0:00:00 - Scott
Okay.
0:00:08 - Alex
Okay, great Well, welcome to a very special episode of experience focused leaders. I have an offer to a B test. Was you Whether we're going to talk to Scott Brinker, the VP of platform ecosystem, at a hub spot? Whether we're going to talk to Scott Brinker, the editor and Godfather of Mar-Tek, industry chief Mar-Tekcom. Or Scott Brinker, the creator of interactive content category as we know it, which is near and dear to my heart. Personally, scott, tremendously excited to have you on the show. Welcome.
0:00:52 - Scott
Yeah, wow, I can't wait to meet all these people.
0:00:56 - Alex
You have to talk in voice. You got to bring your Italian hair. Whatever you got, well, look, you know. There's so much to cover from our point of view, but let's start at the beginning, because what you know you've started back in the nineties, a boutique agency that effectively, over time, turned into kind of creating interactive content as a category, and later, in a book that you've written called hacking marketing, which is another fun thing for our audience, you wrote something that I love. I don't quote you. The most significant change that has unlocked opportunities for marketing innovation is this Marketing is expended from the design and delivery of communications to the design and delivery of experiences. Well, we tell prospects and customers is still important, but they're about how they experience. Touch points with the company has become even more important. Can you tell us about like? Is it? You still believe this? This is a? I think it's only more true.
0:02:07 - Scott
It's only a little bit more true than it was.
0:02:11 - Alex
And, you know, tell us about this insight, the hot that you've gotten, you know, in kind of building the category of interactive marketing experiences.
0:02:20 - Scott
Well, you know, one of the things about marketing is it is a we'll call it an honorable right, it's an honorable profession. That's been around a really long time, you know, and so, even before all things digital really started to take hold, you know, there've been so much, so many great leaders and pioneers. You know, I mean certainly the Mad Men era, you know, and one of the things from that era was this whole concept of thinking about, like you know, messages and media and the media and the media miss the message and you know like kind of covered it and then we it sounds like we missed, we missed the rest of it or like Well, it's like, you know, I mean, when you think about traditional marketing, advertising, you know it was very much purely a communications.
I mean, you know, again, there's lots of stuff always on the margin of this stuff, but the core, you know, what marketing did, was really around the communications how do we decide what messages, who were getting them to and how we deliver them. And, as I said then in that quote, that hasn't changed. I mean, like, understanding our messages, our audience, making sure we get those messages in front of them, is still, like, really crucial to successful marketing. But we now do have this whole other dimension. You know that people are not just passively consuming messages like a radio ad or a magazine ad or you know, a piece of direct mail in the, you know mailbox. You know they're going to websites, they're engaging to find answers, perhaps participate.
You know in everything, from when you start talking interactive content, things like oh, you know, can I do this assessment? You know, could I run this calculator? Could I, you know, in a very interactive way, learn about the opportunity of working with a particular company? And that's entirely new and it's what's actually. I really do find it so incredibly exciting because, hey, marketing is a creative profession and it's almost like we were creating in 2D, you know, and now all of a sudden we've been given permission to like, create in, like a 3D landscape, so like just the sheer surface area of creative things we can do to engage customers is greater than ever. But at the same time, this is this is a new discipline, like we're learning how to do this and do it well.
0:04:50 - Alex
Yeah, and it feels like the tragedy is that sometimes the you know we take a pull back up outside of marketing, almost the more important the message, the more sophisticated the nuance, the message, they almost the harder it is for either marketers or sellers to turn it into something that moves you. Right, like you know, I think we're people are going to be reading war and peace these days, right, you know, like, and yet we're showing up with these war and peace equivalents in B2B world. Right, black and white. You know small print, you know type of content that you need to read on the screen which you try to shove that war and peace into in a small real estate. So I'm with you on that. We, like you know, we've coined a derivative, actually Marshall McLuhan and medium. The message is that experiences the message. Right, like, and it's not entirely true, it's a little bit, you know, trivializing the message, but you know it's the first impression. Right, like the first.
0:05:52 - Scott
I think you're. I think you're right. Yeah, the way I did it was, you know, I had the Venn diagram of, you know, messages and media, and I basically added a third circle to that Venn diagram that I call mechanisms, because I love alliteration. So, hey, messages, media, mechanisms, but it's exactly the way you've said. It is more eloquent. You know, it's really about creating experience and I think that is the message you know. In many ways I don't know it's people have become so saturated with just plain messages that to really break through and leave an impression with someone, it has to be experiential in some sort of way. And I actually do think even in a digital environment, you can deliver things that have an experiential experiential right need to be inspired by the real world, like I'm.
0:06:45 - Alex
You know how do we like I kind of was always inspired and friends, and they have these little tasty macaroons that you go to the pate siri and you look at them and some of them some of them just plain and some of them are like have a little creations on them and you're like in there, tiny, and they're just, they're amazing, right, like you look at them, you cannot but stop and marvel at this and then the taste is more sophisticated and so, like, can we make our our? You know, you know the healthy food, you know for the brain, feel like that, right, can we kind of get you to choose you know from, from the flavor that you just like? Right, I think that's for taking these real world metaphors from people that know how to create great experiences, feels like the industry needs and digital. Well, you're, you know, tell me, like when you were an agency, right, like you started the.
I'm curious that journey from an agency to building a you know software to address this, what, what were you know? Because we started almost the the the opposite way, we started like a software person, like hey, can we build the software, but interestingly, we found that you needed to to build the software to really understand how to create truly great experience. You also need to be, you know, really close to the customer, and I think sometimes agents as an agency you actually get a privilege to do that right. And so what was your lesson and kind of building I am yeah and we kind of did a full circle on that, you know.
0:08:22 - Scott
So the way we got started in interactive content is we were effectively a web agency. So we're getting hired by these companies to build out their massive website. But you know, when you talk about a website for Fortune 500. It's still true today, but it's even more true back then that these things did not change quickly. There's a lot of process and review and what's going to be the information architecture and how's this going to live? And if I wanted something new, it's not something that you wake up in the morning and like, oh, I'd like to have this other thing over here.
Just the way the sites were architected in that age. They just didn't even have that surface area. But at the same time, all these marketing teams were trying to run all these new digital campaigns. And how do I bring people to stuff? Oh, do I need a microsite? I need a landing page, and it was just really awkward to create that stuff. And so that's what originally inspired us to create a software saying like listen, this isn't meant to build your website, right, this is meant to build all of the other kinds of marketing assets sales.
0:09:24 - Alex
Yeah, Got it.
0:09:27 - Scott
And we called it post-click marketing at the time, a phrase that never really quite took off. But yeah, it was this idea. You do all this investment in winning the click. How much effort are you doing in the other side of where you received the click? And so we built that. We shifted out of being an agency into being a software company. It is as challenging of a transition as people say it is. We probably were too dumb to realize how challenging it was going to be, but somehow actually made it through. But then the thing we found on the other end is, even once we had the software that was capable of building all these things, it was very clear that this was such a new net new capability, such a net new skill that customers didn't know what to build.
0:10:10 - Alex
They didn't know how to build You're talking to a marketer, you're not talking to a web designer, and so they weren't thinking in that. In that, you know?
0:10:18 - Scott
Yeah, and it wasn't even like classic web design, right, these like little you know experiences. They were kind of like a new form, you know, and so we actually then started to layer back in more service offerings, you know, partly to teach people how to fish. But if I'm being honest, and more than a few cases, it's like they just wanted us to feed them the fish. So okay, we'll do that too.
0:10:44 - Alex
Well, and I think kind of the you've taken like the sort of the survey, the interactive, like deep, deep kind of surveys and questionnaires and calculators. They're complicated kind of experiences, so I think it's not a trivial to go and figure that out on your own, I would say. But I think you're right, you were creating a category and I think people don't recognize, like having done a few of these in the past, this is very hard and I think to do that you created this term interactive content to kind of differentiate from static right and started educating as in traditional, you know, the PDF and yes, although I will give credit where credit is due, although we had been building this software, I think we were one of the first to actually build software for this.
0:11:33 - Scott
At the time, we were sort of framing it around landing pages and post click experiences. Landing pages was terrible because it became a commoditized term, and post click experiences People just didn't know what that meant. I think it was boy I'm trying to remember his name Seth, the fellow from snap app you know, he was the one who actually started calling this stuff interactive content and the moment I heard that I was like yes, that is the way to frame that. So yeah, giving credit where?
0:12:03 - Alex
credit is due. Well, look you're, you're, you're, clearly you're marketing of you're in the category creation. The ones that you were think created the category, the ones that you know.
0:12:15 - Scott
I'll give him a credit for the term.
0:12:17 - Alex
We'll take a little credit for, yeah, contributing to the category, but you've done a lot of educating on that and I think that was one of the things that we stand on your shoulders, what I was, one of the things that inspired us, you know, starting to relate to and you know actually what I referred to. The other example for one of your speeches that I left, where you talked about the presentation, where the presentation 50 years ago was like a custom creation and you know the effect of within, powerpoint comes in and creates the first sort of demarcation like for citizen, like the first version of citizen creators really was Microsoft Office, right, like, if we are like like honest about it, I was at Microsoft Circle, office 97, launching some Internet capability in there, and I loved it Back then. It was not evil at all, right, it was actually really an inspiring thing because, like a schmuck like me could go and create something, you know, hopefully without too many weird you know weird, you know animation things but it was sort of still empowering to be a creator back then. And I think that, at the same time, what they've done and this is sort of like interesting parallel to something that I'm worried about today is they, you know, they made it to make it easy for creators. They simplified and say, hey, you just create a bunch of bullets, because bullets are the lowest common denominator, and so we were all kind of got into this multi-bullet hell. Right, like you know, and like we don't have, we don't set the templates, didn't invest in the templates, it was all about, you know, creation. So the templates weren't really sophisticated and so only the specialists could create a really compelling experience. So that first revolution did, you know, do a democratized creation.
Then there's this wave, you know, let's call it collaboration wave. Right, like we let's call Google slides, google docs. Right, like, okay, it's still same ugly shit, but now it's a little bit easier to collaborate with it. So like, which is a problem, a real problem? And, and I think, with AI, like I'm actually quite worried that you know, we're now unleashing into the world a bunch of tools that are going to help people create more pseudo, spammy AI email.
You know things and you know the types of content that really, you know, is me, me, me, much more versus customer centered, kind of like encourage some of the older habits of like simplifying the creator and not really starting. Kind of like was the interactive content, which is like, hey, you actually want to create a great experience for somebody. You know, overwhelming somebody was. A ton of information in the day and age, where information is not a scarce commodity anymore, is not, you know, a recipe to a grade buying experience. It's a recipe to being ignored. You know, what's your take on that? Like, because you're you, you know you've obviously championing citizen creators and I want to come back to that, but like that's a worry trend for me of like the current focus on Gen AI.
0:15:22 - Scott
I think. I think that's an absolutely fair concern. In fact, I don't know, maybe six months or so ago I wrote a piece. I was thinking about the second what I call the second order effects of AI that you know. Okay, if the first order effect is AI allows you to create a whole bunch more content, you know what's the second order effect? Oh, you're like audiences are going to be even more overwhelmed and more spam and are going to like find ways to put even more barriers.
0:15:52 - Alex
As that spam sequence was not enough, yeah, no.
0:15:57 - Scott
I mean, like the hell, like again, like you know, it's not even creating the content. I mean, like these AI agents actually can do the full life cycle, like they can create the content, send the content like you don't have to be involved, you know, and so when the marginal cost, you know, of basically doing unlimited, you know outbound pushing to, you know prospects, become zero. Yeah, I mean, it's very logical to assume that okay, well, everyone's going to engage in that. Now what's interesting is there's two possible solutions to that, and I don't know that they're mutually exclusive, but one is you're going to see the buyers actually start to embrace technologies to go from a what is it like? You know the recipient of this stuff to be like no, no, I'll tell you what. I'm not going to pay attention to any of this. I'm going to have my own agent and I'm going to tell my agent go out and get X, y, z for me. And increasingly, it's going to be on the marketers to make sure that when these agents, you know, are requesting things on behalf of a buyer, you know that they can serve them up. But we're not only going to interact with agents.
So the other way in which I think there's a huge opportunity is the experiential dimension of this. It's like, basically, if everyone else is pumping out crap, you know the opportunity for you to do something different. You know something that is remarkable, something that you know wins the engagement of the audience On the like, just on the merit you know of it. Wow, this is so much better, nicer than you know. What I've seen everywhere else can actually be a real brand building. Opportunity, opportunity.
0:17:40 - Alex
Yeah, this is sort of. This feels like not to toad, like our, our horn, because I think we've been forking on this, but it feels like it's almost becoming a like. The next step from generative AI should be some sort of like customer focused, customer obsessed AI. We call it interactive AI because we're more in this interactive world, but, like, whatever you call it, don't start with like you know output you know like, or input like low input, high, high output, crap type of thing. Start was the outcome. What's the outcome that you're trying to achieve? And then work backwards. Right, like the good old, classic Steve Jobs thing. Like start with the customer and work backwards sounds, yeah, you know, sounds like we're forgetting that and getting too excited in the friction removal component of it.
0:18:35 - Scott
No, I think they're absolutely right.
0:18:37 - Alex
And I think, something that you've also like. As you can see, I'm a fan like you. You've spoke, you've spoke about the sort of the citizen creators movement, and I think that actually one thing that I found was interesting in there is that to really use a tool like Webflow which, by the way, we do use and we'll come back to how we use HopSpot it's a kind of a citizen creator tool, but it's like it's in a world where not all citizens are created equal and it's very much for the citizens that have the time and attention to do it. And then Figma, which is the star for most people that are not designers. Just the Zoom interface alone already confuses them and they're like God the moment you send them the Figma library of stuff.
So what we're seeing is that the sort of citizen creation world kind of bifurcates a little bit.
So there's these sophisticated tools that create great stuff, and then there is the rest of us that are going to be creating more spammy emails, because that's relatively easy, and we think or like the kind of back to the PowerPoint example, and so one of the ways that which we are building on your legacy is we said well, if most people know how to create a PowerPoint and, let's say, it's easier to show somebody.
Give somebody a good template for PowerPoint. Then teach them how to use a no code platform for an average marketer, average seller, maybe even some designers that are more graphic designers, like they're living in an InDesign world versus Web Design world. Can we enable them to become citizen creators? Can you take a PowerPoint user and help them create a better customer experience and at least helping people navigate through that library of content that they're sharing with a customer? What are your thoughts on that kind of citizen? The divide in the sort of the no code tools that are super simple but not tell the full story and just play like very nichey versus like all right, let's enable the average person to be successful with no code.
0:21:02 - Scott
Yeah, absolutely. It's funny because I do get a lot of pushback Every time I'm talking about the no code stuff and citizen creators, citizen developers. I get pushback saying from people saying like, oh well, it's not the coding itself or something like that, it's the depth of skill of understanding what to code and how to code. And I will acknowledge, yes, that is a factor. But there are two other factors that those people forget about. When you talk about building something amazing, one thing is like, oh, do I actually have the skills to understand how to design something great? But the other two things are do I really understand the problem? Because very often you have a bunch of people who are like super skilled at things and they get hired or brought in to solve something, but they don't really know the problem, they don't really live the problem.
Versus, like these citizen, you know, creators, developers, like they're living the problem, they see it, you know. And the third component of that that can't be underestimated, in my opinion, is passion. You know, because the people who are in the middle of living that and they see the problem and they want it solved for their customer, for themselves, and they're passionate about it. That's something that's very hard to get. When you're filing a ticket, you know, and hoping that someone else you know in like a central design group or a central IT group is going to solve this for you, and so, yes, there's a balance here. You know skill matters, but I feel like that depth of understanding, that being close to the problem and having a real passion and willpower you know to like solving it are like two huge assets in favor of citizen developers, citizen creators, and I think the technical skill part is in some ways easier to start using up the gap from the technology, the understanding the problem and the like, having the passion for how to solve it.
you can't. There is no software that gives you that Well they're like.
0:22:54 - Alex
The contra argument could be there could be a streamlined path right. There could be a playbook right. And so what we're seeing is Airtable has certain playbooks that it knows how to do really well, and then it's, the same time, capable of doing everything else, but it's not as going to be a playbook right, Same as Mondaycom. How are you seeing that kind of where where you basically start democratizing, the democratization, so to speak, with these, with the playbooks that help, you say, okay, you may not be an expert in how to solve a particular you know dilemma. In our case we're no code for content, hubs, for example, right, Like we have specific industry, are the things right?
So if we give you an example, an easy way to get to that version, then people sort of say, oh, I see how other people have solved that particular problem and I could spend save some cycles making you know an enthusiastic error, you know, in solving it. Are you seeing that kind of as a movement? And you probably see some of that was a range of, you know, various ranges of HubSpot users, right, Because we have people that are kind of digging in and figuring out. Everything that's possible was in the sort of the no code, you know, and the power features was in HubSpot. And then you have folks that are, you know they need, somebody needs to set up a calendar integration for them. You know, because they that will be overkill for, you know, for now and I get it.
0:24:24 - Scott
It's almost like there's a universe of people, you know, and it used to be that there was this very small subset of experts who were the only ones who could actually get any of these technical things done, and so anything that anyone wanted in the broader universe had to be filtered through and queued up through that small group of experts when I see the whole citizen, developers, this and creator, no code moving. All this stuff going is it's expanding the universe of people who can do this, and that doesn't necessarily mean everyone can do that or that everyone wants to do that, you know. But if we can go from a world where you know, I mean whatever it is, pick a number you know, say there's. I believe the current estimate is something like 30 million software developers you know in the world. You know if we can go from, you know there's eight billion, nine billion people in the world.
0:25:16 - Alex
So half a million, half 500 million, half a billion PowerPoint users. Right, that's exactly Okay.
0:25:22 - Scott
And so it's like hey, listen, if I can go from that 30 million and if I can expand the circle to say even 300 million, which is an order of magnitude, a 10x you know increase in the bandwidth you know that is available, the fact that, okay, well, not all nine billion people, you know, have this capability or necessarily even want this capability, it's still a huge, you know, leap forward in just like the sheer bandwidth you know, of what we're able to do collectively in the digital world.
0:25:54 - Alex
Yeah, this is really, really interesting. I think one of the things that I wanted to give you shout out and the hotspot is like as being one of the enablers for creating the sort of the superpower. So, for example, we are huge fans, we are customers ourselves, but, more importantly, one of the things that we've noticed that people start doing is, like HubSpot, in sales, you have your meeting widget right, like so we talked about that kind of the ability to book your meetings and they go directly into HubSpot. And so imagine, now you have just a link to that and in your PowerPoint or in your PDF and then, like, what we're doing, what we're seeing, is people love moving that and relate to that, which it becomes interactive immediately on click. It sort of allows you to book a meeting and then continue consuming the content. And then the same could be was a HubSpot form? Right, you could have consumed a form, filled out a ticket and then, like, started looking out for some additional information.
So HubSpot has created a bunch of these sort of mini apps. Was in itself, was in a platform. You play nice with other apps, right, they do the same thing and you start the data that's being fed, that kind of as a marketing in the organizations that choose your marketing animation. You're basically the marketing system of record, connecting the data. So tell us a little bit about this vision that you have, how you are kind of helping create value for other players in the ecosystem, like us at Relay2, wearing that hat and what's changing there in your view? Right, like you're kind of at the hot seat of creating a new ecosystem, right Probably outside of Salesforce AppExchange, which has been around there for a while. Right, you're kind of in the marketing world. You're creating the next most dynamic thing for creating a different segment of customers, obviously. So we'd love to learn from you.
0:27:54 - Scott
Yeah, well, I mean. So this is one of these things that for the past 15, 16 years, I've been writing the chief MarTech blog. Three or so years into that, around 2010, 2011, I started doing these maps of like well, what are the different MarTech solutions? And we thought there were a lot when it was like 100 or 200, and then it just like it went crazy. It's thousands and thousands and in many ways, like, the amount of innovation in these products is incredible. I mean, the amount of people who are like bringing really interesting new ideas, putting a lot of brain power and collaborative innovation is incredible. But on the marketers end, yeah, this explosion of all these little different things out here was very frustrating in them. How do I get these things to work together? How do I integrate them? Because, even if a piece of something is like really powerful, if I can't connect it into the overall customer journey and the way in which we measure this stuff and get funding for stuff and connect campaigns and programs together, it's hard to really tap into that.
0:29:05 - Alex
Right. So like a classical example, just to illustrate for our users. So if I capture a lead somehow and it goes in either internal system or in a spreadsheet of some kind, right, that's not as valuable that if I have a mark, you know hop spot, and that when I capture that lead, let's say, for our customers to relate to that lead would get you know, could go directly into my hop spot set, or I may not need to have that lead form because I know that they're already a customer because I have hop spot deployed. So that's sort of really interesting way to create lower friction experiences and get richer data about like hey, this customer is interested, you know, this lead is interested in all this particular information, and then you could feed that to your marketing orchestration, to your sales team, through the platform. Am I kind of illustrating with that sort of the flow of the data in a concrete way to some folks that are pretty tactical in terms?
0:30:05 - Scott
of yeah, no. I think that's a very yeah, straightforward way of like looking at yeah, how do you get these things connected together? The data is the most foundational layer to that and actually in today's age, with all the stuff happening around AI and, you know, much more sophisticated machine learning, we're doing with data, and all this, like getting all that data connected together in your internal ecosystem is, yeah, more valuable than ever.
0:30:33 - Alex
Yeah, and so I think there's sort of different platforms, right, like there's sort of the AWS and Azure and, like people, you know Google Cloud, so people think of them sometimes as the platforms, but they're like almost on a lower level. And then there is, like you know, the API type of solutions. Right, you're connecting a really. What I like about HopSpot is you're really connecting marketing to sales, to customer, so you're creating kind of a front office, so to speak. You know full cycle customer journey and like I want to come back to that in a second, because I feel like one of the challenges in Martak is that it only thinks about marketing, but actually some things need to flow from marketing to sales, to, you know, to CS team to be effective, particularly in content. But you're sort of building this, the platform of platforms, to some degree, because then, like people like us that were saying, well, you know, we are focused on, you know, different content types, for example, right, presentations, flip books, videos, et cetera. You know scrollable microsites, and then we could, we would. We are kind of a platform, right, we call ourselves a platform but in reality we're like a midget of a platform compared to HopSpot, because we can then sit on top of.
You know you're the mega platform that you're doing, but I think that isn't there. A movement right now was confusion. You know a lot of like niche vendors that are like I've been doing flip books for 20 years and we'll just keep doing flip books. You know type of things that are sort of stuck in one little niche. You know like, do you feel like the customers are fed up? What was that? And they want to move to platforms, mega platforms like HopSpot. You know maybe sub platforms like what we're doing to simplify their life. What's your take on this?
0:32:22 - Scott
you know moving, yeah, I mean, I think the short answer is yes, and it's interesting because, like this thing about platforms on platforms, that actually goes deep, right. I mean, like HubSpot is built on some of the cloud infrastructure platforms things like AWS and Google Cloud and there's some interesting things you can do within those ecosystems. And then you're right, hubspot is a platform and we have other products that are built on top of ours or integrate with ours, but they, in turn, then have their own ecosystems, and there's even a few cases where you find ecosystems on top of the ecosystem. So it's like an old philosophy joke turtles all the way down. It's like, oh, it's ecosystems all the way down.
I think, at the end of the day, what people are looking for? In fact, maybe this ties back to where we started. We were talking about all the noise in the market from just a marketing messaging perspective. In many ways, technology is another example where there's just so much noise. There's so much here. People are looking for ways to find a path through all this fine cohesion, and I think this concept of platforms and ecosystems is a concrete way to say like, okay, well, if you decide to participate in an ecosystem like this, the big benefit is, you now know a set of things that are going to work together, and so that's. I think that's more important now for buyers than it ever has been.
0:33:51 - Alex
Yeah, so it's important for buyers. And so if we start with the buyers, right, like, one of my questions is, like, do buyers really care whether what's your more tech stack versus your sales tech stack, versus your customer success tech stack? And my answer is obviously no, they don't give a flying whatever, right. And so, yeah, like, you've obviously, like, did a leading job in like educating the more tech discipline, but I'm sure you can see, more than anyone, some of the kind of overlaps, right, like so to us, like in our little niche world, like, if you create a presentation, right, it could be top of the funnel, marketing type of presentation, it could be middle of the funnel, it could be bottom of the funnel, which then starts middle of the bottom, starts getting used in the client engagement kind of ABM campaigns. Then they move into proposals right, it's still the same potentially presentation that your same case study that could be moving across the journey. And then, since everybody's now on subscription universe, right, then, like, once they set up to a customer, they could come back to that, came to study, to upsell to a new product or learn how to, you know, get value for the product that they bought. And yet, like something that.
Just I get this edgy feeling because I see very little of that discussion and even though, like you, get the sort of the new titles like you know I'm a revenue marketer or like I'm a, you know, chief revenue officer, but it's typically like a former VP of sales just get like a little mini promotion as gets called the chief revenue officer they still don't really go deep into marketing and that worries me, like, because it sort of is the opposite. It creates these sort of barriers, right, and you know the. So you've created an ecosystem that connects the dots, but I think a lot of people in the ecosystem in my worries. They're still playing in their little niche and I wonder what's your take on that? Are you seeing changes there?
0:35:55 - Scott
I mean. First, I do feel like we should acknowledge that the amount of change that is happening in not just marketing but yet the broader go-to-market world, I mean, my goodness, things were largely well-established here for decades, if not potentially even centuries, you know, in sort of these patterns of how things work and in the past couple of decades, oh my goodness, the pace of change in the world has been insane. It's truly gone exponential. And you have all these different organizations and all these different professionals who are trying to figure this out and we're asking a lot. I mean, change is hard, you know, particularly for you know the larger an organization gets, the harder it gets, you know. And so I always, while I agree there are definitely these gaps, you know, and people aren't necessarily thinking about or able to operationalize what really the best practice today should be, I also give a little bit of empathy of like, okay, well, I mean, you know, these best practices, in the way it should be, are pretty darn new and so-.
0:37:03 - Alex
And you change every couple of years yeah, they do.
0:37:07 - Scott
It's a really fast moving thing.
So this is again another reason why kind of like the ecosystem concept is because in an ideal world you're right every participant is going to look across the entire ecosystem and really be focused on how do you optimize the whole.
But in reality, we know there's gonna be a number of folks who are like, well, I actually just know this piece and I'm gonna focus on doing this piece really really well. But if you can plug that sort of specialist, narrow view into an environment that's connected across the broader ecosystem, that actually can work out okay. Because like they're focusing on a very it's almost like specialization, you know. I mean, like I've got all these cells in my body. You know my kidney is very different, you know, than you know perhaps my brain is synthesizing a lot of this stuff, but my kidney it's kind of focused on just doing one thing of like cleaning the bloodstream and, you know, move on, and you know that's okay. You know, because as long as the ecosystem is working and the contributions it's doing can be relied on, you know, by the rest of the ecosystem, then yeah, maybe it doesn't have to have the, you know, big picture in mind.
0:38:13 - Alex
So the implication is you have to be narrow, but you have to play nice within the ecosystem.
0:38:19 - Scott
If you're going to be narrow, you're gonna be narrow.
0:38:21 - Alex
you're gonna have to play nice you may not solve the global problem, but I, you know, I kind of still see that the sort of bifurcation you know is sort of the bane of like the. The one thing that hasn't changed is the marketing complains about sales and sales complains about marketing and that is you know, you know that sort of narrative and in B2B world it's pretty problematic for marketers, right, because if the marketers, you know they deliver their, you know their MQLs and you know some kind of version of whatever their kind of KPIs are, but the sales team doesn't truly kind of see that convert into real, real deals or a kind of emotional support behind marketing is a lot of CMOs struggle Like and there's a high turnover in the industry as a result of that. So, kind of on that particular dimension, like, one of our hypothesis is that they're not using the same tools, which makes it hard to communicate right Like. So the you know the marketing creator may be in design and if you send an in design file to a you know salesperson, they'll be kind of overwhelmed with something like that. Right Like the data sets.
May you kind of connect the dots right Like because you have, you know, hubspot CRM and HubSpot, you know, marketing automation working really really well between sales and marketing, but in general, like some people fall there that they can't use each other systems or the data issues. So what would be your advice to folks that are kind of in marketing or MarTech but really realize that you know, at the end of the day, either they deliver the revenue somehow directly through the PLG driven marketing motion, or they kind of they get the sales team to be their biggest champions, right, and kind of advocate for more marketing investment, or let's hire more reps and kind of get more spammy messages out through. You know the SDR playbook right Of 2000s, right, like so kind of what's your take there on like an advice, especially having you know now maybe we're wearing both a HubSpot and a MarTech hat.
0:40:39 - Scott
Yeah, I mean this is. It's funny. Okay, so there's like basically two perennial things that are just always hard. One is change. That's just hard. The second is cross team collaborations. That's just hard, you know, because this tension between marketing and sales. I mean, I come from a background where I mean, the whole reason I started my blog was because of this crazy tension between marketing and IT. You know, we now hear increasingly, you know, in this ever more data instrumented world, you know finances playing a much stronger hand and like what exactly is marketing doing here and how it's proving it.
And so now you've got cross collaboration, tension happening between marketing and finance, and I'm like I don't know that there's a silver bullet. It's the same thing with change it's always gonna be hard. Some companies really invest in getting better at change or they really invest in trying to get this better cross or collaboration and really try and build that into their culture. And I think those companies who do get better at cross team collaboration, get better at change management, have a huge advantage in this world where things are changing quickly and everything is so interconnected. You know that the success of one part of the organization has a huge impact on the success of the rest of the pieces.
And so, yeah, I say you gotta like lean into it. You know, like how can marketing serve sales better. You know how can sales like help marketing be more successful IT finance. You know customer success right. You know that's all thing about like the feedback loop. I mean you know keeping a customer. You know such a better ROI than having to win a net new one. So what's the relationship between operations and customer support and customer service and marketing?
0:42:32 - Alex
It's just no easy answer. Well, I think one. I think one, uh, that is there for me and I'm kind of uh, maybe just by virtue of, you know, being more in the entrepreneurial kind of a you know, high growth companies, I had a chance to switch from marketing to sales role in in the past life and I think that really like opened my eyes because when I was a marketer cranking out some stuff like, and even though those making the best effort, I totally underestimated, you know, the sales perspective and sales enabled perspective of consuming some of that content. So my hypothesis on this is that one of the ways to drive that kind of collaboration is for marketers to really especially with the PLG, they kind of the best marketers really need to think like, how do we replicate what the best sales people do? Was our, was, you know, educating about our products through our marketing collateral, through product interactive, product tours or whatever it is that to create a kind of a sales like marketing content and vice versa.
The sales team, I think, needs like to back to the experiences point. Sales team needs to up its game and ask for delivery of like really you know, experiences right that right now they're not necessarily equipped to create and there's. There's very little of that, like you know. Occasionally you see like a proposal designer right sitting closer to sales organization and some folks that are doing sophisticated things. Like we've been fortunate to work with people who have like account based opportunities, so like that's like you get a marketer to work on a that's like the top of ABM food chain in terms of stuff, but that's rare, that's an exception, not the rule. So kind of I think that what? So maybe what you're saying is like find these exchanges or like start doing like two tutorials, like you know, get the marketers embedded inside sales organizations and vice versa.
And I think to me, like back to the tools, like because the tools do define us to some degree, right, like, and so if we, you know, if we think of the tools in a niche way, you know and you're helping unlock, that was hop spot right, where you could serve in the connected way that might help get us a common language for data and through the tools that we're using. Well, that's my view. More back to you, like you're seeing, you have a pattern matching of chief martack right, and you're kind of at the intersection of a lot of exciting things happening at hop spot. So you know, I know you like to do some predictions and talk about the future. You know what are some of the key trends that you see emerging that you want to leave our audience with kind of that they should, you know, stay on top of to either, you know, engage, you know, give success to their organizations, or or in their career.
0:45:33 - Scott
Yeah, there's a lot, and it's also I always feel like I need to caution that if I've learned one thing over all these years of tracking, my attack, particularly future, is hard Like I don't think I've. I mean, yeah, it's just like, particularly at the rate at which things are changing. You know, I mean, for instance, I would say the obvious statement that you should be paying attention to what's happening here with AI, particularly generative AI, because it is very rapidly changing what people are capable of doing, what organizations are capable of doing. But if you asked me to predict like, okay, well, what will that look like three, five years from now? Heck, if I know, man, it is. It's just on such a fast acceleration pace. So, not predictions.
But I would say three things that I would be looking at, I'd be trying to stay on top of is one is how these AI capabilities are evolving.
You know you gotta, this is going to change what you can do in marketing, so you better be on top of it. The second is what's happening at the data layer. You know we're going a lot better at being able to unify data across organizations. We're getting pretty savvy now about leveraging data across ecosystems, you know, with partners as well to lean into that data, and part of it is because data feeds what's possible with AI, you know. And then the third thing is you know we're talking about these citizen creators is, I think, again, as a function of AI, the empowerment of more people to self service, more of their ideas and more of their needs is going to be a huge unlock in like expertise and passion and just sheer bandwidth, and so I'm sort of stay on top of that. I'm sure there's lots of other things, but those are the three things that I I spend most of my days now paying attention to and thinking about, because it's really exciting the pace at which that's evolving.
0:47:35 - Alex
And so to kind of wrap up on your kind of come back to your three roles. Hopefully we covered kind of your, your, your books, yeah, and thought leadership, your the chief, martech and the hotspot and also the, obviously the story of interactive content. We will still give you credit, even though you didn't coin the term. But, scott, you know what. What do you think the kind of the biggest takeaway from your more recent experience at the hotspot, you know, and how hotspot is changing right, like there's changes in leadership, there's, you know, obviously AI is, you know, you know, introducing a lot of opportunities and and changes for you guys.
What have you learned from the way kind of an organization like hotspot is addressing this changing environment? And, by the way, like we love, one of the reasons a lot of people love hotspot is that you know you're great at executing marketing yourself right In terms of inbound, you know, as a, as a term, and the, you know we personally relate to love inbound leads that we see show up in our, you know, through G2 or something like that, show up in our, you know, in our hooks into into hotspot, you know, and so, like that, you know you guys have innovated on that. What is kind of giving the hotspots innovation going forward?
0:48:56 - Scott
Yeah Well, I mean, you know, again, it kind of comes back to this thing about change. You know Hubspot, just on multiple levels is a company that has to get really good at change. It has to get good with change because hotspots growing. You know we've gone from being, you know, a company that was not too long ago just like a startup, you know, just sort of breaking through, you know, to something that now, like a multi-billion dollar business, has, you know, aspirations to serve an even larger set of audiences out there. It's, you know, increasingly also going upmarket and serving larger businesses as well too. So keeping up with the change to really be able to do that well and serve those customers well. And then there's the external change. You know it's all this stuff that's happening I mentioned with AI and data and, you know, says some great stuff. I mean this is all core into, you know, hotspots market, and so we have to continually change and adapt to those new capabilities so that we can help customers take advantage of what's happening with those trends too.
0:50:01 - Alex
One thing that you brought up like that, like we sort of see, was hotspot is their subspots. That originally was not, was more sales and marketing driven versus PLG driven. It's become in some ways very PLG driven in some products and then you get the same time you mentioned you're moving up in the enterprise. So how is that? Like how typically that's a tension for most companies, right? Like like I'm trying to combine those two. So is this is a sort of you just have different groups and teams and and they're kind of, they're just sort of bifurcating the world a little bit to try to, you know, do both or like how are you executing that? Because that's pretty hard. We have like PLG and enterprise and you know some days your head is about to explode, and how do you combine the tradeoffs for both? And you know we don't have the scale of hotspots. So I'm really curious how you guys pull it off and obviously prioritizing your ecosystem around that as well.
0:50:57 - Scott
Yeah, well, again I'd say it's not so much about going after enterprise like not companies with tens of thousands of employees for assets, small businesses 510, 2050, up to what we consider the mid-market 100, 200, 500, 1000, 2000, you know. And so it's still a somewhat reasonable scope. But yeah, you know, there are aspects of that that lend themselves really well to product led growth motions. And then there's other aspects of it that require, you know, the higher touch of engagement you know with you know sales or CS reps, and so I think HubSpot's sort of guiding philosophy here is let customers buy the way customers want to buy.
And then, so it turns out, there's a set of things where actually customers prefer to do a PLG thing. They don't want to talk to sales rep, they just want to do, you know, they know what they want, just let me do it, you know. And then there's other cases where you know prospects actually want to talk to someone to be able to, you know, go through different scenarios or perhaps talk about, like multiple other stakeholders, and so I don't think it's they're opposed to each other, it's just you need to make it really clear to your audience like, hey, listen, these are paths available to you, what would serve you best?
0:52:14 - Alex
Got it. Well, I know one thing after this conversation. I want to talk to Scott Brinker again. This was really really helpful and insightful, and thank you for letting me. I normally don't talk that much, but I'm so excited about some of the things that you've done that I kind of wanted to bounce some ideas around with you. So thank you so much for being open to that, scott. You know how can, how can our audience engage with you? Know ecosystem work you're doing at a hop spot or was was chief marketer?
0:52:45 - Scott
Yeah, well, thanks for having me here, really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, I used to say on Twitter, but I guess it's X now I'm at chief Mardech without the H at the end. Or SJ Brinker on LinkedIn. And then, yeah, certainly come to ecosystemhubspotcom if you want to take a look at what we're doing there.
0:53:06 - Alex
Amazing. Please do everyone. Scott Brinker, thank you so much for being on the pod All right.
0:53:10 - Scott
Thank you so much, Alex.