Russell Bradley-Cook: Building HubSpot’s App Ecosystem in EMEA

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Hey everyone, welcome back. We are in Paris, and we're at the offices of air call. We have an event happening, as you know, tonight, and we're waiting for people to to arrive. People are starting to arrive, and I am really excited to be joined by Russell Bradley Cook, Russell, welcome. Thank you very much. Chip, great to be here. Yeah. Likewise, I'm excited to be here as well, and you're based here in Paris. And Russell, Russell, you're with HubSpot, and you're the EMEA app partner manager, right, which is a new role maybe in the last, I think, six or nine months, something like

Russell Bradley-Cook  0:38  
that. So thank you, Chip. Great to be here. I joined HubSpot just over a year ago as the first EMEA app partner manager, and my focus is supporting European tech companies who are building integrations with HubSpot to have fantastic, well built integrations that solve for the customer.

Chip Rodgers  0:56  
That's fantastic. So, and you've been very busy, right? I mean, you're well, so first of all, your background is both large companies, enterprise companies and startups tended to be in the FinTech area, and so you brought a lot of that experience to HubSpot, and working with some we were talking earlier you some really tremendous partners here in EMEA that are driving a lot of value with HubSpot. Maybe we could talk a little bit about that.

Russell Bradley-Cook 1:26  
Yeah, great. So HubSpot has 1400 app partners globally. Of those, 400 plus are based here in Europe, and at the end of last year, we localized our app marketplace, which we now have eight languages. And so here in France, we have over 100 apps who have their user interface, their app listing, and their customer success in French. And so I think what we have seen is, I would say, kind of a soon to be mesh network of relationship between app partners, solution partners and even amongst app partners, building value and solving for the customer. And one of the things that we have noticed is that some of our best app partners are themselves using HubSpot, and they can understand the things that HubSpot is very strong at. They can understand the limitations. They also have a tighter feedback between the product team and the users, because it's two desks over if the product is broken, and HubSpot has great marketing automation tools, and so if you are trying to sell software, I would recommend that you use HubSpot. And that's I don't get paid to sell HubSpot, but that is definitely something that I encourage my partners

Chip Rodgers  2:41  
to do. Well, that's a great point is that then your partner, if your partners, are using HubSpot, then they're just that much more familiar with the capabilities and the value that it's driving, so that they can communicate it to their customers and partners 100%

Russell Bradley-Cook  2:55  
and what we see is that sales teams that are using HubSpot, when they go to demo to customer, they just flip on their own portal, and they're like, Hey, let me show you how we're using our product. And it's a very authentic story to tell. It's much more comfortable for the sales people. They don't feel slimy about it. They're not like, well, it's not going to work for you. It's like, Hey, we are already this is up and running with us. And so I think that you'd like to do this. And so for customers or prospects who are using HubSpot, they understand great. I can see immediate value of an integration with the marketplace. And for customers who are unfortunate to use another CRM, they can say, Hey, I'd really like to do that. I think it might be worth joining as a HubSpot customer in order to be able to use that. And we see that with some of our best integrations, for example, livestorm is our number one partner, created partner built video webinar tool, and we have customers who are HubSpot customers on the marketing piece, and they use another CRM. I won't name which one, but it has a big blue logo, and livestorm would prefer the integration to come in through the marketing hub, rather than the CRM hub, which is the much more natural place for it to connect, because that underlying database is smoother the APIs are cleaner for them to work on HubSpot. So nice, really excited about what we're doing, and obviously we benefit from an enormous go to market machine at HubSpot. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  4:22  
it's fantastic. So 400 out of the 1400 global partner app partners are here in EMEA. So you have a few things going on, then absolutely pretty busy.

Russell Bradley-Cook  4:36  
HubSpot is in a slightly unique situation, that we have a booming app marketplace, but we also have 6000 plus agency partners, and one of the things that I deeply believe is that our app partners will eventually, and I see this in the medium term, not even in the long term, have a larger impact on HubSpot growth trajectory than our solution partners and.

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