HubSpot's culture code is a lesson in inbound marketing and diversity. What could your organisation learn from HubSpot's globally recognised culture code and the benefits of more diverse inbound marketing?
In sentiment and in practice, diversity is a beautiful word. It speaks to culture and acceptance, to breadth of knowledge and life experiences. It speaks of changing times and strength in collaboration. As well as this, or perhaps because of it, it's also synonymous with business growth.
A recent study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that 'increasing the diversity of leadership teams leads to more and better innovation and improved financial performance.'
"Companies that have more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenue due to innovation."
Marketing, sales, and service software provider HubSpot is one business advocating the importance of creating an inclusive workplace environment. 'Companies that are diverse in age, gender identity, race, sexual orientation, physical or mental ability, ethnicity, and perspective are proven to be better companies', HubSpot writes on its Diversity and Inclusion page. 'More importantly, creating an environment where everyone, from any background, can do their best work is the right thing to do.'
Speaking at The Revenue Growth Summit in Oxford last year, HubSpot director Dan Tyre spoke firsthand about the importance of diversity in the workplace and why it’s critical for businesses wanting to outperform the competition and succeed in their inbound goals.
Watch Dan’s talk now to discover why your business should embrace diversity in order to grow better.
Video transcript
Dan: HubSpot leans into what we call the culture code. To be part of the inbound revolution you have to live the inbound culture. Turns out that inbound isn’t just marketing and sales tactics, it’s also the way you run your company. Explain what the HubSpot culture code is, Olivia.
Olivia: Have you heard of the acronym HEART?
Dan: HEART — yes — H-E-A-R-T.
Dan and Olivia: Humble, empathetic, adaptable, remarkable, transparent.
Dan: This is the most downloaded SlideShare in the history of SlideShare. Dharmesh Shah invented the HubSpot culture code and it is the only policy that we have at HubSpot. There’s one policy at HubSpot. We don’t really have a policy manual. Can anybody guess what the one policy is at HubSpot?
AUDIENCE: [Replies]
Dan: There’s no policy? No, there’s actually one; it’s use good judgement. If anybody has a policy manual, we’re making fun of user manuals. Does anybody remember user manuals? If you’re like over four years old you’ll remember they’re 140 pages and got all these pictures. Some of the millennials are like ‘what are you talking about?’, but user manuals — that’s how you ran a software program. That’s how you learned about something. The way we run our organisation is we hire super impactful people that can think on their own and all we want them to do is use good judgement. If you want to see the HubSpot culture code, just Google it. There’s a blog article and then 128 slides. I strongly urge you if you’re going to practice inbound to create inbound internal. Just like you have a buyer persona for a target customer, let’s make sure you have an employee persona so you can get the right people to work in your organisation.
There are a fair amount of potholes. What we find is that marketing and sales people understand this because they’re on the frontline. You guys all know when I say that your customer has changed what that means as it relates to the details of how you engage.
Marketers see this all the time. Sometimes senior managers are a little bit more removed and so there needs to be a requirement for how you can engage and educate them on how inbound is this competitive advantage.
Dan: At HubSpot we lean into diversity. What’s your experience been with diversity at HubSpot, Olivia?
Olivia: Amazing. It’s bizarre that I say amazing. I take it for granted that I’m viewed as an equal. Not every woman has that opportunity in the organisation in which they work at. There’s no difference whether you’re a male or a female within HubSpot. You’re viewed as one, you’re viewed as equal and you do your job and use good judgement. But it is important that HubSpot recognises it as well, so we’ve joined I think it’s 20% of companies who have three women on the board. I think it’s 50% of women at the moment now are managers. If we’re selling to women, if we’re engaging with different businesses and different organisations, then we need to have women on board. We need to have women on board as managers, on the director level as well because that’s half of the population as well. You need to make sure that you’ve got different ideas, cultures. So it’s really important from that perspective. But for me as HubSpot and me as a woman, I’m viewed as an equal. It doesn’t make a difference on the payscale. I’m viewed as an equal and I know exactly what I’m earning versus what a male’s earning and I think that’s what’s really important.
Dan: Very nice. Katie Burke is our Chief People Officer.
Olivia: Amazing.
Dan: Voice of the employee. In 2014, 25% of our managers were women. In 2015 it moved to 35%. 2016 it was 41%. In 2017 46% of our vice-presidents and over half of our managers are women, which is part of living the inbound revolution and inbound organisation. Katie Ng-Mak who now runs the agency partner program in North America got promoted on maternity leave. Whenever I hear that I want to cry. So great.
All right, in 2017 I wrote a book called the Inbound Organization. If you need more information or need to convince more people in your company that this in the right way to go, what we have proven over the last 12 years is inbound is this revolution. In 2007, when I was the first salesperson for HubSpot, people asked me two questions. Number one: ‘what is inbound?’ and number two, they’d say: ‘would it work?’ In 2007, I’m like ‘well, we’ve got 30 customers, I think it will work, I’m not quite sure.’ Today we have over 60,000 paying customers. We have hundreds of thousands of people using the free HubSpot software. All of our new products come out with free versions because we want you to get immediate value. We want you to try before you make a financial commitment. We want to make sure that it’s a good fit. The Inbound Organization talks about a lot of the stuff we talked about today: how to align sales and marketing, how to do buyer personas, how to make sure you have an inbound operating system so that you can scale and grow your business.
