Michael Redbord talks Customer Success @ Hubspot

If you work in the marketing field, you have probably heard the name Hubspot. Founded back in 2004, they started with their mission to make marketing and sales more inbound, and have now grown to be one of the leaders in marketing and sales software.

Michael Redbord, VP of Services & Support at Hubspot, started there 7 years ago and was around their 80th employee (now there are over 2,000), and he has been there for the extreme growth period and evolution of the company.

A Boston man, through and through, he grew up in the city, went to Tufts University, and now works at the Hubspot headquarters in Boston. He studied International Relations, worked as a coder for several years afterwards, and eventually found Hubspot and grew into the field of Customer Success.

When he started out, many of their strategies were reactive rather than proactive, and it didn’t even have its official title of customer success at the time - he was helping with onboarding new customers. But as the company grew and matured, the Michael and the Hubspot team took a step back and realized they needed to be more proactive than reactive, and along came the official Customer Success division.

In our interview, Michael talks about what the evolution was like from just doing onboarding to structuring a customer success division. He gives his advice on what mistakes are commonly made and which ones to avoid, and he discusses his favorite form of communication, the phone, and why it is still so important today, especially with all of these new chat-bots that we have available to us.

Listen to Michael discuss Hubspot’s development of their customer success strategy, and what he has learned along the way.