Career Advice, AI and the Future of Marketing

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer podcast. I'm here today with Kat Warboys from HubSpot. Kat, welcome to the pod.

Kat Warboys: Hello, thank you for having me.

James Lawrence: It is an absolute pleasure, and I think most listeners to the pod will have heard your name. Kat is Senior Marketing Director for all of APAC at HubSpot, essentially responsible for growing HubSpot's business across the entire APAC region.

You started it, I was kind of looking at your LinkedIn bio before the pod, and you started at HubSpot almost eight years ago, um, in a senior marketing role, and since that time you've kind of risen through the ranks. You're a well known speaker, contributor to the marketing community, both in Australia as well as throughout Asia.

Uh, I can't wait for today's conversation. Thanks for spending some time with us. Um, I thought where it'd be nice to start is just your journey from, I guess, university to now, I think it's quite a daunting job. Like you're, you're the head of marketing for one of the most, uh, well known bits of marketing tech out there.

You're kind of firmly in the sights of all the marketers in the country. So that's, that's kind of daunting. So I'd love to just hear the journey from, you know, how you started and how you got to where you are.

Kat Warboys: Yeah. And that's a very kind introduction. I appreciate that. And, uh, if we were videoing this, I'd be blushing.

That's very kind. Thank you. Um, it has been a really wild and unanticipated journey. I have to say, um, I often feel bad when people reach out for some sort of career advice that I disappoint because I'm not somebody that would have ever had, you know, the five year plan. And when it comes to my career, I have very much been somebody who.

Just likes to get their head down, do the work, uh, and I'm drawn to work that interests me, so whatever is making me curious, I really follow that, I've been lucky enough to have great, great managers, kind of nudging me in the right direction along the way, but definitely not someone who's had certain roles or titles or achievements.

In their sites or in their plan to have under their belt, you know, by a certain time frame, it really has been, well, what's interesting and let's follow that and do that. And I kind of feel like everything else has come, which I'm most likely in a fortunate place to be able to say that. But, you know, I think with this space, I think if you're somebody who has a lot of curiosity and loves to test and, you know, loves the fast paced world of tech and, and marketing in itself, then it's a, it's a great industry for the curious.

And my journey started in Australia after uni I'm from the UK. Sometimes my accent confuses people, either people get that instinctively or they're like, Oh, I didn't say See that. So I thought I'd just clear up for the reasons. , I, I, I suspected as much .

So, um, I went to uni in the UK and I studied really randomly like business with a, a specialty in tourism.

'cause at that age, what do you wanna do when you're older? What travel? So that sounds good to me. Um, but it was just so interesting at the time, you know, when you get into. The marketing, you know, modules and part of that degree, how different it was in the real world, you know, when you got out there, it was so, you know, direct mail and it was so traditional.

And pretty much as I left uni, my first job was in an agency doing marketing automation, which was just not covered. And it was like, Oh my gosh, I feel so out of my depth. And what is this? But I loved it. I loved it. That like, I wouldn't have said I was into marketing from that experience at uni. I really wasn't interested in it.

Um, but you get to Australia and you're trying to get in the workforce. So you take, you take the roles. I love, I love marketing automation. It's been my dream job since I was a young girl.

I need the visa.

Yeah, that's pretty much it. I think it worked out incredibly well. Faith was obviously looking down on me because I loved it.

I didn't realize how at that point we could actually start to measure our impact in a very. Real way in marketing. And so I found that fascinating. It was challenging though. That was a time where this was a decade ago, more 12 years. Marketers were not, it was very new to start using technology in this way.

So we were using a marketing automation tool. And really going into train marketers, you know, if you're going to have an event, you want to create a landing page and that landing page is going to have this thing called a workflow that sends a confirmation email and that's a trigger and all this new language.

And there was honestly a lot of resistance at that time. I really enjoyed it. I love my role training in these tools, but I think there were many, it was a time when marketers role was being challenged. You know, they were expected to be some of the data scientists and digital gurus and traditional was kind of like really seeing the back end.

And I think that was. Confronting for marketers was such a shift and I was kind of really seeing that as I came into the industry, but honestly, absolutely adored it. And the tools were expanding. We were starting to see sales enablement, you know, coming to supplement just the traditional CRM, which was really like an address book, uh, at that point was some nice lead scoring capabilities.

So we've come a long, long way and it's just been so fun to be part of that journey and I've gone from agency to client side, and then, you know, Yeah, I had HubSpot reach out to me and thought, why not? And you know, it's been eight years of quite, quite the ride.

James Lawrence: You used the word three times, curious, and it's definitely a trait which probably took us longer than we should have to identify that.

And our best team members are the ones that who are genuinely curious. And the space changes so quickly. I think a lot of people in marketing Particularly in the digital side, like they've come from such diverse backgrounds. And I know it's changing now. I've done some lecturing at universities and what is being taught at unis is just so different to what's happening in the real world.

And I think part of that is the speed of change, right? And if you're not doing that, Excited by change and interested in self learning as well as doing ongoing education. It's, I think it's really hard to succeed as a digital marketing.

Kat Warboys: Agree. There's so much benefit to kind of be on the job style, right.

And just kind of getting your hands dirty when AI really started to boom in the way that it did early, you know, 2023, we were having some events and we had Steven Sheila, who's a former ANZ Facebook CEO, I believe. And He is really on the forefront with his own business with AI at the moment. So we kind of got him into chat on it.

And one of the number one questions he was getting was, where can I skill up on AI? Like what course should I enroll in? And he was like, Oh, they're probably all going to be out of date by the time you do. Like maybe just. Try maybe just find an environment where you can test and play with these things.

His takeaway was like, I wouldn't sign up. Like you're learning your forums for learning at the moment should not be traditional courses. You need to be listening to podcasts as they happen. Uh, you know, blogs, it's really the up to date stuff. You don't bother enrolling in a course on this right now. And to your point, I think that's just been a real theme throughout tech in the last 10 years.

James Lawrence: That's true. Cause obviously HubSpot. I mean, my experience working with members of the HubSpot team, they're superstars, spoken to many members of your team at HubSpot about how you go about hiring and it's not easy to get a job there, right? Why have you been so successful? Cause I'm not going to let you off the hook, which is I've been, I've been curious and therefore I've risen to the top of marketing in Asia, like more specifically, like why do you think you have done so well there?

Kat Warboys: Um, it's a really good question. And apart from, you know. Those personal traits of, you know, being curious and experimental and, you know, being eager to test that wouldn't have gotten me very far if HubSpot itself didn't have that culture for learning for, you know, learning fast and failing and all of those things.

And they provided a ton of autonomy. You know, we, as a team back in the day, did a lot of things that weren't within our remit or our goals, but we were like, We're an ANZ, which is very often treated in global companies as a great pilot region. And we absolutely took full advantage of that. I was part of this, but just a really great example that I like to give is the team that I worked with at the time really saw capabilities in like Facebook messenger for B2B when really only B2C were just starting to think about how they were using that as a communication channel.

And you know, we really let the experimentation got, you know, dev support, not a lot of it, but enough, um, to really test that out. And then we ended up acquiring a company to build chatbot building capabilities into things like messenger and WhatsApp. So that's the kind of like company that, and I think culture that, you know, it's no good to have curiosity if it's not welcomed where you work.

And I will give a lot of credit to HubSpot as a company to, you know, Really foster that culture and celebrate it and recognize it and give you autonomy. And, you know, I think people that are curious and want to do well thrive in those environments. So I feel like I've evaded your question a little bit again, as to why I should keep, keep, keep going until I get the answer.

Uh, I think that like, you know, head down, uh, do the work, testing things differently. Like, and this, this is just, There's always opportunities to do things differently. And I think we're a moment in time. I mean, it feels like we're always at this moment in time in marketing where we need to challenge and cut through is harder than ever.

And you know, anything that you can see an opportunity to do differently from right now, I'm, I'm looking a lot, uh, as I'm hiring for a few roles, I'm really excited by bringing some traditional B2C marketers into the company. I really want to see B2B brands acting far more like a B2C to get cut through in the next couple of years.

So, you know, What are things that we could be testing and who's going to help us get there? So just always seeing opportunities to look at things through a different lens to see where that might get you. What might that encourage you to do differently?

James Lawrence: That's a great segue into the next question. It probably answers it a little bit, but a lot of listeners to the pod, we've got a diverse audience of mid to senior marketers.

We also have a good cohort of younger marketers. What are you looking at when you're looking to hire a young marketer? And I think from both the CV and the job experience and university, if that's all relevant, but then also some of the softer stuff as well.

Kat Warboys: Experience wise can be really tricky. I feel like in a regional role, we do still to this day value that broad marketer because we don't have huge teams and we likely won't have super large teams as regional offices.

And we shouldn't, I believe in that fully, but we do need to make sure every year that The, our headcount is used on the roles that we know matter. And again, have a difference in what we need to be focusing on at this point in time. So could extend outside of just the regional setup, to be honest, looking for that broader marketer, as I said, we want to make sure that when we see an opportunity, but we see something that's worth pursuing, we need people who can adapt and pivot.

Um, so it's less about what you've done, but how did you go about something? So in an interview process, I'm very much like the, I'm the How did you do that? Because if somebody has a process and a way of thinking what I'm really looking for is how that could be applied to many different types of marketing or tasks that we might want them to do.

So I think there's definitely that piece to it. I think in a longer term vision, we are seeing less of that science. And deep expertise. There's absolutely a place for it. And I'm quite excited by this resurgence of more of the brand and the creative side, especially in B2B at the moment. And I think that's a big result of AI that's kind of mastering the science for us.

And I'm really hopeful in the next couple of years, and this is a bit of a personal prediction, that we are gonna see that more sort of B2B brands entering that brand marketing arena. Or zero did it last year with the Women's World Cup, like. An accounting platform sponsoring Women's World Cup. I think that's very exciting.

Um, I think that's a sign of things to come. And so creativity and more of that brand experience is something I'm also paying a lot of attention to at the moment. Hmm.

James Lawrence: Yeah. I think that's really interesting. It's went to South by Southwest last year and heard David Drogo speak. And I thought it was kind of so reassuring as a marketer, which I think we're all sitting there going, are we going to have a job in, you know, in 10 years time?

And I think that the idea of, um, Things do change so quickly and it's the speed of change is faster now than it was before. So the idea of hiring, hiring someone based on what they can do in a specific way is just a bit short sighted because what they're going to have to do is change and pivot and all those things.

But you kind of made the point that. AI will revolutionize how we're running campaigns and how we're running marketing teams and they'll kind of be this, it's almost this prism of tech but then old school marketing and strategy and all those things that just don't change and we'll have this kind of incredible tech layer.

But then we'll have this layer of, you know, ingenuity and kind of he talks a lot about the idea that makes the hair on the neck kind of stand up and not anytime soon that a computer is going to do that stuff. And we've kind of gone through this wave of marketing being technical when I think the space will be technical, but I'm not sure that means to be an excellent marketer.

You're going to need all of that stuff anymore.

Kat Warboys: Yeah, I agree. I think our CMO has a podcast. It talks a lot about this, but this idea of the personalization. It's going to be so commoditized that you're going to just see great brand experiences, great digital experiences. It's going to become the norm and that won't get cut through anymore.

So that does mean, okay, well, what does get cut through? And there's some really interesting things I started to see just this year alone. The amount of articles I've already read. Okay. It's not like a huge volume, but it's a surprising volume for brands talking about how direct mail is coming back. And as I said, like B2B brands going inwards that brand marketing space, I think there was, uh, one of the dating apps.

Somebody's got to find out which one it is and let me know. Cause I tried to put the example a couple of times, always forget the name. One of the dating prominent dating apps has started to do in person meetups because people are sick of connecting, trying to connect online on these apps. Um, and that they're starting to, you know, crave in person again and more like different ways of meeting people.

And so it's so interesting that a dating app, which has only really come about in the last, you know, five, six years is now sort of pivoting more to this kind of community in person events kind of space. There's just all this crazy movement. Things are coming full circle. Things are adapting. It's just a really bizarre time.

James Lawrence: Yeah. And you know, I think you always have that zag, right? When industries and segments. Kind of zig, there's always the zag. Like, yeah, similar to that, read an article today that Uber's going to pilot. Like basically booking an Uber via a phone call for executives, which is just bizarre. The idea that I still don't understand the rationale behind it, but it is kind of, um, but they're, they're piloting it kind of saying, well, we're just testing to see if that's what our customers want.

And fair enough. So very interesting. Yeah. And I think big fan of the work that Atlassian did for so long where they kind of took B2B marketing and just applied a B2C lens to it. And it was, I'm not sure where HubSpot sits at the moment with content marketing and gated content, but they kind of said, nah, we're not gating stuff.

It's all out there. We're, we're marketing to people and we'll do it in a, in a more of a B2C way. But it's really interesting to see how B2B marketing is changing at the moment.

Kat Warboys: Yes, it is a lot. I think with the, with the content side you touched on, it's less about like whether we're gating content. I think it's how we're thinking about content.

And so I think we've really moved on from the days of. Downloadable white papers or reports. I think they absolutely have their place and we, we serve marketing and sales personas, and we definitely find that marketers would much still love a report. Whereas the sales professional may prefer YouTube video or how to video or something like that.

But I think involving some of those lead gen magnets to be more value. And these can look like, you know, free courses. It can be tools. An example of a tool we use at HubSpot is a website grader, you know, putting your website domain name and it will do a full analysis or make my persona spits out a template.

So really evolving. Okay. There are more ways to think about how you add value through content. That isn't just the written blog or report anymore. And I think that's also why there's been so much success, of course, with the freemium model in SAS. What is better than actually allowing somebody to try before they buy.

And that, that, that level of high intent that is so mutually beneficial for the business, but also the person really getting a full taste and flavor of your service and your products and how it's going to help.

James Lawrence: A hundred percent. And it feels from the outside, look like we've been a HubSpot partner for years.

We use the tool ourselves. When HubSpot introduced that premium kind of, it's, it feels that that was just so integral to the success of HubSpot. But it is what I see. people using the tool for free and it's, it is just this mutually beneficial kind of relationship, right?

Kat Warboys: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah.

James Lawrence: Once again, a nice segue into it.

Now I wanted to talk about HubSpot and, um, fair to say. The vast majority of listeners will have heard of that HubSpot. So what role does marketing play at HubSpot? Like what are you doing in the team? I only talk about things that you can't actually talk about, but yeah, just so curious, like the role, the markets you're responsible for kind of being an operation in and how do you market to marketers?

Cause it's hard enough. I think most of us in the businesses we're in. We have all these non marketers telling us how to do our job. So I'm curious when you're in an industry where you're targeting marketers, how do you, how do you do it?

Kat Warboys: Yeah, I think, I think we're almost lucky in that respect with marketers.

Like we started out as a marketing company, right? A marketing automation tool. Our founders were so spot on. At the time, they didn't just make a software, they created the methodology, which was inbound, and that was something marketers could absolutely associate with. Inbound back then, as  our founders described it, you know, was really the antidote to what felt like Marketing had become really obnoxious.

It was all about your big ad spend and how best of your ability to put interrupting people in their day. And it was just a bit, you know, not, not great. And so Inbound came along and it was all based on the value of how about we add value to people before we extract it. And we do that from great marketing.

And so it was just really fortunate when you love marketing and you're a marketer and you market to other marketers. It was, it was brilliant. I think the way we did that through content and education, that was the other thing, like we had the product with the inbound methodology, but we also recognized we had a part to play in building careers.

So the academy was something that came a few years later, which is online destination for learning for all sorts of professionals today. It started out as marketing, but it's also sales, customer success. And so we really. We felt like we had a job to do in this fast pacing world of marketing and how are we actually helping careers?

And that was such a big part of our values. And it still is to this day. And it's why we invest so much in thinking about our audience more as we're helping careers grow. How can we help marketers do the best work? There's all these changes coming. How do we figure out what this means so that we can then educate our customers on that and just package that up in lovely, great marketing.

And we've done this all the way through.

James Lawrence: And so it still is. Fundamentally inbound. Is that fair to say? Like you still would, most of the activity you're doing is great content, webinars, checklists, all the things, good SEO, all the stuff that HubSpot has used so much to, like, there's obviously been events, I guess that's probably been interrupted with COVID and, but.

Kat Warboys: Yeah, it depends. Like, I think everybody tries to automatically, or by default, think of Inbound as like a particular channel. It's only a blog, or it's only content, and it's really not. It's a value. It's like adding value before we extract value, and we do that through our freemium motion. We also realized, um, I say the royal we, the founders, I'm sure, realized as they were building the company and getting, you know, really great success with marketers, and on a marketing product, kind of realized, well, it doesn't matter.

Inbound doesn't just apply to marketing. It's a way of selling. It's a way of servicing customers. And so that value is really led to how do we, in those personas and for those professionals, do the same thing. How do we help them get better at their careers by really being at the forefront of education?

So like, I think it's more about a value, but then how do we package that up? And I think that can really change in our persona. Like, As I alluded to earlier, marketers definitely still seem to love a good old report and content that is more longer form, whereas we're learning with sales people, it's actually been a lot easier for us to reach them on the educational level of awareness.

Stage on YouTube with like how to videos and things like this. Um, they tend to network an awful lot more. So it really doesn't come down to the channel as much as it's like, how will you understand your buyer? What are the best ways to take your hopefully brand authority and, you know, point of view and perspectives.

And that is becoming really key. When you ask what we're doing at the moment, I think there's a huge shift that we're trying to work out. So we can bring our customers along on this journey. Is, you know, what is going to happen with content with AI, kind of writing it all for us and being asked to do all of the how to stuff.

I think what we're seeing is people want a lot more perspectives and personality from brands. Um, and it's amazing is if a brand, you can actually have a bit of an influencer, uh, that works for you. I think that it's kind of. The creme de creme, it's like, yeah, people don't always want to hear from companies as much as they do individuals.

And that's why we see the boom of influencers and creators and all of this. So I think this is going to impact, you know, how we create content for search, how we create content at the brand level. Now we're seeing signs of this, our wonderful automation team. I've actually decided to retire for now, the humble newsletter, the one that has been, has worked for a long time, but, and not to, you know, use this terminology to downplay, it's been very effective, but essentially offer stuffing.

Then those newsletters that are like, here's an AI report. Here's a report on how to do this and this and this have slowly been declining. And that's not to say that newsletters don't have a place, but that kind of how to offer stuffing doesn't work anymore. And. Where newsletters are effective with finding is like where there's personality, or it's news related, so very timely.

We applied the hustle, um, at HubSpot not that long ago, and I think that's a great example of a newsletter that filled up a huge audience and following because of this kind of quirky, very newsworthy information in business. And I think the other type of newsletter that does well is It's very pointed.

So it helps me figure out how to do one thing. One of our HubSpot is Kieran Flanagan, he left the company, he's gone really big on AI. He's the guest speaker on the podcast. He sends newsletters that's purely AI driven and it's very clear what I'm going to get out of that. So what are we doing? We are trying to work out like what tone and angle has content had to change in this new world that we seem to be entering.

James Lawrence: And it's it like we're having this. This conversation podcast forum, you, you host a pod, which is brought to you by HubSpot. You mentioned CMO on a pod. How do you, um, refresh my memory kind of thing? My memory is HubSpot, say 10 years ago, articles would be written and you'd have an author within HubSpot that would kind of have been there.

It seemed to have published it, which I think was quite brave from brands or a lot of brands would be like, that person's going to leave eventually. We don't want to kind of connect them, but exactly as you said, like what we say works best for our clients is you don't buy from a brand you buy from people and LinkedIn strategy.

Generally, we're trying to get clients to have. People within the business, ideally you've got founders or thought leaders, but often you don't have that, right? If you're particularly the bigger you get, it's harder. How do you navigate that as quite a big business? How do you determine who it's going to come from and when it's going to come from a person?

And, you know, do you fear people leaving? How does that kind of play out internally?

Kat Warboys: Yeah, yeah. There's a lot in that. I think, this doesn't help, we have very good retention at HubSpot. So, uh, we've got a great culture. I think you retain good people.

Perfect answer. It happens, it happens. No, Kieran Clangan, uh, was very much the head of acquisition. amazing thinker on this and he's moved to, I believe Zapier. I'm going to kick myself when I get that wrong after this, but I'm pretty sure he moved to Zapier and you know, good HubSpot and really built up a profile.

He is still a guest speaker on the HubSpot podcast. Like it's not like they move on and all ties are dead. We find ways to still work with these individuals. And I think that's why there's still such a valid play for influencers and creators and. If it's not coming from the brand icon that people wanna hear from, it doesn't mean you can't give your audience the platform where you are bringing those people, those individuals that they wanna hear from.

So I don't think it's like you have to have these experts or really well known people in your brand to succeed here. You can absolutely think about it in many, many different ways. It's more about how are you adapting your content and making sure it's cutting through At the moment, it is full of personality.

It is offering. perspective. That's probably the key word, actually perspective. That is what we need to be solving for both at the search optimization level going forward, but also just a resonation with our audience level.

James Lawrence: Yeah, that's good. I think it's a good, um, proof point or case study for marketers out there in organizations where they're struggling to get buy in to actually publish on HubSpot and say like, these guys are huge lots of thousands of employees and they're still paying Brave enough to do it.

Yeah. It does. It does kind of work keen to just hear about the different markets that you're working within, like how different is it marketing? Within Australia to, to New Zealand through to the different countries in Asia, different languages. I'm not sure if that's, is that a thing? Is it not a thing?

Just, yeah. How does the APAC kind of role sit?

Kat Warboys: Yeah, it's, uh, it's a great question. Uh, it's what, um, I probably enjoy most about the role. There's definitely a challenge and I, I think what I mean by that is when you were an IC or an individual, you know, contributor working, you are. Very passionate that everything is different about your market like we're completely different.

And when you're in a global organization, and we've got customers, it sounds customers in 120 countries, not physically there that many countries, but we've got quite a presence. And you, as I've grown into a leader, I think I've appreciated. That balance and that trade off for when do we need to solve every individual nuance?

And when actually can we see a good result by, you know, applying the same campaign or the same view and in different markets. So that's been something that I'm still to this day, I think, learning and figuring out and it, and it shifts and it changes. What helps us in these markets, uh, we do a lot of research we do across particularly Australia and Singapore, which has some of our, you know, two key headquarters in the, in the region.

A lot of the time, the trends are very, very similar. What I mean by that, we did a report called connected customer research. And very similar trends in the number of marketers saying it's harder to get cut through at the moment in both regions. The number one reason why it was hard to get cut through.

We also do consumer trends. We started to, which I think is very powerful. We don't just survey B2B leaders at the moment. We try and survey consumers where it makes sense to kind of tie up what's happening, why a market is saying that this is difficult, what a consumer is saying, and that can be very enlightening.

But even those trends can be very similar across markets. We may not be as, Different in some of these trends, given just how global the world has become and how we're all kind of following suit. But I think what is important is how we're telling stories. I think the narratives and how businesses individually are being impacted.

And I think there is a lot of pride in regions for some of those homegrowing brands. This has been a big part of why we've created a podcast that really honed in on Australian brands. It's been very successful for us. Um, we're a global. Company. And we're like, there are a lot of great brands coming out of Australia that we think other guys, you know, marketers want to learn from.

Let's start to tell those stories and how they sold for their markets is, is really important at that cultural level. And we see it all the time. We work with our, our brand team and sometimes, you know, as a us company, the humor isn't They just don't, they don't get us.

Yeah. I don't know. It really tests you to go into those meetings and try and, you know, mediate and not, not downplay somebody's great brand work, but just to describe the differences. So it's interesting. I think we're seeing really similar trends, but our audience still respond really, really well when they see their market represented back at them.

So a number of ways that we do this is, you know, all from the small things from we're never going to copy and paste an event from Australia to Singapore. We have to have. Singaporean brands. We have to have Singaporean spokespeople explaining what it's like in that market. Cause there are differences.

I'm talking about high level trends that remain the same. And we do a lot of this through our customers. I think if you're trying to establish, I think if you're a small business and you're really struggling with localization across different markets, cause as I said, as a leader, I can see now it's timely.

We really have to make sure the ROI is there in some of these things, even though I fundamentally believe local wins a really powerful way is to, is to leverage customers, you know. We actually saw and credit to someone on my team in Singapore who was like, I know we don't really do this and we want efficiency.

So if we do a webinar for Asia, we kind of make it normally for Asia. I kind of want to see what happens if we do one for the Philippines. And we're really just going to on that page, pull out some of the key points. Pain points that we know our product solves for better in this market versus other markets.

Some markets have, for example, pain points can be cost efficiency versus loving the ease of use of our platform, just with examples. And so some pain points really bring true in different markets. And so leading with that pain point, as we, you know, promote the webinar. And then bringing in those local customers, we saw a significant increase in the number of attendees in this case from the Philippines register and attend and go through to sales from that webinar.

At a trends level, but audiences still understand their market, understand their challenges and know their business essentially.

James Lawrence: That's some really good insights I think for any marketer having to, because I think the reality is, is that all marketing teams are restricted by budget and the whole localization thing even more so.

It's kind of like. Compared to the mothership, wherever that may be, you just have nothing like the budget. So it is a case of prioritization, right? Like how much localization versus leveraging those assets that have been done, done globally. In terms of, Asia. Yeah, like is it mostly English language that you're dealing with?

Kat Warboys: Yes, it is from a marketing perspective, not from a product or in language perspective, but from a marketing at this stage. Yeah.

James Lawrence: Yeah. It makes sense. I think I'd like to take the conversation now just into HubSpot itself. So when I introduce you to, you know, every marketer listening will know of HubSpot. I think that's true.

What I think is maybe less understood is how the product itself has changed over say the last five years, or I think it so much work was done so incredibly well inbound marketing, marketing automation, email. If we could just talk about the work that's still happening there, but also I think talking about sales hub service, how they interact.

And I think a lot of us. Might not be necessarily fully aware of how far along HubSpot has come on the sales side because it is kind of a, it's a very different product to what it was five years ago. So without getting into like the kind of nuts and bolts of it, just kind of,

Kat Warboys: yeah, what's

James Lawrence: happened.

Kat Warboys: Uh, you're exactly right.

Uh, and I alluded to this in some of the journey that I started on, which was, began as marketing innovation. And I think we realized actually. Yes, there was a better way to market. There was also a better way to sell and service. And so over time we have expanded into a sales hub, uh, and a customer success hub.

Uh, we also have a CMS and an ops hub as well. So. The vision really has been to be that single source, that, that toolkit for your full go to market teams, marketing for sales and customer success. I think how we've managed to do that in a way that personally sets us ahead is we've built all of that from the ground up in the product.

So other companies may to achieve something like that, where you have tools that ultimately serve a different department and different buyer and different needs, but May rely on mergers and acquisitions to bring that into their product that has been successful for many companies, but it does have a downside, which is.

It'd be very hard to truly connect those from, I guess, an experience level. So, you know, a marketer should feel like when they're in their marketing or the, you know, the content hub of HubSpot. If they're going into the CRM, which they absolutely should be going into the sales hub, feels like very much the same product and same, same experience.

So from that user lens, but also from a data is a much, we see a lot of benefits from our customers who house all of their data in that one place with their hubs built on top. It is by far more seamless. more connected, we find that reports actually add up when you're trying to report on customers. So that's been, I think, a really big part to how we've been very thoughtful about building out the product to really solve for your full go to market teams.

And that's paid off in, you know, some really interesting ways that we definitely could have seen coming. Um, the great Stack consolidation that we saw off the back of COVID, you know, when COVID came out and everybody had to digitalize, they took on so many individual tools and that they were left with, you know, a tech stack of, um, 60, a hundred different tools that their teams were using.

And none of them were connected. Like that's never going to lead to a great customer experience. And so, There was this shift where companies were very incentivized to reduce that tech stack, but without losing capability or functionality. That's something that I'm very proud as a marketer selling HubSpot that we've managed, managed to do.

From a features perspective, AI has definitely become important. And also, I guess, enhancing the need for your tools to be connected across those teams. You know, you cannot give a good experience and AI is really going to shine through for brands and its ability. Of personalization and it relies on data for that.

And so you need to know who that first time visitor is. You need to know who a loyal customer is. I'm still surprised today that, you know, brands don't have that full visibility or end to end data. So we could be sending marketing promotional emails to a customer who's in a real like red ticket flag, could be about to leave.

Your business, but we're still, you know, smashing them with promo emails. It's, it's really a missed opportunity. And I think it's very powerful where we can have all of those teams on one platform.

James Lawrence: I think it's hard, right? It's because technology gets better, it becomes easier. Right. But traditionally it's been very, very hard because every business has different nuances and different differences.

And generally the bigger you get. The more kind of custom you need to get at certain points and not at all to try to show the HubSpot, but it, it's no longer just this little CRM that, you know, a small sales team of five people can manage. We're talking about HubSpot stealing market share from, you know, the big two, the big one kind of competitors in the space for absolutely massive and complex sales environments.

And when you can then plug. Back into a marketing hub and you have this kind of bringing together of your sales and marketing views. It is for the right business of which there seems to be an increasingly large number. Like it is a, it's a pretty amazing solution.

Kat Warboys: Yeah. We definitely hear from customers that of the things they value, the one that kind of comes through time and time again, it probably the top list is the simplicity.

I think for a long time there was almost a sense of pride and if you need a complex and custom solution. TechDev. Staff debt, time debt, whatever you want to call it. Um, there were many downsides to having systems where people were spending more time configurating. Adapting the really constrained businesses from being able to adapt to move forward.

I think as, you know, as the buyer environment has changed so much, you can be really constrained by your tools, if that's the case, and we do hear stories of customers who, you know, have to go through tickets with their ops or dev teams to, you know, have a new field added to a form, which is just not the barriers or challenges that you need to be putting in front of your teams who need to be pivoting fast, moving fast, adapting and testing different things.

So usability is definitely be something that has remained a core part of our products.

James Lawrence: It's always surprised me how the team has managed to keep it simple because it is, as you add complexity to any tech product, it's so hard. It's so challenging, even just in terms of speed, right? Yeah. UX and how do you hand over all of this control to users without then turning it into something that no one can use.

And I think Salesforce has always struggled with that, right? It was always viewed as this incredibly powerful tool, but in order to have that power came with it, you know, the fact that external people had to implement and you had to pull consultancy and a lot of those things are now, I mean, if I can use it, anyone can use it.

Kat Warboys: We've had people that say that, but like, like obviously. There, it's a great tool. They have, you know, great market share that they're doing something very, very right in all of this as well. It would be impossible for me to say what complexity your business is going through, but also like coming back to that idea of, you know, the tech stack, I can't say how many tools are right for your business.

Some of those flags that businesses just can't afford to have time sunk in those areas anymore and not be focusing on the actual execution, doing good work, because we're spending so much time maintaining systems.

James Lawrence: Yeah. Kind of jumping now into just broader marketing landscape, like, what do you see as the big, the big areas?

Kat Warboys: In the, in the next year or so, if I could sum some of them up from the conversation AI, and I'm glad we did have a huge AI conversation because it really feels like it can dominate these chats at the moment. But I think the trend that AI is going to bring is increased productivity, which is such a good thing as we've just been talking about, you know, what your team's being able to respond and do great work.

We know from one of our AI reports that those that have. Got a good flow of using AI in their work, saving up to two days per week, pretty huge. And some of those top use cases are around, you know, text generation, you know, all those things that get our work going that we're coming in and tweaking at the end.

So a lot of productivity gains, but also that personalization piece is the other big, and that's really key. Something we're describing is the big switch off at the moment, which is. It's really a signal from the market that suggests brands have missed the mark on their communications or the volume of their communications.

People are feeling absolutely bombarded by irrelevant marketing materials. That was one of the main reasons some, uh, our research where consumers cited they were having a bad experience. And it's not just limited to our research, we're seeing this play out in very real world ways. Kmart was fined 1. 3 million last year for sending unwanted email to their customers.

Commonwealth bank was another one. I think they had like a record high of 3. 5 million. Fine, so people are Switching off and it's definitely getting harder to cut through. I think the key takeaway for their, for brands is it's going to be quality over

James Lawrence: quantity. And with AI, do you, do you see the biggest changes impacting marketers coming from us and people in our teams and our agencies using tools like ChatGPT and BARD to kind of speed things up that we once, you know, used to spend time doing?

Or do you see The biggest impact likely coming through tools like HubSpot where these big tech companies they themselves are kind of like, where, how do you see it playing out?

Kat Warboys: Yeah. Um, I'm certainly not an expert in this matter, but definitely what the signs that we're seeing and how I think about it at HubSpot from a marketing perspective, we are reducing time on some of those more manual tasks, um, whether that is, you know, coming up with blog content ideas or, you know, titles for our posts, Jenna is definitely helping us there.

Yeah. The thing is, you know. We've had AI in our products for a long time. Most of the products available, like I've saw on the market have, it's just, this is the first time we have generative AI, which is actually helping us create new things. So we use it and we see it on our data, which is feeding into personalization, which is now tapping into content streams.

So it's really that piece of the puzzle where it's like, we have the insights and AI has actually been helping in the reporting level for quite some time. But how are we taking those insights and feeding it into campaigns and even as the sales team, the recommendations, I think we talk a lot about this.

Right. So at least in marketing, but I'm, I'm actually deeply more curious on what's going to happen with the sales teams, a team that might not historically has. Adapt at content marketing as say marketers, but do have to do a lot of that in their outreach emails. Some of the AI features is definitely benefiting the sales professional in a lot of that outreach and the communications.

This is great for several reasons. The big one is obviously buyers are becoming more educated, coming to the table with higher expectations from their sales conversation. Um, the more we can reduce on the sales team in terms of those admin tasks, whether that's forecasting or even prospecting insights.

Is a very, very good thing. I kind of forgot your original question, but I went over it. No, no, no, I think it's in terms

James Lawrence: of like, how do we actually see AI. impacting us? Like, is it us kind of going off and doing these things or is it the tools which, and Google says the same thing about AI, right? Which is we've had AI in our product since 2007.

Like it's not, it's not that it's necessarily new. It's just the way that we're interacting with it is different.

Kat Warboys: It's interesting. Well, I'm just, why you said that, because I think one of the top barriers we see with AI is actually people is training. People do not know how to engage with their product.

Starting to be seamless in some tools, but in many areas does require engagement, still, and prompting can be very daunting way to start with that. And it's one of the biggest barriers that we hear from when we ask people about AI. Yeah.

James Lawrence: Interesting. And I think it nicely weaves in the conversation that we had earlier, which is it's so easy now to create content, right?

And it is so easy to then to blast content out there, whether it, whether it's a blog or an email or whatever it might be. And you just have to come back to that principle of value. Like if the, the communication that you're about to send to a sales prospect or through a marketing EDM, if it's been helped or enriched with AI, no problem at all.

If it allows you to do a better job and make it better for the end prospect, but there's just no way that these tools are going to. Win by just bombarding people with average quality content that I want.

Kat Warboys: No, exactly right. And I think that’s why the personalization piece is so important. Like on one hand, there's an argument, we're just going to create more volume.

And it's like, if we're doing it right, we should create less volume because we are getting it so right. If you think like the majority of businesses right now, May not be that hyper personalized, we should be moving away from that world where we get that hit the first time, because it is so highly personalized.

We're able to tap into audiences that are ready now. I think that's going to having a great impacts on, you know, our spend efficiency, conversion rates are going to get so optimized. We're spending less, maybe less volume, um, but certainly higher intent and conversions happening. So if we do it right. It shouldn't be more, it should actually be less, and a very good experience.

Just on better.

James Lawrence: I love it. Okay, we finish every episode of the pod with the question, what's the best piece of career advice? That you would give to an in house marketer.

Kat Warboys: Uh, ask for forgiveness, not permission.

James Lawrence: That's a good one. I don't think we haven't had that one yet.

Kat Warboys: Okay. Good. Good. That's advice that's been given to me.

And so far I've gotten, yeah, it's gone well.

James Lawrence: Excellent way to finish the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us.

Kat Warboys: No, my pleasure. Thank you for having me on. It's good chat.