Platinum Partnership with HubSpot has its benefits. One of them was participating HubSpot Inbound 2024 in Boston is a great chance to get firsthand insights into technology, marketing, and sales. Let me share a few thoughts.

1. HubSpot Inbound 2024 and its Relevance to CEE

As the only partner attending from Poland, we were in a unique position to learn from the industry’s forefront of business and technology. This experience should inspire us to grow and learn from the key players across various markets and industries.

Unfortunately, HubSpot has a reputation in Poland for being expensive software (if HubSpot is costly, then what do we call Salesforce?), so that may be the issue. Or it’s because their communication has traditionally been feature-oriented, causing the market to misunderstand its capabilities. The perception of this solution is off, as seen from the attendance of people from our region versus other places at a similar stage of development.

2. How much does selling major software to a large client cost?

I met a colleague at the conference who came with two coworkers. They work for a large European company. HubSpot invited them to the conference. They paid for their flights, hotels, and tickets to see what it’s all about and build a case for their board to switch from their current tech stack to HubSpot. Executives, they found the time. And they’ll probably buy it—if not in their current company, then at their next one. There were hundreds of such companies here, likely around 2000 people in the process of making purchase decisions.

How many European tech firms have the resources to compete with this kind of machine to generate pipelines among large clients? That’s why enterprise sales in Europe (especially in CEE) could be more developed (and SAP alone doesn’t change the picture).

3. Do startups still have the speed advantage?

At this year’s conference alone, alongside a few new AI-powered products, HubSpot presented 200 (!) new features in existing products. What percentage of startups, famous for their speed and hard work, add 200 new features and a few new products in a year?

The current wave of technological progress in AI will create winners and losers among SaaS companies. In this sense, AI can simultaneously positively impact the world’s largest corporations and small startups. HubSpot is one of the contenders for victory, partly due to the efficiency of its product teams, which produce massive amounts of software.

4. Software as a career boost

Beyond business outcomes for companies, people want to implement HubSpot because being a user leads to career advancement. Talking to partners from different geographies, I heard that a significant portion of their pipeline consists of people wanting HubSpot for this reason. They want to travel to Boston/SF, get certified, earn a raise, or change companies because they implemented HubSpot at their current one and achieved a return on investment.

I’m sure that in Poland, which not so long ago considered HubSpot prohibitively expensive, mindlessly compared it with point CRMs, the same pattern will emerge. I’ve seen it on a smaller scale with Google certifications, which were a significant badge among marketers at one point.

The reverse trend will also happen. People recruiting for sales management positions will soon frown upon someone who used a local or point solution in a team of 20+ people.

5. Software vs. Software -> Ecosystem vs. Ecosystem

HubSpot consists of 6 core products dedicated to marketing, sales, customer service, operations, e-commerce, and content. It also has 1700 integrations with external products and 3000 partner firms implementing it for clients.
HubSpot’s data shows that customers stay longer when:

  • they buy more than one HubSpot product,
  • they integrate more external applications with the hubs,
  • they are supported by a solution partner (this reduces churn by 12 percentage points!).

How many companies try to “do HubSpot on the cheap”, utilizing no more than 20% of its potential, only to churn later because they can’t extract value from their investment?

Competition in the mid-size and large company segment no longer revolves around Pipedrive competing with HubSpot. It’s more like the Pipedrive ecosystem competing with the HubSpot ecosystem—but only up to a certain point. Beyond a specific company size, not switching to HubSpot or Salesforce makes no sense. The opportunity costs are too high to justify not migrating.

That’s why Pipedrive and other local/point solutions will focus on smaller clients. More prominent clients will appreciate Salesforce and HubSpot. Investing in talent capable of making your company AI-first is a costly undertaking. Pipedrive is valued at $1.5B, and Zoho at $5.9B—too little to compete effectively. Only some have a tech-savvy founder like Dharmesh Shah.

6. “There is an agent for that.”

The most important word of the conference was “agent”, which means AI Agents, of course. HubSpot’s CTO, Dharmesh Shah, presented during Hubspot Inbound 2024 the agent.ai, a marketplace for agents. Some are pointless (an agent generating memes forgets that they should be funny), but others have potential. The company sees this marketplace as its own AppStore.

In the B2B segment, they have a good chance of competing with OpenAI, which seems more focused on agents and use cases appealing to the average consumer rather than a sales rep working to increase their employer’s revenue. HubSpot’s CEO said, “It’s all about AI Agents.” It’s early days for this direction, but we’ll see.

7. Copilots

HubSpot launched Copilots for marketers, salespeople, and customer service reps. It’s called Breeze—a copilot for non-technical people. It’s exceptionally simple and helpful to the point that I started thinking that if someone is paying a cold mailing agency 1500$, they should drop it and instead spend that money on HubSpot and prospect on their own using Breeze (if this is you, contact me, because we should talk). Copilots also invalidate the old rule that large software solutions lose usability because the interface has been radically simplified by introducing copilots.

After tons of hype and entertainment-focused narratives in recent years, HubSpot’s approach was refreshingly practical. They see this technology as a way to solve business problems and make money. This approach feels like home to me. It means AI adoption is entering a new phase:

8. Innovators -> Early Adopters

In this customer typology, innovators are interested in what’s new because it’s new, not because it works or provides value. Early adopters are interested in what promises to give them an edge over the early and late majority, even if it still needs to be perfect. Until now, to leverage the potential of AI for boosting your company’s business results, you needed to:

  • Identify a problem to solve using SaaS/LLM,
  • Choose the right SaaS/LLM (e.g. which one is better for writing – ChatGPT, Claude, or Copy.ai?),
  • Check if it can ensure the security of our data (this eliminates 95% of larger companies from the race),
  • Get onboarded with the chosen SaaS/LLM,
  • Pay and extract value from it.

It’s difficult and time-consuming. There’s a high chance it won’t work out, and time and money will be wasted. Now, a large part of this process can be bypassed using copilots (of course, only for HubSpot users).

9. AI delivers business results for B2B and e-commerce companies now.

There are few cases of measurable, money-based results from AI implementations. Either companies need help with effectiveness, or they’re good at it but don’t want to reveal their secrets. HubSpot, however, excels and has an interest in showcasing these results.

Companies already resolve 30% of their support tickets using automated agents who handle the most straightforward customer inquiries. As a result, they unlock the possibility of 24/7 chat support without extending working hours for human staff (for 30% of inquiries). This leads to a decrease in response time for support tickets (in one case, by 30%). The AI gods clearly favor the number 30.

All of this dramatically improves the customer experience and does so without increasing costs. AI can build a customer knowledge base and FAQ by leveraging past support conversation histories, saving companies significant resources. Half of the conference was about how Company X achieved financial milestones such as increased contract value, shortened sales cycles, boosted conversion rates, and reduced costs, all thanks to AI.
The most critical presentations are not available online. For example, the entire Partner Day won’t be published. However, the opening speech by HubSpot’s impressive CEO and the talk by Dharmesh Shah (CTO) deserve attention.

10. One More Thing from Hubspot Inbound 2024

This is just the end of the beginning. AI is just getting started.

In the summer of 1998, Richard Rumelt asked Steve Jobs:

“Steve, this change at Apple has been impressive. (…) So, what are you trying to do in the long term? What’s the strategy?”

Steve smiled and said, “I’m waiting for the next big thing.”
2.5 years later, it was the iPod launch day.
I was in Boston recently.
I saw the big thing.
It was good to see it again.