time, what behavior causes the lead to accelerate through our sales funnel? What is the most influential piece of content on our website that causes leads to close fast and at a high rate?

Once we have the answers to these questions, we can assign an accurate score to each lead. Too many companies build their lead score on the opinions of the sales people or the marketing team. A gut-driven approach is a substantial missed opportunity. The data is available to provide this guidance and is so critical to the efficiency of your funnel.

Hold Marketing Accountable for Lead Quantity and Quality

With a statistically driven lead grade in place, we can now aggregate the results into a target points score for marketing to hit. It is important that the target is not the number of leads but instead a number of points that corresponds to high quality leads. A demo request may be worth 10 points. A white paper download may be worth 1 point. This approach ensures the alignment between marketing and sales to ensure marketing is focused on the leads that perform best in the funnel. Once the point target is established, hold marketing accountable to the target on a daily basis.

How have you adapted the organization as it grew through certain key sizes?

I have listed below a series of changes that happened as our growth continued:

• One of the first changes that happened was the need to add in a layer of sales management between myself and the reps. We have found that each manager can handle approx. 8 to 10 reps.
• Next we split the sales organization to specialize and focus on different types of customers. We had initially two customer types, and later three. It helped to have reps that worked only on the one type of customer as they became more expert at understanding the needs of those customers.
• Next we recognized the need for manager development, and we created programs to address things like leadership training, rep mentoring, etc.
• After that, some of our manages became Directors, and we had to evolve development programs for them
• One aspect that I have enjoyed about rapid scale is the need to constantly re-define my role. When taking a team from 1 to 100 and growing revenues by over 6000%, if you are not re-defining your role as an executive every 6 months, you are probably not planning for the next phase fast enough.

I’d like to thank Mark for taking the time to share his thoughts. What is most striking about Mark’s approach is how he blends science and process with the art of selling.

An Argument for Specialized Sales Teams — An Interview with Aaron Ross

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Reaching Your Highest Potential Customers – Outbound Prospecting

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HubSpot Content Marketing Case Study – What Makes HubSpot’s Content Marketing Strategy Unbeatable

When you talk about a killer content marketing campaign, what is the first name that comes to your mind? For most of us in the content world, it is probably HubSpot . You run a quick Google search on anything content creation and marketing, and there is at least one HubSpot article among the top 10 results. This SaaS marketing company has become one of the most trusted sources of information and a well-known name for content marketers the world over. From in-depth B2B content marketing guides to their state of marketing reports, HubSpot has gradually grown into a go-to knowledge hub for both new and seasoned content marketing professionals. This HubSpot content marketing case study takes a closer look at HubSpot’s content marketing strategy over the years, how they took inbound marketing to a whole new level and what we can learn from this winning strategy.

A brief history of HubSpot

The inbound revolution, hubspot’s content marketing plan, types of content in the hubspot content marketing strategy, how does hubspot pull off such an elaborate content marketing strategy, what we learned from the hubspot content marketing strategy.

TL;DR Here’s a video on the HubSpot content marketing case study to give you a quick glimpse:

It was in 2004 that two fellow MIT graduates, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, noticed a changing trend. They noticed that modern consumers no longer wanted to be bothered by pushy sales calls and emails. They had, in fact, learned how to ignore these attention-seeking bids from businesses and do their own research to make well-informed purchase decisions. Thanks to the internet, they could learn a lot more themselves than what a salesperson could tell them about solving their problems. They wanted to see honest product reviews , compare products and get their hands on unbiased, genuine information.

Brian and Dharmesh saw this as an opportunity to change the course of marketing and make use of what is called the inbound marketing strategy. Inbound marketing does not sell a product but rather offers a solution to the consumer, and helps them discover the product on their own. No harassment from innumerable unsolicited calls and emails. This idea gave birth to HubSpot in 2006.

HubSpot’s intention was to create a level playing ground for smaller businesses and startups that did not have the means to spend on huge advertising and outbound campaigns. It started off as a small community offering consultation for inbound marketing to startups but began to grow rapidly, catering to bigger businesses as well. Gradually HubSpot’s solutions ventured into all aspects of inbound marketing including social media, website optimization, SEO, and more. By 2010, HubSpot’s revenue grew to $15.6 million and this was its first big step towards becoming the multinational company we know today. It released multiple free tools for inbound marketing and there was no stopping them from this point forward.

Well, if they were helping others win over customers with inbound marketing, HubSpot had to practice what they preach. So, like any other inbound marketing plan, they first needed to identify their target audience from among the masses. They had to decide whether their company caters to B2B customers, B2C customers, business owners, or individual marketers. They started off by focusing on small and mid-sized business owners and marketing managers.

Their aim was to offer a solution for inbound marketing which their software tools already did. But they realized that their customers can only implement inbound marketing effectively if they knew the fundamentals. This urged them to make the first move in their inbound content marketing plan – starting the HubSpot blog.

But that was not all that HubSpot did to add some real value for its prospects.

Blogging has been central to HubSpot’s content marketing plan, but with time they have diversified and included several other forms of content in their strategy too. In fact, the very reason why HubSpot content marketing has seen such immense success is because they did not just stop at blogging or rely on a single channel for creating brand awareness.

HubSpot content is presently categorized into the following sections on their website –

Newsletters

Social media content.

Let’s take a better look at what HubSpot has done with each of these categories of content.

HubSpot took its blog very seriously, right from the start. As a visitor to their site, you would be instantly impressed by the fact that they have categorically separated their blog content for different niches. There is a different set of posts each for –

• Industry news

Apart from simplifying our search for relevant content on the blog, this segregation had its own benefits for HubSpot’s segmentation too. By separating their sales and marketing content, HubSpot was able to capture leads from different segments of their audience. People from marketing backgrounds who want to learn more about attracting an audience and generating leads would engage with the Marketing blog posts.

People from sales who are responsible for converting leads into qualified prospects and then into paying customers would go to the Sales blog to learn more about smart selling. The same goes for customer service and website optimization.

HubSpot has software products for all of these categories. Based on which visitor engages with which category of content of their blog, HubSpot can generate an appropriate strategy for pursuing these leads. So they’re not only providing more purposeful content to the prospect but also recommending the right products, increasing their chances of conversions.

Categorization of blog content is a crucial step in audience segmentation and we’ve witnessed this in our Airtable content marketing case study as well.

The next category of content is their newsletter, The Hustle, which shares business and tech news to get you updated in just 5 minutes. But HubSpot has not left the newsletter’s content exclusively hidden behind a subscription. They also share news and updates on their site.

This again serves as a smart way of appearing in searches for recent industry news and events. People who are interested in industry updates may be potential customers, making this yet another opportunity for capturing leads for HubSpot. The news page has an opt-in form where readers can sign up for the daily 5-minute news roundup that is their newsletter.

HubSpot’s visionary content marketing strategy is evident from the fact that the company has not stuck to traditional content marketing and has adopted different content formats quite early on in their journey. Statistics show that textual content alone is no longer enough to engage your audience and other formats like video and audio content are quickly catching up. The demand for online video content has almost doubled since 2018. But as many other businesses were still contemplating the value of videos, HubSpot understood it more than a decade ago. The HubSpot Marketing YouTube channel was launched as early as 2007, and currently offers over 400 free marketing tutorials.

They have another YouTube channel for HubSpot that focuses on promoting HubSpot Academy and HubSpot’s software products. HubSpot Academy is the company’s educational hub for inbound marketing, sales, and service, offering both free courses and certification.

YouTube content seems to play a vital role in a company’s content marketing success. In our case study on Notion’s content marketing strategy , we found that Notion too shares a significant amount of educational and informational content on their YouTube channel, which audiences love. If your YouTube strategy is still in its early stages, these companies could serve as a great example.

HubSpot has also hopped onto the podcast bandwagon sooner than most other brands. Podcasts are the new rage in content marketing. Podcast listeners have grown by almost 29.5% in just 3 years between 2018 and 2021. And HubSpot is not letting this opportunity pass. Statistics from the U.S. show that more than half of podcast listeners in the country are between the age of 12 and 34 years . Though their podcast section is relatively new, HubSpot has made sure to connect with this younger section of their audience through a channel they have been increasingly engaging on.

Apart from creating highly authoritative blogs and articles filled with content marketing stats and data, HubSpot also invests considerable time and effort in creating other insightful resources for its audience. The Resources page lists everything that their customers could ask for, from free tools to templates, ebooks, guides, and more. So if you Google for a blog post template or an ebook template or a social media marketing guide on Google, there is every probability that you will land on Hubspot’s resources page.

HubSpot also conducts its own research on various areas of digital and content marketing each year and publishes the reports as gated content on its website.

HubSpot’s social media content strategy is on point as well. It has a widespread presence on almost all the popular social media channels, from Facebook to LinkedIn. The social media accounts are very active, making sure that they don’t just have a presence but are seen often by their followers.

Their social media content is rarely self-promotional and more educational, with lots of quick tips and valuable information for marketers, business leaders, and other prospects. Apart from the occasional event promotions and company news, they mostly share content that their audience would be drawn to because of its relevance and value. For instance, a common theme we noticed was sharing tidbits and quotes from HubSpot’s leadership. Here’s an example from their Facebook page.

There are more from their CEO, Marketing Director, CPO, and others. This is certainly a discreet way of promoting their content (like the podcast in the post above) while also sharing these nuggets of information with people who can benefit from them.

HubSpot also banks on humor and wit to make its social media content more engaging. Here’s what we’re talking about.

This post from their Instagram feed is both funny and relatable to their audience, given the current remote work situation everyone is dealing with.

Overall, every different type of content that the company creates for every channel is very closely aligned to what they call the ‘ HubSpot Customer Code ‘. The tenets of their customer code always dictate them to put the customer’s interest ahead of the company’s.

These principles that HubSpot lives by and advocates were formed after conducting extensive surveys to learn what their customers wanted. But bringing this customer-first approach into content marketing is not an easy task.

Here’s what we observed when researching their content across various channels for the purpose of this content marketing case study on HubSpot. HubSpot’s content marketing strategy relies heavily on the following content marketing tactics:

1. Thought leadership content

2. content repurposing, 3. updating existing content, 4. creating well-defined audience personas and segmentation, 5. creating high-quality, valuable, learning-focused content – hubspot academy.

HubSpot went head-on into building its image as a thought leader in the industry. Thought leadership is at the heart of HubSpot’s blog content strategy . Their content tries to explain complex concepts in a highly simplified way to marketers, irrespective of their industry. From detailed guides to how-to articles to articles based on their own experiences and internal strategies (like the one below), HubSpot has never failed to deliver something worthwhile and new to its audience.

They have insightful and relevant content for each stage of their audience’s journey, be it for beginners or managers and leaders at an advanced stage in their careers.

HubSpot’s content tries to answer all their questions, share research and data that people find worth linking back to, and thus, build a loyal following for the brand.

Nothing can be achieved without hard work and effort, but HubSpot also does some smart work. The HubSpot blog is their biggest asset and it is managed by a big team. And they make good use of their blog content through content repurposing . A large part of the video content on the company’s YouTube channels, for instance, is repurposed from their high-authority, long-form blog posts or research reports.

Take this video on the Top 7 Email Marketing Tools on the HubSpot Marketing channel for example.

This video is repurposed to discuss the top 7 tools from a longer list they shared in one of their blog posts (refer image below).

They have also been repurposing their research reports into various formats, including blog posts with engaging graphics, ebooks, and more. They also repurpose videos from their Inbound Marketing conferences into more easily accessible YouTube videos.

So, content repurposing takes a major load off their shoulders, especially when creating videos or social posts.

Another very important thing that HubSpot has realized over the years and implemented very effectively is the practice of updating old content . Search engine algorithms keep changing and what was good for SEO a few years or even a few months ago, may not be enough for ranking at the top today. Back in 2014 itself, HubSpot discovered that 76% of their blog’s page views are of their old posts. This means their old posts are ranking well but it is likely that most of the data and information in these posts are outdated. This could cause the post to drop in search rankings.

To prevent this, HubSpot carries out what they call ‘historical optimization’. Historical optimization is the practice of optimizing old posts to update all the information and generate more traffic and conversions from them. The post need not necessarily be years old. It could even be a month old, but if there is anything that can add more value to it, HubSpot doesn’t shy away from updating it.

Here’s an example.

Take a look at the time stamp on the post below.

The HubSpot blog team has been able to increase views of old posts from organic search by nearly 106% through historical optimization.

Every HubSpot content page that you look at, you are bound to notice how neatly segregated their content is for different audience personas. Be it the blog or the podcasts, there are well-defined categories for marketing, sales, leadership, startups, and more. This practice of having clear audience personas that the content marketing team can understand has paid off for HubSpot.

It has allowed them to create engaging, relevant content for each of their audience/customer segment. Their approach to creating content for marketers is different from that for salespeople, giving them more clarity on the kind of content they need to create. When the audience persona is well-understood, your content goals are clearer, and creating quality content that aligns with these goals becomes easier.

Lastly, a common theme that you will notice throughout HubSpot content on all channels is that they are rarely pushing their products. Content marketing for HubSpot is more about helping its audience learn. The free and paid certification courses that they offer through HubSpot Academy also work on this principle.

The purpose of the content is to educate the participants, and they are later required to practice what they have learned with the help of HubSpot tools. This way they are able to capture new users on their free tools, through valuable content alone. When users experience first-hand what the tools have to offer, they are more likely to trust the products and convert into paying customers.

This HubSpot content marketing case study was a learning effort and a fruitful one. The one crucial lesson that we learned from HubSpot’s content marketing strategy and its success, is that building credibility among your audience is the key. With honest, authoritative, and high-quality content it is only a matter of time before your brand earns a solid reputation among its audience. And for this, the first thing that you need to do is understand your prospective users. Knowing what your audience’s challenges are and creating content that can offer a solution, or help them find their own solutions, helps earn their trust.

Also, creating content that you can use and reuse saves you a lot of effort. HubSpot earns a major chunk of its traffic from repurposed and updated content. So when you are creating something authoritative, keeping it evergreen and having repurposing ideas ready will definitely help you gain more traction for the same amount of work.

HubSpot has also shown us the importance of breaking legacies and experimenting with new content formats. Even for an established brand like HubSpot, staying relevant in the eyes of an evolving audience is important, hence their efforts to include podcasts and interactive social media content in their strategy.

HubSpot shows other content marketers that, even if you start small, being found by the right audience and trusted by all is possible. All it takes is an investment of some effort, time, and the will to deliver an excellent experience to your audience above everything else.

If you liked this case study, check out our ClickUp content marketing case study and Marketo content marketing case study to learn how these SaaS companies became well-known names in the industry with product-led content marketing .

Neelam Goswami is an engineer turned writer, currently working as a Content Specialist. She has always had an affinity to writing and loves creating simple-to-read pieces for everyone to enjoy.

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7 Examples of SaaS Companies with Exceptional Marketing

Updated: July 28, 2017

Published: October 01, 2015

Who doesn’t love a good story? The characters. The page-turning twists of fate. The surprise endings. You might not expect to hear one from SaaS companies. (I mean, how exciting is software?) But in the marketing world, they’re like the Grimms' fairy tales.

The SaaS sector is relatively young and seriously competitive, which means companies have had to wring every last drop of creative juice from their patchwork just to get on the map. And usually, with only a fraction of the budget their larger competitors are working with.

We’re going to regale you with true tales of marketing triumph. Some involve small start-ups going from rags to riches with one great idea. Others are displays of true grit. But all of them are amazing examples of what can happen when you get creative with your inbound strategy. Without further ado, here are seven SaaS companies doing it right.

1)  HipChat

HipChat is a private chat and instant messaging service that provides one-on-one and group chatting, as well as cloud-based file storage, video calling, searchable message histories and online image viewing. It began as an unknown start-up in California and wanted to run billboard advertising campaigns to generate awareness and traffic, but realized quickly that it couldn’t afford it. Billboards run between $30,000 and $50,000 per four-week campaign.

HipChat co-founder and CEO Pete Curley put on his business pants and thought about it from the billboard supplier’s point of view. He speculated that there must be occasions where a buyer backs out, or a campaign falls through at the last minute. And in those instances, he assumed the billboard company would prefer to sell the ad space to someone for a lesser amount than let it sit vacant and worthless.

On a whim, he reached out to his CBS Outdoor rep and asked to be notified if there were ever a case like this. Sure enough, a few weeks later, that rep called him with an opening, and HipChat landed prime-location advertising at 101 North in the San Francisco Bay area for four weeks. Its total bill: $6,999 — tens of thousands of dollars less than the true value of the space.

But that genius streak wasn’t over. Now that it had the space, it had only days to come up with an ad that would attract attention. HipChat (a faceless company at the time) decided to keep it simple and used a relatively popular Internet character, the Y-U-No guy from Rage Comics, to turn heads in its direction. By associating a character familiar to drivers with an unfamiliar product, interest was piqued …

The result: This ad campaign is still paying off. Pictures of the billboard showed up on Twitter, Tumblr, FAIL Blog (in the “Wins” category), and the coveted TechCrunch. The company saw a 300 percent rise in online searches, an onslaught of new customers and a warp-speed transition from three guys with a good sense of humor to a small (and successful) business. Not long after, HipChat was acquired by a larger company.

The bottom line: The initial investment was expensive, but the huge success of the overall campaign and the subsequent influx of new customers helped offset the CAC. The exact number of customers accrued wasn’t disclosed, but at $2 per month per user, and an infinite number of impressions generated during that four-week time frame, Curley was impressed with the outcome. As for customer LTV — it, too, went up.

2)  Trello

Trello is a free collaboration tool that organizes projects into boards to make them easier to monitor in one glance. Its marketing approach is inimitable because … it doesn’t have one.

You heard right. Instead of investing in advertising, Trello focused its entire budget on building a sound, user-friendly product that people and businesses truly need.

The result: High-volume word-of-mouth appraisal. Countless blogs mention the service, organizations rave about how much it’s helped them organize tasks quickly and easily, and how cost-effective it is. And those that haven’t switched to it are at the very least debating the move via online discussions. Though Trello’s baseline service is free, the company offers upgrade versions; a Gold package for individuals is $5 per month or $45 per year. For businesses, there are two paid service options.

The bottom line: With word-of-mouth as its main source of advertising, Trello’s CAC is incredibly low, and because the overall opinion of its product is high, so is its customer LTV. Trello provides productivity content on its social media pages and blogs, and has in the past let its members earn free, upgraded Trello access for a limited time by sharing Trello social media posts or getting new members to sign up. This result is more users without Trello spending any extra coin. Customers do all the marketing work. The company continues to focus its money and efforts into providing a superior product — and everybody wins. 

3)  Intercom

Intercom is a communications platform that connects businesses with their customers in a simpler way. Its strategy is a little more … conventional than some of the other SaaS companies listed here. But the angle it uses is entirely unique.

Instead of targeting buyer personas, Intercom targets the jobs it is being hired to fulfill. Its philosophy: Knowing the job helps find the audience. Here’s how it does it:

First, Intercom works to understand what creates the need for a company to buy a certain product. It reflects on conversations with customers, former customers and prospects, and uses any feedback to identify trends and improve how it explains the product. This information feeds into the development of its five job packages: observe, acquire, engage, learn, support.

Next, Intercom creates a messaging guide for each job package it offers, which it now uses as the template for putting together landing pages for each. It includes questions like, “What problem are we solving?” and “Why would people hire Intercom for this job?” Each landing page is laden with SEO strategy and designed using visually appealing graphics to present the question/problem a prospect might have, like, “Is your customer support process broken?”

Then, it uses more graphics to move the page into a solution, with a headline such as, “Sort it out with Intercom,” and a description that presents the job and how Intercom can do it best.

Finally, Intercom created a short video (less than 2 minutes) for each job to effectively show how it gets it done. Each page includes a sticky navigation bar that stays at the top of the browser window as viewers scroll down the page, enabling quick access to key sections of the page (like pricing and a call-to-action).

To establish credibility with visitors and showcase the types of businesses it caters to, Intercom also displays the logos of reputable customers and features customer photos with a quote describing how Intercom has helped their business. Pricing, sign-up and trial information is front and center — making it a no-brainer to find. And Intercom uses programs like Google Analytics, Inspectlet and Optimizely to monitor and measure prospect interaction with its pages, and test customer engagement hypotheses.

The result: The depth of knowledge it gains throughout its targeting strategy provides it with the foresight to know what types of events to attend/sponsor/speak at in order to meet the type of people who would use its product (hence its philosophy).

The bottom line: With each job-focused landing page it built, Intercom saw a conversion rate of approximately 5 percent. Its top-of-funnel traffic has more than tripled and continues to grow on a weekly basis, and its conversion rate remains consistent. Because its strategy is so focused on solving specific customer problems, its customer LTV is high, and while it does put a great deal of time and energy into developing this strategy, the conversion rate helps offset its CAC.

4)  HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media management system that helps businesses track and manage their social media channels. HootSuite tirelessly looks for new ways to entertain audiences and last year, a pop culture-inspired video campaign helped it break personal records.

As “Game of Thrones” fans, the HootSuite team decided to theme the video after the opening sequence of the hit series and release it just in time for the season premiere. Taking the idea a step further, they drew a parallel between what the show is about and what HootSuite does for businesses (helps manage the quiet battles fought between social networks). Fans totally got it — and loved it.

The result: Within hours of release, the video had thousands of likes and shares on social media networks, and found its way to some major media outlets. Since then, it’s been viewed more than 850,000 times and is regarded as the single most successful piece of content the company has created. Like Eat24, the video reached a whole new market — “Game of Thrones” fans. Sure, some fans may have already been HootSuite users, but this video made an impression on many fans who weren’t using the service.

The bottom line: The entire video was produced in-house and HootSuite mostly relied on owned media to promote the video. Plus, social sharing ended up carrying the bulk of the video’s promotion. Combined, these elements resulted in a relatively low CAC.

5)  Buffer

Buffer is a social media scheduling app that allows users to create updates in a queue for dispersal throughout the day at peak time frames. Like Intercom, its marketing success sprung from conventional strategy paired with a unique approach.

One of its main advertising channels is blogging. At first, it only blogged about topics related to social media, but the strategy had limited reach. That’s when a presentation by Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin sparked a new strategy idea. Instead of creating content for potential audiences, Buffer decided to target the influencers who were already reaching it.

The new angle? Telling stories that incite people who already have a captive audience. This led to covering topics a wider audience could relate to — topics like psychology, creativity, multitasking, life hacks and more.

After changing its content game, Buffer posts experienced a substantial increase in social media shares. Actually, more than four times the amount, taking their counts from 250 to more than 1,000.

Kicking it up a notch, Buffer decided to start guest blogging to build new relationships and reach larger audiences. This connected the site with friends and followers of major social media influencers. The impact wasn’t immediate, but eventually, Buffer started hitting big numbers, like 100,000 new users in less than a year.

The result: Buffer went from a small company with no experience, no funding and no connections to a major player in the content marketing game. It has more than 1 million users and earns almost $4 million in annual revenue.

It eventually reached viral status with the blog post “ 30 Things to Stop Doing to Yourself , ” which received more than 500,000 Facebook likes, 400 comments and 20,000 Tweets. The company learned three things from the post:

• Even if a post is lengthy (this one was over 1,500 words) it will get read if the layout is easily skimmed.
• Using psychology to create headlines will generate more views. In this case, the title incited curiosity from potential readers, and made them wonder if the article applied to them.
• Don’t always rely on previously tested methods for creating content, and don’t be afraid to test unconventional ideas. You never know what might go viral.

The bottom line: Because much of Buffer’s writing was done by co-founder Leo Widrich, the company’s CAC is relatively low. Buffer did hire a full-time writer to head a second blog focusing on the culture of work life at Buffer (it provides a unique setting that values exercise, healthy eating and world travel). It received more than 900 applications for the job in just one month.

6)  Contently

Contently is a content marketing (gone full-on media) company that connects freelancers with publishers (usually brands) who need content for their websites or marketing strategies. It’s known for drawing some serious brand dignitaries — like Pepsi, GE and American Express — into extended contracts. How did Contently do it? It re-invented the compensation model to pay out writers at a much higher rate than other media sources.

To turn a profit, Contently licenses its marketplace software to publishers instead of offering traditional revenue share with writers, where they take a cut of the prices set by the publishers.

It’s a win-win setup. Customers gain access to the entire Contently network of freelancers, and get to select whomever they like best. Writers are connected with work for hire, but without having to worry about managing the process (which Contently does for them). This frees them to focus on their craft and produce better work. And recently, Contently expanded its service to help writers market themselves online and file their freelance tax returns. 

The result: Contently attracted a lot of investors, who have helped the company raise millions. Its business model also sets new ethical standards for the treatment of writers. Moreover, its compensation model draws in some serious talent, which is why it’s managed to land big brands.

The bottom line: Contently sports a high customer retention rate, which contributes to a high customer LTV. It also has the support needed to expand, and plans to incorporate publishing and business results into its business model, making it the content marketplace to emulate.

7)  Zendesk

Zendesk is a cloud-based customer service platform that provides ticketing self-service options and a slew of other customer support features. It also is the mastermind behind a truly bizarre marketing ploy that earned it major attention.

The Zendesk team regularly monitors search terms. In fall 2013, the team noticed a trend — people kept using the term “Zendesk alternative” in search for other platforms like Zendesk. The company’s genius marketing team decided to win some organic search traffic by embracing the search term in a very … involved way.

They created a comedic “Making the Band”-themed video, and invented a fake alternative music group, naturally dubbed Zendesk Alternative . The company bought the domain name, created social media pages for the band on Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, listed the band name on Bandcamp and Reverberation, applied unique keyword rich anchor text, title tags and page content, uploaded their video and eagerly awaited reaction.

The result: Days after launch, the CEO of Helpscout (Zendesk’s biggest competitor at the time) made a congratulatory Tweet after Zendesk took its place as No. 1 in the ranks.

The bottom line: The faux site, zendeskalternative.com converted at a 95 percent higher rate than the main website, launching in October 2013 and closing five deals by April. In addition to winning over Google’s ranking, it also won the hearts of customers by poking fun at the competition with charm and class. The time, money and effort that went into the campaign likely increased its CAC, but the influx of recognition offset this spike, and customer LTV increased.

Some of the biggest marketing mistakes SaaS companies make are focusing too much on software and not enough on service and results; failing to delight current customers; unnecessarily driving up CACs; not maximizing customer LTV and following conventional marketing models without original thought.

These seven examples of exceptional marketing strategies side-step the pitfalls beautifully, and prove that you don’t need a huge budget or strong footing in the market to climb your way to the top. A sense of humor, creativity and bold, unorthodox thinking is enough to rival even the most successful competitors.

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4 Ways to Maximize HubSpot for a SaaS Business Model

December 10, 2020

By Kristen Deyo

SaaS marketing is not for the faint of heart. SaaS organizations are laser-focused on their ability to drive high volumes of sustainable growth in a short amount of time ... or else (*cue dramatic music*). In fact, it is estimated that even SaaS companies with an annual growth rate of 20 percent have only an 8 percent chance of surviving . Thus, hyper-growth is a prerequisite for survival.

However, starting a SaaS company is not the same as scaling a SaaS company. The hallmark of SaaS is the ability to identify the growth channels that are going to drive real results—fast. It requires powerful martech to propel the kind of growth needed to rise above the competitive noise. Building strong momentum to sustain your SaaS organization through growth and expansion is paramount.

How do SaaS organizations achieve this type of growth, particularly when their competitors have ten times the budget and brand equity? The answer: by leveraging powerful martech that empowers you to use inbound to its full potential. You need a platform that can help you move quickly, optimize as you go, and give you the revenue attribution metrics needed to determine where and how to pivot to stay nimble. Yes, I am talking about HubSpot .

What Makes SaaS Unique?

If you’ve read anything I’ve written about SaaS, I’m probably sounding like a broken record, but SaaS marketing is challenging. In fact, there isn’t another type of marketing that’s similar. 

Not only that, but it’s also seriously competitive. SaaS marketers have to also be data scientists, constantly refining and optimizing every last effort just to get on the map, let alone cut through the competitive noise and make an impact. Yet the potential impact for SaaS organizations who get it right is monumental. In fact, it is estimated that 85 percent of small organizations will invest in SaaS this year, bringing the total size of the public SaaS market in 2020 to $157 billion .

Widespread change and adoption in technology, coupled with the reliance on digital, have made businesses look to SaaS in order to streamline operations, increase efficiency, and reduce costs—and this shows no signs of slowing down. By end of 2021 , more than 73 percent of organizations indicate nearly all their apps will be SaaS .

Why HubSpot for SaaS?

“ HubSpot helps SaaS companies attract higher quality traffic, convert that traffic into more qualified leads or trial users, and nurture those leads to customers.” I’ve seen firsthand how HubSpot can help empower SaaS companies, small or global, to grow their bottom line in the most effective—and cost efficient—way possible.

HubSpot says it best: “Simplicity and sophistication are the hallmark of innovative marketing software.” It’s true. HubSpot obsesses over their technology and has built a truly powerful platform, one that doesn’t require an entire IT team to figure out. It really is built for SaaS marketers.

Here are four ways to maximize your investment in HubSpot for a SaaS business model and achieve growth.

1. Outrank Competitors and Attract the Right People 

For 89 percent of SaaS businesses , new customer acquisition is the top growth activity. This means getting your SaaS business at the top of search engines and driving qualified people to your website. Driving top-of-funnel growth means keeping several key things in mind:

Content marketing is queen

Inbound is fueled by content, and nothing is going to help get your SaaS business at the top of search engines better than investing in great content. By great content, I mean content that is helpful, optimized for search, and guides personas through their Buyer’s Journey (awareness, consideration, and decision stages).

Remember, Google’s mission is simple: helping searchers find the information they need and are looking for. How you see yourself and how Google sees you can be vastly different, hence the importance of doing proper keyword research and building content for search.

All things SEO: technical, on-page, and off-page

Writing killer content is one strategy to attract visitors. More critically, you should be ensuring that content is optimized for search, so it gets in front of people who might not know your brand, but whose pain points you can solve with your SaaS offering. Here are a few best practices to get you started:

• Run your website through a technical audit to see if there are ways to improve the indexability, searchability and rankability of your website. Tools like HubSpot’s website grader , SEMrush site audit , or Woorank are all places to start.
• Focus on non-branded keywords in your editorial and content planning to ensure that you’re getting in front of personas who might not be familiar enough with your company to do a branded search. Here’s a great blog post to get you started.
• Use HubSpot’s traffic report to determine your most trafficked pages with the highest bounce rates and/or lowest conversions, and focus on those for some on-page SEO.
• Never underestimate the power of off-page SEO. Part of scaling quickly is relying on the brand equity and backlinks from highly reputable sites. One quick win is to start with third party listing sites (think G2, Capterra, Gartner, TrustRadius, and so forth). Ensuring your profiles are up-to-date, accurate, and pointing to meaningful areas of your website can help drive more qualified traffic to you. Remember, organic and referral traffic convert better than other traffic sources, so it’s worth focusing on.

If you’re looking for more great tips to get started, a fellow SmartBug, Sandy, wrote this killer blog post on quick SEO fixes for website optimization that comes with its very own worksheet! 

The power of customer stories

Customer stories offer SaaS companies a great opportunity to show that your products and/or services deliver real results. In fact, in a study by Hawkeye , 71 percent of buyers in the awareness stage and 77 percent in the evaluation stage cited testimonials and case studies as the most influential types of content when making purchasing decisions. 

If you’re looking for ways to make the most of your customer stories, I wrote a blog post jam-packed with nine powerful ways to use customer stories in your marketing efforts .

How HubSpot helps

HubSpot has powerful SEO and content tools that can help your SaaS organization in the following ways:

• Discover and rank for the topics that matter to you and your customers
• Get topic suggestions based on relevance, competition, and popularity, as well as access to monthly search data so you can estimate how ranking for specific topics will translate to organic traffic gains
• Create clusters of web pages and blog content around each of your core topics
• Easily designate canonical URLs to focus your search authority on your most influential pages

The best part? HubSpot offers robust, detailed reports so that you can track performance in one convenient dashboard. From here, you can watch your traffic increase over time as you build search authority and find opportunities to improve and refine your efforts.

2. Get Personas to Raise Their Hand

It’s one thing to drive qualified traffic to your website, but now we want them to raise their hand and say they’re interested in what you have to offer. Here are some strategies to ensure that you’re creating content that helps people convert:

Create the digital path of least resistance

This seems straightforward, but in my experience it’s anything but. There are so many low-hanging-fruit opportunities to convert more of your traffic, and it starts with creating a path of least resistance for visitors. This means making it clear what you want them to do by providing a logical next step—always. Every page needs to be built with the question “What do we want visitors to do next?” in mind.

One way that I like to understand whether or not the next step is clear is by looking at a behavior flow of visitors to see how you’re funneling traffic through your site. Typically, the vast majority of your website traffic will enter on your homepage, and a certain percentage of that will drop off, and a different percentage will make it to the next step. 

Ideally, their first interaction should align with your goals. For example, if your goal is to have visitors sign up for a free trial and schedule a demo, they should be hitting that trial or demo page by their first interaction (i.e., their next page visit after the initial landing page). If your visitors do not end up there on their first interaction, then their second interaction should pick up the slack. If they still don’t, that’s a really good sign that you need to adjust their digital path.

Here are some quick-win strategies you can easily implement using HubSpot to boost conversions and turn visitors into leads or trial users on your website:

• Add a pop-up form or lead flow to your site (HubSpot can add these to your website even if its not hosted with their CMS)
• Remove unnecessary form fields and use progressive fields
• Add testimonials, reviews, and logos to create credibility
• Remove distractions or friction points that could inhibit conversion
• Make trial and demo sign ups easy and seamless
• Strengthen and test your call-to-action (CTA) copy across your website
• Leverage live chat to your website
• Use A/B testing for headlines, CTAs, and other landing page copy
• Use smart content to personalize the experience

All of the quick-win strategies above are not only made possible with HubSpot, but it also makes them easy and straightforward. Many of these are equipped with their own reporting features so that you can keep track of performance and make optimizations and data-driven decisions more easily.

3. Shorten the Sales Cycle and Improve Close Rates

One of the most powerful features of HubSpot is email marketing and the ability to create robust automation using workflows. HubSpot gives SaaS marketers the power to effectively manage leads, ensure they are getting the content they need, and enable them to trigger automation based on levels or engagement or behavior.

The power of lead nurturing

It’s estimated that between 40-60 percent of free trial users will never come back to your software after signing up. It isn’t enough to hope they become a customer; you have to ensure you’re educating them and giving them every reason to be a customer. Lead nurturing can help ensure that you’re staying top of mind, being helpful, and using their level of engagement or behavior to trigger content and touch points that are going to help them while they’re testing the waters with your solution. In fact, according to Aberdeen , targeting users with content relevant to their position along the buying process yields 73 percent higher conversion rates. 

Getting (more qualified) leads to sales faster with lead routing

You can manage your funnel effectively and improve close rates by clearly aligning sales and marketing . This means ensuring that sales works the most qualified leads, and marketing manages those who are not yet ready to talk to sales. In fact, companies with strong marketing and sales alignment achieve a 20 percent growth rate compared to those that don’t.

Response time for SaaS is crucial. It’s important to ensure that leads or trial users are getting the right content at the right time. With the ability to leverage power engagement and behavior metrics, HubSpot makes it easy to trigger workflows, personalize content, and route leads to the appropriate members of your team. This will ensure nothing slips through the cracks and opportunities are not lost.

One cornerstone of inbound is “smarketing” (sales + marketing alignment), and HubSpot has worked at great lengths to create a platform that keeps sales and marketing on the same page. HubSpot helps remove friction from the sales process and ensures a seamless handoff between sales and marketing through automation and CRM sync tools.

4. Boost Retention and Up/Cross Sell Opportunities

While the majority of SaaS companies are focussed on new acquisition, it does not mean other forms of revenue are not a priority. In fact, “ existing customer renewals are the top growth strategy for 59 percent of SaaS businesses , followed by upselling and add-on sales, which are in the focus for 46 percent of businesses.”

Creating a unified space with complete visibility into your customers helps ensure that not only are you keeping them engaged with relevant content, but that you’re also providing product and/or service recommendations to help them grow their business. With a powerful, consolidated view, you can also reduce churn by delighting customers with personalized communications.

If you’re looking for ways to increase upsell and cross-sell opportunities, check out this blog post !

SaaS marketing is in a lane of its own, and while it’s plagued with complexity and nuance, the potential for infinite rewards and growth makes it both exhilarating and worthwhile. The key for SaaS organizations is leveraging the martech tools and platforms that are going to help you cut through the noise and scale more quickly.

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About the author

Kristen Deyo was formerly a Director of Marketing Strategy at SmartBug based in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. She has 8+ years experience developing strategies for primarily B2B SaaS/technology companies and hyper-growth startups. She holds degrees from Queen's University (Cha'Gheill!) and the St. Lawrence School of Business. When not digitally plugged in, you can find her enjoying a good happy hour or planning her next adventure. Read more articles by Kristen Deyo .

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Peek inside HubSpot’s multi-million dollar SaaS growth strategy

Chris Von Wilpert

Rocketship Growth

If you’re in SaaS, you can’t help but hear about HubSpot’s massive growth.

They have a traffic rank of #5 in the world … in the online marketing tech space.

This doesn’t include websites they’ve built to build their community and fill the top of their sales funnel.

They are a major player in the SMB SaaS market.

It is my hope in this article to show you what’s truly working online in SaaS by giving you a glimpse into the strategies and tactics of one of the SaaS industries biggest players.

What you see below is not conjecture or theory. This is the real facts behind a major SaaS company, the marketing strategies they use, and the tactics used.

About HubSpot

HubSpot was founded in 2006 by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah . In 8 years they grew from zero to $100M+ revenue, with an IPO in 2014.

Perhaps best known for their inbound marketing prowess, HubSpot’s rocketship growth trajectory makes them the second fastest SMB SaaS company to ever IPO.

Both Brian and Dharmesh had successful backgrounds in tech before launching HubSpot. Brian was VP of Sales at Groove Networks, which was acquired by Microsoft, and Dharmesh was founder and CEO of Pyramid Digital Solutions, which was acquired by SunGuard Data Systems.

In 2009, Brian and Dharmesh co-authored a book called “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media and Blogs” .

Lastly, Brian and Dharmesh were named in the Inc. Founders 40 in 2016.

Summary Of Their Strategy

While they have about a dozen sites over the years, it appears that there are 4 critical websites key to HubSpot’s online marketing strategy.

• HubSpot.com
• Inbound.org
• WebsiteGrader.com
• ThinkGrowth.org

The bulk of their traffic is from inbound marketing, primarily through organic search. However, they are are also spending money on paid search ads. Their blog post CTAs and ads are driven to landing pages with a very basic level visual design, short form copy and a full lead form.

On their landing pages they offer hundreds of different lead gen incentives (to match their blog article content and the searcher’s intent) in exchange for a full lead. Beyond the lead they sell inbound marketing software for a subscription fee based on their customers number of CRM contacts.

Traffic Profile For HubSpot.com

This is their public facing main site. It gets an enormous amount of organic (earned) traffic from the search engines. HubSpot put A LOT of focus on content marketing and SEO.

The reason I say that is when I look at the keywords they are ranking for and which ones are sending them the most traffic, they have thousands of generic key phrases like “Website Leads” and “Grow Email List” ranking on the first page of Google.

From analyzing HubSpot’s 69,087 organic keywords I could count 5,905 that rank on the first page of Google and 10,440 that rank on the first page of Bing/Yahoo!.

They are also spending a moderate amount of money each month on paid search ads. When I investigated their paid search ad strategy it was primarily advertising their Free CRM, which has a core feature set of the main product, and leads SMBs to upgrading to their paid version once they experience HubSpot’s value and want to use the full feature set.

There is a lot of valuable content accessible from the HubSpot website which I believe is contributing to their low bounce rate and high time on site.

Traffic Profile For Inbound.org

Inbound.org is an online hub for marketers to connect, learn and find jobs. It is funded by HubSpot Labs, an R&D department within HubSpot.

This site is primarily driven by high direct traffic from their main site, the 200,000+ community members who go straight to the site to login, organic search and 90%+ of social traffic from Facebook.

One of HubSpot’s largest revenue generators is channel sales. Just like Xero leverage accounting partners to grow their business, Hubspot’s marketing agency partners account for 40% of their revenue (as of their last earnings call).

Inbound.org is the perfect community for HubSpot to stay engaged with current marketing agency partners, educate them on the latest marketing trends, help them find new employees, get real-time feedback on their products and attract new potential partners into their ecosystem.

They have 3,400+ partners servicing thousands of HubSpot customers, helping them get better results, month in and month out. HubSpot’s partner program for marketing agencies recently scaled up past $100M in annual revenue.

Traffic Profile For WebsiteGrader.com

HubSpot’s free Website Grader tool was the first ever project to come out of HubSpot Labs in 2007. A person enters their website URL and email address to see how strong their website is out of 100.

They then get recommendations on what they need to improve when it comes to:

• Performance (30 points)
• Mobile Readiness (30 points)
• SEO (30 points)
• Security (10 points)

Aside from being a super helpful tool for small business owners, it is also a great example of how to build a free tool to drive millions of market specific TOFU (top-of-funnel) leads to your SaaS company.

Dharmesh posted on Inbound.org about how significant the tool has been to HubSpot’s success…

A simple little tool that helped millions of people improve their websites — and in the process, helped HubSpot become a publicly-traded company [NYSE:HUBS] with over 15,000 customers and a market value of over $1.6 billion. — Dharmesh Shah

The majority of website traffic for the tool comes from the HubSpot blog, suggesting that blog content combined with a strong market specific lead magnet can be a great combination to acquire TOFU leads at scale.

Since their success with Website Grader, HubSpot have got ultra-granular with their TOFU lead generation. They now create blog posts with blog post specific lead magnets on their main website to fill the top of their sales funnel with thousands of leads every month.

Traffic Profile For ThinkGrowth.org

ThinkGrowth.org is a HubSpot Medium Publication that was launched on April 17, 2015. It was first branded as ReadThink.com, then re-branded to ThinkGrowth.org on Dec 14, 2016.

Here is what Janessa Lantz, Principal Content Marketing Strategist at HubSpot said about what their Medium publication represents:

ThinkGrowth.org reflects a commitment to thinking deeper — asking questions, poking holes in the easy answer, and exploring past the first page of Google’s search results. It’s also a commitment to finding the right questions, the kind that will move your career and business forward. — Janessa Lantz

HubSpot’s launch on Medium was based on this premise: more and more people are consuming articles directly from platforms like Medium, Facebook, and podcasts so they want to be where their readers are.

Early posts were mostly cross-published content from the HubSpot blog, but HubSpot quickly realised that their “optimized for search” blog content wasn’t generating many views on Medium.

They had the best success by finding writers on the rise on Medium like Seth Godin , Nir Eyal , Larry Kim , steve blank and Danielle Morrill and syndicating content they had created — exposing both them and HubSpot to a new audience.

By “optimizing for people” with opinion pieces, personal accounts and reaction posts from top writers and influencers, HubSpot found content that would often have a stronger performance than their home blog.

Not only did HubSpot breakthrough the “Plateau of Despair” and grow well beyond 160,000 views per month, but their Medium publication is now the 18th largest publication on Medium:

Since their success on Medium, HubSpot have decided to invest in a brand new team focused entirely on “offsite” content strategy which is being headed up by Meghan Keaney Anderson , Sam Mallikarjunan and Janessa Lantz .

They have over 150 guest writers and take guest submissions at [email protected]

Top Performing Blog Posts

Notice that some of their blog posts aren’t the type you’d typically see on a website that sells inbound marketing software.

Their most shared post generate leads for their HR department to fill their product management jobs pipeline (high-growth companies need to hire!):

The second most shared is an opt-in page for a free guide on “How To Use Excel”:

You may be thinking… why in the heck are HubSpot teaching people how to use excel?

Trust me… this isn’t a mistake.

The smart team over at HubSpot did their research and found that there are 27,000+ people every month searching for “how to use excel”.

When you search for “how to use excel” on Google, the first organic search result to pop up is a HubSpot blog post titled “How to Use Excel: 14 Simple Excel Shortcuts, Tips & Tricks”.

And guess how they are using that blog post to generate leads?

In the blog post they have 3 CTA’s that link to their “How To Use Excel” guide:

• Native link at the start of the blog post
• CTA box on the bottom right after you scroll 20% down the page
• CTA image at the bottom of the blog post

If you take a look through HubSpot’s blog , you will see that these 3 blog post CTA’s are consistent across most of HubSpot’s blog posts.

Sometimes they all go to the same lead magnet (like in the example above). Other times, all 3 CTA’s will go to 3 different landing pages with 3 different lead assets relevant to that blog post.

HubSpot has thousands of these “owned media” lead assets, with their own dedicated landing pages.

Here is an example of 5 blog posts and lead assets from HubSpot’s Marketing Blog that they are using to fill the top of their funnel:

• Blog Post: How to Plan a Content Marketing Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide ; Lead Asset: Marketing Plan Generator
• Blog Post: 6 of the Best Messaging Apps for Different Scenarios ; Lead Asset: The Marketer’s Guide To Mobile
• Blog Post: 5 Overlooked Metrics Your Agency Needs to Measure for a Profitable 2017 ; Lead Asset: New Client Intake Form
• Blog Post: How to Build a Process for Growth Experiments ; Lead Asset: 2017 Marketing Experiment Templates
• Blog Post: 8 Timeless Business Lessons From Bill Belichick ; Lead Asset: How To Be A Leader eBook

As you can see… HubSpot are an inbound content AND lead generating machine!

One thing HubSpot do really well, is update old blog posts to make them relevant again today with an Editor’s Note at the top of post to let people know what has been updated.

Here is an example:

This is a great strategy to generate more leads from old, evergreen content pieces.

Top Performing Paid Search Ads

They have 587 PPC keywords that they are bidding on, but almost all of their ads were a version of the above.

Here is what their entire paid search funnel looks like for their Free CRM offer:

There were a couple of other ads like one with the headline “Free Lead Generation Tool - Start Capturing Leads Today” which were spot targeted ads for a free version of their HubSpot Marketing product.

However, their 3 main active paid search funnels are below and drive traffic to these 3 landing pages:

• Unbranded CRM Keywords > CRM Ad > Free CRM Offer
• Branded Inbound Marketing Keywords > Inbound Marketing Ad > Inbound Marketing Assessment Offer
• Branded Keywords > Demo Ad > Demo Offer

This is a very mature account and the most recent data in the tool doesn’t represent where they started.

When I look back over the years I can see that HubSpot have tested many different offers including:

• Free Price Quote
• Free 30 Day Trial
• Free Marketing Guides

They have now pruned all but the most profitable keywords and segments over the years and found the best offers that convert for the highest buy-intent keywords in their market. Either that or they are grossly under-utilizing one of the best ad platforms on the Internet (not likely).

Landing Page Breakdown

This is the above-the-fold section of their Free CRM landing page. It’s important to note that if anyone comes to this page, they can make a quick decision from the info provided in this first section.

Their “Get Started” CTA button leads the visitor to a half lead (email, company name, website URL) form after clicking through.

Everything they need to convert their user is in this section…

• An image of their “Google Partner Certification” helps instantly add credibility by associating themselves with a big brand name aka Google
• Emphasis of their headline is about the #1 pain point their market faces (ie: bad sales process)
• Sub-headline gives people a high-level overview of what the HubSpot CRM does and uses buzzwords that trigger an emotional response with their audience (ie: brand new, tricks and capabilities)
• A strong call to action in contrasting colours to the background image let people know exactly what the next step is if they’re interested
• Some people like to read, and some people like to watch. A short 2 min video testimonial from 1 of HubSpot’s customers boosts social proof here

If people want more information before making a decision, they can scroll down and read these 4 points:

6. The market for CRM software is fiercely competitive. HubSpot know this, so they talk about their key USPs here (like powerful data enrichment functionality, adding leads from your inbox and one customer view) to help people understand if this CRM will be the right fit for them

7. Introducing benefits like ‘10-second installation’ and ‘100% Free’ help to overcome objections people usually have with a product like this

Now people know how HubSpot’s CRM is different from others and the benefits it provides in the 4 points above, they let people know it is just 3 simple steps to get started in the next section:

8. Adding a screenshot from inside the software helps people understand what they are going to see when they use the product

Then to round out the page, they have one final CTA:

9. It’s been proven over and over again that headshot’s with short text testimonials right above or below CTA buttons and lead forms increase conversions — use them

If you are in the same market as HubSpot, you certainly have your work cut out for you. However, I hope this brief has helped you to see what areas they are strong in and where they might be weak.

If you are not in the market you should be thinking about how you can apply what they are doing to YOUR SaaS, in YOUR market.

You should not be thinking my SaaS is different so none of this applies. Trust me after having worked with numerous SaaS companies — no SaaS is that different. These strategies work in all SaaS markets.

Also, take notice as to what is not here. The strategies they are and aren’t using is important to identify.

What strategies and tactics are not showing up here that some experts say you MUST be doing. I find it much more effective to learn from what’s actually in play and working with the biggest players, than trying to guess.

Double-down on what works. Ignore everything else. It is just a distraction.

What You Should Do Now

If you are serious about becoming great at growth marketing, you should download our amazingly useful growth hacks spreadsheet.

For 1-on-1 marketing help click here 👈💰

Thanks for reading! :) If you enjoyed it, hit that clap button below. Would mean a lot to me and it helps other people see the story.

Written by Chris Von Wilpert

Sumo Copy Chief. Teaching people how one blog post can beat 100s of fluff pieces at ContentMavericks.com

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Client: D-Tools

Global, Award-Winning, B2B SaaS Migrates to HubSpot Marketing and CMS Enterprise for Huge Results

D-Tools is an industry-leading estimating and design software provider for AV and low voltage system integrators.

Growth-Driven Design UX/UI strategy New sitemap Brand design expansion Web design + development

Content Marketing Technical SEO Audits Content Strategy Blog and case study development

Technical HubSpot Consulting Migration: Marketo > HubSpot Marketing + CMS Enterprise Custom reporting dashboards Onboarding + training

D-Tools is trusted by nearly 7,000 companies across 80 countries with its award-winning estimating and management software for AV and low voltage system proposals, designs, and project management. Yet, the B2B SaaS company was coming up against two hurdles: its website and marketing strategy were due for a refresh, and its marketing enablement software – Marketo – wasn’t equipped to help the company scale in all of the ways it needed to. To solve for the challenges, D-Tools was gearing up to make a definitive shift from Marketo to HubSpot and needed a strategy to maximize ROI on its HubSpot investment and refresh web and marketing initiatives. The company was aiming to generate more brand visibility in search results, increase web traffic, and drive a higher volume of sales leads from the website.

D-Tools partnered with Mole Street for two key business objectives:

Support the implementation and onboarding of hubspot, develop a data-driven, scalable, organic search-driven growth and inbound marketing program to attract and convert more web visitors, the mole street team got to work immediately on the following initiatives:, migrating d-tools from marketo to hubspot , planning, designing and developing a new website on the hubspot cms, developing a data-driven content and keyword strategy to support a blog and case study program, conducting seo technical audits and implementing a new url structure to support a more competitive website, the results were immediate and have remained long-standing and consistent. within the first six months, d-tools was landing in position 1 in organic search engine results for high-value industry keywords., in the first year of working with mole street, d-tools also experienced a 258% increase in new visitors through organic search..

“Partnering with Mole Street has been, by far the best decision I’ve made in the 15 years I’ve been with the company. The team at Mole Street goes above and beyond the typical client engagement, and I can honestly say that they have become a part of our team.”

Growth-Driven Design

Mole Street was tasked with redesigning the D-Tools website on the HubSpot CMS. The goals was to develop a site that better encouraged buying behavior and nurtured web visitors along the buyer’s journey. To maximize opportunities around purchase intent, our team reorganized the sitemap to ensure that top navigation elements visually aligned with the buyer’s journey. We launched a side-by-side product comparison table and a pricing page, as well as moved items that were not specifically focused on new client acquisition to less prominent main navigation locations and areas within the footer navigation.

Finally, the website needed an updated look, which the Mole Street team created with a new, atomic design. The design featured reusable row types and page templates so that the D-Tools team was empowered to make web updates with the confidence that a universal look and feel would be maintained as the website (and business needs) evolved. Our team also designed and built on-brand and eye-catching marketing collateral templates for landing pages and email newsletters. Creating an organized home for the templates was part of a larger initiative that Mole’s Street’s HubSpot consulting team ran to ground.

Content Marketing Program

To support the web build and fuel organic growth further, our content strategists ran a technical SEO audit to find areas of improvement where the D-Tools’ site could run more optimally.

Our content team also applied a new seo keyword strategy which contributed to the sitemap overhaul and provided a map to update on-page elements like header tags, meta descriptions, and internal links., beyond the website build out, mole street’s content team collaborated with d-tools to understand its competitive landscape, buyer personas, and customer needs to create content and convert traffic..

Stemming from a robust, keyword-driven editorial calendar, Mole Street helps D-Tools create and publish compelling and educational content for its target market. As part of this initiative, we create lead-generating content to assist in the growth of warm contacts and leads. Over the first year of working together, our team’s SEO adjustments, alongside the content strategy work, resulted in a 162% increase in organic sessions to the D-Tools website, in addition to achieving position #1 on the SERPs for multiple, high-intent, industry-specific keywords.

Most notably, Mole Street helped to turn D-Tools’ website into a content and conversion machine, resulting in a 258% year-over-year increase in new visitors through organic search. The triple-digit growth in organic performance is hard to argue with, but ultimately, we here at Mole Street are only satisfied if the companies with whom we work feel the same way. The D-Tools team continue to feel enthusiastic about the work we do, the method in which we collaborate with them, and the results we continue to drive for their team.

Increase in organic sessions to website

On SERPs for multiple high-intent keywords

YOY increase in new visitors via organic search

“We saw an immediate ROI – our web traffic increased exponentially and that was in less than three months of working together and implementing the Mole Street team’s suggestions. In addition to helping us implement HubSpot and roll out a comprehensive content strategy, [Mole Street Principal] Brendan Walsh and his team have become trusted advisors.”

Using the core d-tools brand as a foundation, mole street’s design team was able to support content marketing efforts by developing an overarching art direction, which included an icon library, patterns, and photography guidelines. this visual system exploration allowed us to establish strategic rules around content design, which ultimately led to a consistent, yet flexible system that could be applied across various creative formats..

Technical HubSpot Consulting

After completing migration work from Marketo to HubSpot — and with a new website up and running and a content program expanding weekly — visibility into results became top priority for D-Tools as they looked to assess the ROI of their HubSpot (and Mole Street!) investment. Our HubSpot consultants built custom reports and dashboards for D-Tools to clearly understand its online performance metrics. In addition to HubSpot’s default marketing analytics software – which highlights basic KPIs – our team developed customized, multi-touch attribution reports to track marketing contacts and revenue. These reports provide D-Tools with specific metrics the team needs, right within the HubSpot portal. To ensure the D-Tools team was empowered with the knowledge they needed to run the company’s marketing campaigns on HubSpot, we customized HubSpot training sessions for their employees.

“mole street goes above and beyond to deliver results. working with their team has been an absolute pleasure and just a great fit for our business. from my first interaction through the day-to-day working relationship, the focus is and has been on helping us meet and exceed our objectives. our meetings are not simply status updates, they are collaborative, working sessions that often uncover hidden opportunities that can be immediately applied to help our efforts to improve our content strategy, seo optimization, and website user experience. in addition to helping us successfully onboard hubspot as our marketing automation platform, it is their approach to helping us understand how we can leverage hubspot as the cornerstone of an overall inbound growth strategy that has had a positive impact on our website traffic, inbound conversions, and overall digital presence.”, relevant work.

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Case Studies

Companies all over the world use hubspot to unite their teams, empower their business, and grow better. learn how..

Featured Case Studies

WeightWatchers Completely Revamped their Enterprise Sales Process with HubSpot

• Consumer Services
• Increased Productivity

eXp Realty communicates seamlessly with 90,000+ agents through HubSpot

• Real Estate
• Marketing Hub
• Improve Contact Management

Boyd Switches from Pardot and Captures 82% More High Quality Leads

• Manufacturing
• Increase Conversion Rates

Howard University’s School of Business Builds Stronger Sponsor Relationships With the HubSpot CRM Platform

Rock Content Increases Revenue by 650% with HubSpot

• Software & Technology
• Integrate Company Data
• Sales and Marketing Alignment

Avison Young Increases CRM Adoption from 23% to 90%

• Team Adoption
• Revenue Forecasting

Momentive Aligns Marketing Processes With HubSpot

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Ceros used HubSpot to achieve 180% deal generation growth through smarter prospecting

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See how your industry peers are succeeding with HubSpot.

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Attract more leads, convert more customers, and grow better with HubSpot.

The HubSpot CRM platform empowers businesses to unite their teams, close more deals, and delight their customers.

Marketing, Service, and Sales Hub users closed

more deals than users with Sales Hub only.

CMS and Marketing Hub users added an average of

more contacts than users with Marketing Hub only.

Sales, Service, and Marketing Hub users saw

more website traffic than users with Marketing Hub only.

Start Growing With HubSpot Today

See for yourself how the HubSpot CRM platform can help your teams be more connected, your website more customizable, and your business more customer-centric.

businesses in more than 135 countries trust HubSpot.

Case Study: Salesforce to HubSpot CRM Migration for a SaaS Company

• By Chris Strom
• Aug 15, 2023 11:59:00 AM

We recently completed a very large technical project: migrating a client from Salesforce over to HubSpot CRM. There was over a decade worth of data to migrate over, so it was a big project! We did it in 4 steps:

Step 1: Integrate the systems

We integrated HubSpot and Salesforce together to start syncing most of their data between the two systems.

This was the easiest part. We reviewed and set all the integration settings as needed and enabled the integration.

The integration defaults to preferring Salesforce data over HubSpot data, but the client wanted to start working in HubSpot alongside Salesforce, so we changed all the property mappings from “prefer Salesforce” to a two-way HubSpot-Salesforce sync instead.

Step 2: Data cleanup

This was the biggest step by far! One big thing that we had to change was that the HubSpot-Salesforce sync set the create date in HubSpot of all the synced deals/opportunities to the day the integration was enabled (June 2022).

So we had to find a way to change the create dates of the HubSpot deals to the actual create dates of the Salesforce opportunities over the last 10+ years.

We did this by doing a spreadsheet export of all the HubSpot deals, including their Deal IDs. Next we exported all their Salesforce opportunities with create dates into a separate spreadsheet.

Then we used VLOOKUP in Excel to create a combined table of all deals with both the HubSpot Deal ID and the Salesforce opportunity create date. Then we imported that into HubSpot, using the HubSpot Deal ID as the unique identifier to update the create dates on the existing deals.

The next part of the data cleanup was fixing any sync errors arising from bad data in the system. After 10 years of use by multiple employees, there was a lot of data errors that had accumulated!

Missing contact owners, inconsistent state/province/country naming, and bad email addresses were the most common sources of integration errors. Systems integrations have a way of revealing all the bad data that had previously been sitting undetected in a company’s systems.

Finally we got all the various data cleanliness issues resolved and we got the “all-clear” in the HubSpot-Salesforce integration dashboard (see screenshot below).

Step 3: Replicate reports and dashboards

There were about 12 custom reports on a dashboard in Salesforce that we needed to replicate in total. The reports were primarily tracking quantity of deal stages and sales activities (demos, order forms, etc.) monthly. HubSpot’s report builder and dashboarding tools have improved substantially over the last few years to the point that it’s now near feature-parity with Salesforce.

So we were able to replicate most of the reports almost verbatim, though we did need to make a few changes to account for differences in object architecture between the two platforms.

(All chart labels here have been redacted for privacy purposes)

Step 4: Decoupling

Once we had all the objects, properties, and reports mirroring correctly between HubSpot and Salesforce, and the client felt comfortable running everything natively in HubSpot, the final step was simply to turn off the HubSpot-Salesforce integration.

Now everything going forward would live natively in HubSpot. Our client then reduced their Salesforce subscription to a bare-bone single-user account for one additional year as a backup just in case, but so far they have not needed it.

The biggest benefit by far of migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot is the ability to track sales back to the marketing activities and channels - even down to the specific ad campaign that eventually resulted in a customer.

This is a result of all the sales and marketing objects and data living in a single system in HubSpot, rather than being spread across multiple disparate CMS systems, plugins, analytics tools, and CRM tools.

We are getting closed-loop campaign -> contact -> deal data in a way that we never were able to before, and we are using that to now build out much more targeted and accurate campaigns and content. We are excited to see how far we can now run with these new superpowers!

The Three SaaS Metrics That Matter in 2024 with SaaStr Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin

by Amelia Ibarra | Blog Posts , Early , Featured Posts , Metrics , Videos , Workshop Wednesdays

What are the three most under-discussed metrics on social media, with VCs, and especially with founders? SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin shares his top three SaaS metrics that matter in 2024:

• Net new customer count
• Growth vs. efficiency
• The bar to IPO

Net New Customer Count is Your North Star

One of the most important metrics in SaaS today is net new customer count. For those of who have seen growth slow over the last year or two, be laser-focused on this. Very few founders use net new customer count as their #1 KPI because they’re solely focused revenue growth.

In your first couple of years, you might now have any customer growth, but for anyone at scale, from $4M ARR to $5B, new customer growth is anemic. The top leaders in SaaS and Cloud still have triple-digit NRR, so you’ll still grow even if you bring in no new customers.

The worst offenders are at the bottom of this table, although these are great companies. Fastly , an Enterprise CDN at $500M in revenue is only growing its customers 1%. When times are challenging, or growth is ok but not great, founders hide from this and say, “Oh, we grew 48% this last year.” That’s great, but your future is uncertain if your net new customers don’t grow at least half of that top-line revenue growth. You’re hiding in NRR.

You may have to tweak the ratio based on how Enterprise or SMB you are, but roughly speaking, if your new customer growth is not growing half of your top line, you are shrinking in relevance and market share, and your future is at risk. Your future is growing your customer count, and it is an indicator of the core health of your company.

Growth Is Still 2x More Important Than Efficiency

The single biggest mistake founders make today is believing we’re in an era of profitability. We are not. Profitability is not your key to success. What has changed is efficiency. You have to be more efficient.

You can’t go public not growing. Too many startups aren’t growing, or they’re growing 10-15-20%. It turns out that if you don’t close customers, pay your sales teams as much, or cut down marketing, you get more efficient, but that’s now what building a business is about.

What has changed is that you now have to do both: growth and be profitable. But profitability isn’t enough. In 2021, all that mattered was growth. In 2024, profitability matters, but growth is twice as important. Let that be your guiding light and principle.

The goal of 2024 is to grow almost as fast as we did in 2021, but without burning all the cash. It’s hard, and you don’t get a pass on growth because you’re profitable or cash flow positive.

HubSpot vs. Veeva vs. Dropbox Case Study

SaaStr publishes a series called 5 Interesting Learnings every Wednesday, where we look at all the complicated metrics from leading public companies and break them down into 5ish things that matter for founders. The latest ones were about Hubspot , Veeva , and Dropbox .

They’re all at $2.5B ARR today, but what they’re worth and how they’re doing is very different.

Hubspot and Veeva are both worth $33B. They’re the LeBron James of SaaS. Hubspot is growing twice as fast at 24% with a 17% profit margin. That combo is 41, so 13x ARR after you take out cash, which is pretty good.

For Veeva, they’re barely in the growth stages. It’s 12% at $2.5B, although they’re guiding to 15% next year, which tells Wall Street they will accelerate. They have almost 40% margins and are sitting on $4B cash. They only raised $8M in capital before IPO and haven’t spent anything. So, you have 12 plus 38, which is 51, meaning Veeva is wildly efficient.

Hubspot and Veeva trade at roughly the same; both are profitable and have high margins. But Veeva’s margins are insane, which can make up for good but not great growth. Hubspot has very good growth and still has to be profitable.

Now, look at Dropbox, also at $2.5B ARR, growing 6%. They’re not a growth company anymore. If you back out of all of its cash, it’s only trading at 2x ARR, a sixth of the valuation of Hubspot and Veeva. Dropbox is an example where a tiny bit of growth, and some cash is not good enough.

Getting profitable is not the mantra. It’s necessary but not sufficient. You have to grow and be profitable, and that combination is under-discussed.

What It Takes to Go Public Today

What does it take to go public today? Most of us won’t IPO, but it’s good to know where to skate the puck to. If you’re a little on that path, someone might buy you for $10M, $50M, $100M, $500M, a billion. What does it look like, and what do you have to build to?

When Jason started in SaaS, the bar was around $100M in revenue, growing maybe 50%. That’s what Hubspot and Box looked like when they IPO’d a decade ago. The bar has gone up for a variety of reasons.

No one truly knows what the bar is today, but there have been two IPOs since 2022 to look at: Klaviyo and Rubrik soon.

Klaviyo IPO’d late last year. They own marketing for e-commerce, and almost 70% of everyone on Shopify uses Klaviyo. You can read more about them here. They IPO’d at $600M in ARR, growing 57% and profitable. It’s only worth $6B.

Rubrik is next. ARR is confusing for them; you can read 5 interesting learnings here . They went from on-prem to a SaaS model and may flatter their metrics a little by confusing them. But put that aside for this discussion, and let’s simplify it.

They’ll go public at $780M in revenue, growing at 47%. They might trade at $6B to $7B. This is the bar. Most venture-funded startups have no hope of growing more than 50% at $600M or more.

Today that might mean quadrupling or quintupling this year, and that’s just to trade at 10x revenue. If you’ve raised any capital at 10x revenue or more, you’re kind of living in a bubble. You should stay there as long as you can.

So, what is the bar, and how do we get to it?

As founders, you have to understand that as hard as what you’re doing is, you may have to do even better to IPO. The window is open, but the bar is pretty tough.

Key Takeaways

• Track your net new customers after churn. This should be your North Star metric. Invest in your long-tail; don’t give up on champions and smaller customers.
• Profitability isn’t everything, and growth matters twice as much. You have to do both, and it’s harder.
• Quietly be aware of the bar to IPO.

Related Posts

• The Second Half of 2024 Could Be Really Good For SaaS
• 5 Interesting Learnings from Model N at $200,000,000 in ARR
• 5 Interesting Learnings From RingCentral at $1B in ARR

SVP and GM, SaaStr

Mobile-First Adaptability

Recognizing the increasing demand for mobile accessibility, Rondesignlab has tailored the HubSpot CRM application to fit the bustling lifestyle of modern professionals. With a design that's as functional on a smartphone as it is on a desktop, the app ensures that users can manage their customer relationships effectively, no matter where they are.

The website for HubSpot CRM extends this philosophy. It serves as a comprehensive portal for potential users, offering detailed guidance and resources that highlight the platform's capabilities. The responsive design guarantees that the site is as navigable on tablets as it is on other devices, making it a versatile tool for users worldwide.

A Seamless SaaS Experience

The culmination of this design effort is a SaaS solution that not only meets the practical demands of business professionals but does so with a user-first ethos that is both engaging and straightforward.

"As professionals continue to seek solutions that can keep pace with their dynamic workflows, HubSpot CRM stands out as a beacon of innovation in SaaS design," — notes the team at Rondesignlab.

This redesign by Rondesignlab not only elevates the HubSpot CRM but also sets a new standard for SaaS applications, where functionality and user experience are seamlessly intertwined. The project serves as a testament to the power of thoughtful UI/UX design in transforming software into an indispensable ally for business growth.

App design and UI/UX case study

For more information make sure to check out rondesignlab.com

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