Kipp Bodnar: The Unfair Digital Marketing Advantage That Drives Faster Business Growth | Marketing | YAPClassic

Kipp Bodnar built his marketing career by spotting opportunities others missed. That instinct helped him rise to Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot in just five years and grow HubSpot’s blog from 200,000 to 1.5 million monthly readers in one year. In this episode, Kipp shares the content marketing strategies that actually work today, how to spot overlooked opportunities, and the secrets to scaling your business through customer relationships and AI. In this episode, Hala and Kipp will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:26) Key Strategies for Career and Business Growth (08:22) Building Your Brand While Working in Corporate (12:29) HubSpot’s Secret to Global Marketing Success (15:20) Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing (17:28) Content Marketing Strategies That Still Work (22:04) Three Ways to Stand Out as a Content Creator (24:17) Email Marketing Tips for Building Customer Trust (30:34) CRM and AI Tools for Entrepreneurs (34:48) Customer Service That Drives Retention (38:41) Marketing a Business with Limited Resources Kipp Bodnar is the Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot, where he leads global marketing strategy to drive awareness and demand for HubSpot’s products. Before becoming CMO, he led content, social media, and SEO efforts, helping scale HubSpot's digital marketing presence. Kipp also co-hosts the Marketing Against the Grain podcast, where he explores AI, emerging marketing trends, and business growth strategies. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Northwest Registered Agent - Get a complete business identity with Northwest. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/YAPFree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Mindstone - Master practical AI skills without the complexity with Mindstone’s AI Competency Programme. Head to experience.mindstone.com/yap and get 10% off. AT&T Business - Stay connected with reliable, secure internet built for entrepreneurs. Switch to AT&T Business at business.att.com. HoneyLove - Treat yourself to the most advanced bras and shapewear on the market. Save 20% off Honeylove by going to honeylove.com/PROFITING! #honeylovepod ElevenLabs - ElevenAgents by ElevenLabs helps businesses deliver better customer experiences. Start with a demo at ElevenLabs.io/profiting Quo - Bring your calls, texts, and contacts together in one place. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting. Resources Mentioned: Kipp’s Podcast, Marketing Against The Grain: bit.ly/MarketingAgainstTheGrain Kipp’s Book, The B2B Social Media Book: bit.ly/B2BBook Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, E-commerce, LinkedIn, Instagram, Storytelling, Advertising, Social Media Marketing, Communication, Video Marketing, Social Proof, Influencers, Influencer Marketing, Digital Trends, Online Marketing, Marketing Podcast

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  I don't have an MBA. I didn't work at McKinsey. I'm an untraditional marketing leader. Marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where their inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return. The best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it. You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're an executive at a company, doesn't matter.

• 1:36Speaker 00

  So I know that HubSpot actually coined the word inbound marketing. What inbound strategies are working?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  A few things.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  Yap fam, you don't need the biggest budget to win at marketing. You need to spot the opportunity everyone else is missing. Today, we're bringing back my conversation with Kipp Bodnar, Chief Marketing Officer at HubSpot and one of the sharpest minds in digital marketing. In the Yap Classic, Kip reveals why the biggest breakthroughs in business and marketing come from finding unfair advantages and seeking opportunities that others overlook. So if you're trying to build a brand that stands out in a crowded market, listen in. Here's my conversation with Kip. Kip, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Hey, y'all. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

• 2:18Speaker 00

  I am excited for this conversation. I love to talk about marketing. And I was so impressed with your journey. When I was researching your story, I found out that you rose to CMO at HubSpot in just five years, which is absolutely incredible. So my first question to you is, what do you think set you apart from other employees at HubSpot and accelerated your career growth at the company?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Look, I think accelerating a business career growth, it's all, it's all very similar. I think it's about how do you really focus on the small set of things that are going to give you the high magnitude of return? I think so often people get caught up in like operational details or let everybody else kind of push their priorities on them, where you have to be like, you have to look at the situation and say, what are the three to five things that if I do, I will be 10 times more successful than anybody else in the situation? And that's, I mean, it sounds simple, but it is the thing that I think matters the most.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  Before you were joining HubSpot and you started there, you were actually an entrepreneur. So what were the advantages or disadvantages that you faced joining corporate, already having entrepreneurship experience?

• 3:30Speaker 01

  I think the first side hustle entrepreneurship thing I had, I would, I would go to like Sam's Club and Walmart and find like clearance items and flip them on eBay when I was in high school. And so I was always somebody who was obsessed with arbitrage. How do you buy low and sell high? And where are the inefficiencies of a market? And one of the great things about marketing is that marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where their inefficiencies, where things are underpriced. They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return. And so what happens when you go and then work at a startup? At the time, I think HubSpot was about 100 people when I joined. You go from just running really fast by yourself to needing to run really fast with a bunch of other people.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  And that's the biggest change. And you have to adopt a different mindset. And I think the mindset there is, I have limited scale, just me. I could accomplish much bigger things if I do it with other people, but I gotta bring them along for that journey. If I just try to push my agenda on everybody else, nobody's going to understand. They're not going to have the context and we're not going to go anywhere. And so I think the biggest shift from being somebody who is working solo or on a small team to like being on a bigger team is, how do you actually clearly articulate the problem you're going to solve in a way that people are really excited to solve it with you? Cause when you're like, when you're an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just kind of do what's in your head and go, right?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's like, how do you motivate teams? And I love what you said about marketing being arbitrage. I think that's so smart and it's so true. It's like almost every marketing activity is some sort of arbitrage.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  100%. Exactly what it is. Whether you're trying to game an algorithm, whether you're trying to make a great YouTube thumbnail, whether you're trying to buy ads on an obscure platform that maybe your industry doesn't use, but they're way cheaper, those are all just different ways to find arbitrage and take advantage of it.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Totally. I love that. So in your career, like I said, you rose up the ranks very quickly. Were there any like pivotal moments that really shaped your trajectory or relationships? Or what do you think it was that you were able to go from employee to CMO and in the C-suite?

• 5:42Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot, I think there's lots of moments that, that make that happen. Uh, I think my very first job was I ran the HubSpot blog. So basically the equivalent of what you do now and, and what a lot of creators and, and amazing media companies do now, I did a long time ago, because I'm old. And I think the most pivotal moment was that first year when, you know, we had a blog that had about 200,000 readers a month. And by the end of the year, we were at about 1.5 million monthlies. And so we were able to really grow and scale that work. And I was maniacally focused on that, for better and for worse. And there are like, there are challenges with being too overtly focused and you probably don't collaborate as well with others and everything.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  But I knew I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of the work we were doing. And so I kind of look at everything as like a sprint. And it's like, whether it be a week, a year, two years, it's like, what do I need to really change and transform in that time? And I knew that I needed to change the type of content we're creating, the frequency, the process, all of those things that creators now do on a daily basis. But in 2010 was, you know, kind of new and people were trying to figure it out at the time. And so I think that was one. And then the other is when you go from being somebody who is contributing as an individual to like leading a team. And so I went from running that blog to running like all of our content

• 7:09Speaker 01

  and how we were, our blog, our social, our SEO, how we were scaling up. And that was a pretty pivotal transition because it's like, can I get people to follow me? Do I have a clear story? Do I have a clear strategy? And the, the simple thing I would tell everybody out there is the key step in that is people need to feel like they're going to learn something from you. And so even though they may be specialists, like I would go and I would find the latest article, the latest hack that somebody had done, even if it was for somebody else on my team. And I would send it to them and talk to them about it and talk about how we could use it. And they were instantly like, oh, you understand my work. You understand the craft that we're working on together here.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  And I trust you to help me make my craft much better than it is today. Not that it's bad today, but that I think I can get much better with your help.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  That's so interesting. So basically you were a good colleague, right? And you helped other people. And that's really important with politics in corporate and especially, you know, getting into the C-suite. So what advice do you have for good relationships in corporate? And being somebody who higher-ups think about when promotions are coming up?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  I think the best relationships are results. I think, I think results speak for themselves and are very, results are the ultimate meritocracy, right? And I think the biggest thing that people get wrong is they look at what other people ask of them and say, hey, here are the goals that I think you can achieve. And they look at that as like the ceiling of what they're supposed to do. Like, so if you're running a LinkedIn program, for example, it's like, oh, I think you can get a million, million views a month this year for our company, company content. Great. Well, you or I, if we were in that situation, we would say, cool, you think a million's good? I think 10 million's good. How would I go and use the same constraints, everything I have access to, to do way better than you think?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Because that change in magnitude is impossible to ignore. Cause then you're like, oh wow, we have somebody who's able to over exceed what we think are fairly aggressive expectations that we would have of them. Clearly they are able to do more and we should put them in a situation to do more.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  Totally. I teach a LinkedIn masterclass and I, and it's people that want to grow their personal brands. And one of the most common objections I get from these folks is that, I'm really scared to start growing my personal brand while I'm working corporate. I'm scared to do my own thing. And I noticed that you launched a book while you were working at HubSpot, right? So talk to us about that experience. What's your advice to people who want to become a thought leader in their space, but they do work in corporate? How should they approach it without stepping on toes? Or making sure that like their business, their company is aligned with what they're doing?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I find that people's own ambition or lack thereof is their biggest limiter to growth. Not their capability, not their aptitude, not, not anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. If, you know, you're scared largely of what other people think versus the, what's actually true. And what's actually true, if you look at the market and what happens is that a company, no matter whether you're starting it or you're working for it, they need experts. And they need people who their customers look to as trusted experts and advisors who have deep knowledge and deep perspective and point of view on their market.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  You know how you get there? You have a great presence on LinkedIn. You start a podcast, you write a book, you have an email newsletter. There's tons of different ways, depending on your skills, your interests to get there. But you have to get there. And the thing that nobody tells you, because I got a job at HubSpot because I had run a blog. They liked my blog and then I ran the blog. I host the Marketing Against the Grain podcast now. Thing that you know, and a lot of people don't know is that when you create, when you make something every day and every week, you learn so much faster and you get so much better at your craft. If you have to teach a lot of other people, the thing that you want them to know and the thing you're trying to be good at in your job.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  And I have always found on my team that the people who are out there actively creating are some of the best people in their current roles. In addition to what they may be doing on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever.

• 11:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I totally agree with you. A lot of the times it is an excuse, right? Like people, people are saying, oh, I think my company is going to get mad. My boss is going to get mad. But in reality, what may happen, especially if you like, you know, let them know you're going to do this. And it's not competitive to what you're doing at work. You'll get more respected at work. I remember when I started growing my brand and podcast, I started getting promoted more often at work. I was being asked to teach how to use LinkedIn and getting flown to conferences and whatever it was when I was working at Hewlett Packard.

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• 15:09Speaker 01

  And I look at it as any situation, every situation, you have an unfair advantage. It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is. And I always tell people that, you know, when you work at a great company, you have the two things that matter most. You have agency and control, which is what most entrepreneurs have and they want. But you also have resources to go and do what you want with that agency and control, which a lot of entrepreneurs do not have. And so when you have both of those at the same time, regardless of the situation you're in, you should take advantage of it.

• 15:42Speaker 00

  Totally agree. Okay, so let's move on to some marketing best practices. HubSpot has become a household name. So what do you think has been some of the major factors in becoming a global brand?

• 15:55Speaker 01

  It's a little bit what we talked about earlier. I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? I didn't work at McKinsey, I didn't work at, I don't have an MBA, you know? Like I'm not, I'm not out of central casting. I am, you know, from a small town in West Virginia. My goal was to like do interesting stuff and see the world. And when you're in that kind of situation, you just think about solving problems differently. And that comes back to the idea of arbitrage. You have to understand, if you're a marketer, what are the unique ways to reach my audience? And what are some of the ways that we have done that at HubSpot over the years? I think would help maybe bring examples of that. First, in very early days, we created a free tool called Website Creator,

• 16:40Speaker 01

  where you could just put your website in and it would give a full diagnostic. So normally what you would hire a consultant for, or you talk to a sales rep for, it's just going to give you a report on the webpage and email it to you, which in like 2006, '07, '08 was transformational at the time. That's, you know, it's a long time ago, almost 20 years now. And we had millions and millions of people use that. And like our co-founder, Darmesh, built it himself, right? Like it was not like anything fancy and it was, and what it was rooted in, he watched our other co-founder, Brian, doing all these sales conversations. And he was doing all this manual research and he was like, I can, I can make an app that does that for you. And then they just gave it away and that worked really, really well.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Then the second thing that worked really well for us was blogging and content in the early days of content and creating. And what we figured out is that Google search was growing rapidly and there was an arbitrage and a market inefficiency where you would search for so many things back in the day and there were terrible search results, right? Like you would go and like, nothing on this page is good. And if we create something, we will by far be the best thing on that topic. And we were able to grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of visits doing that. And we had that hypothesis, we created a process to scale it and we spent a lot of time and money. The other thing that people in marketing get wrong, they do 10 different things kind of shitty, right? Like I'm scrubbed real thin, I think I gotta do everything.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  You're way better off to do one to three things better than anybody else. And if you can do one to three things better than anybody else, you can build a billion dollar company if you have one or two great marketing channels that you are world-class at. You cannot build a $10 million company if you have 10 crappy marketing channels. I've seen it time and time again, that's just how life works.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  I love that advice and I agree 100%. It's so right. You've got to really know how to leverage one or two or three channels really well before you go so broad. And then, especially when you have no resources and you're just starting out, right? So just build one at a time and go from there. So I know that HubSpot actually coined the word inbound marketing. So can you help us understand for those who are new to marketing? What's the difference between inbound and outbound marketing? And how was marketing different before HubSpot really came on?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  The world of marketing changed a bunch with the internet. Before the internet, people remember, it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those things. And they were all really annoying, right? Because you didn't opt in any of those things. The commercials interrupted your television when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right? You'd go home and your mailbox would be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was like very outboundy, very interruptive. And we were basically like, well, now that the internet exists, there's a whole different way to do marketing. You can do it in an inbound way where you create content and pull people in through search engines, through social media, through email marketing, through things that people opt into and want to participate in.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  And that was, now seems obvious because it's how the internet works, but 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary. And so we created a new category. And sometimes if you're in marketing or if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, the best thing you can do is, there's a great quote out there, "Better is a debate, different is a choice," right? And you have to, when you force somebody to make a choice, and you do that by creating a new category, where it's like, hey, do you want to do this new awesome inbound thing that works really great? Or do you want to do that old stodgy outbound thing that everybody hates? You know, and we tell that story and people are like, oh, I want to do the new cool thing that people like. I don't want to do the old bad thing that everybody hates. But if we had just said, oh, like, hey, we can help you do your direct mail a little bit better.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Who cares? Like, well, maybe it's good enough. Do I really even need better? I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about. Right? And so painting a clear choice for your target audience is so powerful. It takes a little bit longer, right? Because people aren't familiar with it. There's a level of education that you have to do, but anybody can do it. And if you're in it for a long haul, if you think you have a big opportunity and your business is a five, 10, 20 year thing, then it's a really important thing to take advantage of, to actually be differentiated in the market.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  I know that you've been talking a lot about arbitrage, unfair advantages. So in 2025, what inbound strategies are working? Like, are blogs still working? How do you think about SEO?

• 21:07Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. It's a great question.

• 21:08Speaker 00

  And all that stuff.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  What's, what's marketing? What works in marketing in 2025? A few things. Creators, working, partnering, or being with creators. And like these modern media companies like you, Ron Hala, like huge opportunity, huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators. I'm a creator myself. Like, it's, it works. YouTube, YouTube works. YouTube is an exceptional channel to drive awareness and monetization. It is much harder to disrupt through artificial intelligence, which is kind of the thing that's changing marketing the most. Blogging still works. It does. But it works for the very focused universe of like the industry you solve, like where you have unique data, unique insight, unique credibility, you can, you can get that.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  You can't go and talk about everything in the world, but like, and get search traffic, but you can focus on your core niche and get a good baseline audience through blogging. Those things are completely working. Partnering with creators, even through like advertising means hugely, hugely valuable. The other thing that's working, a lot of people are doing events and in person because we've gotten so segmented, no shared experiences. I think if you're selling high, big ticket, expensive things, bringing people together in person is becoming something that all the marketers I talk to are spending more money on this year, not less money on.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  So true. And when I'm thinking about, you know, my marketing strategies and unfair advantages and untapped opportunities, I'm thinking about SEO within platforms.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:40Speaker 00

  So for example, like podcast, search SEO, how do I become more like searchable on LinkedIn in particular, right? How do I become more searchable on YouTube?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Well, that's one of the reasons YouTube's works is because YouTube's the second biggest search engine.

• 22:54Speaker 00

  But when it comes to blogging, I'd love to like dig deep on this because I actually was thinking like, you know what? I feel like blogging used to be how, I used to have a blog in my twenties that was really popular. And then I was like, blogging is over. But sometimes these things like come around, right? And I was thinking, you know what? I feel like blogs are kind of making a comeback, or I like with Substack becoming so popular. And I was thinking, should I start a blog on my website? Where like I create content around entrepreneurship? Or should I like leverage something like Substack and leverage that platform for a blog? Like, what would be your advice to start from scratch or leverage a platform?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Well, I have a rule that I don't make anything without I'm, without being clear on how I'm going to get it distributed and what the distribution advantages are. I think Substack, if you're an entrepreneur, has a little bit of built in audience, but it's not worth it because the bigger built in audience is information discovery. And I, and I say that kind of broader than search. And so if I were starting today and it was just me, you and I were starting a company, we were going to go out and do something, I would start a blog on my website.

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• 26:57Speaker 01

  They want to see how they're doing. They're competitive. They want to compare themselves. All that stuff happens, right? And so you were going to see that be a real standout thing. And so that's where proprietary research, customer data, things like that are a huge leverage. And then the third is like, can you be really contrarian and have a good argument? Can you go against the status quo and change people's thinking with a real deep and thoughtful reasoned argument about something? And if you can do that, you're also going to get people's attention. What would you add? Like, you, you're doing this all the time. What'd I miss?

• 27:29Speaker 00

  Well, I feel like you hit a lot of them, but I think at the core of it is like, how do you help people? Like, how do you actually bring value where people feel like, oh, wow, I learned something. Oh, this is, this is something unique and meaningful. This is not just regurgitating what's out there or just clickbait for me to just get on this page. And then I actually, there's actually no good information or no good tools, like you were mentioning. So you want to just figure out how to actually teach people something that they can't really find anywhere else. That's what I feel like is really working.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  The prompt I've always given myself is like, is, is what I'm about to do going to be 10 times more valuable for people? Or would somebody pay a thousand dollars, $2,000 to have access to this? And if the answer to one of those two questions is yes, it's going to be really successful. And if the answer's no, it's probably going to be middling and average.

• 28:15Speaker 00

  Totally agree. So how do you think about email? So email is one of those channels that have been around forever, but it's still really effective. What are your thoughts about it? How do you think we should best leverage it?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Okay, email is super important. And here's why email is super important from like a principal base. It's one of the few channels you actually control. There's not an algorithm, right? Like, somebody gives you permission to email them and you get to send them a message. And you actually own that email address. Somebody can't come along and change the Google algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm. I know people are all up in arms about LinkedIn algorithm changes recently. That's the real value of email marketing is that you have way more ownership and control of email marketing than most other channels out there. And so, once you kind of have that foundation, you're like, okay, email marketing still matters. What am I going to do?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  And the number one thing you're going to do is to have as highly personalized emails as possible, and that's writing your emails with AI. So one of the things we did at HubSpot is we have, we have what's called HubSpot Academy, which is teaches you how to do marketing, how to use our software, all of those things. And there's a bunch of different courses on HubSpot Academy. And we basically, when people come into HubSpot and maybe consume an article or a free guide or a webinar, what have you, will then send a follow-up email that is custom, one-on-one, written from them by AI, and that we recommend based on everything we know about them, the content they've consumed, what the best course for them to take is. And like, we mentioned their, not only do we mention their business,

• 29:49Speaker 01

  but like, we have puns, like AI has gotten very good at that. And it feels like a human researches company and wrote them an email. And that email converts 80 to 100% better than our normal emails. And so that is like, number one, anything you can do to better personalize your email and make it relevant to their problem and their experience with your company and your website, you are going to get much, much better results.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm. The other thing I would add when it comes to email is you were talking about giving away free tools, free content. Instead of having people pay for it, make their email the way that they pay for that content, right? You want to just collect as many emails as possible. One of the biggest regrets that I have is that I only started collecting emails like three years ago. I wish I started seven years ago and really made it a point to collect emails. So what are the best ways that people can grow their email list right now? What do you suggest?

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, you gave them the you gave them the great ways to do that, which is like offer something really valuable that you consider charging money for. Remember that marketing is just it's kind of a lesson in economics. It's what do you want to sell versus what do you want to give away to sell a bigger thing down the road? And like, how do you how do you offset? How you think about that? And so for me, the the things that are really good, if you have any free tools, great. If you have any templates, like you do the work of building out a big Excel sheet with formulas and everything that people could just drop their own data in, they will give you an email address for that. I promise you, like, uh, one of the things that worked really well at HubSpot back in the day, and you can do similar versions of of this now, is we would find our customers always needed

• 31:26Speaker 01

  like stock photography and imagery uh for their email newsletters, their landing page. And I was like, well, what if we just hire a freelance photographer, buy the rights out for like $10,000 to 500 different pictures? And we just give those away for free instead of them having to pay Getty Images or all these people? And I think over the years, we've had like five million downloads. I can't I can't like can't even tell you how popular that has been. But it's looking at your market, thinking about something that they do, that they spend money on, and say, hey, can I give that to them for free? And if you can, you will get whatever information you want in exchange for them saving that money.

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think people need to realize that a lot of this marketing strategy is a long game. Like, sometimes you're you're marketing to somebody who might start a company in four years, right? And might need your services four years down the line. So you guys have like free trials. For me, I collect emails, I do webinars, and you know, sometimes that leads to a course that's pretty expensive. And people might attend three, four webinars before they actually purchase the course. But I'm investing in them, building that trust. And so talk to me about how you guys think about your like free HubSpot service. Like, why are you guys giving away your tools for free initially?

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so about 10 years ago, we were like, hey, you know what? The world is changing and trust is becoming the most important thing. And one of the things, ways you can build trust with people is to let them try before they buy, right? And like your webinar is a great example of that. It's like, hey, if I'm on a 30, 60 minute webinar with you, I probably have a pretty good idea about what your course is going to look like, how what the quality is going to be, what it's going to feel like, the experience. And so I'm much more likely to have trust and go buy that course. So if we if you use our free version of HubSpot CRM, you're much more likely to buy a paid version because you're like, hey, you know what? I'm up and running on this. I've closed a couple of deals with it. I understand the features that if I pay for them, that I would get. And you know what?

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I kind of need them because I think I would make even more money if I paid for those features. And it's a whole different game. Right now, like, we all have access to infinite knowledge with AI. Knowledge is good, complete commodity. So in that world, trust becomes everything. You can, people can know who you are, but they can still not trust you at all. And giving that value away is how you build trust. And so for us, like, the free version of our product, so we do it, but you know, you have webinars. Every there's a there is a version of that for any business, is I think what I would say.

• 33:53Speaker 00

  And I think the main lesson is like, don't be afraid to give away great things that people can actually use for free, right? Don't be afraid for people to have to have enough for a couple of months or whatever to to do what they need to do, because it's going to build that trust.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  I have I have a maxim I live by, and it's distribution is undefeated. And like, you, if you can get a big audience, you can always figure out how to make money on it. The inverse is not true. Like, you could have an expensive product and sell it to a few people, or you can have a big audience and sell it to a lot, lot more people. But it's going to take a little bit of time. It's a different way of thinking. But distribution is the most is the biggest reason most businesses don't grow, because they just don't have a big enough audience, universe of people who actually care about them and the thing that they're offering in the world.

• 34:39Speaker 00

  Did you know that we just signed with HubSpot? Yeah, media.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  That's amazing. Welcome.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  Thanks for coming on.

• 34:44Speaker 00

  Yes, of course. Yeah, we're like doing this whole big HubSpot implementation, and it's like a huge company focus. Yeah, so I'm really excited about that. So CRMs, I've got a lot of like young entrepreneurs who are probably working at spreadsheets and doing everything manually. What is a CRM? And what would benefit? How how do startups benefits from CRM?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Okay, so if you think about CRM, there's lots of views of what CRMs are. But what they really are is a single source of truth for your customers and your prospects. So instead of your support team having us uh working out of a project management system, sales reps working out of spreadsheets, all of those things, everybody, your marketers, your sellers, your customer service folks, all working, updating one record, all the context in one place, and then being able to do really powerful things, whether it be advertising, email marketing, marketing automation, sales call prep, sales follow up, sales automation, all of those things. Like, that's what you're that's what you're talking about doing. And you're going to see CRM be way more important over the next couple of years. Because what's going to happen with CRM over the next even year

• 35:50Speaker 01

  is that all the unstructured data, your meeting recordings, the emails you exchange, all of those things, all that context are going to make it way better. Because you're just it's your CRM is just going to generate the email follow up to your meeting for you. And it's like, oh, great. I know I need to follow up from this meeting, but I've got to go run to this other meeting right now. Well, it's great. I can do it in 30 seconds versus having to do it 15 minutes tonight when I've forgotten half the things and need to go look them up, right? And that is why CRM is so important. It also is, when you have all your data in place, you can do real reporting and actually understand what's working and what's not working. And as somebody who has helped grow a business from tens of millions of dollars to billions of dollars, it's done through basic iteration over a long period of time.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Finding problems, solving them and building and iterating. And you can't do that without your data in place and some clear reporting.

• 36:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about, is like being able to track everything, having everything in one place. If I'm like, what's happening with this sales deal? I can click in, see all the conversations to a point, like AI summaries and and things like that are coming out. And have you guys been thinking about AI agents at all?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Tons, tons of AI agents. So um, so first of all, the most you most use AI features at HubSpot. One is to prep for sales meetings. So we have a co-pilot where it just will take everything from a contact record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. We have an agent called Content Remix. So like, let's say you're going to run a content campaign, you're going to do an email newsletter, or so you're going to do a webinar. You're going to do a webinar. It's like, it will spin up the landing page, the email, the ad assets, everything for you, and does all the manual work in the background. And then we also have a product that our co-founder, our founder, called agent.ai, which is a marketplace of agents where you can go and anybody can build or use different agents. It's kind of like um a modern kind of automation marketplace,

• 37:43Speaker 01

  where if you have a problem, you can either use Agent AI to build it, or somebody's already built it, and you can just use their agent. Like, a really good example is uh, there's a company research agent that will give you like a McKinsey analyst level kind of deep, detailed briefing. Who's the CEO, funding history, core products, competitors, the whole thing. And it'll do it in like two minutes, right? Perfectly formatted for free. And like, that is just a game changer when it comes to agents.

• 38:09Speaker 00

  If you are in marketing and in sales and you're feeling like overwhelmed with AI and leveraging AI, how would you approach it?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  Okay, this is this is a fantastic question. I use AI all the time. I'm AI obsessed.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I would pick one AI tool and get really good at it. And for marketers, that's probably Claude. For sellers, that's probably ChatGPT.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  But and you're going to use those tools. The reason I say Claude has the best taste, it's really good at writing. It has, you can upload to projects in Claude and have really great, specific, highly repeatable writing output. That's core to marketing. For sellers, I think one of the best AI features that exists on the planet is ChatGPT's deep research feature, where you can have it go and just build a incredibly complex research report. And it might research a pro a problem for five, 10, 20 minutes with all these different agents in the background going and doing that. And you having the full map to an industry, the accounts within the industry,

• 39:13Speaker 01

  how your product maps, the core competitors in that industry, like those things become super valuable. So that's that's where I would focus if I was just like feeling overwhelmed and not yet started.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that advice. I feel like we've learned so much so far about marketing. I'd love to move into customer service, because it's not only important to bring in customers, we've got to retain them. So how does HubSpot help people in a CRM? How does that actually help with your retention, with your customer service?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a few things. So we, one of the other agents we have is called our customer agent. And it basically helps resolve customer support. Like, the average HubSpot customer solves 30% of their support questions are answered by AI, or answered by our agent. And so that's 30% less support people, support time, fail under time, depending on the size and scale of company that you have to spend. And if you kind of focus on it, we've seen customers get to like 50, 60% deflection, which is huge. Saves so much time and so much money. And the biggest reason why that's important is because in today's internet, where everything is highly competitive, as we've talked, we've talked all show about, it's never been easier for a customer to switch. So your core economics are

• 40:23Speaker 01

  going to be retaining that customer. I'm sure you see that your best customers are people who take multiple courses, people who do multiple purchases with you. And if you don't have good customer service, good onboarding, good customer support, man, they're, they're going to be out really quick. And I think it's one of the things most entrepreneurs overlook early on. They get so obsessed with sales and bringing those customers in, they're like, oh, gosh, why did like 80% of my customers leave this year? That's because I haven't been focused on it at all. I don't have any of the infrastructure to actually focus on it.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Yep. And the best customers refer other people who are great customers too. So you're missing out on all the referrals if you don't. Yeah. How can we better align marketing and sales so that we have the best customer service?

• 41:08Speaker 01

  Customer service is largely about setting expectations, right? Which is, do I know what I bought? Do I know what I'm going to use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm going to think that that's valuable? Right? Like, that's, that's, if, if the answer to those things are yes, that customer's normally pretty happy. If it's no, they're going to be pretty unhappy. And so, marketing's job is to set up the value proposition early on. A sales job is to not oversell, to not make promises that the product can't keep, and to understand that customer's business enough to understand that this is how you're actually going to use this thing once you buy it. And then customer success and customer supporter, their job is to help you get on boarded and get any blockers. Because there's always unique things that like, your business has this problem that

• 41:52Speaker 01

  isn't relevant to our other customers that we need to help you solve. And once you kind of fix those problems, the customer's going to be very happy. It's normally in one of those stages where things go off the rails.

• 42:02Speaker 00

  We just rolled out like a new customer survey to try to see like how our agency clients are feeling, how our network clients are feeling. It was really, really helpful. Do you have any suggestions of like the type of questions you should ask your customers to get their feedback?

• 42:15Speaker 01

  Oh, this is great. This is great. So I think the most, the most helpful thing that we have done and learned over the years, is we always run a monthly net promoter score survey with our customers. And so, net promoter score is this question we all see, how likely are you to rank the company from one to 10? And please tell us why. And the score, kind of important. The tell us why is very important. And the reason for that is, you get a real sentiment as to what people value or like or dislike about your product. And now with AI, you could, if you run a survey like that, you can take all of those text responses and just get the core themes very quickly. And

• 42:56Speaker 01

  what your job is with any customer surveying, and I, why I think NPS is so good, is to not have problems be festering and systemic. Like, you always want new problems. So it's like, oh, our customer support's back. Great. Let's go fix, fix our customer support. And then you won't hear anything about customer support. You'll hear about a new thing, like product speed, or, oh, our client portal is tricky. Something, you hear all these things, right? And so, that, I think the net promoter score question is the best, because it gives you where the big root cause are. When you ask specific questions, you often get the symptoms without the root cause.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  I want to close out our interview with some scenarios.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  That I think are going to be really fun. Okay. So, you are a brand new entrepreneur.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  You might be, I have like a little bit of money, but you, mostly you have time. So you have time to invest. What would you do for your marketing strategy, launching a new company?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  All right. If I'm time-rich and money-poor, what would I do?

• 43:52Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  The first thing I am doing is I am figuring out what type of creator I need to be, right? Am I going to be YouTube, LinkedIn? What's my product? What's my market? And I got to start creating, and I got to create on the daily. Because I'm time-rich. I got the time to make every day, and I got to make something every day. And that, and I got to, I'm going to use AI tools to help me keep up the pace of production. And they're free to very low cost, so I can, I can take advantage of that. And then the second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find one area where my target audience spends a lot of time, that I might be able to reach them in a very interesting way. Like, an example of this is like, the early days of LinkedIn groups.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Right? What you could do in the early days of LinkedIn groups is sponsor messages to that the group owner could send to the entire group. And we would go and we would spend money to do that. And nobody else was doing that. And we got hugely efficient lead generation by doing that. And it's just like, oh, a million marketers in this group. Nobody is really going after them. How do we get them?

• 44:57Speaker 00

  I love that. I think the whole theme of this episode is unfair advantage. I remember when I started my podcast, I started on LinkedIn. I wanted to target young professionals, and nobody was talking about podcasts. Nobody was putting up anything about podcasts. And then I became the number one podcaster on LinkedIn. But it was already a channel where people were hanging out. They just weren't doing what I was doing. So what is your way of like, cutting through the noise and getting in front of a lot of people in a creative way?

• 45:22Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Okay. Now, what if you exited a company, you're slightly older, you've got more experience, you've got some money.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  But you've got a family, you've got a lot going on, but you do want to start a new company. How would you, you know, what would you do to market your company?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Money-rich, money richer, time-poor.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Time-poor. Yeah, exactly.

• 45:41Speaker 01

  I got, if I have some resources to do this, it's not going to be that dissimilar. I think the channels work. How I'm going to accomplish those channels, like, I would probably, I'd probably still be a creator, but I would hire an agency to help me do all the post-production, to help me do the research, do all that. I would, and I would use AI to kind of prep and, but I would need somebody if I was time-poor to tell me, oh, these topics suck, they're not working, these are the new topics we should do. They kind of give you the cheat sheet of editorial and iteration, for sure. And then if you have some money, you can use programmatic ad platforms.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  You can use Google, you can use Meta, that will give you enough baseline revenue to kind of start reinvesting. And so, I would probably use YouTube, YouTube ads, to be honest with you. YouTube ad targeting is great, and the cost is so much lower than Google and Facebook and Instagram, that I would probably do that.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. There's plenty of agencies, like my agency, for example.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Yes, like, go hire you guys.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Entrepreneurs, just show up. We do everything for you. Just, if you want a podcast, you show up to record, or we literally just write everything on your behalf. So if you've got money, you can invest, like you said, in an agency. I know we only have a couple of minutes left, so I got to wrap up, even though I really want to keep asking you more questions.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  We can talk all day, I know.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  But, but I will be respectful of your time. So, the, the last questions that I have, I ask all of my guests.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Please.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  And this doesn't have to do with, you don't have to even talk about marketing, you can talk about whatever you want. So, what is one actionable thing our young and profiteers can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Start using AI. Pick a foundational model, ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and use it every day. Once, once or twice a day, every day. Build the habit.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  It's very important for the future. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  I just bought a piece of art that says, if you don't know, find out. Be endlessly curious. Be endlessly curious, and ask questions. Never be stupid, never feel like you're stupid. Like, just go and ask all the questions. And if you're curious about something, like, just call somebody up. You'll be shocked. People will give you time, people will give you information, if you care enough to know it. And then, once you have that knowledge, your life is just way better, in every single way.

• 48:06Speaker 00

  And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Okay, you could check out hubspot.com, product, everything there. I host Marketing Against the Grain over on YouTube, and wherever you get your podcasts, you can check out Marketing Against the Grain.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  Awesome. Thank you, Kip.