Why hubspot acquires performable

The acquisition brought HubSpot a team of 20, led by founder David Cancel, which specialized in technology for letting businesses personalize websites and email for customers.

Cancel, who became HubSpot's chief product officer, and the Performable team led the development of the new version of HubSpot's software which debuted in August. The HubSpot 3 software offers companies the ability to customize the web, mobile and email experience of visitors, using information stored about each visitor in a contacts database. You put it on your site and you got more conversions. With Drift you can message them and tell them about what they should be trying. We need to take you on the road.

You keep going places. I want to meet the people you meet. I should say first that this interview is sponsored by two great sponsors. The first is a company that will help you hire your best developer ever. David : Thanks for having me. Andrew : So, that first business, the idea came to you from a problem you noticed—with Performable, not the first one. What was the problem that you noticed with Performable? So, we noticed that problem.

We talked to more marketers. So, we started on the journey of building Performable. Andrew : How did you know that was a problem? David : We did a ton of customer interviews. So, I had come out of the marketing software world. I had done several companies before that, one called Compete, which did kind of like audience measurement.

We noticed this thing. You need to change your website and respond to what your customers need. They would always say the same thing. Andrew : How formal were your interviews? David : Anyone that would talk to us. So, going to coffee shops, going to people that we had known before within the industry, just anyone who would talk to us who we thought would have this problem.

The best interviews for me are always the ones that you do that involve observation. What I mean by that is we would go into the offices and see people in their native setting. How did they work? What did their browser look like? What were the items on the desktop? What opened up? What was in their cubicle or their office? We would just start to observe that stuff to really understand how they worked and who they worked with because for us that was as much of the problem and the possible solution as watching them work with our software or our prototypes.

Andrew : I see. So, at that point you got them a prototype when you walked into their office and asked them to try it. David : No. At that point, we were just talking about ideas. David : This is such an interesting phenomenon.

For me, I would think would never respond to someone. I need help. We would have customers who would do Skype calls just like this one and they would share their desktop with us.

Do you mind if we record your desktop? Andrew : So, what was the conversation that would start off with them getting you even on Skype? How would you get these people? David : So, we would cold outreach to people. Andrew : Okay. Often times we were wrong and it was a process of iteration. So, we would keep going down this discovery path—. David : Later we would segment, but segment is like a rich person problem.

First we just wanted to get anyone to talk to us and then later over time, once we started to see patterns we would start to segment. Andrew : Who did you initially think you needed to talk to?

David : We thought we just needed to talk to marketing managers. We wanted to talk to the actual person suffering from this problem. So, what would you say to them to get them on a call with you? Do you have this kind of problem? I just want to talk to you about some ideas. David : Exactly. And how many of these emails would you say you send out back at Performable? David : Oh wow, hundreds. Andrew : Hundreds? David : Yes, definitely.

Andrew : By the way, you were incredibly successful back then. You built all these other businesses. You still have to send out hundreds of emails in order to get somebody to respond. David : I still do. Andrew : You still do.

Even right now at Drift? But I kind of believe this. These people should want to talk to me. Will you chat with me about your problem? Can I have some time to talk to you about it? You eventually get on a call with them. How do you make it productive? Do you have a list of questions? Is there something else you do?

David : Yes. Sometimes it takes a long time for them to share how they work today. What do they do to solve these problems today? Andrew : So, do you make a list of problems and then you have them show you? David : I have a list of hypotheses, like that we want to test, like one is in the Performable case, creating landing pages on their own is a problem. It usually takes end number of steps for them to be able to do it and so I want to go see what it actually takes.

I have no data. Or they want to go back to advertising buys. We still listen. With Performable, we started with landing pages. But by the end, what we were really selling to customers was marketing automation. We started with landing pages and went through to analytics and finally the real problem was around marketing automation and that was when we started to hockey stick and when HubSpot acquired us.

Andrew : What do you mean by marketing automation for you, for Performable? David : Yeah, so at Performable, the problem that we saw was the data for leads was scattered all over many systems for marketers. They just had all these scatterings of data. We unified that first through landing pages. So, it kind of took this journey to understand really what they wanted to do was trigger the action. Landing pages was one path into ultimately triggering an action.

Andrew : And David, at every stage are you doing the same thing, talking to customers, seeing their problem? Andrew : You are? David : Absolutely. We took this religion to HubSpot up to 15,, customers, we were still doing this same religion. We can just sit back here and look at an Excel spreadsheet or look at some tool. But at the end of the day, you have to go out and talk to customers and understand their problems. A lot of that does not come through in just testing. David : I wish I did.

What I do in my interviews—I even noticed going back to will my first interview with you—I asked for examples because examples lead to stories, lead to specifics and get out of what you think of what is the real world into what you really do. Do you have things like that that you do? David : Our framework is around problems. Could we solve those problems? Andrew : Is there like an outline or something that gets you to the problems? Is there a set of questions?

Do you have anything like that that you know will get people to open up or get people to tell their problems? So, yes, we develop questions over time. Those help us reveal the problems. Andrew : And you write it down for yourself when it works for you?

There are some questions that are general, but most questions are very specific. They went to your website. They signed up and basically all you have is a landing page. What were you hoping that I would show you today? One of the first things you want to know when someone enters their email is what do they want out of this. Andrew : All right. Let me do a sponsorship message. But the sponsor is Toptal. You can find a pair of hands a lot of places. You can go to all the freelancer websites and get them.

David : Totally. The place that I recommend that you check is Toptal. Do you know them at all? What problem are you trying to solve with this software? HubSpot customers who want to access Performable functionality immediately can purchase the product starting today. Originally published Jun 16, AM, updated January 13 Logo - Full Color. Contact Sales. Overview of all products. Marketing Hub Marketing automation software.

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