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David Weinhaus: 15 years at HubSpot and creating a community
54 Plays8 months ago
David Weinhaus, a 15-year veteran of HubSpot, recently appeared on the "Dial It In" podcast to share his sales secrets and insights gained from his time at the company. Weinhaus's experience at HubSpot spans across various departments, where he played a crucial role in the company's growth and success.
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Dial It In Podcast is where we gathered our favorite people together to share their advice on how to drive revenue, through storytelling and without the boring sales jargon. Our primary focus is marketing and sales for manufacturing and B2B service businesses, but we’ll cover topics across the entire spectrum of business. This isn’t a deep, naval-gazing show… we like to have lively chats that are fun, and full of useful insights. Brought to you by BizzyWeb.
Links:
Website: dialitinpodcast.com
BizzyWeb site: bizzyweb.com
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Mission
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Dial It In, a podcast where we talk with interesting people about the process improvements and tricks they use to grow their businesses. I'm Dave Meyer, president of BusyWeb, and every week, Trigby Olsen and I are bringing you interviews on how the best in their fields are dialing it in for their organizations.
Introducing David Winehouse
00:00:24
Speaker
I had a great experience recently, Dave, where a friend of mine, who's somebody you know to, it's kind of a surprise guest today, told me privately, yeah, I'm going to be leaving. And I said, wow, that's huge. You should let people know you've completely changed dozens, if not hundreds of people's lives. And he kind of poo pooed it and said, nah, nah, nah, nah, I just, no, no, no. I don't want to slip out the side door.
Winehouse's Impact at HubSpot
00:00:52
Speaker
I said, well, okay. And then once he finally did, and he let it loose that he had left the company, he got hundreds and hundreds of people wishing him well, hundreds and hundreds of people wanting to know what's next. And he has been quiet about all of it, except that he agreed to come on our podcast to answer all the burning tell all questions. So.
00:01:18
Speaker
I'm very excited. Our guest today is David Winehouse, formerly of HubSpot. David was a 15-year veteran of a number of different departments in HubSpot, helping it grow into the variable juggernaut that it is today from being what he classifies as a non-sales salesperson into teaching an entire generation of marketing and salespeople and HubSpot partners.
00:01:46
Speaker
David has a storied career at HubSpot, who he has recently transitioned into doing other things and exclusively coming on our pod.
00:01:59
Speaker
Thank you. I'm super excited. David, before we get started, I got to gush just a little bit because as the straight man in the Dan Tyre David Winehouse duo and the Project Lion, you truly changed the way I sell and the way hundreds of other folks sell. My goodness, it's amazing to have you on. I'll just do one little boo just to make you feel at home.
00:02:26
Speaker
Is Dan on the call? That was amazing. David M. Winehouse, what does the M stand for? It stands for magnificent. So excited for him to be here. David, what are your top three words to start with M?
Influence of Winehouse's Sales Training
00:02:43
Speaker
Well, marvelous to be here today. We'll go with that. Love hearing the introduction.
00:02:52
Speaker
And I'm excited for this conversation. Both you guys are among my favorite people within the ecosystem, as is BusyWeb. I have a ton of people that I love and are favorites, but you both are definitely among them. And very excited to be here today and share a little bit about my story.
00:03:09
Speaker
Yeah, I want to I want to echo what Dave said, because I do a pretty decent entire impersonation. But how I really think about how selling as I, you know, it's the old 80s drugs commercial. You know, I learned it by watching you.
00:03:25
Speaker
And so when I need to go calmer, when I need to be more thoughtful, I channel my inner Winehouse. And we actually have another, our other Salesperson at BusyWeb actually has gone through the program and he's a Winehouse Acolyte as well. Awesome. I love hearing that. I feel like we have different hats that we can pull out for different occasions. I pull out my Dan Tire hat sometimes when I need to. It doesn't necessarily within me, but it's within the part of Dan that I can pull out.
00:03:52
Speaker
So I appreciate knowing that I'm one of your hats, Troy Gray. Yeah, and for those of you who don't know who Dan Tyre is, he's basically the energizer bunny. He just is consistently high energy all the time, and he's an amazing guy. And he is Lewis to David Martin, but that doesn't really do either one of them justice.
HubSpot's Growth Journey
00:04:13
Speaker
David, 15 years at HubSpot. How did you get started working at HubSpot?
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah so may of two thousand and ten is when i started up spot but i guess my journey starts a little bit before that in that i was well even prior that i'd work for ups you had a personal company. I started a freight business the recession of two thousand eight two thousand nine happened it was a terrible time to be afraid a great time to get out of freight and was looking to get into the tech business in general. So i hooked on with the company that was selling paper click advertising work with great people but just
00:04:49
Speaker
Really not a good experience selling pay-per-click and the company is as a whole It feels like you know, like I was selling yellow pages Advertising the product wasn't great. The retention wasn't super the culture of the company was not great But a couple of prospects that I would go and visit with you know door-to-door out here in Boston You know, I would ask folks What are you guys using today to help you grow the business and a couple people said HubSpot I said HubSpot is that advertising? No, it's not advertising
00:05:18
Speaker
One woman showed me the screens. I had no idea what HubSpot was. I don't think she had any idea what HubSpot was. This is back in 2010. But what was amazing is that the couple of users that I found of HubSpot were believers in HubSpot. They loved HubSpot. And I was not used to hearing companies talking about products that they used, that they loved. So that planted a seed in my mind.
00:05:44
Speaker
Which that i've got to figure out what's going on with this company i was super excited when i found out they were located in cambridge so in my backyard here i tried to apply in two thousand and nine. Didn't hear anything back i don't think the company was really set up at that point with a recruiting option and a training function but in two thousand and ten i've realized i had a connection through someone a neighbor of mine.
00:06:07
Speaker
who was in Mike Bulpe's wedding, just throwing names. Mike is one of the original gangsters of HubSpot and part of the founding team. Made my way in the company in 2010 in the sales function and started from there. When you got hired, how many employees did HubSpot have? I think about 140 or so. That's only a couple of years in, right? Yeah.
00:06:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think officially the founding was 2006, but that was a couple of guys sitting around a conference room. I think 2008, maybe the end of 2008 is when Inbound Marketing was published. And then 2009 and 2010 started to grow. How many HubSpot employees were there when you resigned? I think it's close to about 8,000.
00:07:01
Speaker
So you were part of a company that went from 150 people to 8,015 years. Yeah, it was quite quite a rocket ship. As we said back then, when I came on board, I didn't quite believe it, but I came to believe it pretty quickly.
00:07:14
Speaker
That's astonishing. Sales is one of those things, especially in that sphere, in TechSphere, that people, I think it was in a ton of tumult and there was a lot of change inside of how you did sales.
Evolution of Sales and Marketing Strategies
00:07:32
Speaker
Just knowing from what I know in our Lion groups, you're one of the original proponents of you actually need to pick up the phone.
00:07:42
Speaker
And that that's kind of amazing nowadays is like people don't get that anymore. Yeah. Nowadays, especially, I think, I think there were definitely some really interesting things going on back in 2010 when I joined. And one was definitely how, you know, sales was transitioning. But I think the other part that's interesting to go back and look on is how marketing was transitioning as well. So, you know, if we take a little bit of a trip down a history lane,
00:08:09
Speaker
Those were the days when people had websites, but they were kind of like billboards in the deserts, so to speak. Everyone was rushing to get a website, but then it was kind of like, what do I do now? They realized that they put a lot of money into it, but it wasn't driving traffic or sales or leads for themselves. And there were a lot of different approaches going on back then. Link building,
00:08:33
Speaker
SEO dropping Britney Spears in the bottom of your website, the same text color as the background of your website. People wouldn't see it, but the search engines would. What HubSpot was preaching back then was really revolutionary, this concept of inbound that we all know now, which is actually create valuable content, put it out where your prospects live, and then help folks as they make their way back to your site to take them
00:09:03
Speaker
through their buyer's journey. It's less revolutionary today. That concept has kind of went out, but back then it was super revolutionary. I also remember hearing about how many inbound leads HubSpot was getting back at the time. It was about 14,000 inbound leads a month. And as a salesperson, I was like, what? Like inbound leads coming to you, 14,000 inbound leads a month.
00:09:28
Speaker
I said this is a place that I got to be. The mission really resonated with me as well as the culture of the sales team as well. HubSpot actually was very prominent in publishing the big culture document. That was a big change and a big shift that they actually cared about people and all of the things that comes into that. That must have been super exciting.
00:09:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think, you know, and this was the days I can't remember if the culture act was maybe 13 or 14 what they when they published it, but I really the mission of HubSpot being actually being helpful as opposed to gaming. The system is something that really resonated to me. Although I will tell you just one of the funny funny stories is back when I interviewed in 2010. So it was it was an exhaustive interview process back then.
00:10:18
Speaker
You go through case studies, you meet with managers, and then your final interview, like my interview five or six, was with Brian Halligan. This was back in the days when Brian would meet with everyone. And you know Brian, you see him on stage, and he's a great storyteller.
00:10:35
Speaker
And he's telling me about one of the co-founders of HubSpot for those people who are longtime listeners, but not having the orange Kool-Aid. Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Trigby. So co-founder of the company now, you know, hugely influential, uh, you know, a founder, very well known, well-known back then among the HubSpot community too. And I had watched videos, very kind of like friendly, warm guy, you know, talking about the story of inbound marketing and his different elements of it.
00:11:03
Speaker
So I'm thinking this is a kind of shake the hand, you know, interview. It's my fifth and sixth interview. It's with Brian Halligan, very warm, friendly guy. When he's speaking, I walk in and Brian's like, all right, I want you to sell me pay per click. Right. He knew I was a pay per click salesman starts off, you know, no, no pleasantries. Nothing goes immediately negative on me. Uh, and wants me to sell him pay per click. And I'm like, Oh my God. Like I was not prepared for this at all.
00:11:33
Speaker
I guess fortunately I was prepared for having sold pay-per-click for a year prior. So anyway, I went through the activity with Brian. Clearly I did well enough because here I am at the end of the process, but really
Role and Mentorship at HubSpot
00:11:45
Speaker
threw me off. My game was not quite expecting that. He bought something from you. He did indeed. I tell you that the other interesting part of that interview is, you know, like we, we broke down a little role playing in the first 10 or 15 minutes, but then Brian was up and Adam at the whiteboard.
00:12:00
Speaker
and we were talking about the personas that HubSpot was going after. Back in the day, it was owner Ali, small business owner versus marketing Mary, which was a little bit more upstream. And we talked about how HubSpot was looking to evolve over time. So how long were you in sales? So I think I mentioned this in that LinkedIn post that you referenced, Trigvi, is I'd never really thought of myself as a salesperson like at all. I started in software,
00:12:30
Speaker
programming and development. Then I went to business school I got a you know came out of it with an MBA in marketing work for UPS corporate. In terms of marketing the reason I got into sales is we we moved as a family. To Boston and I I did entrepreneurial suits around starting a freight company but that was largely. Signing up freight accounts and going door to door I was able to do pretty well.
00:12:57
Speaker
Although I was never very good, you know, traditional freight salesperson, they knock on the back door to the freight dock. They come with donuts or baseball tickets or hats. I tried that one time. I was just horrible at it. It felt really weird bringing in donuts. Like I didn't have the relationship. I wasn't working for a freight carrier. I was working for like a third party. So I really didn't have much name recognition in doing it, but selling freight, I figured out.
00:13:25
Speaker
some of our strategic advantages as a company and then I would pour through lists of potential accounts all across the country because I could sell anywhere all across the country and I would try to find folks like who had lanes that we specialized in so like Wyoming based companies I would call them and through this approach of just trying to figure out where are we strong what type of prospects existed anywhere in the company country and I could apply the power of focus to pour through lists and do matching that I was able to do pretty well.
00:13:55
Speaker
selling freight until the recession happened. And so that was really my first experience selling. And then when it came time to get into tech, I said, you know, the best way to get in the door, I'm not going to be, I can't be a product manager or, you know, like a walk into the CFO or anything like that. I'm going to get in through sales. I'm going to use those skills that I've developed. And then from there, what I eventually realized is I could take a lot of those same skills that I'd started to build in the freight world and apply them
00:14:24
Speaker
2x or 3x times in the tech world. Back to the question, you got your initial sales role. What was the next role for you at HubSpot? The initial sales role I was selling direct to HubSpot customers. We mentioned Dan Tyer before. I worked in partnership with Dan for a long time, starting in 2017. But back in 2010, I worked for Dan. Dan was my first manager.
00:14:55
Speaker
No, no, we're not running past that. What was it like to burst for Dan? So Dan and mine's first month together, we sold nothing. Zero. Dan could not believe it. Because I would tee stuff up and Dan liked to jump on the calls and he would just sell, sell, sell. And we sold nothing that first month. Now the second month was much, much better in terms of doing it. But Dan and I, I think you alluded to this before, we're very different types.
00:15:23
Speaker
of sellers, Dan will just, you know, Dan's like the trains leaving the station, baby, you want to get on board or not, here's where it's going. And he would just sell the heck out of that story, which was inbound marketing and a great story at the time. I'm more like, where are you trying to get to when you need to be there by like, tell me, you know, tell me about where you're coming from. But the process of selling with Dan,
00:15:47
Speaker
we were able to yin and yang a little bit on those calls, although I work for him, so it was a lot more his yang to my yang back at the time. But I really learned kind of how to pull on my dantire hat, which is when I need to go excite, when I need to build a story and get someone excited about something, and that has value in the sales process as well, is selling what Dan was such a good education in being able to do that. So I got a whole year's worth of time doing that with
00:16:17
Speaker
Dan before I ultimately ended up in the partner program about a year later, where I met kind of my second, I'll call him like main mentor at HubSpot, which was Pete Caputa, who some of your audience will know or much of your audience will know started the partner program at HubSpot. And I had the opportunity to learn from him a very different style of sales than Dan. Can you do 30 seconds on what exactly the partner program is for the audience?
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah, so the partner program. Yeah, it is really revolutionary and different for how HubSpot chooses your business. So it's, I think it'd be good to unpack it just to hear. Yeah, so the partner program is HubSpot's channel program. Pete started back in 2009-ish or so. Brian, the founder of the company, did not believe in the vision of the partner program at the beginning. Pete pitched it to him. Brian said, someone getting between HubSpot and its customers?
00:17:14
Speaker
I don't think that sounds like a great idea. So what Pete did is the traditional HubSpot thing, nights and weekends, building out this proof of concept that says, A, partners who largely in 2010 HubSpot's partners were marketing agencies or website companies who were heavily invested in project based work, but whose cash flows were very lumpy because they would go from project to project. So Pete's concept from having worked in the agency world was,
00:17:44
Speaker
Using a concept like inbound marketing, they can turn those project-based work into ongoing marketing retainers. So his concept was we can serve values to partners, and from the HubSpot side, HubSpot could benefit from partners who can go in and do a lot of the work because
00:18:06
Speaker
HubSpot is great as it is. It doesn't run by itself and it's not advertising. You just pour money in and wait to see what happens and you know either money comes out the other side or money doesn't. It's a process and a methodology and a set of tools that are easy to use but still require work. And so what partners could help HubSpot with is to make our customers more successful as well as being another potential sales channel for HubSpot as well in terms of driving up demand through their own relationships. It worked out beautifully.
00:18:36
Speaker
4 HubSpot provides a lot of HubSpot's revenue and really impacts customer success and retention equally as importantly. And it all started back with Pete's vision back in that 2009 timeframe. And I had the good fortune to be able to jump on in 2010 and help figure some of those things out.
00:18:56
Speaker
What was it like when you started with the partner program then? Were you coaching individual partners? Were you connecting or were you kind of like a sales rep to help those partners be successful or where did that come in?
Project Lion and Partner Program
00:19:13
Speaker
I was in a role called the channel account manager, which yes, yes, and yes, it did all of those things, which was actually very interesting and good for skill building.
00:19:24
Speaker
Very, very challenging. So, uh, channel account managers back at that time were responsible. You were, you were a cam. Wow. That says so much about you. I was a cam. I was among the first, I think I was like the sixth, uh, the sixth cam or so along with some, some really storied names and, and, and HubSpot. But yeah, the job was all of the above. So it was hunting for new partners. It was, uh, onboarding.
00:19:49
Speaker
partners we even have like channel consultants back then that you know for them to take service issues or other thing was hunting new partners upskilling partners it was selling co-selling with partners and then it was also a lot of like coaching those partners to help them run a sales process as well and it was carrying a number so at the end of the day you need to make sure that you produced a certain amount of monthly recurring revenue either with partners or
00:20:17
Speaker
partners had accounts that you could help close, it was to do some selling as well. Right, so true partnership, which is also a little bit unique, I think. I don't know of any other companies where you literally get someone from the company that you're representing to come on board and be kind of your sales team with you. Yeah, I think part of the difference too is like if you look at the Salesforce ecosystem, they had large integrators.
00:20:43
Speaker
There were small partners, but they were larger partners. There were other, um, you know, partnership programs where it was really, you know, based on like how much business can you service or bring in? I think one of the great things about the HubSpot partner program is we were very invested in, could have been at the time, single person agencies, a couple of people, 10 people, you know, 20, 25 person agency, uh, was a very large partner for HubSpot back at the time.
00:21:12
Speaker
And I think part of that is because if you go back to that time, HubSpot is evangelizing this whole different process of marketing called inbound marketing. So if you start with an agency that's already very set, maybe they're providing advertising services or media placement services or creative services, all of a sudden HubSpot says, no, no, no, we got a better way. You can produce ROI. You can create content services. You can do all these kinds of things.
00:21:38
Speaker
I think the companies that were very, or the partners that were potentially very receptive were smaller firms who were looking for something that they could build their agency around. And so HubSpot very much looked to invest in those types of agencies and those types of partnerships. So you're a cam for a while, and then how did we get to the project line?
00:22:06
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll talk first, because even before Project Lion, there was a lot of training and enablement pieces that I think ultimately ended up in Project Lion. From my early on days as a cam, I started doing a lot of group training and coaching. And I'll tell you, a lot of it was like I enjoyed it. I liked teaching. I really liked teaching. But a lot of my motivation in those early days was very selfish as well.
00:22:33
Speaker
So I remember this concept and I can't remember what it stands for, but it was like the three C's of a good fit for HubSpot. One was like they had a considered sales process. I can't remember what the other two C's were. And if I had to repeat that like one more time to one more partner that I was bringing on board, like my head was going to explode. I just find myself saying the same thing over and over again. And I said, there's just, there's got to be a better way to do this to make this repeatable and scalable. So very early on, I started with live like group training programs.
00:23:03
Speaker
And then we would record those and make those available for the next session of people that we brought on. But delivering the same information multiple times, just not a good way to do things. Then I found that I really enjoyed it as well. And so we played with some other types of training programs too. So I know some folks familiar with this. The host side knows the name Katie Ing Mack, who is one of the leaders of the HubSpot Partner Program several years ago. Her and I did this Friday group sales coaching.
00:23:34
Speaker
where we would work with partners around a case study type of an opportunity and we would live role play or we would talk about someone's opportunity. And what I saw is we were bringing partners together. Partners were starting to get to know other partners' names. We were having a good time with it. And we were also able to convey the kind of principles that we wanted to convey around selling wisely and intelligently and to good fit prospects and not spending time with bad fit prospects.
00:24:04
Speaker
And it was really powerful that we could start to do that in a group sense versus doing it one-on-one. There's a little more of this story, but that's kind of what led to this concept of group coaching and group enablement, which eventually resulted in Project Lion in 2018 or so. Was it really only 2018? It felt like it was 100 years ago. I know. It was really only six years ago. Maybe 2017. Somewhere around there. Sure.
00:24:33
Speaker
Okay. So how did somebody came to you and said, Hey, we're going to, we're going to do this thing and we're going to call it project lion. So that was Dan. It was a Dan's original concept. Dan has a storied career at HubSpot. He found himself back in the sales funnel, like selling, you know, carrying a quota and said to himself and everyone else, I'm going to be out of this role in six months. What am I going to do? He didn't know, but I was facilitating some small group coaching programs and Dan said, Hey, let me run a group around prospecting.
00:25:02
Speaker
And with a small subset of people and let's see if we can, we can do something with it. So Dan being Dan, he worked that thing hard. He brought the passion. Those particular like agencies really ate it up. I was a little bit skeptical at the time, not so much that, um, folks wouldn't have, you know, good experience with Dan and Dan wouldn't really be able to hype them up. But I didn't know if there would be enough.
00:25:29
Speaker
Salespeople within the hub spot partner ecosystem that would enlist in a program like that where we could actually support like a full time. Position so that was a first test to make sure we could get some movement in a small group of folks. That were interested in doing it and then there is a particular business problem at hub spot which i think lent itself. To getting some latitude to do more experimentation which is.
00:25:53
Speaker
You know any and any group in this holds true for partners as well you have some you know rising stars at the top who kind of just knew what was going on they may be had sales DNA. They were selling a lot of business for hot spot you have folks the bottom who just it wasn't a good fit to start with and they're just not gonna be tremendously successful at least because the fit with hot spot and then there's a huge group in the middle of folks that were selling and servicing some hot spot.
00:26:21
Speaker
But when we signed them up, both they had bigger expectations and we had bigger expectations that the partnership would flourish even more. And so being in the sales organization, I'm coming at this from a sales perspective, how can we enable partners who are in the middle to sell even more? And we had the recognition that we're working with a ton of talented marketers at small agencies, but they were not necessarily hired as salespeople.
00:26:49
Speaker
Which is what we were at HubSpot. Yet at the same time, HubSpot has all this sales DNA that we could help impart to partners to help them be more successful. And making a bet on that at scale is really what Project Lion was all about. And we had some believers within the executive ranks who gave us some latitude to do that because Dan and I were too high producing sales people.
00:27:18
Speaker
The bet was we could produce more MRR by doing this at scale than two high performing salespeople could pull in in a monthly quota. Did you? We did it for five years. So yes, we think so. I mean, it's actually, I think it's one of the ongoing challenges of enablement. A single sales post is directly attributable for the monthly recurring revenue that they bring in. At a program level,
00:27:46
Speaker
We worked with a ton of partners who also had individual sales reps who were directly accountable for MRR. So we were kind of like an overlay on top of that. So we did measure like influence. And then there was also a lot of stories, you know, people would, Brian Halligan coming back to him, he would ask people at the inbound conference, Oh, you're lying. How's it going? Has it made a difference for you? And, you know, inevitably the people that were in the program really felt the benefits
00:28:15
Speaker
of the program so I think it was this combination of having a lot of influenced MRR and the stories that people told were really like powerful because they needed a lot of help and we were able to give help and able to pull together a community that could provide help and support as well and it all kind of came together in a very powerful way. We need to take a quick break for sponsors but I want to come back and keep talking about community so stay tuned.
00:28:45
Speaker
Today's episode of Dial It In is brought to you by BusyWeb, your partner in driving growth for business service and manufacturing businesses online. Are you a business service or manufacturing business eager to expand your online presence, generate leads and boost revenue?
Community and Empathy in Sales
00:29:01
Speaker
BusyWeb has what you need.
00:29:03
Speaker
At BusyWeb, we specialize in helping businesses like yours with CRM, marketing, advertising and website solutions. As experts in HubSpot, Google, social media and email, we offer full-service digital marketing tailored to your unique needs. Our mission is to drive leads to your business and empower you to convert those leads effectively through smart follow-up strategies.
00:29:27
Speaker
visit our website at busyweb.com. That's B-I-Z-Z-Y-W-E-B dot com. Or, give us a call at 612-424-9990 to start a conversation. As a special offer for our dialed in listeners, we're offering a free download of our newest eBook.
00:29:47
Speaker
everything you ever wanted to know about HubSpot. With this free download, we'll share with you how to grow your business with an all-in-one sales, marketing, website, customer service, and CRM powerhouse. Explore the power of HubSpot to decide if it's right for your growth plans. This offers exclusively for Dial It In listeners. Don't miss out. Visit busyweb.com slash pod for more.
00:30:14
Speaker
I had this unbelievable experience and it's one of the most surreal things that's ever happened to me. And I'm gonna, David, I'm gonna, I'm gonna rattle off a bunch of names for you. Me, Heather Watson, Lika Walters, Tracy Graziani, Keith Gutierrez, and Omie Diaz Cooper.
00:30:42
Speaker
kind of OG original Lions from 2018-2019. I had dinner with them two years ago at Inbound, and these are people that I love, and I had such an amazing feeling that I was loved too. And because I've spent dozens and dozens of hours with these people, and what was so surreal about it, David, it was the first time we'd ever all been in the same place at the same time.
00:31:12
Speaker
It was literally the first time I met these people, but they were invested in me. And that was through that community building in the Lion program. So was that on purpose or was that just a nice byproduct of what happened? Gosh, that's a good question. I think part of it is, well, yes, but I think a big part of it is being in the right place at the right time as well. One of the things that I think makes
00:31:39
Speaker
And I'll just extend it to the HubSpot community as well. This is true for line community, but I think the HubSpot community is that, um, and for the partner community is that the shared mission. Right. That HubSpot has and HubSpot partners have as well, which is to do sales and marketing the right way, a really like people centric way, uh, to improve people's business and also to, to reinvent the way that marketing and sales is done.
00:32:09
Speaker
and the way it's thought of. I think without that shared purpose, you can pull people together, but you don't have the foundation for the help and support. And it's been a shared mission, but it's also been a hard mission to put, you know, change is hard. And so like, trick me, that group of folks that you just described, those are people fighting this battle, this mission, you know, back, you know, years and years and years.
00:32:37
Speaker
And again a lot of folks within the HubSpot partner community they're doing this in a small world whether it's a two person agency or five person or even ten or twenty or thirty person agency or larger where they're building out this part of the business and to find people who are on the same journey that you're on I think is very powerful.
00:32:58
Speaker
It is kind of a unique journey in business as well. I mean, you kind of teased at it with what Brian responded to when you were talking about let's start up a program. And he was like, well, the partners, what are partners? We just need revenue. We need sales. So a lot of times people tend to
00:33:18
Speaker
bucket the sales function into almost like a widget or a machine that they can control the inputs on and then just turn the screws a little harder on the sales people and they'll make it happen. But they forget that
00:33:32
Speaker
you're dealing with real people and you're an actual human being that has connection with other people and that strives for that. So I think that's part of why the partner program and the Project Lion was so successful is that it really was a support group as much as anything else for the people that were terrified of picking up the phone and needed to go through.
00:33:54
Speaker
I think it's a little different than that because I think this is one of these things that as I get older, I realize that Hollywood sometimes has some stuff wrong.
00:34:03
Speaker
and the cliche of Glengarry Glen Ross of always be closing and of boiler room where you have to murder the person next to you in order to get a sale. That's what was so fundamentally different about the community aspect is you're not alone. And when you're in sales and you're dealing with almost universal rejection just to get to one yes,
00:34:28
Speaker
That's entirely lonely and that's why so many organizations have such high turnover in sales. And so all of a sudden now I had six people who were around the country doing the same thing that I was doing and knew what I was feeling and we were supporting each other. And I wasn't alone anymore.
00:34:50
Speaker
That was the difference is all of a sudden and that's, then that's why it's really called project line. Well, a cause you know, Dan wanted something catchy, but more, more to the point you can live and work well in a pack. Yeah. I think that's very true. I think a lot of the magic came from getting people into the same room together. One of the things that I was most excited about in this, I learned about
00:35:18
Speaker
after we started or after we kind of came up with a mission of Project Lion, but before we scaled it is something so simple, but the concept of Zoom rooms, which had not existed prior to that point, I remember telling Dan, Dan, these rooms within Zoom are going to be a literal game changer for the Lion program that we are doing because it took it out of the concept of us facilitating group conversations with
00:35:47
Speaker
ten folks or twelve folks which can still be back and forth but into this realm of three people go off in a room. What can i give you something to talk about but it doesn't even really matter so much what we assign you to talk about what's important is that you guys can go off share experiences. Together and create those meaningful connections tricky that are the ones that you're talking about.
Global Impact of HubSpot Bootcamps
00:36:10
Speaker
So when you started in 2018, there were, let's make this fun and quizzatory. How many HubSpot bootcamps were there? You went from zero to how many? Well, we started with one to build out the program. And then from there, I think, I don't know, Dan and I were probably each running
00:36:34
Speaker
maybe six, five or six. You were running a lot of different instances, but it was the same class, right? It was the same class. That's right. So I ran. So just to set a little background here. So Dan was teaching prospecting. So we called his the pipeline generation bootcamp. So the first part of the sales process. And then I was, um, I was teaching like the, the, the sales skills from discovery on, and we called it the sales skills bootcamp. So folks would often take,
00:37:01
Speaker
Well, they did it in different orders. You didn't have to take Dan's first, just depending on where your need was, but they would often take the prospecting bootcamp with Dan, and then they would come into the more discovery-oriented bootcamp with me. Dave, who teaches pipeline generation bootcamp now? Someone who is very talented. I can't remember their name off the top of my head. All right. Well, we'll come back to that.
00:37:25
Speaker
Narrator voice it's trig v o He runs on props That's for sure Right. So just just for quizzicles, you know now that you're out at hub spot. How many how many boot camps do they have now? Oh Gosh, I think the last time I heard this may have changed, but I think it was like 15 different boot camps and across multi-disciplines Well, let's insert thematically in terms of classes. How many are there?
00:37:55
Speaker
Thematically in terms of, Oh, you mean like, like you, you, you taught one of those. So how many, how many others are there now? Oh, gosh. Uh, I don't know. It moved eventually into HubSpot Academy or I was a little bit distanced. Yeah. There are, there are, as we're talking about your life with us with HubSpot, it went from nothing to two. Now there are eight different boot camps.
00:38:23
Speaker
Wow. And in multiple languages as well. And in four different languages, they're taught in English, Spanish, French, and German. So there are 32, eight times four, so 32 different boot camps running every quarter of which now, what was the biggest class that you ever had, David? I maybe had a hundred, I mean, well, I maybe had a hundred to 120 folks across six different
00:38:53
Speaker
six different instances of the class that I was running. And Dan may have done equivalently, so maybe a couple hundred people every quarter or so. Gotcha. The need for the breakouts, wow. Yeah, my last pipeline generation bootcamp, I had 350 in one class across 12 time zones around the world.
00:39:13
Speaker
Unbelievable. No large part due to the foundational work that you did. That kind of makes the dialing section a little bit more tricky, doesn't it? How many, in my last, because you talked about the breakout rooms, which is a really big part of it, how many breakout rooms did I assign my class to? I think I remember this, so I'm going to guess, but wasn't it like 50?
00:39:43
Speaker
85. Holy cow. Zoom might have listed they used to have a limit of 50 breakout rooms. Nope. I had 85 breakout rooms with five people in each breakout room. I had one guy from Israel who I accidentally assigned to a room with four AI note-taking robots.
00:40:04
Speaker
So now we can't, now we don't allow AA, AA, no sinking robots. So the point is you created something that is truly meaningful to literally hundreds of people. And I know you want to downplay that, but it's, it's now so integral into the part of the HubSpot experience. I honestly think it's a privilege to be able to teach it and teach my version of
00:40:31
Speaker
I think it's a really special program and I think it was launched in a very special time and a special community as well. I think what's nice is that as leaders of the program we could bring people together again around a common mission and sharing something very valuable for that group.
00:40:48
Speaker
But the people that were there as well and showing up to these sessions and being willing to go into breakout rooms and being willing to share with their peers what their challenges were and how they were dealing with those challenges. I feel like a lot of the knowledge they impart it was from the curriculum and what we took them through. But I feel like some of the most memorable things that people took from those lessons were those breakout rooms and those relationships and those other nuggets that they discovered away from the teaching that even we did.
00:41:17
Speaker
I want to dig into that for a second and the content in particular because the sales skills one that you led was I think the most transformative for me. And did you just have all of that in you? Did you work with a bunch of people to create that curriculum or how did those themes come up? Yeah, that's a great question. So I'm not really like a visionary type person.
00:41:44
Speaker
I can't sit around a room and come up with methodologies out of thin air, but what I'm really good at is taking things from other people and optimizing them. The other thing I would say, I think one of my superpowers is that I'm a bit of a slow learner and I'm not as much of an intuitive type of person. I need to break things down to make them make sense to me. I need to struggle with them a little bit.
Winehouse's Future Plans and AI in Sales
00:42:10
Speaker
I need to think of different
00:42:11
Speaker
Alternatives and make them make sense and that can often be like a slow process For me, which a little aggravating sometimes, but I do feel like I go deep and once I do get something I get it very well So I think a lot of what the boot camp ultimately turned into was my journey through learning how to sell One of the big principles of the you know, the course the very first slide is like the three sales sale. It's breaking down even a discovery call and
00:42:39
Speaker
into again, you know, what are you trying to, like, why are we here? You know, then what's might be the right solution for you? Then how does that solution get implemented? And I, I just need things simple. And so I feel like a lot of what I took, I took a little bit of like Brian Halligan, a little bit of peek a poodle, a little bit of Dan Tyer, a little bit of David off a little bit of other partners who I run into and tried to distill it down to something that could be conveyed easily. And it was also very actionable.
00:43:09
Speaker
for folks and really the curriculum did not change very much. And I think it's still very similar today in terms of the folks that are teaching the discovery bootcamp because a lot of it was very evergreen type principles. It was just conveyed in the right way for the partners that we were trying to assist. So 15 years in, you left for greener pastures. What's next for you?
00:43:37
Speaker
Yeah so part of it is I'm taking a little bit of time. It's a good question what I contemplated for a while doing this for fifteen years having a great time doing it but eventually I got to a point where you know my kids are out of the house at this point which is really lovely. I want to do a little bit more traveling. I want to figure out the right next thing for me but I'm in a position where I could take a little bit of a breath in order to be able to do so so.
00:44:06
Speaker
That's some of what I'm doing right now, in addition to spending a lot of time on the pickleball courts. If we have any pickleball players within the community, hit me up. I've been doing a lot of that. I've been doing some offline type ventures, which is topic for a different call, but around e-commerce business acquisition. So I have a little side gig going on at the same time.
00:44:29
Speaker
And then the next thing that I really wanna do that I haven't had a ton of time yet or mental energy yet but it will be the next thing that I'm looking into is to do some exploration of how I can continue to use my skills in terms of sales coaching and enablement to continue to make an impact on other firms. And I thought of a couple different ways that I can do that. So one is fairly straightforward which is in a sales coaching or sales consulting type of a role and I might start to explore a little bit of that.
00:44:56
Speaker
through any folks that are interested in that, that I might be a good fit for. Hit me up. It's something I'll be exploring over the next couple months. Don't quite have the model for it yet or exactly how I'll do that or how I'll take that to market. I know how I'll do it, but how I'll take it to market. But that's something I'm considering. The second thing, which is a little bit more exploratory in nature, is I want to continue to explore this intersection of community and sales and how companies can use community to better enable
00:45:25
Speaker
Both their partners but also their prospects and customers so they can drive more. Selling you know i worry a little bit about the future of sales with with a and how a lot of the work that like you do as a sales person which is like looking through lists and doing research and answering questions and.
00:45:45
Speaker
A lot of that can eventually potentially be automated, especially from a buyer's perspective. A buyer think like I just want to answer, you know, X, Y, and Z question or give me a list of pricing or come up with scenarios for me. But what I don't think can necessarily be replicated is this idea of potentially building community, including among your prospects of folks that are on a similar mission and path and both offering help with that community, but also having it benefit you.
00:46:13
Speaker
Through sales or you know deeper penetration within the market and I think there's something there. In terms of bringing community out among a set of our universe of prospects and customers together that can both benefit them and benefit businesses and I like to spend some more time coming up with some ways to do that I have some ideas.
00:46:36
Speaker
but I like to come up and go deeper in that. That would be brilliant. I think you're wrong about AI, David. I don't think AI is ever really going to replace a good salesperson, but I do think it helps in sales speeding up your efforts for sure. But I think in 2024, there's never been a better time, a more important time to be empathetic in selling.
00:47:04
Speaker
That's the thing that's never going to be replicated. Being clever couldn't matter less, but being empathetic matters more than anything right now, which there's an entire generation of people selling CRM software who owe that to you.
00:47:19
Speaker
and who emulate you in that. So as you're thinking of your next steps, I think you should take note of the fact that the work that you did should affect the next work because we're all out here just trying to follow what we were taught by the man. Yeah, I think that's a good point. I probably said that a little inelegantly in terms of AI and sales. I do agree with you, Trigby, that there will be a place for empathy
00:47:45
Speaker
in the process and a human touch and consensus or stakeholder building. And I do think all of those things are valuable. I just think more and more, if you think about being able to systematize something, that that is something that can potentially be taken out of a human salesperson's hand and into an agent's hand, for instance. The empathy is harder to do, but I think a lot of the sales process can be systematized.
00:48:15
Speaker
What i don't think or i think is hard to systematize is building a community of people with shared purpose and vision.
Reflections and E-commerce Ventures
00:48:24
Speaker
And helping to unlock what's within that community especially if you have the right value proposition to help help them grow and further their mission. In addition to tools like sales people empathy and ai as well.
00:48:39
Speaker
It is a unique skill set to be able to connect with your potential customer, sympathize, empathize with them, answer their questions, and then start to steer a conversation to where it can be mutually beneficial. And as a group, I think that is where a lot of the power came inside of my participation in these groups. And so you learn so much in just being able to bounce ideas off each other. It's fantastic.
00:49:08
Speaker
So after 15 years and what was ostensibly a large tech startup and you now a New York Stock Exchange two billion dollar a year juggernaut. What are some things that you reflect back on your on your time there. What do you what do you what are you happy about. What do you wish you could have done differently. What are some what are you taking away from your time at HubSpot. Good question. Now it's definitely a special time at HubSpot. I think one of the things that maybe I knew but I know
00:49:39
Speaker
more now through a fuller experience is, well, here's the thing. Interestingly enough, I am not big on change, Triggy and Dave. You wouldn't think that, right? I've kind of done entrepreneurial ventures in my life. I went to a tech company. I did sales. But I'm always of this mind, like, gosh, once you can figure something out, you can just leverage that and use it. And to some extent, I think I found that a little bit with the bootcamps, because a lot of what we were selling were
00:50:07
Speaker
evergreen type principles in terms of sales that worked out really well for me cuz I like to figure out I can I take a long time to get comfortable with something to do it well and that I like to do that. So in general I'm not good with with change but I think working with how spot and working within the partner community and working you know to sell the hotspot product.
00:50:29
Speaker
It like taught me like things change and things change a lot. And I remember, you know, one of the thing that Brian Halligan would always say is like, we're, you know, we're in the second inning here of a nine inning game. And I think that was very true, but sometimes you gotta, you gotta rip me like kicking and screaming, you know, to keep up with change. And I think it's something I'm a little bit better at now for having gone through it.
00:50:55
Speaker
I think it is very challenging if there are people listening to the call that are in the HubSpot ecosystem or HubSpot community or that work at HubSpot or HubSpot partners. You know it too because you feel it. The product changes. It's hard to keep up. The go-to-market motion changes. The partnership agreement changes just when you figure it out and you think you got it.
00:51:21
Speaker
Right project lion change right the sunset a project lion after after five years and for good reason like there were better ways ultimately to bring the knowledge that we had out through folks trig v and the academy and cams and different arrangements But I think all of those things are very hard to learn sometimes when you're going through them I think now I have the at least at this moment in my life and at my time I have the privilege of being able to look back on those things
00:51:47
Speaker
and saying, damn, that was really painful, like to go through and hard and challenging, but I don't think I would want it any other way. I think it gave me a much better appreciation for growth. Because as much as I'd still like to be, you know, telling people, you never heard about marketing, you know what you can do with your website. Like, you know, that wasn't going to stay consistent for 10 years, but I really appreciate
00:52:13
Speaker
to I think about HubSpot, the company and the people I work with and the partner program is it can be hard to adjust to this. No one's pretending that it's easy, but I think the community is all coming from a very good place of ultimately helping people, helping them market and sell better. And if that means we got to change and roll with the punches sometimes and work through them together that we know because we're all coming from a good place and trying to go in a good place that we're able to adapt to those things. So I have a, I have a better appreciation.
00:52:43
Speaker
for that at this point.
00:52:45
Speaker
Wow. Awesome. One last thing before we wrap this up. I know what David's e-commerce side hustle is, and if you know David, I'd encourage you to reach out and ask him about it. I know I'm going to respect that he doesn't want to talk about it here, but it is the most awesome and hilarious thing that given he just talked about how he doesn't like change, it is the most eye-openingly cool thing. Definitely, if you know David, reach out to him about it.
00:53:14
Speaker
It's a fun teaser because you're not going to guess it. Not in a million years. I'm not the face of the product, which is why I'd rather stay away from what the exact product is on this call, but I love talking about it. So if anyone's interested in the world of e-comm and small business e-comm acquisition, I'm always happy to chat about it. For sure, which leads us to our last thing. How do people get ahold of you, David? Yeah. So the best way to get ahold of me is on LinkedIn.
00:53:44
Speaker
You can find me, last name is W-E-I-N-H-A-U-S, first name David of course, and happy to make connections with folks and correspond a little bit, although I'm having a little bit of downtime right now, so just be patient if the back and forth can take a little while to do, but I very much welcome connections and conversation.
00:54:08
Speaker
Okay, after my captain, David, thank you, doesn't seem to encapsulate it, but thank you. We're even close, yep.