Jason Zintak: Leveraging Data and AI to Engage Prospects at the Right Time

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. Jason, welcome to Make It Happen Monday. It's an honor to have you here. Thank you. Thanks, Russell. This podcast is a podcast takeover of John Barrows' show, and the target audience is AEs and sales leaders and BDRs who are in the front lines trying to make stuff happen and really excited to bring them your insights, both from your experience writing the company, but also from Sixth Sense, which is a fantastic buyer intent tool, which HubSpot itself uses. Awesome. Look forward to it. Can you give a little context and maybe an introduction about what Sixth Sense is and how salespeople are using it today? Yeah, sure. So Sixth Sense is an application software that bridges sellers and marketers together.

And in its simplest form, we help surface buyer intent, buying propensity of a prospect or a customer. And when we surface this intent signal, you can do all types of things with it. So you can launch an email, an ad, social posts, LinkedIn, Facebook, or simply from a seller's perspective, engage with the persona that might be showing this intent. Similarly, marketing can engage in maybe just a simple campaign, a nurture campaign based on level of intent, or maybe direct call from a BDR or AE. This account is hot, so to speak. And I think it's a really interesting story of you joining the company because you weren't there as a founder, but you got brought on or you made the decision to join, but also got brought on a little way into the journey.

And that's maybe sometimes a little bit challenging. I was curious, maybe if you can share a little bit about that story. Yeah, sure. I joined the company back just around between Series A and Series B. Six years ago, we were about 5 million in ARR at the time. Today, we're in the neighborhood of 200 plus or minus. And it's been quite a journey. But for the founders and for me, they were looking for a match of someone that could potentially take the commercially take the company to the next level. And the fascinating part is I came from previous jobs that were big data, AI related, and then email marketing in the company called Responses bought by Oracle. And so Sixth Sense was this perfect fusion of next-gen sales and marketing, leveraging AI and big data, and sort of both in my past experiences.

And that's why I got super excited about it. Frankly, as a former seller, I just knew there was a better way. And Sixth Sense was on to it. And it wasn't broadly commercial whatsoever. The size was pretty small, but it represented a whole new way for sellers to go to market. And that was actually my heritage. I love it. I often see sellers and even sales leaders sometimes jumping into a role a little bit too fast and either the fit with their previous experience isn't good enough. When I was doing some research, you mentioned that you had a six-month dating process with the founders. Where did you get that inside of you? Because I've seen a lot of sellers not do that well. Yeah. Call it like careful.

Well, let's see. So, I mean, with anything, in my opinion, it's all about the relationship and chemistry. And so it can be the coolest technology, the hottest thing, the latest, greatest. But if people don't get along, if there isn't a chemical reaction, so to speak, that we see relationships could work, working ways are similar in style. And we actually have something in common that we believe in. That's why it took six months. I was in no hurry. My company, former company, I was CEO of Platform, sold to Workday. And I was looking for the right thing. And so when you have that mindset, both about the human connection, cultural connection, and then vision, you got to wait on it until you find it.

One of the things I've also heard you talk about is that you started your career at SAP. And Sixth Sense has recently launched a freemium product. And it seems like a big jump both in the history of Sixth Sense, but also in your personal history to go from basically the definition of enterprise to a freemium product. Maybe can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I mean, just like I talked about Sixth Sense revolutionized sales and market. I mean, that was then. This is now technology changes at light speeds. It's not enough to sell a heavy client service solution anymore. I mean, we're in the age of cloud and PLG and freemium. And so interestingly, our product spans multi-verticals, multi-segments.

I mean, we sell the Fortune 100 and we sell companies with 100 employees. And so the freemium was really just a way, given the product has broad applications from that segment size, we decided we wanted to be able to introduce the product to those wanting to try it out. And so that was only five months ago. And today we have 20,000 users based on that version. Wow. That's milestone. Yeah. Definitely. I coached my app partners to look at a freemium model as they engage with HubSpot ecosystem, because it makes it easier for customers, but also even reps to say like, is this something that I'm confident to recommend to be able to test on their personal accounts? And so that's, but it just personally, it's also a big step.

Like I see a lot of sales leaders take their previous playbook and basically just change the logo and, and run it. And so to go to freemium, I'm, I'm very impressed. Uh, yeah, I think you gotta, you gotta be adaptable and willing to change. I mean, you can't sit in your old ways. And by the way, I mean, that's one reason why I got so excited about Sixth Sense is, um, you, you might, you know, previously you might've gotten in front of your prospect through some, um, some, you know, hosted dinner, a steak dinner or a ball game or, uh, something to that effect. Well, I mean, those days are way over. Um, and I mean, you shoot for the last like two years, we, you know, uh, COVID the macro work from home, uh, people don't see each other like they used to.

And so, um, this is just another illustration of, of like what, what is current. And we leverage huge data sets and, uh, web behavior to find prospects and customers and engage at the help sellers, BDRs, marketing teams engage at the right time when there is actual interest. Um, that's a far cry from like thinking that you have a universe of 20,000 accounts and not the rep, but maybe the whole company, uh, but you have no idea how you're going to get to them. So this, this just allows you to use data science, uh, artificial intelligence to, um, and sort of lasso, lasso the, uh, the interested prospect. Well, you, you teed me up nicely. Uh, we joke at HubSpot that there is a five minute SLA to mention AI in any discussion I have.

So, uh, I, I'm not sure if it's a serious SLA, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't. Um, curious, you have been early to AI at Sixth Sense. Uh, I wanted to hear a little bit about Sixth Sense's, uh, experience with that and maybe some of the mistakes that you see other companies making with it. Um, yeah, yeah. Like we were to your point, like we, we started in AI as an AI first company 10 years ago. And so now with the AI being mentioned in every breath, it's sort of laughable, uh, to me. Um, I mean, sure, we're all are trying to innovate around it, but I guess the good news is we've been doing it for 10 years and, uh, we had our Gen AI, Gen AI product out two years ago from that. So, um, what are the mistakes?

Uh, I think that, I think the mistakes, uh, are, are largely the representation to the customer base if you don't communicate what it can actually do or not do. Um, but it, but they are models. Um, it is data and it's not perfect. Uh, so, um, expecting that the result even in Sixth Sense might be a perfect, uh, answer to what you need to do is unrealistic. Um, the good news is that we're actually helping you sift through lots of data sets that, that humans can't possibly do. Uh, and so in that sense, if you're thinking about as a, as a sales manager, as a sales rep, um, all these signals that are given off, you know, um, in fact, we find that in today's, in today's selling on the enterprise side, actually in that segment, it needs, you need like 12 engaged personas, 12 engaged contacts.

And, uh, in order to close a deal. And that's, that's gotten bigger in sort of this current macro, uh, which also includes about 120 website visits of the prospect across the personas. Well, that's a lot of signal if you think about it. And, um, this is, this is the promise of what AI can do is it can help you call that. It can help you filter and do the stuff that a human honestly couldn't do. We couldn't see those signals if we were just sitting behind our phone and using our Rolodex and, you know, sending a few emails. So I think, I think it's, don't expect it to be a miracle worker. Don't expect it to be a silver bullet, but it does reduce waste, um, and time and market. It's, it's interesting.

You mentioned the 12 buyers, um, as one of the top integrations with our CRM is a company called org chart hub, and they allow you to do a visual representation of the buying committee at the company. And then they overlay heat map in terms of sales activity, as well as marketing activity. So you can see, okay, this is the buying committee. Hey, the VP of sales is very active, but like CRO and the head of marketing haven't looked at anything. Likelihood of this deal closing next week, practically zero. And so I love just like sales has been a very specific way for a long time. And I love to see the innovation that you're bringing it in and the folks at org chart are bringing it to make it, um, more exciting and, and wouldn't say easier, but, but, um, certainly we, we're getting more output from our, from the calories that we're burning.

Yeah. I mean, uh, similarly, you know, we're, we're a HubSpot integration partner and, and our, um, intent and data signals can show up inside HubSpot for the sellers that can help them do their job more efficiently. Um, we have a, you know, our technology is different, uh, no matter what you mentioned, but we have a persona map and you can see of your, of your target account, you know, who in that persona, um, is engaged, not engaged, how much, what are they engaging with? I call it a digital breadcrumb trail. Like, uh, did they visit a website? Did they, um, open an email? Uh, and furthermore, you can actually identify, um, uh, and add contacts that you don't have in the persona map. Um, but it's all around seeing the activity level and helping you engage further with your prospect.

In terms of AI, uh, I was wondering if you could share some concrete use cases of how your sales and marketing team are using AI today. Uh, yeah. So, I mean, one of our, one of our, so we're actually leveraging gen AI in our, what we call our conversational email product, um, and think about gen AI leveraging that. So as opposed to, and I came from a former world of, of email, as opposed to a rule based email system that says, if it does this, then do that. Uh, and generally written manually, um, we actually can feed content, uh, from the six cents platform to the email writer, what we call an AI assistant and the AI, uh, um, uh, bot can send out the email from your outbox, you know, in my name, Jason's Intac, um, to you Russell.

And, uh, and, and it, uh, the AI generates and works on a, on a Katie's that will send, um, you know, you may not open, you may not be interested in a third try. It says X, Y, Z, and it goes down this, this route. And then, uh, if engaged, when engaged, uh, the conversation carries on via the AI bot. And so this might be seven to 10 touches that you yourself or me, if I'm the BDR did not have to make, it was just set and gone. And then it engages at the right time. There can be human intervention, uh, on stage gate based on type of response, but the content flows from there. And the most amazing thing is if you were to review the email trail between you and I, you would have generally no idea that it wasn't me.

Um, and, uh, it's a huge productivity tool, a huge productivity tool. I love it. Uh, is that available for HubSpot users today? It is. And, you know, interestingly enough, uh, like we had another customer, I mean, in the early beta of, uh, of the product, uh, marathon health, uh, in two months, they generated 22,000 emails and had an open rate of 38%. I mean, normally the open rates are like sub 10. Um, and then, uh, it increased their open rate by 55%. And so this is, this is, and by the way, it's highly personalized. So it's different than a broadcast email. So, um, you know, a rep, a BDR may say, Hey, I want to, I want to focus on, uh, close lost opportunities and create a category of, or a segment of only the close lost that I haven't heard from in six months.

And you can set this against that, uh, category or segment and can, and it can run, um, uh, without the human intervention. So this is the big news about it. It's just a huge productivity tool. Uh, and the result, the results are fascinating. And by the way, marathon health, like closed their pipeline gap, just using, um, just using six cents conversational email. And we ourselves, uh, had a pipeline gap last quarter and we increased our pipeline. Uh, it was like 13 to 14% of the gap we were trying to fill in just in quarter, which was shocking. Um, I don't know if it answers the question, but one of the, um, things I've always been worrying, wondering about is around, uh, automation. And as you kind of take, uh, tools and automation, which has historically been in the realm of marketing, and then you give, put it into the hands of BDRs and salespeople, uh, which HubSpot is, is definitely a firm believer of who actually controls those messages.

Like should those automation and that sequences, should that come from marketing or should the reps be allowed to customize it? And what I hear you saying is neither. This should sit with AI and this should be personalized at scale. Well, uh, I'd say it's a, it's a combo that answer. Um, and if you, as you pose the original question, uh, you could let reps use it. You could let the marketing department use it sort of, it comes down to a fundamental, um, philosophy within your organization. Um, in, in the sense of conversational email, what happens is that generally the marketing sales department will decide a rough, um, uh, talk track and actually feed the talk track, um, and create templates.

And then the, and then the AI, the gen AI takes over from there. And so that is what the most interesting part of it. That's, yeah, that's neither sales marketing or the BDR. It's just the AI, uh, uh, uh, running off of the original template. And so one of the challenges that, that John has been grappling with on, on this show, but also BDRs and AEs like everywhere around the world are thinking about is, is AI going to come in and just wipe out my job? And so it seems to me like what you're saying is that AI is going to give reps superpowers and be able to focus on other things. Or do you think a whole percentage of, of reps are just going to go out the door and not have jobs? No, I think it's, I think it's the former, again, down to the time waste.

I mean, you know how hard it is to get some, get someone to react to an email or call. Uh, I mean, I'm, I grew up as a BDR. I was my first job. Uh, back then they called it inside sales. Uh, and, uh, it's, it's really just cutting the waste out of the process. Um, because if they can set and forget a cadence of, um, you know, to have 2000 accounts, uh, they're only engaging the rep, the BDR. Once that email trail, uh, shows it's, it's worthy of human intervention. And so it's just like, and so now you're having a conversation with someone who really wants to talk to you versus getting the sort of cold hangups and no responses, which are none of us like. I'm curious on that. Like if you were a rep today, if you were like going back to your BDR days, if you're working for a company today, like what would you be focusing on to be able to keep up or to, to continue to be relevant in five years?

Leveraging technology that can help you. Uh, there are a lot of tools out there. Um, a lot, a lot, a lot fail on the promise, um, or don't deliver on the promise. It's just enough. Um, we, uh, we set out at the extent to make sure sellers and marketers were working off one sheet of music or singing off one sheet of music. And, um, historically everybody's probably been even today, uh, used to a world where sales and marketing doesn't necessarily agree on how to go to market, or we're not talking about the same data or the marketers think the sellers aren't following up and the sellers think the marketers are not giving them good leads. Um, this actually bridges it all together. So it's one, you know, marketing operations and sales ops use our software in conjunction with their respective departments to launch an entire go to market strategy.

And to me, that is the most, uh, exciting part about it is there's no more finger pointing. There's no crossing the aisle. Uh, it's yeah, we see the data, we see all the activity. There's no arguing with it. The data is the truth and it's the simple landscape. Um, so I would say leverage technology for sure. Uh, I, I, but it doesn't do the job for you. It just helps you do the job better and faster. So you still have to have traditional, um, selling skills, if you will. You still need to learn to, um, the best seller is a listener, not a talker. Uh, you know, when I grew up, I, that's the thing I learned to do is listen. There's all types of nuggets in the listening. Oh, by the way, six cents is a listening tool.

We find out pretty much everything is going on. Um, and that just sort of came to me, but it is. And, uh, that's information that you know, what to then know what we, we have a saying, no, anything, do anything. And so six cents help, you know, essentially everything about your target account list. And then you can do anything, uh, off of that intelligence data, if you will. Definitely. The best salespeople are, are excellent listeners. And so it's interesting what you said about six cents being a listening tool. Um, curious, um, historically just for, for our listeners to understand a little bit of context. Um, how did six cents go to market, uh, for like, probably like just at launch and then after you joined and then today has a, has there been an evolution or has it been consistent?

Uh, definitely an evolution, but that's because the product advanced. Um, and so we, we eat our dog food. I mean, we go to market by, um, leveraging six cents to, uh, design territories. We actually, we ingest lots of data around, uh, a territory. Um, and from that data, we understand, we already understood what our ideal customer profile looked like. And then we masked it to the data to say is what we think it is, match what the data says. And typically the two are not the same. And then you actually refine your ICP and then you design your territory off that. Uh, then you decide your territories as what, sorry, your individual territories, your segments, um, stratification. Uh, and then you, you sort of set the software to go.

And so we, we are an account based, um, meaning we, we look at, uh, originally went to market as just, uh, dividing up accounts and then setting the software to help us understand buying intent and signals and behavior and people and technographics, pharma graphics, psychographics, everything, uh, all those get revealed to a six cents platform. Of course, that wasn't day one. Um, certainly we have our inbound now, our emotions a little bit different with the conversational email product I told you about, um, that, that can help you either surface inbound or outbound, uh, depending on what strategy you deploy. And so I, I sit in Europe. I originally grew up in, in the U S, but I was talking to some of the marketers in, in, uh, HubSpot's marketing team here.

And they mentioned that the six cents team is better in Europe than some of the alternatives, uh, U S based alternatives. Uh, I'm curious. So yeah. How do you think about internationalization on this? Uh, so we're, our product is fully global. I mean, we're basically all over the world. Um, uh, we continue, we will continue to internationalize and look towards like local language type stuff. That's not in the software right now. Um, it's applicable. It works. Um, and the way we found that out was just basically our U S customers were started using it in their international geographies. And then we said, huh, maybe we should, maybe we should go into that market. Uh, and so we do, we, we, we've gone into the market, although it's, it's really early innings.

We're all in, although it's used at all these, um, different global spots, uh, around the world. It's largely being used there, not necessarily have offices there. So we, we do have office in London and Singapore. Um, um, but we have a lot, a lot, a lot of TAM to expand on for sure. You've been at companies that have been acquired, uh, by Oracle by Workday. Um, you've worked at SAP. Like you, it seems like you've got a pretty, you've had a lot of different experiences and seen different partnership teams. Um, I was curious as part of how you see partnerships as part of your go to market. If you see as a channel partnership, product partnership, how does success think about that? Uh, we do both that you mentioned.

I think, um, in this, in this world today, partnerships are huge. Uh, absolutely need to try to find a way to leverage it. And I think I would say it's sort of stage appropriate growth. I mean, we, you don't do everything all at once, but, uh, and partnerships may, you know, take a little bit longer to develop. Again, it's, it's also company and product specific depends on what market you're serving, what product you're selling are the obvious channel partners that could sell for you. Uh, we, we, uh, I believe in a, I believe in a very broad open ecosystem. That's one reason why we have an integration with HubSpot. Like I, I believe more data, better, more open system, better, uh, let data flow, um, uh, let competitors be part of your ecosystem as we have.

Um, and ultimately that, that benefits the customer and it makes the customer experience that much better. So in other words, don't be afraid to like open the ecosystem. And it turns out that's how we get more data as well. Uh, more partners that we integrate with, the more data that flows, the more we all collectively learn and it allows us to go to market better. Uh, we, we have, we white label our products. So some, some, some, uh, people are a partner based on using our technology to help their products get better. Uh, we, uh, have an ecosystem of, um, integration partners. Like I mentioned HubSpot and, uh, we have a bunch of other software, uh, vendors that, uh, ingest and integrate to help data flow back and forth.

Um, we have implementation part. Are those, are those typically data, data flows, data partnerships or like CRM and marketing automation partnerships? So like, um, um, data side, like G2, uh, G2 crowd and Bombora partners of ours, um, customers as well. Um, uh, we have, um, most of, uh, all the maps, the market automation systems and the, uh, uh, CRM systems as partners. We have the, uh, what, what was called or is called the sales engagement platforms like outreach and sales loft and, and other. Um, but the idea is that we're not saying you do only, you, I think gone in the day, where you only use one software platform as your tool. And the more we can integrate the bet, more customer can decide what's the right journey.

What's the right go to market motion. And if I can integrate with six cents, all the better. We have got out from the CEO of G2 as part of the HubSpot podcast takeover. And one of the things that he shared was that in his first company, um, they, big machines that they had burned through 19 of the $20 million and the way that they grew from $1 million left in the bank to a $400 million exit was from partnerships. Um, and so I'm really excited about that. And obviously very, very smart, smart folks to, to partner with. Um, do you share the attach rate on channel partnerships? Do we share it? No. Uh, no, I mean, uh, yeah, we bet. I mean, we measure, I'm saying that a little flippantly, but, uh, lots, lots of data I get in my inbox.

Um, yeah, we, we do, we do measure, uh, attach rate from partners. Uh, um, sell through, pull through, uh, influence, um, dollars generated. We're, uh, we're, uh, turning over, we're in the stage now, we're actually turning over the product to partners to fully sell as opposed to us being part of that sales cycle. And, and that's probably depending on your company, that's one of the last steps where you say, Hey, the product's mature enough that I can teach partners how to sell it. Um, and, and we had to, we had to grow into that phase in my opinion. Yeah. And where does the partnership team sit in your work? Is it part of revenue or product? It reports to me. Okay. Directly. Cool. So it's, yeah, I mean, that's, that should tell you how, how, how key I think it is.

Uh, but I, I also see a world where it's, I mean, from what we do, uh, it could be in our go to market, you know, organization. And when I say go to market, it would be, I would say, alternatively, you could organize it with a CRO provided the CRO has sales and marketing, um, well, and customer success. But partnerships is an integral, I mean, partnership stocks are a product team daily. Uh, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a trivial, um, lightweight lift if you decide to go in, but it's, it's certainly, in my opinion, a strategy that needs to be deployed. Absolutely. And I think it sets, it sets salespeople up for success when your product has not only an integration, but a high quality, uh, product integration, it just makes it easier for customers to buy and to say yes.

And say, Hey, we've already got these tools. I haven't got to rip out everything in order to put this in just works nicely time to value much better. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's usually the first thing you hear and it's like, Oh, I've got, this is what my tech stack looks like and go to market. Uh, do you work with any of them? I mean, we tend to check like 80% of those boxes and that makes it a lot easier for a company to make a decision. Nice. And for, for salespeople, I think one of the challenges with partners is do they bring in partners to the sale? They may have a perception that it's going to make the deal longer. Often the data that we see is that actually deal cycles can be shorter.

The sizes can be, can be higher. Um, I'm curious how you, if you measure that and if you incentivize your salespeople to bring in partners on deals. Yeah, we do. I don't remember the stats on, uh, you know, how effective that is, but what, what I, what I know is that. As an output of whatever those stats that we look at is that we, it condenses the sales cycle. Cause imagine the world where in their, in their tech, the buyer's tech stack, they've got three benders and they're wondering about two and should, you know, let's say I'll quite often. It's hard to understand who does what, like where does one, one leave off and the other pick up. And so the faster we get that answer collectively to the customer, I, the partner, the two or three partners are talking together with the prospect.

Um, then, then there's no guesswork by, by the customer trying to figure out who does what. So I think it condenses the sales cycle. Now, every, every seller tends to get nervous that it's going to cannibalize their own sale. The reality is you're just getting to that answer quicker. And so the sale is going to be the sale. And if you wanted to go faster, get everyone on the, to the table. And by the way, it just provides the right, the right value and the right solution. Um, so ignore, ignore your commission check, like get the right solution for the customer. Uh, I, I, I believe it is, it's sometimes a hard message to get salespeople to hear. Um, do you incentivize yourselves to bring in partners?

Uh, we, we have, yeah, we have referral agreements. We have commission, you know, uh, joint commission plans. And the, the, the whole concept is to, to grease the skids, you know, don't make this difficult, make it easy. And, and like I said, if you're, if you're not doing it and you're sort of fighting it, you want to keep everybody out. Well, then your sales cycle is going to be three times the length. How about, how about this? How about you, uh, you, you get everyone on the same page, you sell together, your sales cycles reduced and you just sell more deals. And so, uh, you know, any, any, any attrition of the overall deal value, I think will be made up in, in, uh, velocity and counts at the end of the year.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, my, my experience working with HubSpot sellers is that when they join, there was a lot for them to learn about HubSpot. Like HubSpot is number one in G2 for more marketing for sales. And so it's just a very, uh, sophisticated product. And so by the time it's like nine to 18 months, depending on how much experience before they're ready to think about integrations and, and how these integrations really function at, at, at, and when, when they hit that. They then operate on just another higher, higher level. And I had one call with the cell, with one of our HubSpot sellers who mentioned nine integrations on a single call. I listened to that one call and gone. I just hung up.

I was like, guys go to president's club guaranteed. No, no doubt about it in my mind. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious, do you use, uh, a data, uh, data tools like reveal or, or cross beam as part of either your product or as part of the go-to-market motion? Uh, we use both as, as part of the go-to-market motion. Mark emotional. Yeah. And, and extremely, extremely helpful, uh, extremely helpful because it helps align in these partner discussions. The number one thing you get to is, Hey, let's get your list in my list. Let's see where the, let's see where the, uh, where the crossover is. Um, and then resulting white space that just accelerates it. And it actually, I think it creates a level of trust, um, that you would eventually have to get to in order to, to do the work.

And this, that accelerates that, that trust and, and actually just, uh, the, the canvas for which you work the big believer. I'm curious to hear a little bit about how your teams on the go-to-market side, either on sales or marketing are using data sources like reveal. So, yeah, it's an active, uh, go-to-market motion for us. So it starts, it starts with the partner team and the partner team cascades it down, um, to the respective sellers and, uh, they work it. I mean, they literally like work the list. And I think earlier you asked me about partners. So you're a partner, uh, of ours in a really good one, sort of a natural, it's what we do. We ingest the CRM data and then take the six cents data and push it back to HubSpot.

Um, similarly, we've got other partners. You'd ask, ask me about like sales loft and outreach and G2. And, um, and so I, I, the, the beauty is that for those that we have integrations with, these selling teams can really add a lot of value to their prospect and customers. And so that's generally the angle from which they, they work it like, uh, okay, we've got a joint customer. Are they happy? What can we do to make them more successful? We've got, we've got a, uh, we've got a platform of products, multiple SKUs, uh, not everybody's using all of them. I'm sure our partners have the same. And so that's one. And then for a prospect, it's, Hey, I've got a, I've got a pursuit. You've got a pursuit.

So we joined forces in this pursuit. We've got an integrated product and likely a better value story to tell. And so I think that's, that's really helpful. Um, and I, again, I, I love, I love, you know, growing up in client server and now being a cloud product. Um, you know, you're forced to get customers to think about the renewal and value every single year. And so I love that. I mean, uh, I love that we, we have to show up. And so that value story that partners can bring together is, is, is key to stickiness, key to renewals, key to upsells, cross-sell. Got it. And I were one of my, one of my, um, theories on sales, uh, is that closed one does not exist. And it's, it's, it's ironic because it's in everybody's CRM, but when you're in software, there is no such thing as closed one.

Like you will have a renewal. And if you turn that renewal in 12 months, you probably lost money signing that deal. And so Goddard put it down as closed started. So I could start a campaign to see if we could get everyone's CRM stage updated to closed started. I like that. I like the sound of that. In terms of, uh, the best sellers, definitely what we see is information and, and intros going back and forth, uh, as part of co-selling motion. But one of the huge pieces that I, the way that I see, uh, that co-selling evolving is around influence. And the challenge is some of that is hidden. Like you don't know how well somebody is going to recommend you. Um, and you talked about six senses, two way data integration.

I think that's one of the key things that product is a key piece of this discussion. The integration has to be solid and robust. Otherwise the CSM teams are going to get burned. The salesperson is going to see their previous deal backfiring on them. and they're just not going to bring that partner on for, for future deals. So I'm really excited about what you're doing and how you think about it. Yeah. Thanks. So we actually monitor like all the data flows and integration of that data across partners. And so we can, we can see the engagement and that's really key, the usage, uh, and what's working. And, and we, you know, we, we do have one, one, uh, saying internally, it's like the, um, if you have three use cases, uh, and they involve partners, um, the, the, uh, the renewal, um, is almost nearly certain.

Uh, what that just means is that they found a way to network three different partners together, as an example, and those three partner solutions are working data's flowing and therefore it's, uh, by definition sort of integrated and sticky and probably they're seeing value. Otherwise they'd rip it out. So that's, that's a campaign we have, um, which is obviously highlights the value of a partner network. Absolutely. From, from HubSpot's perspective, our goal is to get, uh, customers using seven to 10 integrations and that has a double digit uplift on retention, which is at, at our size, a monster number. But honestly, at any SaaS company, if you can have one cohort of customers who return at 10% less, most people are, most CROs are interested in that.

Uh, and the finance team certainly is. G, G2 though, actually interesting, kind of follow, uh, um, a model similar to what you were talking about, which is looking at the number of use cases. And so they will be looking at, for example, does the marketing team use it? Does the product team use it? Does the sales team use it? And if they can get those three teams using G2 data, they know that their, their retention is, is very, very high. Yeah. Similar here. You have got a lot of experience coming up from, from BDR. I saw you put a LinkedIn post about BDR appreciation week. Um, I was wondering, one of the things now that you're in a position of hiring sales managers and sales leaders, what are the things that you look for in sales leaders?

And that if you're a BDR or AE that you should be developing today so that you can be in a position. So when they're interviewing for a role with Jason that it's in the back. Yeah. Uh, great question. What I look for in a sales leader and how could a BDR, um, or young AE sort of grow up with those attributes or, or learn those. Um, you know, first some very obvious things, uh, I like them to have a spare balance of IQ and EQ, um, you know, understanding the emotional quotient, um, question is, is key. Um, I, I aforementioned the best sales skills that, that of a person. Uh, so does this person listen, do they have the ability to be an active listener? Are they looking, uh, for insights through conversation and exchange of ideas or are they just selling feature function?

Uh, the ladder just doesn't work and it turns off any prospect or customer. Um, uh, I, uh, high integrity, um, you know, good citizen. Uh, I, I really, you know, we, we won a bunch of awards for culture at six cents and that's key. I mean, we call it one team. Uh, our whole go to market mission is one team and that one team is multifunction. It's, it's basically the entire company. It's, you know, it's not just sales, pre-sales. It's, I mean, we involve product, we involve our partnership team. We involve our customer success team, uh, because of the handoff. Um, so, um, building on that, uh, somehow a passion, like what is their passion? What fires their belly? Um, why do they get up? Why do they get out of bed?

What, what, what are they excited about? Um, so I'm always looking for this sort of passion or natural curiosity. Uh, I know for me, uh, I always just wanted to learn. And once I stopped learning, I was bored. And so, um, now it doesn't mean like you deserve a promotion cause you've learned everything. You've got to, you've got to show results with that, that knowledge. Um, but I tend to find those people that are active and, and sort of, I had even had one, one recent executive say, Hey, I'm just, I feel like I've licked this and I want to do more and I'm capable and I want to do more and I'm hungry. And I, I, here's what I see as a problem in our company. I want to help solve that problem.

That type of attitude, uh, is, is, is what I look for. Um, team players for sure. It's got to be a team. Um, you know, there's all these things are sort of common. There's no I, uh, but active listening, passion, uh, will to win sort of three key elements and then, and then good citizen. Jason, thank you very much for, for joining the make it happen podcast. Uh, with John Barrows, this has been the HubSpot takeover episode. And if you're listening, go check out six cents. Uh, they've got a freemium product. So, um, you can get started today and, uh, really, really appreciate the, all the, the sharing and lessons and, and thank you very much for joining us. Yeah. Sleeper. I, uh, I, I really appreciate the opportunity to enjoy our, our partnership in the market.

Thank you for everything you do for HubSpot. Take care. See ya. 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 favorite episodes with your network. Also check out my new website at www.johnm.barrows.com where you'll find even more ways to engage. There's a ton of free content and you can also get trained from me directly as an individual or for your team. Look, I'm out there selling every day, just like you are.

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