As you may have seen, we shared some exciting news this morning: More than 15,000 customers now use the HubSpot Marketing Platform. As this is a pretty big milestone for the inbound marketing community, we wanted to make sure that we took the time to celebrate and thank all of our fantastic customers appropriately.
So we got 15,000 ping-pong balls and decided to have some fun. As we set out to put together the video below, I started thinking about all the great insights we’ve learned from our customers over the last eight years. I decided to ask around: What was the most memorable thing you’ve learned from our customers?
Check out the video and lessons below to find out what we’ve learned.
1) Even when you don’t think you have anything to teach, you probably do.
“Whenever people tell me they don’t have anything to blog about, I tell them something that one of our customers (Tom at GoodbyeCrutches.com) told me: ‘What’s obvious to you is completely new to me. Don’t try to teach yourself, try to teach me.’ We’re all experts on things we don’t even realize, and odds are that even if something is obvious to you, it’s completely new information to your prospects.”
– Sam Mallikarjunan, HubSpot Labs
2) Inbound allows you to invest in the best people.
“In 2013, I had a call with a customer that’s stuck with me ever since. Steve at Yale Appliance told me about how inbound changed his business — not because he could turn the cost savings into profit, but because he could reinvest the savings in his team. He’s invested in better equipment, better training, and better people, and found a lot of ROI from all of those, too.”
– Rosalia Cefalu, Marketing
3) How your customers really use your product might be different than you imagined. (And that’s okay.)
“One of my customers (Seth at Longitude Media) uses HubSpot in an innovative way to not only to benefit his own businesses but to advance his customers as well. Seth uses HubSpot product to execute inbound campaigns that provide more qualified leads for his customers to nurture and close — completely transforming many of his longstanding partnerships.”
– Tim Cormier, Services
4) Where there’s a will, there’s a way (to do inbound).
“I love working with customers who don’t have a marketing background, but are crushing it with inbound. I have one customer who’s a percussionist, but also a very successful with the HubSpot software. People like him have taught me that it’s less about how much you’ve been taught about marketing, and more about how much of a will you have to share everything else that you know.”
5) People will always be the key to success.
“People talk about business as business, but our customers teach us that it’s all personal. Many of our customers have built their own successful businesses because of the personal attention they give it, and they’ve told us that they chose HubSpot because we have the same philosophy from our support team all the way to our CEO.”
– Katie Burke, People Operations
6) You can get a great waffle at the Eiffel Tower.
“Last April I was flying to Paris to visit a friend. I emailed one of my favorite customers, Julie of Hoi Moon Marketing, because I knew she lived in Paris. I asked Julie how to get to my hostel from the airport. Instead of giving me directions, she came to the airport to pick me up and show me in person. It was incredible. She came and got me on the train, showed me how to buy a ticket, how to navigate the trains, and then took me to the Eiffel Tower for a waffle. She taught me a lot about Paris, and also gave me a huge reminder that our customers are the best!”
We still have a lot left to learn.
At last year’s INBOUND conference, we included 143 suggestions from our customers in our product updates. We love to learn from our customers, whether it’s about inbound marketing, the ins-and-outs of Paris, or how to make our product better. We’re very excited to learn even more together.
