February 2nd, 2009
Focus on success: HubSpot's rapid growth
HubSpot seems to be everyone’s favorite marketing firm these days — or at least the favorite of many. The firm, which charged into the market two years ago, now has more than 1,000 customers leveraging its inbound marketing services. I know I’m not alone in being fascinated by HubSpot so I spoke to Mike Volpe, vice president of marketing, about the company’s rapid growth, the benefits of “eating its own dogfood” and how his six-person marketing team appears larger than life.
Q. [Jennifer] HubSpot seems to be on fire in terms of it’s brand exposure. Over the last year, at the least. What do you credit with that?
A. [Mike] Really? Thanks! Two years ago we were five people with an alpha product and 12 customers. Today we’re 65 people and have 1,000 customers. But we’re not a household (or business-hold) name yet. We have a long way to go in terms of building a company and brand. But, the growth we have experienced is completely based on having a great team that has built cool marketing software products and marketing content that people seem to like. All we try to do is build things we think people will like – both software like HubSpot and the free marketing tools at Grader.com and other things like our blog articles, Webinars, videos, and HubSpot TV – and then share these things with people and ask them what they think.
Q. Are you guys “eating your own dogfood” — so to speak — with inbound marketing?
A. Yes, absolutely. About 90 percent of all our leads are inbound. There are two huge benefits to that.
First, the lead quality from inbound marketing is much higher since all of our leads approached us. We make zero cold calls. Every single phone call one of our sales reps makes is calling someone back who has already used one of our software tools or watched a webinar or something like that. A lot of people we call say “Oh, HubSpot, cool! I was hoping you would call. I just watched your webinar and I had a question…” Our sales reps are a lot like marketing consultants because they are highly trained in marketing and are just there to answer questions about our product and how you can use it to drive more marketing results. At other companies you’re making a cold call, and the person either doesn’t answer or when they do answer they start thinking “who is this person calling me and why do they think I want to talk to them.”
Second the cost per lead is much lower from inbound marketing. Our cost per lead is about five to 10 times lower than the benchmarks for most other B2B software companies. And that enables us to have a very low price product and serve a much larger market of small businesses, rather than spending lots of money and having to go after a small number of large companies and charge really high prices. It also enables us to grow a lot faster using less capital than other companies, and we can spend a higher portion of our dollars on product development and enhancements, which makes customers even happier. There are a lot of positive reinforcing loops when your company embraces inbound marketing.
How does HubSpot measure success? –>
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Jennifer Leggio, aka "Mediaphyter," writes about the "social business" side of social media - including enterprise, security and reputation issues. See her full profile and disclosure of her industry affiliations.
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