# Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams · How to Scale Customer Success Successfully · How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani 20Sales · Sep 27, 2024 · 57 min · 10,410 words Speakers: Harry Stebbings, Jeetu Mahtani Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-501af1a9/ ## Cold open **Harry Stebbings** [0:00]: This is 20 sales ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:00]: with me, Harry Stebbings. Now 20 sales is the monthly show that dives into the world of sales, revealing the tips, tactics, and strategies of the best heads of sales. Today, we're joined by Jeetu Mahtani. Under his leadership, Jeetu grew the non US HubSpot business from, check this out, 3,000,000 in ARR to close to billion in ARR. He then moved to lead the customer success org at HubSpot, which expanded to managing 1500 people in CS. 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More than 1,500 organizations including Okta, Adobe, Workday, Zoom, and Finastra run revenue on Clari to improve win rates, prevent slip deals, forecast with accuracy, and boost the productivity of all revenue critical employees. To learn more about how you can create, convert, and close revenue with Clari, visit clari.com. You have now arrived at your destination. ## Conversation **Harry Stebbings** [2:24]: Jeetu, I am so excited for this. Listen, I just chatted to Brian at HubSpot obviously before this. He said so many wonderful things. So thank you so much for joining me today. **Jeetu Mahtani** [2:33]: Oh, appreciate it, Harry. And big thanks to Brian too. I'm a big fan of your show, so I'm excited to be here. **Harry Stebbings** [2:38]: Brian told me that I had to start with some context, which was you first wanted to be in product, and he said that you didn't get the job. So talk to me about that moment and how you came to HubSpot then as one of the very, very, first. **Jeetu Mahtani** [2:53]: Oh, wow. I joked that I was fired even before I started at HubSpot. Back in the day, my business partner and I, Peter Caputa, who was a former HubSpotter, ran a business together. So Pete and I ran this event registration business that was a mix of Eventbrite and Facebook in those days. we made some good progress, but eventually we got to a point where we were like, we need to sell the business and go get real jobs. So we drove to One Broadway in Cambridge. We walk into this office, Harry, it's probably a 100 square feet. There are four people in the office, Brian in one corner, Dharmesh in the other corner, Mark Roberge, who was HubSpot's first VP of Sales, you've had him on the show, and Patrick Fitzsimmons. We walk in and we're like, Brian, we're here to sell you our company. And you know, Brian goes like, you know, he just like rocks on his chair. He's like, no, we don't need your company, but we'll give you jobs. So he looks at Peter and he's asking Peter, what do you want to do? Pete's like, I want to be in sales. So he looks at Mark and he tells Mark, Mark, why don't you go write up Peter's sales contract? Mark's like, don't have sales contracts. And Brian's like, just download one and give him a sales contract since we're hiring Peter as a sales rep. And he looks at me and he's like, Jeetu, what do you want to do? And in those days, Harry, my background is in computer science. I was the product person who generated all the code with Peter in our startup. So was like, Brian, I want to be a product manager. And Brian goes again like this. And he's like, Nope, I'm HubSpot's product manager. We don't have a job for you. So while Pete is writing his contract with Mark getting his sales role, I'm kind of like standing at the entryway of this 100 square feet office wondering what the heck do I do now? two years later, Brian and the recruitment team reached out and I ended up joining two years later as a sales rep. involved. **Harry Stebbings** [4:47]: So clearly they liked you so much post hiring you that they decided to send you far away as soon as possible because they put you in charge of international G2 And you did such an amazing job. Brian was telling me all about what a killer you were for them, opening up eight offices around the world. First office in Dublin. Can you talk to me? What are your single biggest piece of advice when it comes to going international? I know it's broad, but I didn't to corner you. **Jeetu Mahtani** [5:16]: Yeah. I think the one that I would always keep in mind is like international is a huge opportunity for any company. If you look at the S S&P 500, which is the 500 largest companies in the US by market cap, half of their revenue comes from outside the US. So I would be thinking about international like this huge leg of growth, which I think any serious company that's going to be multibillion someday should be thinking seriously about. The other advice I would give you, and because we went through this is we were going to open Dublin in 2012, but we shelved the idea because our retention metrics were not great. Our gross retention was like low 70s. Essentially, the economics were not ready to make that big investment to open an international presence. What is ready, Jeetu, do you think? What I would say is I would look at something like LTV LTV to CAC. CAC. Like, have you figured out how to acquire customers at reasonable CAC and then keep them around through great service. So you have great LTV to CAC. In 2012, our LTV to CAC was probably, for every dollar we would put in, we would get two to three back, But we got it closer to four, five, six over time. And I think that was like, all right, we have great product market fit, not just with acquiring customers, but we can keep them around. That's when we decided to pull the plug or, you know, go in and open Dublin in 2013. **Harry Stebbings** [6:58]: Jeetu, do CACs get worse or better over time? If you think about the CACs of enterprise in year one of doing it versus the CACs of enterprise in year four of doing it. so remaining in that segment, is it the same? Is it less? Is it more? **Jeetu Mahtani** [7:15]: I would say it was higher in the earlier years and then plateaued or flattened after we got enough of brand recognition, but it actually did go up in the earlier years. **Harry Stebbings** [7:29]: Yeah. And so then we have like good enough CACs to LTVs and we're like, you know what? we're ready to go international. What did HubSpot do really well to enable the international expansion to be a success? **Jeetu Mahtani** [7:44]: There were a couple of things we did that I think were really key to our success. One is when we opened Dublin, it was an expensive investment and we were like, all right, it's expensive, but it's a big bet for us. So when we opened the office, we actually sent an expat team of five people from the Cambridge office and we hired five people in Dublin. It was like this one to one match, Harry. Like it was crazy in those days, but we were like, we're picking the right market. We're hiring with great quality and we're going to give them the right resources. So if it fails, it's not because we didn't do everything we could control. We did everything we could control. So that was one thing we did is just simply like over in the early days to get the right team on the ground with the right help. **Harry Stebbings** [8:36]: What ARR were we at when we made the expansion into Dublin? **Jeetu Mahtani** [8:40]: Oh, it was tiny. It was tiny. It was like, million when we opened Dublin. **Harry Stebbings** [8:47]: Would you not advise angel Investments Day that that is too early? I would say you have not nearly saturated your domestic core market. Absolutely double down there until you're 20, 25, 30. **Jeetu Mahtani** [9:01]: In our world, and I still think it's true, is maybe 10 years ago to do international, boy, it's a huge investment. I don't think it's that type of an investment today because you've got much more efficient go to market motions like PLG, freemium, and also with digital CS, like you can acquire global customers and be able to service them in a really efficient manner. **Harry Stebbings** [9:28]: So with the different methods that we have today, PLG, digital CS, would you still advise companies to go international as early as you did? **Jeetu Mahtani** [9:37]: I would, as long as your core market has good economics. If your core market doesn't, then hold off, like you're not ready to go and go into a completely different region. I would also add, when you go international, you're going to get some signals, Harry, like the markets pull you in. It's not like, you you wake up one morning and you're like, all right, it's time to go international. So for example, in our case, in those days, we had signals with like partners in the UK who were doing great. We were getting inbound leads, just not from the US, but from lots of English speaking Europe. So in some ways, almost like with the work we were doing in The US, it was resonating in other parts of the globe and the market was pulling us in. So the market was pulling us in and what we ended up doing is like, all right, before we open the office, I ended up hiring a bunch of young dads who would show up at 4AM in Cambridge because they wanted to get home at 2PM to be with their kids. And we were like, let's validate that demand. So we were selling early in the morning from Cambridge calling into the UK and we proved out that pieces that we can acquire and retain them before we actually ended up opening Dublin in 2013. **Harry Stebbings** [10:50]: I mean, I love that in terms of validating the demand there with with the time zones. Can I ask then, is time zones the only reason you do international expansion today? Given the technologies that we have to make cross border selling and great product experience and great touch points with customers so easy, is time zone the only reason that you do international expansion today? **Jeetu Mahtani** [11:10]: I think time zone is a big one. You do get leverage by hiring talent in different geographies at different price points. So remember LTV to CAC, like the other way you can influence that ratio is getting talent at a better price point in other countries. I would also say partners matter. I think partners want to see that you're committing to the market by having talent in their country. Customers care about like if you're selling and servicing Germany, you can get by to a certain extent, but at certain point they want to actually see your brand in Germany. **Harry Stebbings** [11:42]: Do you always have to send talent from the core home destination to indoctrinate the new talent in the new country? **Jeetu Mahtani** [11:49]: I think it was a playbook that worked for us really, really, well. The idea is like you bring this, what I would call a tiger team. The Tiger team coming from Boston is going to be in Dublin, paired one on one or in a really nice ratio. They help hire onboard, help these early teams succeed. And over time, you figure out how to fire yourself and you leave that team and leave it to local leadership. The Tiger team tends to be there between six to 12 months. In my case, for example, like there's this whole idea of like, you need to get a local leader. I was the local leader in Dublin. While I was in Dublin, I took one of the members of the Tiger team. His name was Sam Schulman And Sam moved to Sydney to open our Australia operation and be part of the landing team. So this playbook of sending an expat team, they open one office, they stay six to 12 months, they figure out that region, then they get shipped to another office so they can go and open that region and that office. **Harry Stebbings** [12:46]: Did you find rep ramp time? I know this is a very specific question. Did you find rep ramp time varied by geography? **Jeetu Mahtani** [12:54]: It did vary by geography. And what I would say is the countries that were similar to the US, UK, Netherlands, like the ramp time was comparable. In fact, the economics were actually even better for some of those countries in Europe. **Harry Stebbings** [13:11]: What was that ramp time? How long was it before you expected people to start closing and start paying for themselves? **Jeetu Mahtani** [13:17]: The ramp time is somewhere between six to nine months. Can be a little bumpy, but once you get to that six to nine month mark, you can start seeing like a fairly consistent trajectory as they ramp to greater productivity. **Harry Stebbings** [13:31]: How so I'm so interested. I know we had the schedule, but sod it, I'm enjoying this too much. How How large an ACV average contract value or customer value do you have to have to justify a sales rep? **Jeetu Mahtani** [13:43]: If you are sort of like mid market, like HubSpot sweet spot, which we would define as 25 to 500 employees, you need an ACV of somewhere between 10 to 12k ACV to make it work from a return on rep investment. **Harry Stebbings** [14:00]: But when you were three million ARR and in Dublin in the early days, you were only serving SMBs in those days, correct? **Jeetu Mahtani** [14:08]: Yep. It was largely up to 500 employees, like small and mid market companies. I think what you're getting to is like the economics are hard when you are in that ACV and that is true. But as we added more products, as retention got better, the reps could cross sell and upsell other products like rep PPR started to increase. So the economics worked over time. But in the early days, yeah, like it was an investment. It was, LTV to CAC or 1 is to 4, 1 is to 5 and over time, depending on the segment and geography, it became became one is to seven, one is to eight. **Harry Stebbings** [14:45]: When you look back with the benefits of hindsight, G2, what were some of the biggest mistakes that you did in the international expansion? **Jeetu Mahtani** [14:52]: I would say as we expanded globally, Harry, we use this framework that we would call operational complexity and the size of the market. You can almost think of like, all right, I pick a country and I say, is it easy or difficult to do business in? I would call it the operational complexity. Then I would say, okay, for that country, what is my TAM or addressable market? So we graded every country on complexity versus TAM, and you can almost like look at a series of bubbles on the left, the US, big TAM, blue in color because it is low complexity. On the other end, you have something like China, big market, but red in color because of the complexity. And in between you've got France, Germany, Spain, and all the other countries. Our playbook really worked great in those countries that were closer to the US Germany, France, Netherlands, Australia. But as we went to the right where the complexity increased, let's say Japan, one of the mistakes we or I made is that playbook of sending an expat team was not an option, Harry, because of the language in Japan. Like they obviously, didn't speak Japanese. So I was not able to send that expat leader to Japan like I was able to do in Dublin and Sydney. So I had to hire from day zero, day one, all local. It was hard to do that tiger team approach. And some of our early hires in Japan, they sounded like me. They sounded like the Westerners. And I fell into that pothole because I was hiring like I was hiring in the US or in the UK. And that was a mistake because if you want to sell into Japan, you really need to love Japan. You really need to understand the business culture and the way business gets done over there. So I had a mistake with the hiring in the early days of Japan. The other one I would say is, that operational complexity, Harry, low complexity to high complexity, the color of the bubble tells you, is it red, high complex, blue, easy, and the size of the bubble tells you how big the market is. If you think about your go to market and you are going into one of those complex countries like say Japan, for example, it's more on the right side, more complex. I will be thoughtful about your go to market on being direct or going through partners and our reseller ecosystem. We try to do both. We had a direct team in Japan and also a reseller team. My learning from that experience is when you have a complex country and a product that needs help, HubSpot Pro or Enterprise does need implementation help. you are better off in those complex countries going through a partner ecosystem as opposed to going all in with the direct sales and CST. So that was the other lesson we learned is match your go to market to your product complexity and your country complexity. Don't try and do like a one size fits all go to market in every country. You got to think about the country dynamics, the country complexity, the help customers need when they need to implement your product, and then match that with the go to market that will service them the best **Harry Stebbings** [18:10]: You mentioned that the CS element. I I I do want dive into that later, but I I do to cover sales first because you played such an important role in scaling from you know, million, where you mentioned that with you the Dublin office, to either 600 million or a billion, one of the numbers. So my question to you is it looks like completely up into the right when you look at HubSpot scaling of their sales revenues. What allowed HubSpot to scale sales so efficiently when you review what you did in the early days in probably that 3 to million range? **Jeetu Mahtani** [18:41]: I would say the inbound engine with like we were creating tons of content that was resulting in leads, like that became a machine, Harry. It's still a machine. I really think when I think about moats that HubSpot has, it's like that inbound engine, its blog, its website. The blog still gets about million visitors even today, each month. All of HubSpot gets like, I think million. The traffic and that inbound engine made it really easy to instrument demand going like this, hiring to service that demand going like this. So it became very much like, running a calculation to figure out like if demand is going like this, let's continue hiring to service that demand. And the ARR just kept going up to the right. The other one that I would say is what we would call like this predictable and scalable approach to growth. Like we got really good with hiring great sales reps, onboarding them, coaching them and making them productive. So that whole approach we took of like acquiring talent and making them productive was another reason why it worked so well. I think the other one that I think many companies interestingly still don't think about today is a partner ecosystem. I still see so many SaaS companies not digging into how do I get like efficient growth, not just through my talent, but through a partner ecosystem. And HubSpot has about half of its revenue coming through the partner ecosystem. It's big. It's a huge part of HubSpot being driven by these amazing partners. **Harry Stebbings** [20:17]: Okay, so I have to dig I have to dig in on some elements there. One on the SEO side, that's insane. million of million going to the blog itself. Question for you, for founders listening today, is that SEO heavy approach still applicable today in a much more challenging SEO environment? **Jeetu Mahtani** [20:36]: I still think it's something you have to do. 10 years or 15 years ago, it was easy with SEO because the formula was like, you got to create content, you got to create blogs, you got to think about your conversion paths. But I do think distribution is harder these days. Like you got to think about social, you got to think about, your presence on LinkedIn. Are your founders and execs creating content on LinkedIn. The philosophy is still the same, which is it's all about content. But I think the way you think about content, the way you distribute it has gotten really layered. There's just many more layers you need to think about when it comes to like SEO and content. And where do you spread it to get your leads and customers? **Harry Stebbings** [21:18]: I would say it's actually the same. It's just the format with which you can create it has exploded. And so it's like and the the biggest challenge I find with startup founders is actually they do 10 different types of channels. And it's like, no. If you build the most effective SMB sales channel on TikTok, you will have millions of fans and you can redirect that back to your landing page. That's just the same as having a great HubSpot blog in the early days. It's a different format, but it still redirects the same way. And I think that's just the thing that's changed, which is there's just a lot more options in terms of format. On the partner program, I hear you, but I worry that a lot of founders will go, partner programs, that's our holy grail. And they're often a lot harder than people think. They require a lot more investment. What stage should one think about partner programs and what is required to do partner programs well? **Jeetu Mahtani** [22:12]: I would say the stage you should start thinking about a partner program is when you have clarity on what role partners can play with your product. If you're a very transactional product, you're probably not going to get partners to like bundle services on top of HubSpot because the way they make money is through retainers and services they offer to their clients. In the case of HubSpot, it worked really well because we needed partners to create, help customers create content, landing pages, do analytics. And the same thing has played out in all the other hubs that HubSpot has offered over the last many years. Think about it when you're clear that there is a need for other people to help your customers succeed. And other people could be just not like service providers. It could be app partners, it could be ecosystem partners. So that's probably the stage that I would start thinking about partners. **Harry Stebbings** [23:04]: What level of investment is required for a partner program to be successful? **Jeetu Mahtani** [23:08]: I would say you do need someone to think about like partner acquisition and partner enablement. I also think founders should not make it super complicated because just like when you're selling to prospects by creating content, your content is going to get found by partners also, And that's what happened with HubSpot is all the content we were creating was getting found by partners. And they would call in saying, hey, we found you through your content. And I actually want to offer services on top of HubSpot to my end customers. Peter Caputa, who I would consider as the founder of HubSpot's partner program, connected the dots. And he was like, we need someone to help our customers. We have these hundreds of partners over there who are calling and saying, we would like to offer services on top of your product. We were like, all right, like how do we enable these partners? How do we teach them what services they should offer? How do you price those services? How do you sell those services? So I would go back to you need someone to help you think about partner enablement. **Harry Stebbings** [24:09]: Does every company not want someone to help their customers extra leverage? I like statements where you can prove or disprove them. When you have like, sure. You you want help my customers? Yeah, Great. Thanks, Jeetu. two. Everyone would want that, but it requires an insane investment upfront to get it over the line. It requires incredible education on partner integrations, that onboarding, how they talk about your product, how they educate customers to your product, and then the lifecycle management of that. I think it's so much more complex than just like, hey, when you need more help. Do you know what I mean? **Jeetu Mahtani** [24:46]: By the way, I'd push back a little bit. I don't know if every company would need that help from partners because sometimes companies are building products that are purely PLG driven all the way from being acquired to renewing. It could be very SMB. Maybe Dropbox is an example. I don't think partners play a big role in that type of a product. But when you do need services help and you don't need it to be just your team providing those services help, And you have to keep in mind, partners will just not say, yeah, we're just going to do what you want us to do. They're like, how do I make money? How do I create more cash flow in my business? How do I make my business more attractive to outside investors? So this is where you need to think about, well, what are the services partners can offer? You do make an interesting point, which is it is expensive. And I wouldn't say you have to always do this, but one of the things HubSpot did in the early days and to some later stages too, is if you want to become a partner, you need to buy HubSpot. You need to learn the product. You need to learn how to generate leads using HubSpot. So it's almost like you're being treated like a customer. You prove yourself out and at the right time, you can become a member of HubSpot's partner. Can I ask you what broke in the HubSpot scaling of sales teams? There are a couple that come to mind, Harry. Like if I just maybe use international as an example, one of the things we saw like when we went to Germany is our English content that we were creating. Half of our leads coming in from Germany, prospects in Germany were reading our English content. That was actually really cool because we were able to get a fair amount of demand just from English content and even before we started localizing into German. So that helped us like, all right, we can get a sales team going, but we also knew we needed to invest in German content to fill the funnel with more leads that will get found by a German content and just not through our English content. Where it did break is we underestimated that effort in Japan because in Japan, only 1% of Japanese prospects were getting found by our English content. I think we overestimated the speed at which we could get that Japanese funnel going. **Harry Stebbings** [26:57]: Were you tempted to pull Japan? The team wasn't working there. The content wasn't working there. If I was in leadership, I'd be saying, let's get the fuck out of here. **Jeetu Mahtani** [27:06]: I'm not sure, Harry. I think, you know, if you are at HubSpot scale, billion plus, you have **Harry Stebbings** [27:11]: to figure out Japan. You did Japan when it was hard. When you look back, what did you not do? It could be in sales, could be just January, that you wish you had done. **Jeetu Mahtani** [27:21]: There are couple I'll give you. One is, interestingly, are markets like Brazil, India that are starting to get pretty attractive. But to succeed in those markets, need to think about like local talent, you need to think about currencies. And now we're starting to like get more serious about those markets. Like we have a bunch of like great activity happening in India. So that would be one that I wish we started a little earlier is thinking about like countries and the entity strategy. The other one that I wish we started sooner is there was a point, Harry, that we were getting MRR from 150 countries. It was nuts. Like there was revenue coming from every country and it got really hard from of investment standpoint to prioritize like, hey, how do we keep growing when we have MRR and demands from all these countries? So what we decided to do over time is like, we're going to take a portfolio strategy, which is like there are 150 countries, but which are the countries we want to be number one or number two? Not number three, number one or number two. So we call them like accelerated growth countries. And there were only seven countries that made up that accelerated growth. And then there was a second bucket that we called steady growth that would get like what we would call run rate investments. And then a third bucket that was like more like partner led efficient growth. So we did that in a later stage where we were like, we can't keep operating like this. We only have finite budgets and we need to think of it as a portfolio where there is a small group of stocks and countries that we gotta like win and be number one or number two. So that happened over time. **Harry Stebbings** [29:03]: Which country did you think you'd be a success in? And it was way harder than you thought. And which were you like, that's gonna be shit. And it was way better than you thought? **Jeetu Mahtani** [29:12]: Japan, it was really hard. Germany was hard, but we knew what we had to do, which is what I mentioned earlier is like, if you're thinking about a non English country, think about your demand even before you go and open an office. Like I would almost hire a marketer before you actually hire your first sales rep, maybe 18 to 24 months in advance they can the get the That's interesting. Why would you do that and how would you structure that? The way I would think about it is like, why would you have sales reps showing up at an expensive office with no leads and purely cold calling? Like that's not the most efficient way to set up your team for success. **Harry Stebbings** [29:48]: Is it AE's responsibility to acquire their own leads? **Jeetu Mahtani** [29:52]: I would say in today's world, it's a mix of if you're investing in marketing, well, let's get an ROI on marketing. But we also have to appreciate that marketing can be responsible for like the full number. There's a percent of that number that needs to come from AE's own activities, working with BDRs through other non marketing type **Harry Stebbings** [30:13]: Everyone says BDRs and SDRs is dead now. The cold outbound, the cold email, cold LinkedIn. Pfft. 2015, do you agree or do you think that's a glib statement? **Jeetu Mahtani** [30:26]: I would not fully agree with it. I would partly agree with it, with it's not the most efficient go to market when you have pure cold calling with BDR. But when you get much more sophisticated, you think about your target market, you think about your target lists, you think about first party and third party signals that you can get today when buyers are researching solutions like yours. So you're not doing a pure outbound, pure cold call, what we would call almost like all bound, Harry. It's a mix of inbound and outbound whereby you're knocking on doors, but it's the right doors. When you speak with them, you know they have some pain. And this is where it comes back to like, how do you enable your BDRs and AEs to be able to have those type of conversations when they don't know your brand, but we know there is a pain that they're trying to solve. **Harry Stebbings** [31:20]: In the early days, the founders need to create the playbook, the sales playbook. **Jeetu Mahtani** [31:24]: I do strongly believe that founders need to play an active role in the creation or the co creation of the sales playbook. And I would also encourage all founders early stages, I don't know, until you get to 100 or more customers, you need to be on every sales call. One is you're not filled with dozens of sales reps. You have maybe in the early days, couple, maybe two, three sales reps. And there's some magic in the early days when a prospect hears from a founder on why they built the product, what is the vision of the product? Prospects know like you are a no brand company, you're in the early days of speaking directly with the founder. So I think it helps you know, win in those early days. The other is I don't think founders get everything right on day one. HubSpot didn't get everything right on day one. We made several tweaks, pivots over time. You do need to create that feedback loop. And founders, what better way than to be on a live call hearing about prospects and what challenges they're dealing with. So you can create that feedback loop back into the product development. **Harry Stebbings** [32:26]: Speaking of creating feedback loops, always think about momentum and building momentum in teams. To what extent would you advise early sales teams to focus on amazing, amazing marquee logos or just getting a load of customers in the door, high velocity, flooded with customers? Which approach would you focus on? **Jeetu Mahtani** [32:45]: It's a good question and I'm sure many or some will not agree with me. My school will be stop chasing elephants. If you are a mid market company, you have a big addressable market. Sure, a large marquee logo is expressing interest. Engage with them, but don't count on them as your answer to hitting your target. You want to still be prospecting into good fit companies who have a reasonable sales cycle which will help you build a predictable pipeline to get to your target. I think the risk is with marquee logos is people just get attracted to the sexiness of a marquee logo. And then you show up in the last day of the quarter only to realize the marquee logo sales or buying process and buying cycle doesn't match with your sales process. Don't go all into marquee logos. If you're a mid market company, figure out how to diversify your pipeline. **Harry Stebbings** [33:40]: I also find that actually people do it because they think it will lead to subsequent immense customer acquisition. And actually it has a much smaller impact than you think working with a large name company. People are generally like, well, it's only one or two of their divisions. Well, they've just got a new CEO who doesn't know what they're doing. Well, they just raised a big round of funding, so they're spending a load on tools. And so often people always reduce the importance of it anyway. **Jeetu Mahtani** [34:05]: I always say like revenue and customer acquisition, customer delight solves most problems. Like you just got figure out like how to create that momentum. **Harry Stebbings** [34:12]: Do you think it's unfair to unfair to say sales reps are coin operated? **Jeetu Mahtani** [34:16]: You do need to be money motivated if you want to be in sales or in any revenue producing team. The reality of the role. You also need to figure out like at the end of the day, the coins only keep coming and keep growing when your customers are succeeding. If you are coin operated and you're just acquiring customers for the sake of acquisition and they don't stick around and you have a leaky fund, that's not going to work for you long term, Mr. or Ms. sales rep. **Harry Stebbings** [34:43]: Speaking of coin operated and those coins keep coming, any big lessons on sales comp plans for sales teams? **Jeetu Mahtani** [34:50]: Big lessons would be at the end of the day, I would say a sales comp plan just drives behaviors at the end of the day. Like if you don't get the comp plan right, you're just going to end up with bad customers, bad behavior, bad culture. I would also add when you think about sales comp plan, think about what phase of growth you are in as a business. Like if you're an early stage founder, early stage company, velocity matters. Like you might have a sales comp plan that is a bit more indexed towards like simply raw acquisition. But as you grow bigger, you're going to start like thinking about like retention, cross selling, upselling. So think about how does your comp plan also evolve as the company and its phase of growth also evolves. **Harry Stebbings** [35:36]: Should customer success not also share in the financial incentive structure of an upsell or a retention? **Jeetu Mahtani** [35:45]: I believe they should. If you have the sales team that is getting rewarded for acquiring customers and you have the CS team that's only being recognized for driving usage, but not getting any recognition in the expansion of the customer, over time, you're going to get CS reps who are like, well, I was the one who helped the customer get the next product or expand into the platform. So I do think when you think about comp plans, you want to be clear about like what role do you want your CS team to play? If your CS team is a pure account management team, maybe there isn't something on the recognition like sales. But if your CS team is a revenue producing team, is I believe every CS team should be a revenue producing team, you want to structure their comp plan in the form of some kind of a basic variable. **Harry Stebbings** [36:37]: When you say a revenue producing team, you mean they are responsible for the upsell and the retention, correct? **Jeetu Mahtani** [36:43]: That is correct. Now, some teams will generate what we would call SQLs, and the sales team would close it. **Harry Stebbings** [36:50]: If incentives drive behaviors, which I think we both agree they do, and you incentivize me, a CS rep, with, you know, economics on upsell, G2. Jeetu, my dear customer, my dear customer, I think you could do with our CRM. I know you've got another CRM, but you could do with ours. It's much better for your needs, I promise you. It may not better for their needs, but the economic incentive alignment is to me, not to the benefit of the customer. In all cases, there will sometimes be misalignments. How do you prevent misalignments between provider and customer when the economic alignment is between the CS and the upsell? **Jeetu Mahtani** [37:26]: The way you would do that is having an incentive structure that measures on whether the customer is successful. If they buy a second or third product, are they actually using the product and getting usage out of it? And if they don't, then you know that it was oversold or the CS rep did not do a great job of positioning the right product to the customer. **Harry Stebbings** [37:46]: Do you see now CFOs bundling spend moving towards much fewer providers than we used to. **Jeetu Mahtani** [37:55]: Do you see that? I do see a wave of consolidation. Customers are looking to simplify their tech stack. And I just think, you know, there was some research done by HubSpot not too long ago where SMBs had a tech stack of about 250 apps. It was nuts. And we're seeing a wave of consolidation or at least while I was at HubSpot is like, how do we simplify? How do I connect the dots? Because companies and CFOs naturally are like, well, we need our investment to lead to efficient growth. It needs to be more durable and sustainable growth. And you can't do it when you have 10 different solutions disconnected, cobbled together. So they're like, well, how do we bring it all together so we can create alignment between our go to market teams so we can find out like the work marketing did, did it result in an ROI on that marketing investment? The customer sales acquired, did they get the right usage and expansion? So I do think having like a unified tech stack makes a difference. **Harry Stebbings** [38:55]: I think brand marketing is largely BS. I know that's unfair of me. So I'm probably going get pushed back on that. How would you push back on that? Because I just see it and I'm like, turn it off for a month and see how revenue goes. And everyone does that. And then the revenue was not impacted. And they're like, but it could be in years time. Am I wrong to be rude about brand marketing? **Jeetu Mahtani** [39:16]: I think you're partly right and partly wrong, Harry. **Harry Stebbings** [39:19]: Very charming, GT. You can tell me I'm wrong. I I I sometimes provoke for a reaction. **Jeetu Mahtani** [39:23]: Yeah, Yeah. No, I get where you're coming from. And I would say in the early days, I would be like, yeah, Harry's right. Like forget spending on brand, like put more content out there and prospects will find the content. It's a lot more predictable. We can attribute it better. But I think with brand marketing, gets harder with attribution on what that investment is actually resulting in. But I think it does make a difference depending on where you are as a company and what geographies you are going into, what segments you're trying to break into. Because I do think like if you're an enterprise, large company CIO looking into a solution, I just don't think you're always going to find the product through content. You're going to probably pay attention to the presence of that brand in different places. I'll give you a simple example. Do you watch Wimbledon? Do watch tennis? **Harry Stebbings** [40:15]: course I watch tennis. I'm a Brit. Yeah, I love Wimbledon. **Jeetu Mahtani** [40:18]: Perfect. Excellent. So I'm a tennis buff too. And the women's semifinal, one of the players had a HubSpot logo on her sleeve. That's brand marketing. I don't know how much was paid over there, but I got so many pings like, wow, like, you know, you guys are all over the place at Wimbledon. I mean, it makes a difference. Like, I think it helps like create awareness and you could still get there but it will take you so much more effort. **Harry Stebbings** [40:44]: So it's so funny when I said that I was thinking the one example that I disagree with actually is I don't know if you've seen but expensify sponsor some form of race car. I don't know if it's F1 or whatever race car it is and basically for two hours you see the driver and then Expensify, like on their helmet and I'm like that is great brand marketing. Two hours flat of just in your face Expensify or same with HubSpot in this respect with the tennis player who's got it on their arm. What are the biggest ways that startups mess up CS? **Jeetu Mahtani** [41:20]: By not investing in CS, by getting a team going on an acquisition, but not thinking about retention. When When is the right time to **Harry Stebbings** [41:29]: invest in CS? **Jeetu Mahtani** [41:30]: Just like founders are going to play a role in selling, I do think founders play a role in the really early days with CS type activities. Like, they need to learn like, what it's going to take for a customer to see results and stick around for haul. a long haul. In terms of the actual hiring of your first, second CS, I will think about it in two ways. One is how many customers do you have right now? And think about, to provide engagement to those customers, like, do you need a CS rep or not? The other is like, at what speed are you acquiring customers? Because if you see, customer count getting to a certain point, you should start planning in advance that you do need a CS rep. What I will add that I think is changing now quite dramatically is like you don't need CS type human engagements all the time. You can do that through self-service. You can do that through digital scaled emotions, whether it's a chatbot, it could be an academy, it could be help content. So do a lot of that. I would probably as founder, like try and get your first CS rep so you can get the structure and the process and right. But then don't keep investing in CS reps until you get a foundation of like self help and knowledge and content in play. **Harry Stebbings** [42:49]: Two elements I have to discuss before we do a quick fire. Number one is I often sit on boards and, you know, teams say to me, oh, you know what? That big customer, they slipped to next quarter, and that's why we missed our our quarterly goal. And I'm always like, what's the right way to respond to that, Jeetu, **Jeetu Mahtani** [43:07]: Why don't we role play, Harry? **Harry Stebbings** [43:09]: Okay. **Jeetu Mahtani** [43:10]: Sales rep and I'm your manager or the other way around? **Harry Stebbings** [43:13]: Sure, sure. So, like, G2, I'm sorry. Like, honestly, I thought they were going land and they just, they didn't. And so they moved into next quarter. Really sorry. **Jeetu Mahtani** [43:25]: Oh, that's too bad, Harry. Were you counting on that deal to hit your quarterly target? **Harry Stebbings** [43:32]: Yeah, **Jeetu Mahtani** [43:32]: Yeah, I was. Okay, well, sorry to hear they got pushed out to the next quarter. What deal stage did you have it sitting in? **Harry Stebbings** [43:41]: Honestly, I was actually just waiting for their approvals. They took it back to the group, the founding team, and I was waiting for them to confirm it. **Jeetu Mahtani** [43:49]: Well, let's just pause for a moment, Harry. Walk me through your sales qualification that led you to putting this deal in almost like closable for the quarter. **Harry Stebbings** [44:00]: Yeah. I met them and they they said that they were enough of a champion to get it done on their own. And they said that they had budget. We went through the use cases. It all seemed pretty good. And you know, honestly, it was a really good fit with with our core market. And then suddenly they just went a little bit more quiet and a little bit more quiet. And then he said, listen, You know, I need to speak to the team and see where we're at. And it's really stalled from that. **Jeetu Mahtani** [44:24]: What did you uncover in the sales process that got you to determine urgency or they really needed the solution versus something that would be nice to have **Harry Stebbings** [44:35]: long term? That's a hard one. I don't I don't I think that's the thing that's missing from so many sales processes, and that's the art of the great salesperson, which is how do you create synthetic urgency? Because, like, if we're honest, very few people need HubSpot this month or they're going die. You know? They can have it next month. Yeah. I don't I love I love HubSpot, but it's not like, oh my God, the world will end. Crowdstrike could happen know, to maybe too soon. But, you know Yeah. there's no catastrophe. **Jeetu Mahtani** [45:11]: Yeah, there isn't. I think many leaders will maybe disagree with me, but I don't think you can create urgency. Like, you can't create fake urgency. And if you have urgency to hit your number, that's not the urgency your prospect has. So this is where I would be as a sales manager is like, well, in your sales process, Harry got pushed to next quarter and you said they have a need for it. Well, tell me what was the need? I needed more leads. Okay. Why do you need more leads? Well, we need to hit our sales targets. Why do you need to hit your sales targets? Well, because we committed to the board 30% growth and hitting our sales targets helps us get to 30% growth. Okay, Great, Harry. What would happen if you don't hit your sales target? They take me outside and shoot me. That or they would put you on a performance improvement plan. Right? Like what would happen if you're on a performance improvement plan, Harry? When you're speaking to a customer, I just think sales reps just shy away from asking the tough questions. Why can't you ask personal goals? Why can't you ask about what would life look like, Mr. Customer, if you did not have the solution? Because I think this is where like a lot of sales reps just sit on the surface that I call level one. You got to get to level two, level three. And of course, you don't dive right into level three. like you build rapport, you're an advisor, you're trusted as a sales rep. And you got to be in a situation where it's not like a game talking tennis, one player against the other player. It's a doubles match. You and your team are together. Your prospect and you are together. And if you're together, you should be comfortable challenging each other because you want each other to win at the end of the day. **Harry Stebbings** [46:55]: Do you ever do discounting? One way to get people to move faster is say, hey, you know what, Jeetu, and you can be honest. G2. Jeetu, I need to hit my plan. You know what it's like. Let's not give you 25% off if you sign in next week. **Jeetu Mahtani** [47:09]: Yeah, I hate that. I hate that. And discounting. I do not like to lead with discounting. And it is a disservice to the customer and to the company and to you as a rep to lead with discounting. There is a place for discounting, but it should not be so prominent in your sales process unless you have gotten to a point where clearly there's a need, they need to solve that need, but they have a gap in their budget and you structure the discount to help them get maybe the first year, but the discount goes away in the second year. Maybe other sales leaders believe in discounting, but I am very opposed to discounting. **Harry Stebbings** [47:49]: Great. I like opinions. Fantastic. Good. Customer testimonials. G2 really help me if you could, you know, do a customer testimonial for us. You're at HubSpot, Jeetu. Getting on our website mean a lot. Is it okay to ask them what are the biggest lessons for startups and how to get customer testimonials and do them right? **Jeetu Mahtani** [48:08]: I don't believe in it. And I just think like you are mixing too many variables when your focus should be on what does the customer really need? Like what is their pain? Connect their pain to a solution. Why are you diluting your value as a sales rep by throwing in testimonials and discounting? And again, you can get to a discount down the road if you do need it to close a gap in budget, but don't play games is the way I think about it. Like if your buyers don't value you as an advisor and value the solution you're recommending through a fairly exhaustive sales process, then I would question whether that buyer is a good fit customer and whether they will do everything they need to do to succeed with your platform. **Harry Stebbings** [48:53]: As I said, strong opinions are great. So always love that. Listen, Jeetu, I could talk to you all day. So I do want move into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? What do you believe that most around you disbelieve? **Jeetu Mahtani** [49:07]: I believe sales experience is overrated. When you are a highly tenured rep, I think some people believe that it should be weighted the most when hiring a sales rep. I don't think that is true. There are other characteristics that I would weigh over sales experience. **Harry Stebbings** [49:24]: I totally agree. I also always think actually Jason Lamkin, who's like, you'll never get a truly great second sales leader, like second time sales leader to do it again. They know how freaking hard it is. G2 is not going be like, yeah. Can go into another one millionaire or ARR company and go through that shit again. So I totally agree with you. Tell me, how were the first walls in the Dublin office built? **Jeetu Mahtani** [49:46]: Well, I told you that it was like we brought five expats, we hired five in Dublin. We were sitting in an office that had a little wall kind of like in the center, Harry. And culture is really important to me. I was like, we need to make sure everyone's learning from each other. It's an open layout. So I called Ken Papa, our facilities guy. And he was like, what do you want me to do? I was like, can you bring the wall down? So he sent someone with a drill and the guy's like drilling the wall and I have a picture of all of us with yellow hats on calls while this person behind us is like drilling on walls. So that's maybe I think why you were asked to bring up that question. **Harry Stebbings** [50:23]: Tell me, what's the most contrarian or unorthodox advice for founders listening? **Jeetu Mahtani** [50:27]: Founders often are math and science driven. They weigh data heavily in their decision making. So if I was a founder, I would not see it as someone else's responsibility to be selling or hoping your product is going to find revenue on its own when it's just not. you need to get on calls with a sales rep or on your own. Make that call, send that email, and believe that customers or prospects will love talking to founders and founders will be great at selling. **Harry Stebbings** [50:56]: What have you changed your mind on in the last months? **Jeetu Mahtani** [50:59]: You know, I had some doubts, Harry, on the AI thing and whether AI can truly replace a large part of selling. And from what I'm seeing in the last six to months, oh boy, I think that a large part of selling is going to get automated with the AI type bots or AI type engines. And I don't think it's going to completely replace salespeople, but it's going to raise the bar. So you as a salespeople need to be even better with the way you're advising prospects. **Harry Stebbings** [51:28]: Which duties or responsibilities will get automated first, do you think? **Jeetu Mahtani** [51:32]: I think some form of discovery where you would spend two hours of discovery, part of that discovery can actually happen through some form of AI engine where customers are going to be able to almost self discover their challenges and also almost get pointed to this is the direction you need to go with this solution. But you will have a direction, but you still need someone at the other end to help you dig further to make sure you're making the right choice. What sales tactic has died **Harry Stebbings** [52:01]: a death, do you think? **Jeetu Mahtani** [52:03]: There so many, I would say besides the discounting that we talked about earlier is no one gives a crap about your product or its features. Like stop talking about your product and its features when you connect with the prospect. Spend your time understanding the customer, understanding the buyer, what matters to them, their industry, what are they trying to get to And you will get to your product. But too many sales reps out there still spend way too much time just like spitting a lot of their product and their features out very early in the sales process. **Harry Stebbings** [52:34]: Is that the fault of founders for not teaching them a more efficient sales playbook of customer discovery and qualification? **Jeetu Mahtani** [52:41]: It's partly the founders. And I think this is where, like, founders have it in them. They don't know what they don't know. And this is where, like, if I'm a founder, I mean, are great resources to go and learn. Like, you know, how do you run, like, a reasonable sales process? Like, it's not rocket science. I think the challenge founders will have is just simply like, how will prospects react when we ask them all these questions? They're just like hesitant to ask these deeper, harder questions. I think they do need to work with whether it's their board or mentors and help them get some confidence that they can do this. at the end of the day, customers want to work with salespeople that they like. What they want to do is like you because you care. You want learn about them and their business and you to help them succeed. That's what matters at the end of the day in sales. **Harry Stebbings** [53:29]: Final one for you, because I could talk all day, is what one company sales strategy have you been most impressed by recently? **Jeetu Mahtani** [53:36]: It's not a perfect example, Harry, but I do think with the way digital and AI are going, I think Amazon's a great example of how selling is going evolve. Like, for example, I had a problem with the product the other day. I went to to my account. I was like, I have a problem with this product. Like, they gave me a list of resources based on my problem. Very next action was like, did it solve your problem? No. right, we're launching a chatbot so you can speak with a human. I had a chat with an AI chatbot. It got me pretty far, but it didn't give me the actual answer. They're like, all right, hold tight, we're calling you. So someone called me and I spoke with the human on the phone. I just think that customer experience, which is like almost like digital led human in the loop, sales rep in the loop, is where the world is going. And I think AI is just to make it possible and actually accelerate that customer experience. **Harry Stebbings** [54:29]: Jeetu, listen, I've loved doing this. It was very off script as you as you saw, but you've been fantastic. So thank you so much for being such a great guest. **Jeetu Mahtani** [54:36]: My pleasure, Harry. Love the conversation and I appreciated the back and forth we went. and no one's too upset with me. **Harry Stebbings** [54:45]: I so love doing these vertical shows. So many incredible lessons to unpack there. If you want watch the full episode, you can find it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [54:56]: my sales enablement platform is a waste of money. Ever thought that? You're not alone. Most revenue leaders feel this way watching their sales team struggle to keep up with market, product, and competitive changes. Reps burn hours each day searching, digging, slacking, desperately trying to get the answers they need out of their clunky tech stack. That's why Speck It's AI powered enablement platform was purpose built to cut through the noise and meet reps in their moment of need. Speckits uses AI to recommend the exact content your reps need to close deals in any tool like Gong, Salesforce, or Outlook. 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More than 1,500 organizations, including Okta, Adobe, Workday, Zoom, and Finastra, run revenue on Clari to improve win rates, prevent slip deals, forecast with accuracy, and boost the productivity of all revenue critical employees. To learn more about how you can create, convert, and close revenue with Clari, visit clari.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming on Monday with the executive chairman of Shein for his first ever podcast episode.