Salesforce does revenues of $40 billion annually.

Inspite of (or perhaps because of) adoption across S&P500, it continues to be the CRM used by enterprises.

Inbound marketing takes off with Google and Social Media

Hubspot calls itself the customer platform for scaling companies.

In 2024, Hubspot is valued at over $35 billion, and is doing annual revenue of $2.5 billion.

First, Marketing.

  1. You can use hubspot to create landing pages to your website
  2. Automate workflows around those leads - if a customer visits your website 3 times (after they have filled their contact details), send an automated email to them
  3. You can use Hubspot to do marketing automation - to send bulk emails to your customers

It was built in the 2000s, with the core insight that the sales process in the internet age is not just around outbound, but is about the customer finding you through inbound channels.

The AI-driven future of CRM

Attio raised a round of $33 million. It comes amidst a major paradigm shift - there are ever increasing channels by which your business is acquiring customers. They are doing very different things on your website and in your application.

Keeping track of those diverse interactions across growth channels and with the product to create a unified view of the customer. Web2.0 was fundamentally about tracking clicks and form submissions.

And now how to act across diverse channels - who better than an AI agent that has all your CRM data. Maybe it would suggest that those enterprise leads who were marked MQLs in December of last year but were dropped in BDRs diligence should be revived.

A marketing team would be taking a week to plan this campaign. With an agentic AI, you just to configure the pieces and the campaign would be live in a day.

AI is now able to understand multimodal inputs - what the user is saying on calls. What they are saying in an email.

Back to the basics - Contact (read Customer) is the Fundamental Unit of the CRM

It’s kind of intuitive, right?

Hubspot’s data model allows you to capture all the details around a customer that you might want.

It’s automations already help you out with

Look for more details about Hubspot’s data model - specifically what all are the data that are included in it.

SaaS companies have 3 distinct Lead-based campaigns:

  1. Inbound
  2. Outbound
  3. Account-based marketing
  4. Product-Led Motion

With an Inbound GTM motion, you are doing the following:

  1. Putting your product out there
  2. Leveraging Organic & Paid distribution channels, having a targeting strategy to reach your customers, and a messaging strategy that convinces them that you are the right solution for them. For example, At VdoCipher

References:

https://attio.com/blog/attio-raises-33-million-in-funding

Hubspot analysis

  1. Series B announcement: https://www.hubspot.com/blog/bid/4150/hubspot-raises-12-million-for-saas-internet-marketing-software
  2. Series C announcement: https://www.hubspot.com/blog/bid/5176/hubspot-closes-16-million-series-c-financing
  3. Series D announcement: https://www.hubspot.com/blog/bid/10491/sequoia-google-ventures-and-salesforce-com-invest-32-million-in-hubspot
  4. Quarterly results:
    1. Q2 2024 results: https://ir.hubspot.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hubspot-reports-q2-2024-results
    2. Q3 2024 results: https://ir.hubspot.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hubspot-reports-q3-2024-results

Hubspot international expansion

Salesforce analysis

Q3 2024 results: https://investor.salesforce.com/press-releases/press-release-details/2024/Salesforce-Announces-Third-Quarter-Fiscal-2025-Results/default.aspx

Attios Funding announcement

https://attio.com/blog/attio-raises-33-million-in-funding