Success looks different to everybody. For Amy Brierley, our strategic account manager, it’s less a milestone and more a reflection of long-term value delivered.
Over the course of her 20-year career, Amy has worked in all kinds of marketing and sales environments to drive new business and grow revenue. But it wasn’t until she started implementing HubSpot at her previous company that she realised just how much more efficiently and effectively organisations could be running their revenue-generating machines.
How does Amy help to grow our business without actively selling? How does she help our clients to unlock more value in their organisations, and how has her journey in both these areas shaped her definition of success today, for her and for her clients? Read on to find out.
Success starts with a conversation. To chat with Amy about anything she’s shared here, get in touch.
Thomas Brown: What is it about account management that gets you up in the morning?
Amy Brierley: I’ve always been very interested in driving the growth of the companies where I’ve worked, but I’ve never thought of myself as a salesperson. In account management, I’ve found a role where I can directly contribute to that growth without actively selling by growing my clients’ accounts. Just this morning I had a call with one of our biggest customers to review the work we’ve carried out for them in the past month and prioritise what we should work on next. By helping my clients to use HubSpot as optimally as possible, I’m helping them to solve their problems while getting the most out of their subscriptions. My wheelhouse of expertise is marketing, data, and systems. My current position bridges all these interests, and I’m really enjoying it.
How did you find your way into account management?
It’s a very different role to those I’ve held previously but that’s what attracted me. I’d recently implemented HubSpot at my last company and loved it. We were using so many different systems beforehand. It was impossible to see what was working, and the costs were huge.
It quickly became apparent we could consolidate a lot of our systems and our costs by using HubSpot. We ended up being one of the top users of the platform, and I secured a seat on their Customer Advisory Board. That’s when I first thought about using my experience with HubSpot to help other businesses achieve the same. I'm a big advocate for HubSpot. I think its investment into its product and the direction the platform is taking is really exciting. I’d followed BabelQuest for a while by this point, so I reached out, and here I am.
Tell me more about how you’ve seen HubSpot evolve.
I was having a conversation yesterday with a contact from LinkedIn about this. Public perception of the platform has changed so much already. It’s not just known as a marketing tool anymore. The whole marketing industry has changed so much from when I first started, mostly due to the advancement of data and technology. HubSpot has done a phenomenal job of keeping pace with those changes and developing its products in line with them. Its service offering was a big game-changer for HubSpot and the market. You can say the same about Sales Hub too. Salesforce isn't going anywhere but HubSpot can offer a genuinely competitive alternative. This investment in the product is really what sets it apart.
Every month, new updates are rolled out. These aren’t small tweaks to functionality. And the focus on the customer is second to none. You can see that in the beta tests HubSpot offers its users. A great passion of mine was its reporting tools. When I took my feedback to the advisory board, the people on the board listened. Everyone at HubSpot seems to have this positive attitude towards the customer and this trickles down into the products they develop and the functionality they take to market. There’s this real sense of a long-term vision that’s very compelling: HubSpot knows where it wants to go and it knows how to get there.
What do our clients want from strategic account management?
They want to know that they're getting the most out of HubSpot. With so many updates, it can be challenging for users to keep on top of them all, never mind understanding how to make best use of them to benefit their businesses. With me on their side, they can get on with business as usual, confident that I’ve got them in mind when a new update drops that might be relevant to their strategy or the tools they’re using. So there’s an element of helping them to get the most out of their platform now but also keeping one eye on their future use and how they can unlock more value as new tools and capabilities become available.
There’s real value in that, and not every partner can offer it. I’m able to put myself in my contacts’ shoes because as we discussed earlier I’ve been through the process myself. Every organisation is different but I can immediately empathise. I know how hard it is when your budget is shrinking. You need to make sure you’re unlocking the platform’s full potential.
What does success look like to you?
My clients’ success is our success. It’s always the result of a great deal of work and effort, and it doesn’t happen overnight, so having that long-term vision of what success looks like is really important. It was another thing that attracted me to BabelQuest; the understanding that you need to deliver value consistently, repeatedly, in a sustainable way to drive real growth.
Success to me is about going on that journey with our clients. Delivering value day in, day out. Being by their side as they grow. Our retention statistics speak to that. We’re already an outlier when it comes to retaining and growing our clients and that’s because we can provide the value that our customers need to grow. In that way, I’m able to help us grow, too.
