What was the trigger that made you realize that maybe now the old funnel is dead and that we need to change the way we see inbound,
etc?
We famously went viral for losing 140 million visits in a year from our blog because of all this disruption.
And it's like when you're in the midst of that,
you're like,
oh,
the world is just a different place and we have to do things differently.
Right now,
you're basically saying,
hey,
I've just done text-based SEO.
Now you need to do tech space.
answer engine optimization.
And you need to understand how you're visible across chat,
GPT,
perplexity,
Gemini and Claude.
For most of the CEOs,
it's like,
show me we can get leads from this.
We live in a climate where most companies who have built any kind of marketing demand motion are so constrained that they're paying like break even return on ad spend to just keep a volume going.
What do you think is the best way to lose my board's trust in 2026?
If I'm a CMO.
Do what you've always been doing.
This is a time for transformation,
not the status quo.
Hey,
Kip.
Welcome to the show.
Hey,
Jordan.
Thanks for having me,
man.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Kip,
I've got a big question for you.
So you are one of the person who helped popularize...
the term inbound marketing and hub spots over a decade ago and now you wrote a book with uh kieran flanagan who was a previous guest on the show by the way and about kieran about what you call loop marketing and
so what's loop marketing yeah so loop marketing is the answer for how you how do you heck do you do marketing in the post ai world and the reason for that is
Whether you love it or whether you hate it,
your buyers are adopting AI and they're using AI.
And that's showing up in just your business in a lot of different ways.
One,
like your marketing numbers probably aren't as good because search traffic's getting disrupted.
More people are spending money on paid ads,
so paid ads costs are going up.
More companies are sending emails,
so email open rates and click-through rates are a little unpredictable.
When your sales reps get on call with people,
it's like they've
done way more of the discovery process because they've been back and forth with an assistant or an agent.
And in this world,
you fundamentally have to move in a very different way and operate in a different way.
And so loop marketing is a four-step framework for how you actually approach any marketing activity in the post AI world.
And those four steps are pretty straightforward.
The first is you got to express the idea you have.
And AI makes creating content,
I think,
better and easier than ever if you have the right.
process and the right data,
which we go into very deeply in the book.
And then once you have that story you want to tell,
you want to tailor it,
step two,
how do you actually personalize it in whether it be an email,
whether it be personalized ads,
whether it be another personalized channel to actually resonate with your target audience,
your target individual.
And then the third part of this is amplification.
How do you distribute that message out to the world?
And a lot has changed with creators,
with answer engine optimization.
and how you show up in these AI search engines.
Ads and content have changed dramatically.
We go into all of that.
And the last thing is what we call evolve.
And evolve is like,
how do you learn really quickly?
Learning compounds,
we all know that,
but AI makes learning and moving much faster and much easier.
And so how do you actually think about how your metrics have changed,
the equations you're using to actually inform the marketing strategy that you have and how your team actually needs to.
work.
And whether that team is just you as an individual,
or you have like a real marketing team,
the fundamental way of operating has changed dramatically.
Interesting.
And so
I'm curious,
what was the moment or,
I don't know,
like the trigger that made you realize that maybe now the funnel,
like the old funnel is dead and that we need to change the way we see the funnel and the way we see inbound,
etc?
I think this all goes back to the chat GPT moment,
right?
November of 2023,
when chat GPT launches and it becomes this new modality of how people access information.
And search starts to change then.
Google then starts changing their algorithm very aggressively,
too,
to kind of prepare for the AI search shift.
And so traffic to websites starts to decline.
And then you start seeing AI generated video and ads and.
the whole buyer technology adoption process changes changed what seemed like overnight it wasn't overnight but it felt like it was overnight you know and i don't know you've you've had some of these similar experiences but it really was then and then like we famously went viral for losing like we lost 140 million visits in a year from our blog uh because of all this disruption and it's like when you're in the midst of that you're like oh
the world is just a different place.
And we have to do things differently.
And just doing more of what we were doing is not going to make us successful.
Yeah,
I remember seeing a lot of posts talking about the way,
like the traffic that you lost,
etc.
And I was like,
okay,
what's behind it?
And I also remember one post,
I think it was from Kieran,
explaining like the strategy that you invested.
way more into creators and doing more demand gen,
et cetera,
et cetera.
Can you walk me through like all your strategy behind it?
Yeah.
If you were a company and you're feeling a similar problem,
like what we do,
what would you consider doing?
Right.
And when you lose a bunch of traffic,
the easiest thing to say is like,
Hey,
we're just going to do more of what we did.
And that's,
that's not the right,
the right path here.
What we fundamentally did was a few things.
Before all of this happened,
we realized we had a bunch of concentration risk,
right?
It's like,
hey,
wow,
we're really dependent on traffic from Google search.
If something ever happens that we are in not a good place.
And
I will in a million years tell you,
I would have never predicted the speed and the extent of which that disruption happened.
But like we were like,
we were thinking about it.
And so in we bought the hustle in years ago,
and that was our first step of saying.
Hey,
the world is moving past,
you know,
static text-based blog content and moving much more multimedia.
And our friend Kieran had this amazing slide,
which was like,
you want to be a part of your buyer's day.
And they research on search part of this throughout their day.
There's all other stuff they're doing.
They're listening to podcasts,
they're reading email newsletter,
they're seeing these ads,
they're participating on social media,
and you need to show up across those places.
And so that's what we did.
We
Invested heavily in YouTube.
We invested in a newsletter network of newsletters for different member profiles of our target audience.
We invested far more aggressively in brand marketing and storytelling and how we act.
There was a period of time where marketing was just like knobs and dials.
It's like,
hey,
I can put some money in Google and Facebook and some programmatic SEO.
I know what I'm going to get.
And why do I even need to worry about anything else?
Because I can get enough from those things to grow my business in the way that I need to.
And that is just fundamentally not true anymore.
And so if I were giving various video,
email newsletters,
whether it's Substack or self-hosted,
and when I say video,
I largely mean YouTube,
but I would extend that to TikTok and Instagram Reels,
depending on how consumer or B2B you are,
and even
LinkedIn short form video.
creators.
We have a whole chapter on creators in the loop book,
and it's transformative of how creators are shaping how audiences are influenced to discover products.
And we partnered very,
very heavily with creators,
and we are still doing more and more every month with them.
And those were some really big strategic shifts we've made that have allowed us to be successful.
The other side of it,
though,
is we really leaned into data and AI to really personalize and target our messages.
And we got really big improvements in email marketing and SMS and those kind of one-to-one channels because of
AI's ability to kind of help us create bespoke messages for each individual person.
Hmm.
I told you already before,
but I'm a big...
I'm someone who watches a lot of your show,
Marketing Against the Grain.
So I advise people to watch the show because it's a great show.
And I also saw that you're partnering with shows like
My First Million.
Like every time I check one of the video,
I see a lot of spots in there.
Yeah,
so My First Million is an interesting story.
One,
we acquired the My First Million podcast when we bought The Hustle.
And nobody cared about podcasts back then.
And
Sam and Sean weren't really making any money off of it.
It was kind of a throw-in.
It was something that I was like,
oh,
they've got enough of a listenership.
I was like,
if we could get that podcast as part of the hustle acquisition,
we can use that as the cornerstone podcast to build out a podcast network.
Because it's really hard to have a cold start where you don't have enough audience.
And it's going to really going to take two years to build this to try to build a business podcast that will work.
Right.
And so that works.
And it's been a really awesome partnership with Sam and Sean over the years.
But yeah,
then there's other podcasts where,
yes,
they're just podcast networks.
We don't own them,
but we partner deeply with them on kind of creative and advertising and everything there.
All right,
cool.
All right,
getting back to the loop framework.
Yeah,
let's do it.
What I think is interesting is that it starts with Express.
And you see like
Express is basically starting from what's my unique point of view.
Correct.
Usually,
as a marketer,
people tend to start by what does my buyer want?
And so it's like flipping the thing on its head.
You know,
it's like you start by giving something instead of taking something,
let's say.
And so
I think it's really interesting to understand the behind the scenes of this.
And at Hotspot,
how does it look the way you think about this way?
Yeah,
so let's talk a little bit about this because I think it's really,
really important.
If you are a student and a nerd of marketing history,
like I am,
and you go and you read
Ogilvy and you read the old direct mail copywriting books and the whole gambit of marketing,
a really good book on this is Different by Young Mimoon,
who was dean of HBS for a long time.
There's lots of great stories here.
but the reality is like one of the core things
themes of great marketing throughout time has been differentiation,
right?
And the differentiation for most of modern marketing history was in the story and in what you decided to focus on,
right?
There's the classic Ogilvy ad of,
you know,
at 60 miles an hour in a Rolls Royce,
all you hear is the clock,
right?
Because that's his whole,
like,
I'm going to focus on the unexpected thing.
All the other car manufacturers are focusing on these other benefits.
I'm going to focus on it.
on the benefit of luxury and quality and silence,
right?
And we lost differentiation in the era of the last 20 years of marketing because differentiation moved from story to tactics.
It's like,
hey,
if I was a little bit better at meta ads,
I can be good enough.
And I don't need,
I can arbitrage that.
And I can be the same as these other 20 products on Amazon and be successful.
AI is making that no longer true.
And you now have to be much more differentiated on the story side of things.
And so you're like,
how do we approach this at HubSpot?
I think there are a few tests.
The easiest one,
the most fun one,
and credit goes to our co-founder,
Brian Halligan,
because he used this throughout the company's journey,
was could a yoga studio say this?
Basically,
like,
could any business say this?
you know like put put somebody else's logo on this and could that credibly come from them and that is the most basic test but it really works you know you're like oh i'm saying all this thing i got this jargon and literally like 30 other companies could say this thing and we're seeing right now in ai technology right so see a sameness out there everybody's saying the same thing about ai it's agents it's blah blah it's headless it's cli it's all these things it's like speeds and feeds and all this bullshit.
right and so you're like oh just a total commodity market how do you actually bring to life a truly differentiated point of view and the process i tend to follow is oh well could a yoga studio say this what
is everybody in the world saying what is the exact opposite of that and normally the exact opposite you read it and you're like oh i think that's pretty interesting i i would actually Thank you.
you know what and like we're actually doing a lot of that stuff if we did if we changed a few things like this would fit us really really well and then so if you're kind of going against against the grain there on the messaging then it's like can i deliver it in like unique ways like in the inbound marketing days like we'd
write blog posts about how direct mail was killing the environment like you would find every angle possible to try to make this like counter argument and be the the David versus the Goliath in
your market.
And I think that got lost a lot in the last 10 to 20 years of marketing.
And I think we're getting back to that now.
100%
agree.
And you know,
so the test you were just chatting about,
I've got one test I do in my customers.
It's like,
I call it the white paper test.
It's all right,
take your headline.
Usually it's for the website,
you know,
because I don't know why,
but people with the website,
they try to be inspirational instead of just saying what they do.
You know,
it's like,
it's really weird.
And so what I do is like,
all right,
take your headline,
put it on a white piece of paper,
Just go and see your neighbor and ask the question,
what am I selling?
What am I selling?
And the second thing is,
can you identify that it's me and that it's not another company?
And so it's basically exactly the same test that you're saying.
Yeah.
Here,
look,
we're going to have a quick 30-second detour because the website for any marketer is largely their bane of their existence.
Because the website,
everybody has an opinion about a website.
Literally everyone.
The legal team,
your CEO,
everybody.
And here's the old Ogilvy quote of there's no statues of committees,
right?
That like really remarkable work comes from like a singular mind and a singular idea.
And the more people get involved,
the more watered down.
That's what happened to the website.
Websites get watered down because there are tons of people involved.
And I really like your test because it's a forcing function to go back to that group and be like,
look,
we're trying to do everything.
Can we just do one thing very well?
And,
you know,
it's really interesting how sometimes just by reading the headline,
you don't even understand what the company is doing.
Oh,
totally.
100%.
You know,
usually what I see is that people,
sometimes they think about the value proposition in terms of slogan,
you know?
Yes.
But,
you know,
like,
because you're worth it,
you could sell a mattress with this sentence,
you know?
And so...
Because you're worth it is a good slogan,
but it's not a value proposition,
you know?
And so,
you know,
this is where I think people are mixed up in marketing and try to be inspirational when they miss the pragmatism.
You have to remember that humans are inherently self-interested.
And because humans are inherently self-interested,
they use jargon inside group colloquialisms.
or really meaningless slogans because they're afraid to have something very specific.
Yeah.
Right.
Because it's going to alienate,
somebody that they know,
and that's going to make them feel,
a certain way in some ways,
like the best markers in the world are kind of like empathetic sociopaths.
Right.
Like they like,
right.
Like,
it's like,
I understand what this person wants and I actually don't care what the world says or thinks about that.
I have deep clarity and
I am one of these people.
So I can identify a lot with it.
Like I just,
for better and for worse,
I just don't care what people think.
It's like,
is this the right answer?
If this is the right answer,
you should just do the thing.
And I think that is the challenge is that most marketing work is largely a reflection of how sensitive the leaders of the company are.
Yeah,
completely.
All right.
Okay.
One,
we've defined the point of view.
Then you give marketers a tool that you call the four
R's.
So, Remarkability,
Resonance,
Reach,
Regenerative.
Can you walk us through these four?
So,
what we're trying to do with the book is to tell you that the rules of the game have changed,
first and foremost.
And
I live my life by a set of principles.
One of the principles is
I'd,
never play a game i can't win and i just don't i don't i don't play a game i can't win there's nothing there's no use of stepping on the field and so then you ask well what do you need to win the game to win the game who wins the game normally the you
you're like oh the best team wins the game the most skilled people in the game now the people who normally win the game are the people who understand the rules of the game and the people who understand the rules of the game normally the people who write the rules of the game and so you have to write the rules of the game
And what we're saying here,
what I mean by this is like,
there are new equations to actually do marketing really well in a modern world.
And like,
for example,
an old equation would have been cost per lead,
right?
Cost per lead.
I'm going to advertise on the meta network and I care deeply about my cost per lead.
Well,
and then.
you know your meta rep if you were big enough spender would argue oh you're getting this brand benefit too because people are seeing your brand and all of this so now it's like well what is the actual equation for spending an ad with a great creator
If somebody,
like,
let's say
I've got somebody who has a stranglehold level of trust over an audience.
Am I going to measure that person just on a cost per lead basis?
Would you do that?
I don't think I would do that because then I would completely undervalue the relationship I'd have with that person.
So I need a deep level of conviction in how I'm working with them,
which means I need a different formula,
equation.
to get there and with the the four r's you're kind of bringing up is like those to me are the kind of the guardrails for the outcomes you're trying to achieve right like if you have remarkability if you have resonance if you're regenerative basically means like you're able to actually learn and build off of the cycles of work that you're doing it's like oh i worked with this creator this
creator i value them on this formula i made that's essentially a cost per lead
plus the impact I think they're going to have on my AI visibility,
plus the brand lift I think I'm going to get from them.
And I've built this little composite equation.
I'm going to evaluate and decide how much I want to pay them based on that money.
And that's great.
And so that means I'm going to start getting,
you know,
resonance with their audience,
which is awesome.
Then I need to let them build the message,
not me,
because I don't know shit about their audience.
They know everything about their audience.
If they build the message,
it's going to be remarkable,
right?
Because it's going to deliver in this native,
remarkable way,
which is going to be really,
really powerful.
Then I'm going to look at the work I did with them and actually learn what worked and what didn't work,
give that data back to them so they can actually regenerate and run the next campaign in a much better way,
right?
Like these are like practical applications of what I mean by these terms,
but
I don't think most companies do any of this.
right now because those are these are all post ai constructs versus pre-ai constructs yeah okay and so on the post ai you talked about one thing earlier which was the switch from seo to aeo so
you've invested a lot on this topic uh like uh tried and learned a lot of things so let's say i'm the cmo of a company
working who had a big growth in the past coming from seo i've got my traditional seo team my blog factory content calendar blah blah blah what should i change what advice can you give me uh
it's it's a good question so we're i'm going to use your example because it's like this is a team that has humans and money right it's not this like you know solo person trying to do this thing
You have to do a couple things.
Right now,
you're basically saying,
hey,
I've just done text-based SEO.
Now you need to do text-based answer engine optimization,
and you need to understand how you're visible across chat,
GPT,
perplexity,
Gemini,
and Claude.
And so you need some visibility tool and recommendation tool.
We have got one at HubSpot,
HubSpot.io.
There's tons of them out there.
But you should go and have a sense of what you do.
and and
And SEO and AO is kind of like a Venn diagram.
There's some unique things about each of them,
and there's some areas of overlap.
Like you need to have authority and great content and all these things for both.
But what those things mean is a little different.
Like,
for example,
these answer engines have certain sources they cite at a much higher rate.
So LinkedIn,
YouTube,
Reddit,
for example.
If you want to show up and chat GPT,
you really need to be a part of those three platforms to actually...
build what's called consensus.
The answer engines are looking for,
hey,
if I look around the internet,
what is the consensus answer on this topic?
Where Google used PageRank to say,
who had the most authority?
Who might be the biggest expert on this?
Which is a very different way of addressing it.
So the first thing I would do is go from SEO to add in AEO.
And it's kind of a yes and.
It's not like,
don't abandon traditional SEO,
but know that you're moving on the spectrum towards
You have to move from text only to multimedia.
I would at minimum say text to video.
And so that means you'd be like,
well,
great.
Video's hard.
I only got this amount of people and amount of money.
How am I going to do this?
One,
you need some content automation systems and tools that are going to allow you to get the same SEO and AEO results with less writing time and humans focused on writing and editing so that you can free up some of those people's time to go write scripts and make videos.
And remember,
YouTube is one of the biggest search engines on the planet.
And you need to be a part of that game.
And also,
video is a very important component to all,
to
AEO, to SEO.
And so it's like you're building up this network of content that's going to allow you to be discovered regardless of where you are.
Those are like the two,
there's a long list of things you could do.
Those are the first two things I would do right out of the gate.
Okay,
so.
Video.
It's interesting because we spoke about the creator-led growth,
let's say,
and here you talk about the video and,
okay,
I don't have the resources,
et cetera,
et cetera.
I see a lot of CMOs,
you know,
they're convinced they need to invest in CMO,
in creators,
et cetera.
The thing is that they don't have anybody around them,
and especially like the CEO,
willing to put their face online,
you know,
show up and talk in front of an audience.
Yeah,
it's hard.
you know exactly it's hard so how would you convince someone to start playing this game and showing up and etc etc because like most
of the cmos i know they know it's working but they can't find the right words to convince people to start doing the thing they you're saying like hey they need on-screen talent and they don't have they don't have it yeah yeah
Um,
it's a hard thing.
And part of the reason it's hard is because it's kind of situational to a business,
right?
If it's a super technical business,
you need some credibility and experts there.
I think this is a great example of why you need a different equation.
Okay.
And the path to solve it,
there are a couple paths to solving this problem.
One,
you go out and you say,
hey,
there's somebody on YouTube.
in my market that's already doing this and i'm going to acquire them and i'm going to do an acqui-hire type of thing i'm going to buy their audience and their channel and i'm going to have them do this for me but that's a different equation because you have to then say hey i've never bought this like attention and so what you need to believe is that attention influence and distribution are the scarce resources of the modern world and that's what i believe i
believe it's going to be much easier to commoditize product and features
whether it be a technical product or manufacturing or what have you,
than it is to commoditize distribution and influence awareness.
And so you can go buy that.
That's one thing.
That's one way to solve that problem.
Another way to solve that problem is you have to take one of your best people and say,
this is now your job.
Right?
Like,
so,
so let me,
let me give you,
let's give you like a real practical example of something I've dealt with over,
over the years.
Like,
there's not that many great sales
YouTubers, right?
There's a lot of entrepreneurship.
There's not a great sales YouTubers because like the math doesn't really make sense for them.
Like I'm making a ton of money selling this thing over here.
You're not going to pay me that same amount of money to just like go be on YouTube all the time.
And so
Sometimes you feel like,
no,
I am going to pay the same amount of money or,
you know,
I'm going to do something very different because that
I believe this is existential to the future of how we actually build community and work with and inform our customers.
So you basically say,
hey,
I want you to do this different thing.
I'm going to keep paying you.
I'm paying you.
But I need the trust and credibility there.
The other that's that's option two.
Option three is like you identify somebody out in the world that could be good at this.
It's like,
oh,
they're not doing it,
but they spoke at a couple of our events.
They've done some things.
We could turn them into this.
And let's do a partnership with them or a contract agreement or hire them to kind of do this for us.
And those are like the three paths to doing that.
Okay.
And what about the ROI?
How?
do you calculate ROI on this?
How do I,
sorry,
what did you say?
How do you calculate ROI on this?
Oh,
how do you,
how do you calculate ROI on this?
Depends on,
depends on what you're trying to achieve,
right?
You know,
for most of the CEOs,
it's like,
show me,
we can get leads from this.
Right.
So if it's show me,
you can get leads from this.
There's,
there's a couple of ways to think about this.
There's the very basic way to think about this,
which is,
hey,
I am going to pay X amount of money for this person.
I'm going to pay Y amount of money for production.
uh and and editing and everything and i think i'm going to get the amount of views and i'm going to convert you know uh two percent of those views into and deletes right and so that's that's
the very basic math of all this and that's the math most people would do
I think it's pretty dumb math to do,
but it is essentially the math I think most people would do.
Because it's simple.
Well,
because it's very simple.
It's very rudimentary.
But don't confuse simple with similar.
You can be simple and very differentiated.
And I think that's what I would argue here.
And so if I were,
the biggest thing that that equation misses is that.
We live in a climate where most companies who have built any kind of marketing demand motion are so constrained that they're paying like break-even return on ad spend to just keep a volume going,
right?
And that's what's happening.
I'm out there.
I'm talking to people.
You're talking to people.
I assume that's what you're seeing as well.
And so then you're just like,
this is existential.
I don't give a shit what the ROI is.
I am not going to be a growing business.
If I don't do this,
right?
Yeah.
Right?
Like you're just not.
You're going to be like,
cool.
Well,
eventually I'm going to be paying,
you know,
losing money on these ads on Google and Meta.
And I'm never going to get the volume I need.
And if I don't make some investment to figure out a new channel distribution,
then I'm cooked.
And so who gives a shit what the ROI is,
candidly,
and just like I have to make this work is existential to the future of my company.
Yeah.
Okay.
Tough conversation for some CMOs next week,
I guess.
Look,
I'm not saying it's an easy conversation to have.
I agree.
But
I think it's an honest one.
Yeah.
You know?
Oh,
yeah.
Yeah,
completely.
All right.
Let's talk HubSpot.
So for the past two,
three years,
I've seen HubSpot repositioned to around,
you know,
AI agents,
customer agents,
prospective agents,
et cetera,
et cetera.
What does...
agent first uh an agent first company actually mean for uh a company like hubspot today yeah it's a good question i think a lot is getting lost in all of the technical ai
jargon and cli and skills and all of these things that's why i'm asking yeah so if i if you ask me i think that this is there are this is a pretty simple articulation of it you know
At HubSpot,
we're building an agentic customer platform where you have all of your customer data.
And there are kind of two modalities of building and working.
Like if you're a technical person,
you're going to build on our APIs and there's three layers of API.
There's like a classic data API where you go and access raw data.
Then there's a context API where we have pre-computed and inferred context related to your tasks.
Like,
for example,
like what were the key characteristics of your top?
1,000 performing SDR emails.
And we can turn that into something where you can build a skill,
you can execute,
you know,
your writing and everything,
you're prospecting everything off of that,
right?
That's the second layer.
The third layer is going to be a work API where you can call agents,
call skills,
call tools to actually go and conduct work autonomously.
And so if you're a head of RevOps,
sales ops,
marketing ops,
like you're going to go and do that and you're going to really love working in that way.
If you are a non-technical person,
you're a sales rep,
you're a marketer,
you're going to work with HubSpot in three kind of core ways.
The first way is you're going to ask,
you're going to use our
Breeze assistant,
which has gotten really remarkable.
I use it every day now.
You're going to build artifacts in it.
You're going to interact with all of your context about your customers and the strategy you're trying to build and the tactics you're executing with the assistant.
The second thing you're going to do is you're going to vibe code.
You're going to build artifacts,
you're going to build landing pages,
you are going to use a traditional vibe coding editor experience where I'm a non technical person,
but I can go and build a landing page,
or build a,
you know,
a page for my webinar,
whatever I might need as a marketer or seller to go out there and make my numbers.
And then the third thing you do is going to build,
you're going to build custom agents with no code.
And you're going to,
you know,
build a modern AI agent for the given tasks you might have for your given role.
to make you more productive.
And if you're a technical person,
you're building on the APIs.
If you're a non-technical person,
you're really working with HubSpot in those three ways.
And obviously we have kind of premier agents that you might be working with as well to building custom agents,
but you got to think of like,
you're using building agents as that kind of last one.
Okay.
Maybe one of the questions I'm wondering recently is,
you
Like,
I see the way
I work has changed.
dramatically in the past six months.
Like
I spend time on the terminal,
which was never the case before,
you know?
Sure,
And you know,
for example,
we are HubSpot's customer.
And now I see that
I work on HubSpot from my terminal.
So I create campaigns and
I manage my contacts,
et cetera,
et cetera.
And so
I spend less time.
on HubSpot on the websites,
but maybe I spend more time on HubSpot doing things on HubSpot,
but from my terminal.
And so I'm curious on the way.
So first,
do you see this shift?
Like,
because you've got the numbers,
so you do,
do you see these shifts on,
on many customers and how do you see the future of this?
You know,
the first thing I would tell you is that the
chasm of adoption is very wide yeah sure and there are two groups there are many groups of people but the two primary groups are people like you people like me it's like i got terminal open i have codex open i have perplexing computer i've got breeze assistant i got freaking
10 tasks running in parallel across all those things at one time right um and then there's people who are like i don't do anything with this ai stuff right and that's an oversimplification
but there's there's a lot there and what you see from the people not doing much with ai that's where like just even like a core thing like breeze assistant which can like build some workflows for them and get them some of the data they're looking for and everything is a transformative experience sure
now what you're asking me is for like the early early minority of like hey i'm a little little savvy i'm in this ai game i'm building some stuff what do you see
First of all,
you see anybody who's working in what we call like a connector.
So it's like you have your stuff in cloud code or open a chat GPT or what have you,
Codex,
what have you.
Use the product more and you get more value.
Exactly.
You're seeing what you're saying.
And we don't particularly,
I don't think it matters where that work happens.
Candidly,
what I care about is delivering the right outcomes to you.
Right?
And what I want to do is like,
cool,
if you're in
Cloud Code,
and that's awesome,
and you want to run our prospecting agent out of Cloud Code with our CLI,
go nuts,
man.
Have fun.
Like,
it's great.
Like,
I think that is a,
anytime you have a new technology revolution,
an artificial intelligence one,
you have a really big unbundling.
You know,
you have lots of different platforms.
and ways to work,
and then over time,
those things consolidate.
So
I think right now we're in an era where people need to be working in whatever works best for them and whatever we can deliver the best outcomes.
And that's why we have that whole API and technical infrastructure layer to make that as easy as possible.
And we feel very confident that the economics of us can work for us in either way,
whether you're in the app or not.
I suspect there will be certain things that you're going to want to be in the app more for over time.
as you
build more custom agents on HubSpot versus...
Look,
I'll be honest with you.
Cloud code is not that fun.
I know people are addicted to cloud code.
I'm going to take a hot take.
You know what's not fun?
Hitting allow all the time,
downloading files,
uploading files,
managing everything locally,
having a very fragmented mobile versus desktop AI experience.
It's the ultimate single-player experience.
You're like super isolated from everybody.
These are real drawbacks.
These are not things that,
especially if you're like me and you're running a real team of people that I think are good things.
And they're good for like,
if you are working on your task lists,
I think they're fine.
But if you're trying to collaborate and build with others,
I don't think it's great.
And I think for those things,
you and other people will work more at HubSpot.
Yeah,
so two comments.
One is,
I think this is the next evolution of...
tools like cloud,
et cetera,
like the multiplayer.
Oh yeah.
They're going to go that way for sure.
Yeah.
Because,
because I think everybody agrees on this.
Yeah.
Um,
second is.
Not a controversial take.
No,
I agree.
No,
second thing is
I think as a marketer and,
and maybe mostly on the product side,
but what's interesting is that before you had to think about the product,
like the user experience on only one surface,
what was like your website.
And now you have to think about the user experience on different surfaces because now you have to adapt to where people want to work on your product,
you know,
which is like more complexity,
but I guess also more fun.
But yeah,
it's very interesting.
And on this agent first type of company,
one thing that you...
changed also is the way you price the product,
because now you've got part of your pricing model,
which is outcome-based pricing.
So how did you think about that?
Because everybody's talking about outcome-based pricing,
but it's a big decision on what type of outcome do you price the product?
So I'm curious to know what's the behind the scenes.
It's a good question.
um well the first i'd say the the first initial uh part of this is that there's a big theme happening out in the world called token maxing right where it's like oh i just want to spend as many as many tokens as possible because i am getting i
think i'm getting real value and it's kind of a flawed way of thinking in a bunch of ways it's like our thoughts it's the new flex yeah it's like the flex the flex should really be outcome maxing right Yeah.
True.
You know,
part of it's like,
show me massive growth because of all this stuff.
And I don't,
you know,
it's like,
there's a lot of quote unquote efficiency,
but not a lot of growth tied to it.
So that's why you want to like do should be more about outcome maxing.
And so if you're like in the outcome maxing camp,
like we are,
then I think it's fundamentally,
okay,
well,
what are the right outcomes?
And it's easier in some places than others,
right?
Like customer service,
you know,
if.
you resolved a customer's question or not you know and and that's that is much more definable if you you know if you booked a meeting for a sales rep or not it's a lot harder in marketing that's why you don't see it in marketing yet i think we will figure it out but the i think the question behind your question is like how the heck do you think about it yeah
you have to say what is the actual value
my customers deriving from this outcome.
And then you have to say,
I have a wide and diverse set of customers that have very different business models.
So I need to value this outcome in a way that works for everybody and still makes it economically viable for myself.
Right.
And that's,
I think,
the process that we largely went through.
And,
you know,
like,
for example,
like our customer agent is 50 cents per resolution.
I think.
uh and its current resolution rates in the
70s and so it's a really remarkable product and we decided to price it aggressively and you know really high quality product and it's one of the lowest cost products on the market right and so that's part of it is a strategy perspective of like how much do you want to optimize for short-term revenue versus market share right
yeah okay um
And,
you know,
I'm curious because you're doing all this repositioning in real time and like the outcome based pricing,
the agent first company,
blah,
You one thing that is particular to you is that you are doing this publicly and you are a public company.
And,
you know,
you've got you've got investors and you like you've got Wall Street.
Basically,
you've got Wall Street behind you,
like watching.
yeah so
You know,
usually when you do this type of repositioning,
et cetera,
you try to be quiet to have like a private conversations and especially when you're a public company.
And so what do you do differently when every bond move has to land for both the buyers and
Wall Street?
Like,
how do you think about this?
Yeah.
So when you think about,
like,
public company or not public company.
I actually think being a public company is a very healthy thing in this process because what you're essentially saying is,
hey,
I want to deliver the customer the value they want and the value they need.
And I want to be a long-term durable solution by giving them the value,
like the value we provide you,
right?
But the public company side is like,
oh,
there are some like time guardrails.
in which that needs to happen,
right?
Because you could be very altruistic and you could,
there are a bunch of bad companies that have just been like,
hey,
I'm going to like do all this stuff for my customers.
I'll worry about monetization and they just do stuff for years and never make enough progress,
right?
And so I think of it as like,
hey,
we have like important time horizon and transparency around the evolution of this company and that's okay.
And
I've learned in this
life that everything always balances out,
you know,
everything always doesn't go up forever.
You know,
everything,
everything is not just a popularity contest or rational judgment,
right?
There was a period of time where it is always going to be a period of time where certain companies are going to be favored and certain companies are going to be unfavored.
First of all,
there's always going to be an evolution of how companies and people are measured and how they're doing.
Right.
But ultimately,
can I provide differentiated value to my customer?
And I can if I can do that,
I can be very clear about how I articulate that story and the way that my customer and future customers understand that,
then I should be able.
to get my employees,
my investors,
there's a lot of stakeholders,
right?
On board with that mission.
And
I think the biggest challenge here is trying to not do too much.
There's a lot going on in the world.
And can you do enough without doing too much?
It's not easy.
Oh,
no,
it's not easy.
Not easy.
And especially now,
because there is so much FOMO around AI,
et cetera.
Totally.
Everybody's pushing you to do more and more and more.
And so...
Yeah,
of course I want to do more,
but also I have to focus on some of the things that really move the needle.
And so
I think it's really tricky.
All right.
Also,
one thing is that you see CMOs from two angles,
and I think very few people get to see this this way.
So you're running marketing at HubSpot for
15 years,
but you're also sitting on the boards of some companies like Gusto,
SimilarWeb.
Yeah.
And so you watch other
CMOs do their thing.
Totally.
And so from the board seat,
what do you see makes a CMO good versus great?
That's a really good question.
First of all,
I mean,
I think being a CMO is a hard job,
right?
The first job of being a CMO is to realize that the CEO is the CMO,
right?
And so you have to realize that you're in service to...
a CEO or a founder and what they're trying to do.
Right.
And so
I think the really great CMOs understand that,
but they understand when to challenge,
right?
It's like,
they're not just rubber stamping everything.
The,
the CEO founder wants,
right.
Cause that's,
that's not good either.
You know,
the,
the really good C
CMOs figure out how to balance their point of view and the founder's point of view to come out with a better joint point of view.
That's one.
Two,
they run their team.
like Sequoia,
not the bond markets,
right?
They have this portfolio strategy that's asymmetric.
So they have bets that they're making across their marketing team,
some of which are going to fail,
some of which are going to have really high returns,
instead of a bunch of very low incremental return bets.
So what does that mean tactically?
I've talked to a lot of marketers who I don't think
are as strong as they could be over the years because they're just like,
well,
I'm going to optimize some paid campaigns.
I'm going to do some email marketing.
I'm going to do some basic product marketing.
And it's like the best CMOs are like,
no,
I have found a couple of tactics that are unique to my company that I'm going all in on that I think could double,
triple,
quadruple our marketing awareness or our demand.
And yes,
I'm still going to do some of that other kind of table stakes stuff,
but I've got real asymmetry.
in the stuff that i'm doing and i'm gonna get real uh real benefit there uh great cmos are also really good system builders and principal thinkers you know they're closer to engineers than they are marketing i believe is much closer to engineering than it is sales in terms of like mindset skills uh
necessary to be really good at it uh because you gotta remember being a cmo what kind of stinks about it is that like
I'm supposed to know how to
plan a 15 000 person event build a remarkable website the api security documentation of all these platforms that we're trying to integrate and build our marketing on how to perfectly position products how to produce a remarkable brand campaign how
to optimize research how to run remarkable ads how to do all these things we're like if you're running a sales team that's a very hard job but everybody you
everybody's selling,
you know,
it's a very similar job profile where a CMO it's like,
so can the person learn and get to breadth on those things becomes really important.
And can they hire really well?
Because especially around topics that they don't know well,
yeah.
Right.
Because they have blind spots in those areas because you can't be great at all that stuff.
It's very hard.
Yeah.
Very hard.
Yeah.
And I think this is the main challenge for CMOs is like,
usually what I say also to my...
clients is like,
yeah,
you think about marketing as one job,
but marketing is actually 15 jobs,
like it's SEO and paid and blah,
blah,
And so you can't have someone doing like an experts in all of these domains.
But the thing is that because they're not experts in all these domains,
some people,
they can really bullshit their way to make you think they're experts when they're not.
And so,
yeah,
it's actually really,
really hard.
All right.
I've got one last question.
Let's do it.
What do you think is the best way to lose my board's trust in 2026 if I'm a CMO?
Do what you've always been doing.
This is a time for transformation,
not the status quo,
right?
And I think the board,
any board members out there,
like they're a participant in the world and they're like,
oh,
yeah,
I'm doing these things differently.
I'm talking to all these other people who are doing these things differently.
And this person's coming to me,
this market person's coming to me and tell me,
hey,
well,
this was our plan last year.
This is basically going to be the same plan next year.
And we're just going to drag the spreadsheet and all that stuff.
And that's the surest way.
to fail right now.
And it's the most likely way because change is really hard and scary,
right?
And so it's the easiest thing to do is say,
I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.
But
I would posit that it is for sure the easiest way to fail.
Well,
Kip,
thank you very much.
For the people who want to follow your work,
LinkedIn,
Marketing Against the Grain.
Yeah,
hit up Marketing Against the Grain on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.
on LinkedIn or X.com.
I hang out most of my time on both of those spots.
I'm Kip Bodnar on both of them.
Alright.
Thank you,
Kip.
Thanks,
Jordan.
Appreciate you having me.
Thanks,
everyone.
Do it
Just do it
Don't let your dreams be dreams.
Yesterday you said tomorrow,
so just do it
Make your dreams come true
Just do it