Godard Abel: Unlocking Success for Software Buyers and Sellers in the G2 Marketplace

Hey everyone, thanks for listening. As you know, we're on the HubSpot Podcast Network, and we recently made the switch to go to their CRM platform as well. With this, I get some inside knowledge and some of the products and services that are rolling out, and I'm super excited to share that they're relaunching their sales hub with some really exciting new features. The new sales hub connects the dots with sales engagement, so prospecting, deal management, and analytics and coaching, and it aligns all of that so you can have a single view of your customer, and also with some of these new AI tools that they're integrating, you can actually automate all those annoying admin tasks that take you away from selling.

Trust me, you've got to check this out. We are just scratching the surface with this here at JV Sales, and I've already seen some massive improvements. With Sales Hub, closing deals is no big deal. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com slash sales. Hey everyone, welcome back to Make It Happen Mondays, where we talk about sales, business, entrepreneurship, personal growth, mental health, and everything in between with guests who I truly respect, and I think make a positive impact on the world around us. Now this is a very special week, since I'm going to be attending and speaking at HubSpot's inbound conference in Boston all week. Now because of this, we decided to do a HubSpot takeover of the podcast with my good friend Russell Bradley Cook, who's actually the Senior App Partner Manager over at HubSpot.

And he's going to be talking to some of the leading CEOs in the tech industry about the future of sales and where sales is going, especially in this world of AI. We're going to release these episodes daily, so make sure you tune in and let me know what you think. Let's make it happen. Hi John, thanks for the intro. I'm Russell Bradley Cook, and I'm thrilled to be a part of this. As John mentioned, he's at Boston at our annual inbound conference, and I'm going to be bringing you not one, but five episodes this week featuring the CEOs of top software companies with integrations on the HubSpot's marketplace. They are Seismic, Sixth Sense, G2, Chili Piper, and Typeform, talking about how AI is being used by their sales and marketing teams and in their product, as well as the future of sales and partnerships.

Thank you very much for joining us. You can join John and I on LinkedIn with hashtag JBSales and hashtag Let's Make It HubSpot Monday. Let's kick it off. Goddard, welcome to Make It Happen Monday. Thanks, Russell. Good to be here with you. Likewise, we were just talking before we started recording. We had filmed an interview over a year ago, and since then, I believe that G2 has passed the billion-dollar valuation. You've had two million reviews on the platform, and most exciting, I think you biked 116 miles recently. It's been a busy year. Yeah, no, it's been all in all a good year, although tough time for our industry, as you know. Yeah, absolutely. I'm curious. I assume that most people listening to this, it's a very sales-oriented audience.

They would have heard of G2. I've been a huge fan of G2 for a long time. I see it as one of the unbiased places where buyers go to review information about software solutions, and you've been instrumental in building that into a key pillar, not only for CRM, but for many categories. I was wondering maybe if you could give a little bit about your personal journey, and then also some high-level context on G2, fundraising, plans for the IPO, headcount in sales and marketing, that kind of thing. Yeah. No, so I've been a software entrepreneur for 25 years now, building SaaS companies. And first, I was also in sales and Martech. So the first company we built, big machines that became Oracle CPQ, Configure Price Quote.

Then we built another one of those, Steelbrick, that became Salesforce CPQ and Revenue Cloud. And that really also inspired us to build G2. We just wanted to make software buying and selling easier because we saw a lot of our customers struggle to discover apps like ours that could really help their business. And frankly, as an entrepreneur, as a software seller, we thought it was too hard to get awareness of the great apps we were building. And so that's what we sought out to solve with G2. And we are excited. G2 has now become the leading software review platform. When we started, you know, we said our vision was to create a Yelp for business software because we thought this paradigm that's very common in consumer shopping of using reviews to figure out, you know, which products, which services work best for you, that was missing in our industry.

And so we started G2 actually about a decade ago. And it's exciting now to see it coming to life. I think we're up to 2.4 million trusted reviews. And, you know, we did become a unicorn, which is exciting. And hopefully that does put us on the way, someday ringing the bell. Obviously impossible to predict when that's going to happen. But we are excited. We've really built a global team, you know, about 650 people around the world, including team members in Europe, in London, Dublin. Obviously, we started here in the U.S. And now we also have a team in APAC, in Bangalore, Singapore, and a partner in Tokyo. And so it's really exciting that now G2 is truly connecting software and buyers and sellers around the world and doing it based on trusted peer reviews.

Yeah, I love it. And as I mentioned, I'm a huge fan of G2. And also a big admirer of you. And for those who don't know, Goddard mentioned work with Steelbricks, but he has two nine-figure exits under his belt. And I think G2 is going to be even bigger than that. Well, G2 is already bigger than that. And so we'll see when the bell rings. In terms of your personal story, you started, maybe can you just share a little bit about how kind of growing up, seeing your dad's business grow and then how you kind of evolved from that into the software industry. Yeah, and I did grow up around entrepreneurship. You know, my father was an entrepreneur in a very different industry. He was in pump manufacturing and he was making big industrial pumps.

But I was born in Germany and that's where my father's business was originally based. And he was re-entrepreneurial. He wanted to get in the U.S. market. So when I was nine years old, he decided to move me and our whole family to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to start building his business in the U.S. And so I do remember as a kid, oftentimes going to his office on weekends with him. I remember one of the incentives was he had a very early computer-based golf game. But then as I got older, he also had me, sent me to Germany to work in the factory. And so I just remember growing up around both seeing the challenges, the excitement of building a company. And I do think ultimately that really inspired me to want to be like my dad and build my own business one day.

Yeah, I see. For salespeople, I really feel like the best salespeople own their business as if it was they take it seriously and they have ownership of it and say, this is what I'm going to build from it. And so I think that they have a lot to learn from that lesson and that entrepreneurship that you have. And one of the things that there's a lot of different angles we could take to the discussion. But I joke that at HubSpot, we have an SLA for how quickly we can mention AI. And I believe you mentioned that you launched a feature called Monty. Maybe if you want to talk a little bit about Monty and how that's changing G2 as a product. Yeah, at G2, we did launch Monty and Monty is the world's first software buying assistant, AI assistant, specifically built for business software buyers to guide them to discover the best apps.

And probably like most of the world, we were really excited when ChatGPT 3.5 launched last November. And I remember me and my co-founders, we looked at it and we're like, wow, this is incredible. And, you know, how can we apply to G2? And we'd actually, for years, been trying to build software selection tools that Russell, for example, would ask you, hey, what industry are you in? What's your company's size? And try to guide you to the best software. But honestly, none of it worked particularly well. And so we immediately decided, hey, let's try to launch an alpha on top of ChatGPT. And my co-founders, Mike and Tim, they run something called G2 Labs, probably a bit like Dharmesh at HubSpot, your co-founder, CTO.

And I think he right away also launched, you know, your own AI solution. And my co-founders were so excited. And we were amazed. I think we first launched it in March. But even as an alpha, how well it could do. And I think the problem it really solves that we couldn't solve before is a lot of software buyers, frankly, don't know what kind of software they're shopping for. They might just have a business problem. Like, hey, I'm trying to improve my sales forecasting or I'm trying to accelerate my growth. And obviously, those of us in tech and software, we have all this tech speak. And we also have it on G2. There's over 2,000 categories, you know, where there's marketing automation software or email marketing software or content management systems to host your website.

But the reality is a lot of business people, they don't know our software industry jargon. You know, they're just like, hey, I just want to grow my business. And I think it's also always been part of the HubSpot inbound philosophy. Why don't we educate marketers, salespeople on how to grow their business? And I think what Monty does really well, now you can just go to G2 and say, hey, I'm trying to improve my sales growth. And then Monty will ask you more questions and we'll ask you what industry you're in, what's your company size, how many sales reps do you have? And then based on that can make very nuanced recommendations by in real time tapping into the G2 data. And I think also doing it by conversation.

And that's also the other problem, I think, with the internet, most apps, right, they tend to be very rigidly built with like forms and you had to fill in and, you know, structured search. And the beauty of AI now allows a conversation and, you know, it's just like you're talking to the best software consultant or the best agency partner and it can just advise you based on a conversation how to grow your business and ultimately what software tools might help you do it. So we really think it's going to change the game for software buyers and also for software sellers because G2 can be a much better matchmaker and sometimes I say it's like a dating site where we can find the perfect app the first time based on AI and based on data.

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Let's make this happen together. Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the people that you find leaning into G2 from having talked to the team in the past, I understand there's a bunch of different customer personas, whether it be marketing team, whether it be sales team, whether it be product team. I was wondering what are your best customers? How are they using G2 today to excel and grow? And G2 is a two-sided marketplace, if you will. And the number one persona we want to serve is a software buyer. And we've always said software, the buyer first, because ultimately we want to give software buyers, which to us include over a billion knowledge workers around the world. And we all saw this with the pandemic.

Every knowledge worker now, if they weren't already, are using cloud apps all day. Obviously, video conferencing apps like Zoom, CRM apps like HubSpot or Salesforce, and so many other purpose-built apps. And so we really believe it's essential for the knowledge worker to have the best apps, to have the best software stack, because ultimately it determines our productivity at work, it determines our happiness and our success in our career. So we think that's the essential mission, make sure all billion knowledge workers have the best software. And, you know, we call them software buyers. And then, you know, we also, on the other side of the marketplace, we love serving software sellers. And, you know, those are entrepreneurs.

And frankly, as an entrepreneur, I've always been also a salesperson, you know, because obviously to grow my business, our business, you know, we have to sell our solutions and ideally by targeting the right buyers. And so, you know, I think, and that's actually where we've monetized the most, what we call G2 marketing solutions. So we can help software sellers, you know, better market their products. And I think what G2 uniquely provides from its marketplace, we have about eight or nine million people every month now software buyers shopping for software. And we can give marketers a much better intent to target those buyers at the right time. We can give them updated profiles on G2.com so they can better communicate the value of their solutions to those buyers shopping.

And we also can give them great content. And, you know, I think the content we believe buyers will really trust. And actually, your founder, Brian Halligan, said this. I think the world is in a crisis of trust. And the reality is, you know, we tend not to trust companies anymore. We don't trust governments. You know, we're very skeptical, but who do we trust? We trust our friends. And G2 is kind of bringing that concept to your professional peers. You know, we also find, because as a salesperson, sales leader, who are you going to trust? It's pure sales leaders. And that's also who you're going to trust for technology advice. And so that's the core idea behind G2. But we also believe as a seller, you know, what better way to prove your value than to have trusted references, trusted reviews on G2 tied to people's LinkedIn profiles so that the buyer can then, you know, find trusted advice.

And we think that's going to lead to a much more efficient sale. You know, if the trusted peer is recommending your product versus it just being your own marketing claim. And so we do now have over 3,000 software vendor customers or all around the world, I think almost 3,500. And they are using G2, both the marketplace, the intent data and the content and to grow their business more efficiently. And so you mentioned before that you were the original salesperson. I listened to a podcast recently that mentioned you built a sales playbook with one of your co-founders that was up to 100 pages and that you're still evolving that over time. I was wondering the Make It Happen community is obviously very focused on sales.

I was wondering if you could talk through that sales playbook and the evolution over time. Yeah, and my co-founder Matt Kornick and I, we had built this sales playbook which, yes, has grown into 100 pages and we started building that together at my first company, Big Machines. And frankly, I remember in 2003, I kind of learned the hard ways as an entrepreneur how important sales is because, you know, three years into our first venture, we were frankly almost bankrupt and we'd started that company at the tail end of the dot-com boom and this AI boom maybe reminds me a bit of that, you know, but we launched the company back in 2000 and the first year it was great. You know, VCs gave us $20 million and they said, wow, you guys are, you know, young geniuses and frankly, we didn't know what we were doing and we learned that the hard way because three years later we'd burned through 19 out of 20 million we'd raised and frankly, we only had a million in AR to show for it and our metrics, frankly, were pretty terrible so we weren't going to be able to raise more money and growth mode and at that point I also had to take over sales myself like I tried to hire somebody to lead sales but frankly, we hadn't found that product market fit and so and I think most people say that as the entrepreneur at the beginning until you get to true product market fit frankly, you have to be the person selling because you have the most expertise and the most passion and I kind of learned that the hard way and then I had luckily, I hired Matt Gorniak you know, just as a junior sales rep at the time I only had two sales reps and then he and I kind of together learned, you know, how do we really sell B2B software?

A lot of it obviously the top of funnel the qualification how do you grade them but equally probably most importantly how do you really sell value? Because we were also an early cloud software provider so we had to build really compelling value business cases because those early companies at the time we were selling to manufacturers they were very skeptical about working with a small startup so we really had to create the best value case in the world and you know, really make them believe that you know, this software we were selling was going to transform their own sales process save them a ton of money and that we had well thought out plans that they could trust us to take care of them and so we really learned together and then ultimately we scaled that company you know, I think at the end we had well over 100 sales reps it was acquired by Oracle for $400 million and we'd grown it to over 50 million ARR and probably what I'm most proud of from the time we were at 1 million ARR almost out of business we never raised any more money and organically grew it to 50 million to a global company and all those lessons we learned we'd end up still in the playbook and that served us really well and when we went to build Steelbrick because that company had just as much success in two years and was also acquired by Salesforce for close to $400 million but we were able to apply all that knowledge from the first company into the second company and so I think codifying your playbooks and when we learned that was important is when you only have two reps you can be very informal but then you know both companies we wind up with revenue organizations over 100 people or now G2 we have over 200 people and so if you don't have a structured process and playbook enablement those people won't succeed at least they won't succeed very quickly and so it just becomes essential that you know you create your playbook that you create good enablement and can get your reps productive much faster yep that rep time is hugely important QE so what is in the playbook like what I would imagine it's more than just talk tracks it's more than use cases like what do you what are you distilling in that that you want reps to be able to represent when they go to pitch G2 right and it's really the whole funnel you know kind of from the top of funnel which might be kind of an inbound inquiry you know how do you qualify that lead how do you actually turn it into an opportunity then how do you properly grade those opportunities and ultimately convert them to closed one but then along the way there's a lot of tooling you know for example there's templates how do you respond to that initial inquiry what questions do you ask the prospect on that first qualifying call you know to see if this is actually really a valid opportunity and then also you know how do you once you've qualified the opportunity what's the right messaging you know in that first sales meeting which typically will include you know we call it our first vision call which includes the whole playbook here's the slides you present to paint the vision for the company here's that first demo that you do and then here's how you follow up on that first call and you know but then there's a whole process and there's the second call there's a core tool I mentioned around building value we call it a BOA a breakthrough opportunity analysis and where we would with our customers together define how they could achieve breakthroughs in sales productivity using our software and we then back that up also with whole spreadsheet model you know to quantify the ROI together with the customer so they really believed it and you know then it continued into implementation templates SOWs implementation best practices because once the customer is convinced of the value convince your provider they start to have fear how do I actually implement this you know and can I can you be a trusted partner so then it has all the implementation best practices and you know everything you need so really from the top of the funnel all the way through closing and even beyond closing you know then we have a whole customer success playbook which you know is separate but I think the customer the prospect also wants to feel and know that hey it doesn't the relationship doesn't stop in any way when the deals mark close one because we also learned that's actually really when it just starts you know when you know how do you take care of them how do you make sure they're successful and then ultimately how can you grow and upsell them so it's really a holistic approach to the whole you know customer life cycle all the way from that initial inquiry all the way through closed one all the way through successful customer outcome you brought up one of the heretical ideas which I have which is that there is no such thing as closed one and it's funny that closed one exists in almost every single CRM I have ever seen and I don't think that it actually exists that it is as you said it's just when things are starting and especially maybe it works for washing machines or refrigerators where nobody's going to touch it for another couple of years but in SaaS if you've got recurring revenue like you have to be in there you have to make sure they're successful true and I think that pressure is higher than ever you know I think most companies including GT we're having more churn challenges because the reality we mainly serve software marketers and you know it's a tougher market for them they're not able to raise funding so a lot of them are cutting back their marketing budgets so I think you're right if you don't from day one start delivering value making that customer feel great about their purchase obviously successfully implementing but also communicating them hey here's all the value you're getting here's why you should be excited you know if you're not doing that yeah I think it becomes very challenging on churn and I think also the expectation from investors now is that we all have you know very positive NRR net revenue retention where on average not only are we retaining you know the SaaS dollars people are spending with us but ideally every year we're growing that book overall and so I do think Russell it is more important than ever and you're right maybe we should call it like closed start or something you know because it really is the beginning of the customer relationship I love I love I love closed start that's the first alternative that I've heard so I talked to Alina at Chili Piper and one of the things that one of the tips that she mentioned was to use a Chili Piper link for somebody who's canceling and to try to get in front of the person to find out like what's going on and if that is something that can be addressed quickly and they said that that was one of the experiments they had run recently that was was successful and God there's so many different directions we could go in terms of AI coming back to AI I was wondering if you can share some concrete examples of how your sales and marketing team are using AI if you have anything today yeah and we are putting it into our website chat also so we you know I think most people have this website but we've also put Monty in our chat so that we can provide much better answers you know to software marketers that want to learn more about how they might upgrade their GQ profile how they might engage with our audience and frankly we trained that seller Monty based on just call recordings and you know we kind of just took to start we just took 20 call recordings from our best sales reps and then we trained our Monty which is built on top of ChatGPT and we were amazed you know even after just being trained on 20 good sales calls how well Monty can answer a lot of common prospect and customer questions and I think that's obviously that's great for the buyer because they can get educated much more faster they don't even have to wait for a sales call and so I think we're really excited to enable more and salesperson or maybe go read a blog post right now can just be an intelligent conversation with the chatbot Monty right on G2 and we think that's really going to accelerate our sales cycles and sales productivity and so do you think I've got a view on it but do you think that that's going to superpower your sales people or that's going to focus them on the very end of the funnel and yeah how do you think that's going to correct sales I do think that's going to kind of superpower them because I think the ultimate value of a salesperson is in building that human relationship and also letting the customer feel your culture feel that you're going to take care of them and frankly that's something as far as I know we can't put in the AI you know the human connection the human community and I think also being that human advisor and so I think it does in my mind it'll take away a lot of the mundane work and I think also I know you guys are working on HubSpot right also the mundane work of like filling in all the forms to update my CRM pipeline I also think AI can parse conversations and I think that's what your founder Dharmesh is working on right and just do the pipeline updates for you and so I think a lot of the tedious tasks that traditionally sales reps had to do manually I think the AI can automate and so I think it can give sales people more superpower and make them more productive than ever of course on the flip side I would say if as a salesperson you don't adopt it or frankly any knowledge worker if you don't adopt it if you don't learn then I do if I'm sending somebody an email why not use it to improve it we can all use it to improve so many aspects of our work and so I think it's one of those tools now in technology where all of us if we can seize the opportunity to learn we can really automate a lot of our mundane work and really get better at using our superpowers I think it's an exciting opportunity and big inflection point that I do think will power the best sales people to more and more productivity look you know we're on the HubSpot podcast network and we love spreading the word about other podcasts that we think you should check out and you should definitely check out the side hustle pro podcast with Nikayla Matthews Akolm this podcast showcases diverse entrepreneurs who've scaled from a side hustle to a profitable business and I absolutely love Nikayla's real and authentic depiction of what it's like to do a side hustle while working full time and all the emotional rollercoaster that it takes to build a viable business on the side she tells all of this from her own personal perspective of doing this herself and brings on guests who share their own journey with practical advice that you can take action on immediately so listen to side hustle pro wherever you get your podcasts yeah I interesting some of the one of the best use cases that I have seen is combining conversational intelligence with AI and being able to write up call meeting notes and next steps follow up emails things like that which are the bane of every sales person's existence like you want to talk to your customers but actually writing those notes and getting that into the CRM is not the thing that you're most excited about in life and so being able to streamline that and make people more effective but I do also really see a lot of activity and this is one of the spaces that G2 is involved in is around buyer intent and what things are customers asking what questions are they not asking and how can you engage with them and being able to surface that I think can really superpower reps for sure I think you're right a lot of that mundane as you said write up my call notes document the next steps a lot of that can be automated way and just be much quicker and I do think the superpower of sales is going to be more and more on the EQ I would say because even the IQ of just answering basic questions I think the AI can do a lot of that right but I think really building the trusted relationship the trusted connection with the human beings at your customer I think that's going to be I think where sales people can really focus and I think that's what the best sales people enjoy I am curious from a go to market perspective historically would you say that G2 has been very much a marketing driven engine a sales driven engine how would you classify your GTM yeah and it's probably I would say I would call it product assisted growth you know people are talking about these hybrid models and I think the one unique thing about G2 versus the more traditional SaaS business I built G2 is very much a two side marketplace and so honestly engaging the customers is much easier and G2 we're committed to a freemium model so as a software vendor you always start with a free profile on G2 and you don't have to pay us to be number one in your category and one example of that for years Slack was always number one on G2 and frankly we could never get them to sign up for paid marketing solutions but we were okay with that but they had 40 50 thousand really happy reviews and so they actually loved G2 they just never and frankly they were growing so fast they felt like they didn't need our marketing solutions to grow even faster and you know so but I think that's the way G2 starts so it's very much easy to engage that prospect because they're already on G2 we can share some interesting information about how are they doing in their category and they're already on our platform and then what our sales team does it kind of assists them in learning about the value of our premium marketing solutions such as buyer intent or if they want to use our content in their own sales campaigns or marketing campaigns because one downside of sending your prospect to G2 that some sellers see now they're in a very reviews reference page custom branded for myself powered by G2 so that's just kind of one example but then that's what our sales team focuses on is basically educating that prospect that's already on G2.com on the value of our premium solutions and then also assist them in implementing that and having success with it and so I think it's always been a hybrid motion where we haven't and I think over time with AI we can probably get more people to fully self serve but it's been more of hey sign up for G2 start using it for free and then our sales team can start to engage them and hopefully convince them of the value of moving to a premium marketing solution so one of the things so I'm based in Europe and I often encourage the app partners that I work because I think that it's absolutely key step if you want to succeed in the US to have a strong G2 presence and you're right in a way it does show you alongside your competitors but better to look good in that comparison rather than to look mediocre or even worst case you're just missing because it has become a stamp of credibility in our industry what do you mean you don't even have a single review I do think that yeah so I think at least you want to be there definitely and like I said you can be there for free that part doesn't cost you anything because it is designed for startup entrepreneurs because frankly we didn't like the traditional analyst model Gardner Forrester where I remember my first company big machines at the end we were spending 100,000 a year with nine years I won't go down that path one of the things I'm interested in is that you offer dozens of integrations with a variety of different use cases and Matthew Gombeau who's the global VP of partnerships at Aircall one of the things that he has talked to me about is how he sees the evolution of partnerships from a hub and spoke model connected to a specific ecosystem to more of a mesh network and integrations between partners flowing with potentially sales and marketing but also even product integrations and you have integrations with Sales Loft and HubSpot which is kind of more traditional marketing sales automation tools and CRM and then you also integrate with SixSense and Bombora who have their own intent engines I'm curious how do you think about partnerships you've been doing it for longer than most people going back to big machines and steel bricks days we learned our first startups especially big machines we struggled for years I mentioned we were almost bankrupt and honestly one of the things that lifted us out of that was starting to partner and in the relatively early SaaS days I think this was even before HubSpot existed but we partnered with Salesforce early we partnered with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and with Oracle Siebel CRM and all of a sudden once our customers could see how our CPQ could work seamlessly with their CRM it made it a much easier investment decision and frankly then we also had the trust stamp from big companies like Microsoft Salesforce Oracle and frankly as a little startup it was hard for people to trust us without that partner stamp so I kind of learned myself how powerful being part of an ecosystem can be to drive growth and at G2 we also we also believe in ecosystem growth and frankly at G2 we want to stay focused on being a great review platform providing great software advice we don't want to be but to get value from our data from our content people need to operationalize it in a sales or marketing system and so we from day one just said hey let's build great integrations and let's be part of other people's ecosystems and that's why we're also excited to be part of the HubSpot ecosystem we'll certainly be at inbound and because we do have great integrations to HubSpot for example where our buyer intent signals in HubSpot CRM if you're a sales person you get alerts wow your customer obviously on HubSpot you provide this out of the box when they're on your website but equally important hey they're shopping on G2 right now they're looking at your company's profile on G2.com they might be looking at competitors and now you can get those alerts real time in HubSpot and potentially that can trigger actions and this could be not only on your own properties but also on G2.com and so we do see that's how people really get value you know or if they want to use our content put it into an email marketing campaign it can seamlessly flow into HubSpot or you know whatever email marketing solution you might be using and so it's a bit like peanut butter and jelly to maybe use the American analogy but it goes really well together or maybe in Germany it's like your sausage with your mustard but it does go very symbiotically and I do think almost every startup now I think by being part of bigger ecosystems you can accelerate trust and growth and frankly utility because it is very much an API driven economy now and most startups you are not going to be a platform or suite day one so you really want to be symbiotic to larger players use their APIs and add value to your customers by plugging into the platforms your customers already using and so how do you motivate or incentivize your sales people to lean into those partnerships and I think usually in most people let's say I remember at Big Machines Steel Brick we had sales reps aligned by region and I remember we said hey 20% of your job is to get to know the partners in your territory and because I think the customer will respond so much better even if your partner if all they do is just send an email you know like hey we trust this partner you know and meet you know meet Jim from my partner I think if you get that introduction from a platform partner where the customer is already your conversions accelerate dramatically so I think as a salesperson thinking of yourself truly as a relationship builder and truly surrounding your prospect or your customer obviously reaching out to them but even better if you have a trusted partner from a platform that could be an agency a consultant that's already working with your customer if they'll give you a trusted introduction I think your odds of engagement are probably 10x higher and your sales cycle will be that much faster so I do think in this modern world of ecosystems it's essential that salespeople think about surrounding the customer with relationships with partners as well and so do you how do you handle that in terms of commission perspective if there is a partner attached to a deal does the salesperson get we always make it exactly the same because if you punish your salespeople in a way by reducing their commission if a partner is involved honestly then they're not going to want to introduce the partners which I think is detrimental so I think we always said hey leverage them and if anything sometimes when we introduce a new partner we'll do a spiff where they get extra bonus extra incentive if they do leverage the partner because partnering is also hard and the reality is you mentioned Chili Piper we also have a G2 partnership with them but at the beginning your sales reps are skeptical and it's understandable in sales you're always under a lot of pressure you have to sell your own product you have your own goals and you're like why should I introduce a partner that's going to slow me down right but then so I think providing incentive sometimes and then they see oh wow and Chili Piper is an example hey if you know people use Chili Piper to set appointments straight from their G2 intent data and they do in real time and they get more meetings guess what the customer is going to be happier right they're gonna buy more from us and they'll be happy Chili Piper customer but think it does take some incentive you have to prime the pump with partnerships because I think most sales reps are naturally skeptical right they want to focus on selling their own wares and they don't want to complicate their deals with partners but I do think in this modern ecosystem world it's also important that you teach your sales people to trust and leverage the partners ultimately to make the end customer happier yep solving for the customer it's we have one of the benefits of working at HubSpot we've got some cool ones like week of rest but honestly one of the best is some of the colleagues that we have in our partnership team we have somebody from the customer success team Katie Moynihan who's stellar and what she always says is solve for the customer and almost even more that solve for the partner because if the partner is not solving for the customer you're not going to win in that yeah now it's got to be aligned with the customer and I think oftentimes also HubSpot I think that's why you guys have such a big thriving ecosystem because so many of your customers for example use agencies to help them get the most out of HubSpot but then they also plug in a lot of partners 40% get even more value from the HubSpot platform but ultimately partnerships are only good if the end customer is happier has more value from using both solutions and I think the good news with modern APIs it's easier than ever but you still have to build those trust relationships where the end customer ultimately sees more value but they also trust that hey if HubSpot if you're introducing a partner that partner I absolutely believe it in a way coming back to how will AI change things that I see a way for or I see the huge opportunity to manage the complexity of the buying process to understand the organization and structure of customers and cross selling and upselling but also as you said building those trusted relationships with partners because you just need one positive or negative word to come in from the partner side and your deal that you think is going to sign this month just gets blown up or it gets signed and it's hard to not you don't have much visibility on it but if you're at sales that is a huge part of your job because odds are they're going to blind reference you with your partner for example I'm sure if it's a HubSpot integration app or integrated app they're going to ask their HubSpot rep hey what do you think about this partner and obviously ideally they say great five of my joint accounts are already using them having great success I think middle is sort of I don't know them that's already bad worst cases don't do it one of my customers failed with it and I think you're right that ecosystem reputation can be quite fragile and so I think if it's with a partner you want to double make sure the end customer has success and then market that success because then it just builds upon itself so it's I think it's super crucial that the customer succeeds and then you build those relationships with the partners let partners know hey our joint customers are happier and ideally you have some stats where look they're going to get so much more ROI with your app my app and by the way they're going to renew more and I bunch of your partner apps they're going to be very committed locked in because they're getting tons of value across tons of apps and frankly switching becomes almost impossible absolutely I definitely think as we look at retention and how you manage that we don't see it going up to 100% but definitely it never happened sadly but it is a very large double digit on case studies for our partners so really excited about that one last question I realized we're just over time any advice for sales reps or BDRs that are early in their career as somebody who has started in the trenches as the first seller and then built up a business yeah I mean I would say right now especially it's a time to grind hard it's a tougher economy and frankly the reality is also true for a lot of young sales reps at G2 sometimes they're like hey you mean I have to make more calls and I might make less money than two years ago that's true I think it's true in a tough economy but I do think showing grit perseverance resilience now what I've always seen then those people that make it through these down cycles in industry they come out much stronger they get a new objection or they introduce new partner but they're learning something every meeting and their top track their messaging gets better every meeting and then if you compound that it's that whole mantra get 1% better every day or even if you get 10% better every year you compound that for a decade and all of a sudden you'll be the best salesperson or best sales leader or maybe you'll even be an entrepreneur and so I think grind hard now get better every meeting really listen to your customers if you do that in a downturn then it'll be incredible what you can do when growth returns to our industry Godard it's been a pleasure looking forward to seeing you at SaaS stock if folks want to get in touch with you on LinkedIn is that the best option LinkedIn is great or my email is Godard at G2 and I always love hearing salespeople entrepreneurs around the world so look forward to hearing from some of you and yes Russell look forward to seeing you in Dublin an honor to have you here on the make it happen podcast and look forward to seeing you soon take care thank you I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did with your support and our incredible guests we're one of the top sales podcasts out there right now and I can't thank you enough now to keep the momentum going it would mean the world to me if you could go and leave a five star review on your favorite podcast platform and share some of your episodes with your network also check out my website at www.john where you'll find even out there selling every day just like you are and I'm doing my best to stay on top of all the latest trends and technology so if you're looking to level up and you give a shit about this profession of sales let's connect and let's make this happen together