GTM Crossroads Podcast Ep10: CRM Choices (HubSpot vs Salesforce)

In this episode, the hosts explore key aspects of building a tech startup, including choosing the right CRM, developing a product-led growth motion, and refining pricing strategies. They share real-world challenges with tools like Stripe, discuss how market uncertainty influences decision-making, and examine how AI can be used effectively to scale operations.

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Disclaimer

Please note that the GTM Crossroads Podcast is co-hosted by Harris Kenny (Founder, OutboundSync), Brendan Tolleson (Co-Founder & CEO, RevPartners), and Zach Vidibor (Co-Founder & CEO, Octave). Each episode features discussions on go-to-market (GTM) strategy, revenue operations, and sales execution from industry leaders.

The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the individual speakers at the time of recording and do not necessarily reflect the official stance of their respective organizations. Statements made during the conversation may be speculative, evolving, or based on personal experience rather than company policy.

This transcript below is provided for reference and accessibility but should not be interpreted as official guidance, policy, or endorsement by any company mentioned. 

Transcript

Harris Kenny (00:00.112)
We’ll see what you can say.

Brendan Tolleson (00:02.179)
We’ll cut that out, but hey, what’s up guys? You’re on the episode of Gunnarock Crossroads. Zach, we missed you last week. Or I guess Harris just joked that he did not miss you, but I missed you, Zach. So it’s good to see your face.

Zach Vidibor (00:04.077)
Okay.

Zach Vidibor (00:13.614)
Missed you guys.

Harris Kenny (00:16.272)
I didn’t miss Zach because I signed up for Octave. And so I am in the process of ramping up our messaging and making it what I think is gonna be way, way freaking better. So I felt like I was with you, you know, in spirit and in product and, know.

Zach Vidibor (00:34.158)
I must say getting to that slack notification at the end of the day for the new user signups that one hit me here man. That was fun to see.

Harris Kenny (00:43.928)
I’m excited. Our outbound function as we talked a little bit is like, it’s not our number one growth lever ironically, but it is important and it’s something we do. so I’m excited to, cause it’s come a long way. Messaging stuff has come a long way in last few years. It’s pretty dizzying, I think. So anyway, I felt like I was with you. It’s my point.

Brendan Tolleson (01:03.897)
Zach, did you buy outbound sync yet? is that?

Zach Vidibor (01:06.734)
I haven’t.

Harris Kenny (01:06.992)
Well, he has a free tier, so he has a much better, more friendly adoption model because we are small. But I do suspect we’ll sign

Zach Vidibor (01:10.818)
We will get there. I need to hire this damn sales team and get some more help first and get myself. I was being, what’s the right word? Not scolded, but close to that word. One of our investors, he’s like, you are too in the business. You need to be on top of the business. like, I know, we’re getting there. Need to hire some people.

Brendan Tolleson (01:12.311)
Yeah.

Harris Kenny (01:39.354)
Yeah, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Zach Vidibor (01:41.42)
Right, and then tools, more outbound, we’re gonna need to sync it, no doubt.

Harris Kenny (01:46.236)
For sure. Actually, what do you use? Maybe this is, I hope you don’t mind me asking, what do you use for your CRM at Octave?

Zach Vidibor (01:56.226)
We are a little bit of HubSpot and transparently we are exploring now, do we continue with HubSpot or do we have HubSpot and Salesforce? And actually, curious, you guys, consult me. We are going to be a product-led sales motion. So where we have this, you know.

decent clip and growing number of users that sign up, varying degrees of qualified. You know, like we have some people that are, you know, you’re a student and you sign up with your, know, .edu address and like, okay, we can toss those right out, you know, have a good fun experience, but like that’s fine, you know, and then we have.

Brendan Tolleson (02:40.079)
I’m

Zach Vidibor (02:45.302)
large enterprises and so we’re trying to figure out do we need to treat those two buckets separately of like HubSpot being more in charge of closer to top of funnel, the marketing automation and all the life cycle processes with the leads that are signing up for the app and then do we pull into Salesforce when we have a…

more significant opportunity that we’re going to lead a more direct sales motion with. And so that’s kind of what we’re exploring right now. like, yeah, curious your guys thoughts on like what you like, what you would say, huh?

Brendan Tolleson (03:19.999)
It’s like a discovery call for me. It’s like a discovery call for me. This is great.

Zach Vidibor (03:24.334)
Bring it on. I’m an open book.

Brendan Tolleson (03:29.743)
What about Salesforce? guess, I really am about to get a discovery call, which I need to be careful of. I won’t do a discovery call sales pitch because I don’t think anyone wants to hear that, but I’ll get to the conclusion. The conclusion would be HubSpot can do both a PLG motion and a…

Zach Vidibor (03:37.1)
No, let’s do it.

Brendan Tolleson (03:50.967)
enterprise deal motion. I think it’s more of an education element of understanding what functionality you were looking for that you see in Salesforce because I shouldn’t say undoubtedly, but I’d say more than likely HubSpot has it. If I was doing a discovery, I’d ask you a lot of questions to lead to that outcome, but that’s where I would position you to. think where we, especially with investors too, there’s almost like a why bother notion with HubSpot and that eventually you just need to move on to Salesforce and so you might as do it now.

But I think that’s an outdated thinking and their husband’s functionality has gotten pretty comparable with very few exceptions.

Zach Vidibor (04:27.064)
Yeah. I mean, this is an area I’m like, you know, and maybe, you know, take this offline and do the truly put me on the couch and do discovery. But like I do have a admitted, I have some bias coming from like, I’ve always, every company I’ve worked at has been Salesforce. And like,

Harris Kenny (04:50.396)
Mm-hmm.

Zach Vidibor (04:50.862)
I’m trying, feel like HubSpot, if you’re doing a startup, you start with HubSpot. So I’ve been, I’ve kind of started us there ourselves, obviously. I’m not a rev ops pro, I’m definitely not a Salesforce pro, I’m definitely not. So I have some like, all right, I know it a little better, I know the ceiling of where I can go with Salesforce more. So I have probably some biases that are like.

Brendan Tolleson (04:56.239)
Thank

Zach Vidibor (05:18.666)
leading me that like, okay, like I need this for the easy stuff, but then yeah, I’m gonna need dashboards and MRR versus ARR recording that like only Salesforce, you know, I’m like, I could be totally wrong to your point, but it’s like that’s where my head is probably just like naturally pulling me.

Harris Kenny (05:35.58)
Hmm.

Brendan Tolleson (05:35.631)
And that’s, I mean, that’s where we started the business. Cause I, on the same way, all my backgrounds in Salesforce and all our initial customers that we sold are your persona of like, Hey, I’m scaling a technology company. All I know is Salesforce. starting on HubSpot. Like I can’t scale with me. That’s like, that is, is a valid concern and understandable one. I think it’s just, it’s more of one of those things where kind of that, like three years ago, we’re doing this. It was like, Hey, this is totally like.

a feature problem and now it’s not a feature problem, it’s an education problem. And so we are happy to have that conversation because I think it’s a fun one. mean, Haris, you’ve been in both sides for, I mean, you support both.

Zach Vidibor (06:14.552)
We start.

Harris Kenny (06:18.012)
Yeah, yeah, so I mean, I’ll say like, to me, like, there’s a couple things, I think this is just an interesting, you know, it’s not just about Octave, I think this is just like obviously a much, much bigger question about, you know, blue versus orange. Which the fact that it’s even that is an incredible accomplishment by HubSpot because Salesforce literally coined the term CRM, you know, I think that HubSpot has done it.

And I think that, you if you asked anybody at Salesforce who’s being honest, think that’s like, yeah, respect. Like you’ve, you’ve done a good job getting yourself into the conversation. So I think regardless that in of itself is kind of fun, interesting to me. And it’s funny watching like Addy. The reason I asked was cause people have been talking about Addy a little bit lately and it’s interesting cause it’s modular, but you know, I’ve just been wondering if it seems like a really solid product. And so, you know, no shade to them at all. I think it looks really interesting and really smart. People like it, but I do feel like

I was about in Salesforce is kind of the default conversation. And I think that the like second, the third place is it’s like far down in terms of what those other tools can do right now. So the two things that I heard that I had like no tend to know a little bit more about are like, okay, we’re PLG. So we’ve got these new signups coming up and there’s this like, I think an idea of like,

where do the not yet or unqualified leads, like where do they go? And so we’ve been, we’re about to launch support for the lead object in Salesforce and the way the HubSpot handles the lead object and the way Salesforce handles the lead object are very different. You know, in Salesforce, the lead object, in my understanding, is that it’s kind of like, that’s like your filter, everybody good, like in theory, if you’re following the Salesforce product, everyone gets dumped into a lead and then like, so all of your setups would get dumped into the lead object.

And then there would be this like decision point of like, okay, there’s a conversion event. It becomes an account and a contact. And then we would kind of have opportunities or deals associated with those accounts and contacts. Whereas with HubSpot, the data model is like companies and contacts exist. And then like a lead is like a pre deal where there’s like an event where there’s like a lead event. And now this contact who I already know, I already have their email address.

Harris Kenny (08:36.634)
they just signed up for my product or they just triggered some like usage threshold threshold and now it’s a lead for my sales team to follow up with them and say, hey, it looks like in Octave, you just tried to spin up your X number of ICP, you know, and like looking at, it looks like you’re in CPG. Well, we work with this company that has this use case. Like you want to hop on a call, we can talk about it. So I think like.

from the top of funnel perspective. then others, like a lot of companies use both and they use HubSpot as the catching ground. They have all the marketing stuff in there and then there’s this triggering event where then it gets pushed into Salesforce from there. I think that like that funny enough seems to be like a lot of times the answer is like both. I’ve not heard people like switch completely because they don’t necessarily want to use Pardot or Marketo or something like that. It does seem like HubSpot sticks around, but there’s some of these workflows and where the other one that I hear is like revenue recognition where it can be.

harder to get like MRR and stuff like that inside of HubSpot. That is an area where it seems like the, like, I mean, we’re tiny, so I just use ChartMogul. But if I needed that data in HubSpot, I don’t know. I tried integrating a Stripe and it was two months and it was just a nightmare. So I do think there are some areas where it’s like a legit thing that Salesforce is better at certain things, I think.

Maybe there’s workarounds, maybe there’s a better way to do it, but anyway, that’s kind of my rambling reaction to kind what we talked about so far.

Zach Vidibor (10:04.055)
Yeah, let’s keep the pain lid covered on Stripe

Brendan Tolleson (10:07.959)
Yeah.

Harris Kenny (10:10.14)
Yeah, I thought they were supposed to be the easy ones. It was like you’re supposed to be the hero.

Zach Vidibor (10:14.382)
I swear to God I like I I had like oh I’m starting this company and like we’re gonna integrate with stripe at some point I’m gonna get to like be a user of like the world’s best Startup like the world’s best private company and like now we’re I can’t believe this is how it works. This is

Brendan Tolleson (10:33.317)
you

Zach Vidibor (10:33.868)
This is painful. I mean, and some stuff, Brennan, we’re like, you know, deals we’re selling with your team and like, we’re trying to do the right things and do like, you know, we’re small, but trying to start to get advanced and do like, sell through Co-Sell stuff and like subscription management within Stripe is just, it’s…

mind-boggling how difficult it is. And like you can’t you can’t make a mistake on anything. Again, now I said we shouldn’t open this and now I’m doing that but it’s like you can’t make a mistake, you mess up on anything, it creates churn if you have to cancel something and it’s like what is that but I’m an admin that’s can I tell you that’s not churn? Anyways.

Brendan Tolleson (11:10.921)
You

Harris Kenny (11:11.819)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, you’re, I mean, no offense to Stripe, but it was like, you were supposed to be different. I’ve had a very, it’s been really tricky for us working with it too. It’s like, I thought you easy. Maybe they are easy. Maybe it’s better to compare to.

Zach Vidibor (11:19.486)
Yeah. Right. If you sell t-shirts on like a Shopify store, think it’s like, you are golden.

Harris Kenny (11:26.94)
But I thought it was like made for SAS. Maybe it’s better than bill.com and maybe we need to go spend a week trying to integrate with bill.com and then we’ll change our minds. I don’t know.

Brendan Tolleson (11:27.225)
Thank

Brendan Tolleson (11:39.119)
Well, yeah, that kind of goes back to like, how do you think about your go-to-market motions and like the one-time recurring and usage? I mean, those are like the three big ones that we think about. Yes, there’s like, how do you acquire the customers? Like in terms of, are we product led? we, you know, one stage, two stage, ABM, et cetera. But like, those are like the three core concepts as far as how transactions occur. Yeah. And Stripe is a, I mean, they all have their flaws, but they’re,

Harris Kenny (12:05.648)
Yeah, yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (12:08.577)
Anyways, Harris, how was your past week,

Harris Kenny (12:13.436)
Things are good. yeah, it’s funny enough. It’s a big Salesforce sprint for us right now. We’ve got three big features that we’re pushing out. So our Salesforce integration will be out of beta. The way we do product is when I say beta, it’s like we build features kind of one at a time. We kind of round out the integration rather than like a version one of everything and then a version two of everything that’s more polished. So we did like.

accounts and contacts and then logging activities to the email object. Then we added the task object and then we added, you know, block lists. Then we added writing to the lead object. And then like once that kind of full set of features is like, they’re all good. Then I consider it out of beta cause it’s just kind of like allows us to ship faster and sell faster. Cause not every customer needs every feature just because of the nature of what we do. So it’ll be out of beta, but like we’ve had stable customers on Salesforce for a few months and who are really happy.

So that’s like my, so that’s a big one for me. And then new pricing, which we had talked about, went live on that and it has gone exceptionally well. I’ve got like seven demos today, tomorrow, deals are closing much faster and the like pricing part of the call is not awkward as it used to be. Where like they’re wondering why, I’m wondering why it is what it is. And then we’re like, okay, but like these tiers, like kind of makes sense, but I don’t understand what half of these features are. So we just like boiled it.

Way down. There’s probably like 95 % fewer words on the page and boiled it down to like the usage metric metric is how many emails you send and receive. And I think that this, can talk about it, whatever you guys want, we can talk, I have to talk about it more, but I feel like this is the thing that I think that I’ve got this right enough that it’s what we need to like.

Zach Vidibor (14:00.302)
So was the unlock, was it changing the metric or just more clearly getting rid, like we have one metric and get rid of all the other stuff or is it like actually a new metric?

Harris Kenny (14:00.988)
grow a lot from here.

Harris Kenny (14:10.968)
Yeah, well, we changed the metric. But before it was kind of like the usage tiers were so one tier was like 40,000 events, a webhook payloads event a month, which nobody really understood what that meant. I mean, I understand what it means, but you know, I’m the loser that’s been working on this for two years. And then the next year up was like 400,000 events. And so really it was mostly feature gating, but people didn’t really know what the features were. the funny thing is I never felt comfortable enforcing it.

So if they were like, look, like I just really want to log this to the task. Like that’s just like how I use Salesforce. In theory, I was supposed to be charging them more for that, but like I never, it just felt like I shouldn’t. It never felt like reasonable. I understand in general why feature gates exist. In the case of our product as a data sync product, it was like, look, our job is to get you the data. What you do with it once it’s in your system is kind of your thing. It’s not really, we change like six characters in an API call. It doesn’t really change anything for us.

So it was changing the metric and then just being like, whatever, we’re not gonna charge for that. you know, if you’re gonna do, yeah, and so just like being okay, being like, that’s not the thing to charge for. Because I noticed on a few bigger deals that we closed, it was always because they were higher volume. And so when I said, yeah, it’s 800 MRR or whatever, 800 a month, they were like, yeah, that’s fine. Like I’m sending 100 and whatever, thousand plus emails a month. Like I get that that costs you money.

Yeah, so it was changing it and simplifying it. When a call was going great and I just had to understand what was going on, I would ask people, what’s your sending volume? And they were always able to answer it very easily. And so when we changed that to the biometric, everything got easier. Because everybody thinks about it in those terms for our product. So that was the unlock. We’ll see, I mean could be regretting this in a month, but so far it’s been night and day.

Brendan Tolleson (16:03.343)
You mentioned, yeah, it sounds like it’s helping once you have the deal in terms of conversion rate. So it like the conversion rate is increasing, which is awesome. You mentioned seven, I think it was seven demos. Is that more than normal or is that? Okay.

Harris Kenny (16:18.428)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our site conversion is also up. So we’re booking more demos from the pricing page. It’s the second most visited site page on our site. First is the homepage. And then, you know, this whatever, I don’t remember what interval this was, but let’s just say it was 800 visits. And then the, and then the pricing page was like 450. And then the product page was like 150 or whatever. So it’s like, you know, it’s dropped off pretty dramatically, but it’s like homepage pricing page. And so that pricing page conversion is, is way up.

from before. We don’t have a freemium thing like you guys have built, so it’s a little bit of different mechanic than what you have.

Zach Vidibor (16:56.558)
like interesting that like that gut check of like the it’s like I know what that feels like ooh is this hard to stand behind like it’s it’s like I really like pricing is there’s a psychological component to it too that’s

Harris Kenny (17:03.516)
You

Harris Kenny (17:08.794)
Mm-hmm.

Zach Vidibor (17:10.094)
And it’s like, yeah. Ooh. Like what am I? I’m having to really like contort myself here to explain this is like a good like, we need to go back to the joint. It’s funny. I remember at like LinkedIn back in the day, like one of the things I on the sales team there, like one of the things I loved was like, they were ruthless about pricing, like until you got into their like, you are a strategic key account. was like literally here are package one, two, three, and four with a preset discount. And then here’s our volume.

Harris Kenny (17:14.844)
Mm-hmm.

Brendan Tolleson (17:18.223)
you

Harris Kenny (17:18.704)
Mm-hmm.

Zach Vidibor (17:40.4)
discounting list. That’s the, you know, it’s like no negotiations. Like here’s how it works. How many pages do you want ads on? How many job slots? And I was like, and it was just like, as a sales rep, like I just remember the feeling of like, oh, like this is so easy. I know exactly what to say. You can call anybody at this company. You’re to get the same answer. You know, it’s like, there’s like all these like psychological components that like go into that too. And it’s like, I’ve like, I’ve like,

Harris Kenny (17:44.57)
Mmm.

Harris Kenny (17:48.988)
Hmm.

Harris Kenny (17:55.215)
Mm-hmm.

Harris Kenny (18:00.099)
Mm-hmm.

Zach Vidibor (18:05.954)
We’ve definitely, we’re on like V3 of our pricing already. And it’s like, it’s definitely, that’s like, it’s like, Ooh, you can feel it in your gut where you’re just like, this isn’t right. Like you say, keep going with like what’s simple, easy. It’s in the customer’s like universe of understanding too, where they’re not like, you’re not making, I needed to calculate some new metric to bring to me. Then they’re just like, I don’t, I don’t know what that is.

Harris Kenny (18:12.688)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Harris Kenny (18:22.086)
Holy.

Harris Kenny (18:29.752)
Exactly. Yeah, I think LinkedIn’s are good, right? So if I’m hiring, how many jobs, you know, if I’m running ads, how many impressions or whatever, those are, yeah. And then for sales nav, how many seats, how many sales reps do you have, right? Like all of those are, it makes sense. Oh yeah, I’ve got three people, three seats. We were weird because we were sandwiched between the sequencer and the CRM who have different models. And so, but ultimately I was like, look, we’re like, I mean, we’re not like Snowflake, but I mean, if you had to say we’re more like a Snowflake or whatever.

Zach Vidibor (18:48.942)
Yeah.

Harris Kenny (18:57.958)
We’re utility, we build the pipe, we charge for how much water runs through the pipe. And when I looked at like other data products and I saw like segment and how their pricing pages worked, it was like, we need to be like that. I mean, it’s a little different, but like we need to move in that direction. And approximated.app was a really great one. talked to the founder of Carter. I talked to him a bunch. He was super, super helpful. And they have a hardcore like pure usage. We didn’t go to pure usage, but it’s approximated to, know, to, pun intended, but it’s approximately their…

approximately a usage-based model with some overages, and then we incorporated rollovers from clay, which people are now familiar with. So we definitely stole some notes from clay too, which we talk about a lot on the pod, but yeah.

Brendan Tolleson (19:37.369)
Yeah, going back to the switching topics a little bit, but connecting it with the idea of psychology and even pricing to an extent. How you know this is not a political commentary. The question is more about with markets and uncertainty. I’m just curious to see how what you guys are seeing, what you’re monitoring, because I’m sure similar to the folks listening this episode, we’re all kind of. Seeing like just trying to figure out what’s going on, and so I just love to get you all’s perspective on.

Harris Kenny (20:03.846)
Mm-hmm.

Brendan Tolleson (20:06.799)
hey, here’s how we’re approaching it, here’s what we’re seeing even in our core business to help us navigate this. I think that’d be maybe an interesting segment for us to park on for a sec.

Zach Vidibor (20:18.702)
I’d say, I guess I’m glad I’m not out fundraising right now. Like the macro, like in the part of the snow globe I’m floating in, like that would probably be like where the macro is like, know, appetite is chilled there for sure. And like I hear that with people I’m talking to. In terms of our customers, I haven’t felt it yet.

Harris Kenny (20:25.19)
Hehehe.

Zach Vidibor (20:47.726)
We’re, you know, we’re still, we’re not immune from it, but we’re still small. It’s early days. You know, it’s like the, the companies I’m dealing with, they’re still going to grow. And like, they’re still trying to, you know, like use case. Number one for us is like, Hey, we’re sending static dusty templates that are the same to everybody. Like we got to change that even more in a tougher environment. Right. So it’s like,

Harris Kenny (21:13.904)
Mm-hmm.

Zach Vidibor (21:15.214)
I haven’t, yeah, honestly, it hasn’t come into our conversations yet. It’s not that I’m not prepared for it and thinking about it. It’s definitely, we’re all osmosing it to some degree, but yeah, I’d say the nature of our product is still, yeah, you can sign up for free. You can have a cool, you’re able to get a lot more out of it, Harris, because like,

You know the ecosystem, you know CRM, you know Clay, you’re familiar with the API and like, if we give you a JSON payload to like minute, like you’re, you’re going to need more Dane. And like our product is still a bit like that. So it’s like, we are like, you have to be a growing, you know, not at the bleeding edge, but like front of the pack type customer. So

Harris Kenny (22:08.56)
Mm-hmm.

Zach Vidibor (22:10.006)
they’re a little more insulated. That’s what we’re experiencing, but I don’t know, Harris, I’m curious what you’re seeing.

Harris Kenny (22:17.308)
I well, I definitely have heard the same about the fundraising environment. I have a buddy who’s…

What is it? A GP. Like he runs a fund. He helps run a fund and they’re having a hard time finding LPs, the investors, for their next round. He said it’s like three times harder than it needs to be because of uncertainty. So I think that’s like a thing, obviously. I mean, I’ve been following CNBC just kind of out of curiosity. Also, because I took a bunch of the normal sites off my phone, because I was just checking the news too much and I was like, okay, business news is always a little bit kind of sanitized. It’s a little less like, you know.

Cause I wanna know what’s going on, but I don’t need to know like every little thing. On the business side, so this is like, I’m cautious to like make this point, but I mean, I feel like, I mean, we’re a three person company. Fundamentally, while I’m very privileged, if I’m gonna like build a business, things need to be changing in the economy. People need to be doing things differently. There needs to be like this,

movement if things are like static and the people who are currently winning keep winning for whatever whatever that means whatever it’s like if the current structure doesn’t change and there’s no room for a startup or for like a new way or a different way and so like Fundamentally are my company exists because people are open to doing things in a different way And I think when there’s a lot of change happening, there’s a lot more opportunity there’s like the extreme of this where you sound like kind of like

Peter Littlefinger from Game of Thrones, where you’re like, chaos is a ladder. And somebody, I think he wasn’t trying to be critical, but this could be interpreted multiple ways. He was like, you know, kind of remind me of like Rick’s Cafe in Casablanca, you know, that like they have this restaurant and like, like anybody can eat there, like either side of the conflict can eat there. And they’re just like, they’re just happy to serve them or whatever. And so like, not that, not that this is quite like that, but I worry about the like moral ambiguity of the, of what I’m stating. I’m not saying no matter,

Zach Vidibor (24:24.736)
arms deal.

Harris Kenny (24:25.604)
Yeah, right. Yeah, as long as people are buying, I’m selling. So I’m not saying that, but I do believe that as someone who’s not currently in a dominant position in our system, to move, things have to change. There has to be movement. If everything’s stuck, then there’s no movement, right? So fundamentally, so we are continuing to grow just like we have grown. Every single month is just like the months before.

We’ve had some leads come in with a very high level of urgency because they have opportunities that they’re pursuing and we facilitate that. I’m sure others are dealing with a lot of uncertainty where it’s less the case. But like everyone’s always trying to grow and yeah, anyway, so very complicated. That’s kind of how I’m processing what’s going on right now. Does that make sense without sounding like weird?

Zach Vidibor (25:15.598)
something. Yeah, like some degree of entropy is like that is required in our world. Yeah. Right.

Harris Kenny (25:21.492)
It’s required. Otherwise, there’s no thing here. Things have to be changing. And if things are changing more rapidly, as long as they’re not collapsing, then that can be good.

Brendan Tolleson (25:34.179)
Yeah, with any type of disruption there are winners and losers and especially.

Zach Vidibor (25:36.75)
What do you see in Brendan? Like are there bigger projects? I’m curious.

Harris Kenny (25:38.492)
Yeah, you have a lot of visibility. What do you think?

Brendan Tolleson (25:42.255)
I would say, I mean, are absolutely, I’m absolutely monitoring it. Cause we, it’s pretty, so I’d say this, we, mean, there’s directed and direct, when I say direct, there are companies like immediate right now that we look at who are impacted by policies. So.

thinking of anything as a tariff related that have hard goods. But there’s also the indirect impact of both the psychology but also the trickle effect of the market that’s gonna impact even the software side, like where you guys are. So, I look every week, we look at like.

indicators and so I look at hey how many qualified deals are we seeing week over week is that you know on track or behind or is it ahead and then we’re looking at I’m looking at the product distribution of like understanding the budgetary mindset of our prospects like are we seeing a this like fixed project mindset as opposed to what we typically see which is more of a managed service mindset where we’re a fractional resource for them and then of course looking at retention so we are monitoring it

I would say what we are seeing is actually our demand hasn’t been impacted, thankfully. And in fact, we’re ahead of plan, which is good. I am seeing a little bit more distribution on the, how do we tighten our budget versus kind of going all in on some things. So that’s been an emerging trend that I’m watching. And the retention side has thankfully been pretty stable so far. So it’s a bit of a wait and see. I…

I do think it’s something that it’d be foolish not to be monitoring it. But that’s how we are at least taking some proactive measures at least to see the data. Now what do we do with that data? That’s a totally different question. But that’s where we’re at. And yeah, so I think, and then to your earlier points, Zach, the companies that have a…

Brendan Tolleson (27:35.885)
compelling offer that gets into how do I scale without constraints? Meaning how do I continue to grow my business without the cost associated with that or at least the assumed cost of like people and whatnot should have a competitive advantage. that’s a lot of what HubSpot talked about at their spotlight event last week is just.

What is AI, like what’s the true unlock of AI? And that’s that whole scale without constraints that I was just mentioning. So it’s an interesting time to say the least. I mean, the 90 day reprieve, will be, I think it’ll be interesting to see what happens in 90 days. Cause I think there’s a little bit of optimism, but no one really knows. uncertainty creates a lot of disruption.

Harris Kenny (28:17.372)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not a political commentator, but I think that fundamentally it was once again a change election and things are changing. I don’t know if they’re changing for the better, for the worse, time will tell. And that affects the economy and that affects clearly the global economy. mean, if you’re at talking to people in Europe, because we have users all over the world, there’s just a lot of people are feeling that. It kind of reminds me of back in the…

2020 days where it feels like there’s this kind of global event happening and everyone’s kind of like processing What does this mean and how do I respond and stuff? It’s obviously different, but it reminds me of that. There’s just like shockwave that’s happening

Brendan Tolleson (29:02.763)
Well guys, I know we’re about at time so I’ll give you guys any final words that either you have as we kind of wrap up as it relates to what’s on your mind, what was going on last week or something you’re looking forward to going into rest of week.

Zach Vidibor (29:17.698)
Hope everybody got their taxes in or filed their extension. No, this was fun. I liked it. I felt a little more open-ended talking about a bunch of stuff. So it a fun chat.

Brendan Tolleson (29:20.141)
Yeah.

Harris Kenny (29:30.992)
We filed early, hire a good accountant. I finally, after I started going to work for myself in 2019, I finally found a great accountant. Shout out to him. I’m not going to say his name because I don’t want everybody to go and work with him and then raise my rates. And I don’t know if he wants that kind of exposure. He’s a pretty private guy. You’re right. Fixed mindset. I need a growth mindset.

Zach Vidibor (29:33.294)
Yeah

Zach Vidibor (29:41.582)
You

Brendan Tolleson (29:44.175)
You just need a workout arrangement. For the referrals, you get a kicker or your rate goes down. This should be a win-win.

Zach Vidibor (29:56.44)
Hahaha

Harris Kenny (29:57.565)
I’m sure he would disagree. would say, I don’t want to go with mindset. I want our accounting to be boring. I said, yes, I agree, Michael. I’ll give you a hint. His name is Michael. Yeah, he’s the best. So got our taxes filed, feels great. But mean pricing, people say this all the time, but having experienced it, pricing is this incredible lever for your business. I mean, frankly, like you may not need to run up on campaigns. You might not need to have on sync.

Brendan Tolleson (30:02.75)
Okay.

Harris Kenny (30:22.138)
you might need to just like look at your pricing and make sure it makes sense to users. I have experienced like last week versus this week feels really different. I’m curious to see how it plays out. having heard people say how important pricing is for years and years and years, I feel like I finally just leaned in and made a really big change. And I can definitely feel a difference after being so incrementalist for so long and being afraid to lose and not playing to win. So I think that we…

Zach Vidibor (30:48.91)
awesome

Harris Kenny (30:49.03)
So I’m just gonna keep watching that and hope I didn’t actually make a huge mistake.

Zach Vidibor (30:53.72)
Hey, it’s very, very, what’s the Jeff Bezos? know, very few things are a one-way door, right?

Harris Kenny (31:00.088)
That’s true. That’s true. That’s true. I can always work for Uber.

Brendan Tolleson (31:01.113)
Yeah, one way, two ways. I filed my taxes yesterday. Not because my accountant is terrible, but when you have your business and personal all wrapped up together, it is a pain in the booty. So I had to send money to New York and Arizona yesterday, which was a lot of fun. I live in Atlanta, for those who listening, so that was not fun.

The only last thought I would have, know, listening to you guys speak and then I mentioned earlier I went to a HubSpot event in New York last week and I just, there’s this whole thing around AI that I really liked how HubSpot framed it of like, how do we move from novelty to necessity? And like the two big blockers right now that at least their positioning is accessibility and then impact. And so this idea of like, how do I, like,

What step do I even take in the terms of accessibility? I know I should embrace this, but I have no idea what to do. And then the impact side of like, okay, I’ve invested in all this, but I’m not seeing this transformational impact to my business. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that and just realizing like, I think we all know this, but AI is not a silver bullet, even like having Octave. Octave is a great solution, but it still requires human intervention. And so there’s like this idea of like, how do we…

make sure that we weave the story the right way, that this is an additive enabler, but the human plus AI is where it gets pretty interesting. And I think the idea like set and forget it, cause I have AI is like a fool’s errand. And there’s just a lot to potentially unpack that for future episodes. But that’s something I’ve been noodling a lot around is even for us thinking about like, do we need to even think about AI embedded service? Idea of like, how do we sit on top of that for, to make it not only accessible, but to create impact, which sounds kind of ironic of like, Hey, you need to have a human

and services on top of your AI, but I do think there’s something there that we’re starting to, I’m starting to play around with in my head.

Harris Kenny (32:56.88)
This stuff is hard. What y’all do is hard. I have been lately like, I think I need a rev ops person to help me build out and like fix some association things. And like, I should be having something summarizing these things. I know HubSpot makes it easy, but I’m bullish on agencies and experts. I’ll just say that. Like, stuff is not easy to adopt, really. And let alone being a big org, I can’t imagine.

having like 250 employees. Like did you see that really quick? I know we’re supposed to hang up, did see the note from the Shopify guy? Toby, not guy, the founder of Shopify.

Zach Vidibor (33:33.014)
I mean, he probably goes his LinkedIn profile is probably like the Shopify guy. I’m the car dealership guy.

Harris Kenny (33:38.18)
Yeah, that’s like how people used to brand themselves on Twitter, right? Like I’m the storage guy and, and, know, yeah, yeah, yeah. But, that, how they expect people to kind of like use default AI. thought it was, I usually hate this LinkedIn stuff that everyone’s posting about, but I thought it was really compelling memo. And I thought it was like, to me, it emphasized like how complex this is and I had to really have to change how you think about stuff.

Brendan Tolleson (33:40.559)
going turn this off.

Brendan Tolleson (34:03.554)
Yep.

Harris Kenny (34:03.9)
was awesome. All right, well thanks guys.

Brendan Tolleson (34:06.039)
Alright guys, good catching up. Enjoy the rest of your week. See y’all.

Zach Vidibor (34:09.006)
See y’all.