Hala Taha: [00:00:00] [00:01:00] Yap Fam. What if I told you that you don't need a massive marketing budget to build a powerful brand? Today we're sitting down with Kip Bodnar, chief Marketing Officer of HubSpot to crack the code on digital marketing for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Whether you're just starting out or looking to level up your marketing game, this episode is packed with practical tips, smart strategies, and real world advice straight from one of the biggest names in digital marketing.

Kipp, welcome to Young and Profiting podcast. 

Kipp Bodnar: Hey, Holla. Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here. 

Hala Taha: I am excited for this conversation. I love to talk about marketing. And I was so impressed with your journey. When I was researching your story, I found out that you rose to CMO at HubSpot in just five years, which is absolutely incredible.

So my first question to you is, what do you think set you apart from other employees at HubSpot and accelerated your career growth at the company? 

Kipp Bodnar: I think accelerating a business career growth, it's [00:02:00] all very similar. I think it's about How do you really focus on the small set of things that are going to give you the high magnitude of return?

I think so often people get caught up in operational details or let everybody else push their priorities on them, where you have to be like, you have to look at the situation and say, What are the 3 to 5 things that if I do, I will be 10 times more successful than anybody else in the situation? And that sounds simple, but it is the thing that I think matters the most.

Hala Taha: Before you were joining HubSpot and you started there, you were actually an entrepreneur. So what were the advantages or disadvantages that you faced joining corporate? 

Kipp Bodnar: I think the first entrepreneurship thing I had, I would go to like Sam's Club and Walmart and find like clearance items and flip them on eBay when I was in high school.

And so I was always somebody who was obsessed with arbitrage, how do you buy low and sell high and where the [00:03:00] inefficiencies of a market. And one of the great things about marketing. is that marketing is a game of arbitrage. The best marketers in the world just figure out where there are inefficiencies, where things are underpriced.

They lean very aggressively into those things to get a really high return. And so what happens when you go and work at a startup, at the time I think HubSpot was about 100 people, when I joined, you go from just running really fast by yourself to needing to run really fast with a bunch of other people.

And that's the biggest change. And you have to adopt a different mindset. And I think the mindset there is. I have limited scale, just me. I could accomplish much bigger things if I do it with other people. But I got to bring them along for that journey. If I just try to push my agenda on everybody else, nobody's going to understand.

They're not going to have the context and we're not going to go anywhere. And so I think the biggest shift from being somebody who is working solo or on a small team to being on a bigger team [00:04:00] is how do you actually clearly articulate the problem you're going to solve in a way that people are really excited to solve it with you?

Cause when you're a solopreneur, you don't have to do that. You can just do what's in your head and go. 

Hala Taha: and I love what you said about marketing being arbitrage. I think that's so smart and it's so true. It's like almost every marketing activity is some sort of arbitrage. 

Kipp Bodnar: 100%. It's exactly what it is, whether you're trying to game an algorithm, whether you're trying to make a great YouTube thumbnail, whether you're trying to.

Buy ads on an obscure platform that maybe your industry doesn't use, but they're way cheaper. Those are all just different ways to find arbitrage and take advantage of it. 

Hala Taha: So in your career, like I said, you rose up the ranks very quickly. Were there any pivotal moments? That really shaped your trajectory or relationships or what do you think it was that you were able to go from employee to CMO and in the C suite?

Kipp Bodnar: I think there's lots of moments that make that happen. My very first job was I ran the HubSpot blog. So basically the [00:05:00] equivalent of what you do now and and what a lot of creators and and amazing media companies do now, I did. A long time ago because I'm old and I think the most pivotal moment was that first year when we had a blog that had about 200, 000 readers a month and by the end of the year we were at about 1.

5 million monthlies and so we were able to really grow and scale that work. And I was maniacally focused on that. For better and for worse, there are challenges with being too overtly focused, and you probably don't collaborate as well with others and everything. But I knew I needed to dramatically change the trajectory of the work we were doing.

And so, I look at everything as like a sprint, whether it be a week, a year, two years. It's like, what do I need to really change and transform in that time? And I knew that I needed to change the type of content we're creating, the frequency, the process, all of those things that creators now do on a daily basis, but in 2010 was [00:06:00] kind of new and people were trying to figure it out at the time.

And so I think that was one. And then the other is when you go from being somebody who is contributing as an individual. To like leading a team. So I went from running that blog to running all of our content and how we were our blog or social or SEO, how we were scaling up. And that was a pretty pivotal transition.

Cause it's like, can I get people to follow me? Do I have a clear story? Do I have a clear strategy? And the simple thing I would tell everybody out there is the key step in that is people need to feel like they're going to learn something from you. And so even though they may be specialists, like I would go and I would find the latest article, the latest hack that somebody had done, even if it was.

For somebody else on my team. And I would send it to them and talk to them about it and talk about how we could use it. And they were instantly like, Oh, you understand my work. You understand the craft that we're working on together here. And I trust you to help me make my [00:07:00] craft much better than it is today.

Not that it's bad today, but. That I think I can get much better with your help. 

Hala Taha: So basically, you were a good colleague, right? And you helped other people. And that's really important with politics in corporate. And especially getting into the C suite. So what advice do you have for good relationships in corporate?

And being somebody who higher ups think about when promotions are coming up. 

Kipp Bodnar: I think the best relationships are results. I think results speak for themselves and results of the ultimate meritocracy. I think the biggest thing that people get wrong is they look at what other people ask of them and say, Hey, here are the goals that I think you can achieve.

And they look at that as the ceiling of what they're supposed to do. So if you're running a LinkedIn program, for example, it's like, Oh, I think you can get a million views a month this year for our company content. Great. Well. You or I, if we were in that situation, we would say, cool. You think a million is good.

I think 10 million is good. How would I go and [00:08:00] use the same constraints, everything I have access to, to do way better than you think. Because that change in magnitude is impossible to ignore. Cause then you're like, Oh, wow. We have somebody who's able to over exceed what we think are fairly aggressive expectations that we would have of them.

Clearly they are able to do more and we should put them in a situation to do more. 

Hala Taha: I teach a LinkedIn masterclass. And it's people that want to grow their personal brands. And one of the most common objections I get from these folks is that I'm really scared to start growing my personal brand while I'm working corporate.

I'm scared to do my own thing. And I noticed that you launched a book while you were working at HubSpot, right? Yeah, yeah. So talk to us about that experience. What's your advice to people who want to become a thought leader in their space, but they do work in corporate? How should they approach it without stepping on toes or making sure that their company is aligned with what they're doing?

Kipp Bodnar: Yeah, I find that people's own ambition or lack thereof is their biggest [00:09:00] limiter to growth, not their capability, not their aptitude, not anything else. And I find those things to largely be an excuse. You know, you're scared largely of what other people think versus what's actually true. And what's actually true.

If you look at the market, what happens is that a company, no matter whether you're starting it or you're working for it, they need experts and they need people who their customers look to as trusted experts and advisors who have deep knowledge and deep perspective and point of view on their market.

And you know how you get there. You have a great presence on LinkedIn. You start a podcast, you write a book, you have an email newsletter. There's a tons of different ways, depending on your skills, your interests to get there, but you have to get there. And the thing that nobody tells you, because I got a job at HubSpot because I had run a blog and they liked my blog, and then I ran the blog.

And I, I host the marketing against the grain podcast now. The thing that you know, and a lot of people don't know is that when you create, when you make [00:10:00] something every day and every week, you learn so much faster and you get so much better at your craft. If you have to teach a lot of other people the thing that you want them to know and the thing you're trying to be good at in your job, and I have always found on my team that the people who are out there actively creating.

are some of the best people in their current roles, in addition to what they might be doing on LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever. 

Hala Taha: I totally agree with you. A lot of the times it is an excuse. People are saying, Oh, I think my company is going to get mad. My boss is going to get mad. But in reality, what may happen, especially if you like let them know you're going to do this and it's not competitive to what you're doing at work, you'll get more respected at work.

I remember when I started growing my brand and podcast. I started getting promoted more often at work. I was being asked to teach the C suite how to use LinkedIn and getting flown to conferences and whatever it was when I was working at Hewlett Packard. Right now, do you feel like you have an entrepreneurial itch or is being in C [00:11:00] suite enough for you to feel like you're building something?

Just because a lot of people think in order to be an entrepreneur, you have to start your own company, but I don't think that's necessarily true. 

Kipp Bodnar: I think entrepreneurship is about solving problems. Inherently, the best entrepreneurs in the world are people who just get really irritated that a problem exists and just become maniacally focused and obsessed with solving it.

And normally do so in a way that generates a lot of wealth for them and other people, right? And that's awesome. You could do that whether you're a solopreneur, whether you're a startup founder, whether you are a leader in a company, whether you're an executive at a company, it doesn't matter. I look at it as, am I in a situation to solve interesting problems?

And the reason I don't go start a company right now is because. I'm in a great position to go start and solve really interesting problems. And I have a lot of access to capital and smart people to go and do that and make much faster progress than if I was just me trying to do something. And I look at it as [00:12:00] every situation, you have an unfair advantage.

It's your job to understand what that unfair advantage is. And I always tell people that when you work at a great company, You have the two things that matter most, you have agency and control, which is what most entrepreneurs have and they want, but you also have resources to go and do what you want with that agency and control, which is a lot of entrepreneurs do not have.

And so when you have both of those at the same time, regardless of the situation you're in, you should take advantage of it. 

Hala Taha: Okay, so let's move on to some marketing best practices. HubSpot has become a household name. So what do you think has been some of the major factors in becoming a global brand?

Kipp Bodnar: I think it's a little bit what we talked about earlier. I'm an untraditional marketing leader, right? I didn't work at McKinsey. I don't have an MBA. I'm not out of central casting. I am from a small town in West Virginia where my goal was to like, Do interesting stuff and see the [00:13:00] world. And when you're in that kind of situation, you just think about solving problems differently.

And that comes back to the idea of arbitrage. You have to understand if you're a marketer, what are the unique ways to reach my audience? And what are some of the ways that we have done that at HubSpot over the years, I think would help maybe bring examples of that. First, in the very early days, we created a free tool called Website Grader, where you could just put your website in, and it would give a full diagnostic.

So, normally what you would hire a consultant for, or you talk to a sales rep for, It's just going to give you a report on the web page and email it to you, which in 2006, seven, eight was transformational at the time. That's a long time ago, almost 20 years now. And we had millions and millions of people use that.

Our co founder Dharmesh built it himself, right? Like it was not like anything fancy, but it was rooted in, he watched our other co founder, Brian doing all these sales conversations. And he was doing all this manual research. And he was like, I can make an [00:14:00] app that does that for you. And then they just gave it away.

And that worked really, really well. Then the second thing that worked really well for us was blogging and content in the early days of content and creating. And what we figured out is that Google search was growing rapidly and there was an arbitrage in market inefficiency where you would search for so many things back in the day and there were terrible search results.

Right. Like you would go and like nothing on this page is good. And if we create something, we will by far be the best thing on that topic. And we were able to grow from thousands to hundreds of thousands to tens of millions. Uh, visits doing that. We had that hypothesis. We created a process to scale it and we spent a lot of time and money.

The other thing that people in marketing get wrong is they just, they do 10 different things, kind of shitty, right? They're like, I'm spread real thin. I think I got to do everything. You're way better off to do one to three things better than anybody else. And if you can do one to three things better than anybody else, you can build a billion dollar [00:15:00] company.

If you have one or two great marketing channels that you are world class at, you cannot build a 10 million company if you have 10 crappy marketing channels. I've seen it time and time again that just how life works. 

Hala Taha: So I know that HubSpot actually coined the word inbound marketing. So can you help us understand for those who are new to marketing, what's the difference between inbound and outbound marketing?

And how was marketing different before HubSpot really came onto the scene? 

Kipp Bodnar: The world of marketing changed a bunch with the internet. Before the internet, people remember, it was largely TV ads, billboards, direct mail, all those things. And they were all really annoying, right? Because you didn't opt in any of those things.

The commercials interrupted. Your television, when we didn't have streaming services everywhere, right? You'd go home and your mailbox would be full of advertisements that you didn't subscribe to or didn't want. And that was very [00:16:00] outbound, very interruptive. And we were basically like, well, now that the internet exists, there's a whole different way to do marketing.

You can do it in a way where you create content and pull people in through search engines, through social media, through email marketing, through things that people opt into and want to participate in. And that was now seems obvious because it's how the internet works. But 20 years ago was fairly revolutionary.

So we created a new category. And sometimes if you're in marketing or if you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, the best thing you can do is, there's a great quote out there, better as a debate, different as a choice. When you force somebody to make a choice and you do that by creating a new category where it's like, Hey, do you want to do this new, awesome inbound thing that works really great?

Or do you want to do that old stodgy outbound thing that everybody hates? We tell that story and people are like, Oh, I want to do the new cool thing that people like. I don't want to do the old bad thing that everybody hates. But if we had just said, Oh, like, hey, we can help you do your direct mail a little bit better.

Who cares? [00:17:00] Well, maybe it's good enough. Do I really even need better? I don't know what you're talking about, right? And so painting a clear choice for your target audience is so powerful. It takes a little bit longer, right? Because people aren't familiar with it. There's a level of education that you have to do, but anybody can do it.

And if you're in it for a long haul, if you think you have a big opportunity and your business is a five, 10, 20 year thing, then it's a really important thing to take advantage of to actually be differentiated in the market. 

Hala Taha: I know that you've been talking a lot about arbitrage, unfair advantages. So in 2025.

What inbound strategies are working? Like, are blogs still working? How do you think about SEO, podcasts, and all those? Oh, yeah. 

Kipp Bodnar: It's a great question. What works in marketing in 2025? A few things. Creators. Working, partnering, or being with creators, and these modern media companies like you, Ron Hala. Huge opportunity.

Huge, huge opportunity there. We work deeply with creators. I'm a creator myself. It works. [00:18:00] YouTube. YouTube works. YouTube is an exceptional channel to drive awareness and monetization. It is much harder to disrupt through artificial intelligence, which is kind of the thing that's changing marketing the most.

Blogging still works. It does. But it works for the very focused universe of the industry you solve, where you have unique data, unique insight, unique credibility. You can get that. You can't go and talk about everything in the world and get search traffic, but you can focus on your core niche. And get a good baseline audience through blogging.

Those things are completely working. Partnering with creators, even through advertising means hugely, hugely valuable. The other thing that's working, a lot of people are doing events and in person because we've gotten so. So segmented, no shared experiences. I think if you're selling high, big ticket, expensive things, bringing people together in person is becoming something that all the marketers I talk to are spending more money on this year, not [00:19:00] less money on.

Hala Taha: So true. And when I'm thinking about my marketing strategies and unfair advantages and untapped opportunities, I'm thinking about SEO within platforms. Podcast Search, SEO, how do I become more searchable on LinkedIn in particular? Right. How do I become more searchable? Search on YouTube. YouTube, exactly. 

So when it comes to blogging, I'd love to like dig deep on this because I actually was thinking, I used to have a blog in my twenties that was really popular, and then I was like, blogging is over.

But sometimes these things come around, and I was thinking, you know what, I feel like blogs are kind of making a comeback, like with Substack becoming so popular. And I was thinking, should I start a blog on my website where I create content around entrepreneurship, or should I leverage something like Substack and leverage that platform for a blog?

Like, what would be your advice to start from scratch or leverage a platform? 

Kipp Bodnar: I have a rule that I don't make anything without being clear on how I'm going to get it distributed and what the [00:20:00] distribution advantages are. I think Substack, if you're an entrepreneur, has a little bit of built in audience, but it's not worth it because the bigger built in audience is information discovery.

And I say that kind of broader than search. And so if I were starting today and it was just me, you and I were starting a company, we were going to go out and do something. I would start a blog on my website for a couple of reasons. One, a ton of people still use Google search and you still can get a lot of.

Traffic from Google search. The second thing is people are using AI for discovery, chat, GPT search, Google deep research, grok, all these things and perplexity. And what we have seen is that text based content and video based content that's cited. In those results still gets a real amount of traffic. I host a podcast called marketing against the grain.

We did a video on deep seek when deep seek first came out and it got recommended on everybody's chat, GPT queries on deep seek. And we got 50, 000 views in like [00:21:00] 24 hours because everybody was searching for it. And we had a really good, credible thing. And so it's almost like the distribution for text and video.

Is getting better. What's changing is that it's a little less attributable, right? Cause if somebody is getting it in like chat GPT or perplexity, they may be reading information and see your link, but they might not directly click back to it. A proportion are, but a much smaller portion than historically in Google.

But you're still getting the awareness, the distribution, the brand recognition for being like a credible resource in those things. And that's why I think you have to have a pretty healthy blog and YouTube strategy to surface in all these new models. 

Hala Taha: Yeah, and we were just talking about SEO in platforms and that's such a great example.

Like, how do I get better search on chat GPT? That's the future, right? And 

Kipp Bodnar: by the way, there's compounding benefits to all this, right? Like if I get discovered in chat GPT and I get really good engagement on my video, then YouTube's going to be like, Oh, this is clearly a good video. So I'm going to prioritize it more in YouTube search.

And then you get more in the [00:22:00] YouTube search engine, and then you have a video that completely takes off because of it. And that's awesome. 

Hala Taha: What would you say is the secret to making content that stands out today, considering that there's so much more content. There's so much. So 

Kipp Bodnar: competitive, right? 

Hala Taha: So competitive.

And it's so easy now with AI to create videos, to create blogs. You don't really need to be a writer like you used to anymore. So what's your best advice? 

Kipp Bodnar: Here's my advice on content creation day. First, people have never wanted more actionable content ever. They don't just want to learn something. They want something that's going to lead them to immediately take action.

And so anytime you're creating content that's can allow people to immediately take action that they can take, especially like in free tools or free platforms. That's going to take off. It's going to go great. I see that all the time. I imagine you see that all the time. That is clearly, clearly a trend that is happening.

The second thing people want is unique data and perspective. If you have a survey of 2, 000 people in a given industry, people are going to check it out. Because they want [00:23:00] to know, benchmark, they want to see how they're doing, they're competitive, they want to compare themselves, all that stuff happens, right?

And so you are going to see that be a real standout thing. And so that's where proprietary research, customer data, things like that are a huge leverage. And then the third is Can you be really contrarian and have a good argument? Can you go against the status quo and change people's thinking with a real deep and thoughtful reasoned argument about something?

And if you can do that, you're also going to get people's attention. What would you add? You're doing this all the time. What'd I miss? 

Hala Taha: I think at the core of it is how do you help people? How do you actually bring value where people feel like, Oh, wow, I learned something.

Oh, this is something unique and meaningful. This is not just regurgitating what's out there or just click bait for me to just get on this page. And there's actually no good information or no good tools like you were mentioning. So, you want to just figure out how to actually teach people something that they can't really find anywhere else.

That's what I feel like is really working. [00:24:00] 

Kipp Bodnar: The prompt I've always given myself is, is what I'm about to do going to be ten times more valuable for people? Or would somebody pay 1, 000, 2, 000 to have access to this? And if the answer to one of those two questions is yes, it's going to be really successful.

Hala Taha: Yeah, totally. And if the 

Kipp Bodnar: answer's no, it's probably going to be middly on average. 

Hala Taha: Totally agree. So how do you think about email? So email is one of those channels that have been around forever, but it's still really effective. What are your thoughts about it? How do you think we should best leverage it in 2025?

Kipp Bodnar: Email is super important, but here's why email is super important from like a principle base. It's one of the few channels you actually control. There's not an algorithm. Somebody gives you permission to email them and you get to send them a message and you actually own that email address. Somebody can't come along and change the Google algorithm, the YouTube algorithm, the LinkedIn algorithm.

I know people are all up in arms about LinkedIn algorithm changes recently. And so that's the real value of email marketing is that you have way more ownership and control of email marketing than most other channels out there. And so once you kind of have [00:25:00] that foundation, you're like, okay. Email marketing still matters.

What am I going to do? And the number one thing you're going to do is to have as highly personalized emails possible, and that's writing your emails with AI. So one of the things we did at HubSpot is we have what's called HubSpot Academy, which is teaches you how to do marketing, how to use our software, all of those things.

And there's a bunch of different courses on HubSpot Academy. And we basically, when people come into HubSpot and maybe consume a article or a free guide or a webinar or what have you, we'll then send a follow up email that is custom, one on one, written from them. by AI, and that we recommend based on everything we know about them, the content they've consumed, what the best course for them to take is.

Not only do we mention their business, but we have puns, like AI has gotten very good at that. And it feels like a human researchers company and wrote them an email. And that email converts 80 to a hundred percent better than our normal emails. And so [00:26:00] that is number one, anything you can do. To better personalize your email and make it relevant to their problem and their experience with your company and your website, you're going to get much, much better results.

Hala Taha: The other thing I would add when it comes to email is you were talking about giving away free tools, free content. Instead of having people pay for it, make their email the way that they pay for that content. Right? You want to just collect as many emails as possible. One of the biggest regrets that I have is that I only started collecting emails like three years ago.

I wish I started seven years ago and really made it a point to collect emails. So what are the best ways that people can grow their email list right now? What do you suggest? 

Kipp Bodnar: Look, you give them the great ways to do that, which is offer something really valuable that you would consider charging money for.

Remember that marketing is kind of a lesson in economics. It's what do you want to sell versus what do you want to give away to sell a bigger thing down the road? And how do you offset how you think about that? And so for me, the things that are really good, if you have any free [00:27:00] tools, great, if you have any templates, like you do the work of building out a big Excel sheet with formulas and everything that people could just drop their own data in.

They will give you an email address for that. I promise you. One of the things that worked really well at HubSpot back in the day, and you can do similar versions of this now is we would find our customers always needed stock photography and imagery for their email newsletters, Delaney page. And I was like, well, what if we just hire a freelance photographer, buy the rights out for like 10, 000 to 500 different pictures, and we just give those away for free instead of them having to pay Getty images or all these people.

And I think over the years we've had like. I can't even tell you how popular that has been, but it's looking at your market, thinking about something that they do that they spend money on and say, Hey, can I give that to them for free? And if you can, you will get whatever information you want in exchange for them saving that money.

Hala Taha: And I think people need to realize that a lot of this [00:28:00] marketing strategy is a long game. Like sometimes you're marketing to somebody who might start a company in four years. And might need your services four years down the line. So you guys have free trials. For me, I collect emails. I do webinars.

And sometimes that leads to a course that's pretty expensive. And people might attend three, four webinars before they actually purchase the course. But I'm investing in them, building that trust. And so talk to me about how you guys think about your free HubSpot service. Why are you guys giving away your tools for free initially?

Kipp Bodnar: About 10 years ago, we were like, Hey, you know what? The world is changing and trust is becoming the most important thing. And one of the ways you can build trust with people is to let them try before they buy. Right. And like your webinar is a great example of that. It's like, Hey, if I'm on a 30, 60 minute webinar with you, I probably have a pretty good idea about what your course is going to look like, what the quality is going to be, what it's going to feel like the experience.

And so I'm much more likely to have trust and go buy that course. [00:29:00] So if you use our free version of HubSpot CRM, you're much more likely to buy a paid version because you're like, Hey, you know what? I'm up and running on this. I've closed a couple deals with it. I understand the features that if I pay for them that I would get.

And you know what? I kind of need them because I think I would make even more money if I paid for those features. And it's a whole different game. Right now, we all have access to infinite knowledge with AI. Knowledge is a complete commodity. So in that world, trust becomes everything. People can know who you are, but they can still not trust you at all.

And giving that value away is how you build trust. And so for us, the free version of our product, so we do it, but you know, you have webinars, there is a version of that for any business is I think what I would say. 

Hala Taha: And I think the main lesson is don't be afraid to give away great things that people can actually use for free.

Don't be afraid for people to have to have enough. for a couple months or whatever to do what they need to do because it's going to build that trust. 

Kipp Bodnar: I have a maxim I live by and it's [00:30:00] distribution is undefeated. If you can get a big audience, you can always figure out how to make money on it. The inverse is not true.

You could have an expensive product and sell it to a few people, or you can have a big audience and sell it to a lot, lot more people, but it's going to take a little bit of time. It's a different way of thinking, but distribution is the biggest reason most. Businesses don't grow because they just don't have a big enough audience universe of people who actually care about them and the thing that they're offering in the world.

Hala Taha: So CRMs, I've got a lot of young entrepreneurs who are probably working at spreadsheets and doing everything manually.

What is a CRM and how do startups benefits from CRMs? 

Kipp Bodnar: So if you think about CRM, there's lots of views of what CRMs are, but what they really are is. A single source of truth for your customers and your prospects. So instead of your support team working out of a project management [00:31:00] system, sales reps working out of spreadsheets, all of those things, everybody, your marketers, your sellers, your customer service folks, all working, updating one record, all the context in one place, and then being able to do really powerful things, whether it be advertising.

Email marketing, marketing, automation, sales, call prep sales, follow up sales, automation, all of those things. That's what you're talking about doing. And you're going to see CRM be way more important over the next couple of years, because what's going to happen with CRM over the next even year is that all the unstructured data, your meeting recordings, the emails you exchange, all of those.

Things, all that context are going to make it way better. You're here. I'm just going to generate the email, follow up to your meeting for you. And it's like, Oh, great. I know I need to follow up from this meeting, but I've got to go run to this other meeting right now. Well, it's great. I can do it in 30 seconds versus having to do it 15 minutes tonight when I've forgotten half the things and need to go look them up, right?

And that is why CRM is so important. Also. Is when you have all your data in one place, you can do real reporting [00:32:00] and actually understand what's working and what's not working. And as somebody who has helped grow a business from tens of millions of dollars to billions of dollars, it's done through basic iteration over a long period of time, finding problems, solving them and building and integrating.

And you can't do that without your data in place and some clear reporting. 

Hala Taha: Yeah, that's what I'm most excited about being able to track everything, having everything in one place. If I'm like, what's happening with the sales deal, I can click in, see all the conversations to your point, like AI summaries and things like that are coming out.

 have you guys been thinking about AI agents at all? 

Kipp Bodnar: Tons, tons of AI agents. So first of all, the most used AI features at HubSpot one is. To prep for sales meetings. So we have a co pilot where it just will take everything from a contact record and give you the full prep summary. That's awesome. We have an agent called content remix.

So like, let's say you're going to run a content campaign. You're going to do an email newsletter. So you can do a webinar. You're going to do a webinar. It will spin up the landing page, the [00:33:00] email, the ad assets, everything for you and does all the manual work in the background. And then we also have a product that our co founder Ramesh started called Agent.

AI, which is a marketplace of agents where you can go and anybody can build or use different agents. It's kind of like a modern automation marketplace where if you have a problem, you can either use Agent. AI to build it or somebody's already built it and you can just use their agent. A really good example is there's a company research agent that will give you like a McKinsey analyst level, kind of deep detail briefing.

Who's the CEO funding history, core products, competitors, the whole thing. And it'll do it in like two minutes, right? Perfectly formatted for free. That is just a game changer when it comes to agents. 

Hala Taha: If you are in marketing and in sales and you're feeling overwhelmed with AI and leveraging AI, how would you approach it?

Kipp Bodnar: I would pick one AI tool and get really good at it. And for markers, that's probably Claude. For sellers, that's probably [00:34:00] chat GPT, and you're going to use those tools. The reason I say Claude has the best taste. It's really good at writing.

You can upload to projects and Claude and have really great specific, highly repeatable writing output. That's core to marketing for sellers. I think one of the best AI features that exists on the planet is chat. GPT is deep research feature where you can have it go and just build a incredibly complex research report.

And it might research a problem for. Five, 10, 20 minutes with all these different agents in the background going and doing that. And you having the full map to an industry, the accounts within the industry, how your product maps the core competitors in that industry, those things become super valuable. So that's where I would focus.

If I was just like feeling overwhelmed and not yet started. 

Hala Taha: I feel like we've learned so much so far about marketing. I'd love to move into customer service because it's not only important to bring in customers, we've got to retain them. So how does HubSpot help [00:35:00] people in a CRM?

How does that actually help with your retention, with your customer service? 

Kipp Bodnar: A few things. So one of the other agents We have is called our customer agent and it basically helps resolve customer support. Like the average HubSpot customer solves 30 percent of their support questions are answered by AI or answered by our agent.

And so that's 30 percent less support people, support time, founder time, depending on the size and scale of company that you have to spend. And if you focus on it, we've seen customers get to like 50, 60 percent deflection, which is huge, save so much time and so much money. And the biggest reason why that's important is because.

In today's internet, where everything is highly competitive, as we've talked all show about, it's never been easier for a customer to switch. So your core economics are going to be retaining that customer. I'm sure you see that your best customers are people who take multiple courses, people who do multiple purchases with you.

And if you don't have good customer service, good onboarding, good customer support, Man, they're going to [00:36:00] be out really quick. And I think it's one of the things most entrepreneurs overlook early on. They get so obsessed with sales and bringing those customers in. They're like, Oh gosh, why did like 80 percent of my customers leave this year?

That's because I haven't been focused on it at all. I don't have any of the infrastructure to actually focus on it. 

Hala Taha: How can we better align marketing and sales so that we have the best customer service?

Kipp Bodnar: Customer service is largely about setting expectations, right, which is, do I know what I bought? Do I know what I'm going to use the thing I bought for? And do I know how I'm going to think that that's valuable? If the answer to those things are yes, that customer is normally pretty happy. Uh, if it's no, they're going to be pretty unhappy.

And so marketing's job is to set up the value proposition early on a sales job is to not oversell, to not make promises that the product can't keep and to understand that customer's business enough to understand. That this is how you're actually going to use this thing once you buy it. And then customer success and customer supporter, their [00:37:00] job is to help you get onboarded and get any blockers.

Cause there's always unique things. Your business has this problem that isn't relevant to our other customers that we need to help you solve. And once you fix those problems, the customer's gonna be very happy. It's normally in one of those stages where things go off the rails. 

Hala Taha: We just rolled out a new customer survey to try to see how our agency clients are feeling, how our network clients are feeling.

It was really, really helpful. Do you have any suggestions of the type of questions you should ask your customers to get their feedback? 

Kipp Bodnar: The most helpful thing that we have done and learned over the years is we always run a monthly net promoter score survey with our customers. And so net promoter scores.

Question. We all see how likely are you to rank the company from one to 10? And please tell us why, and the score kind of important. The tell us why is very important. And the reason for that is. You get a real sentiment as to what people value or like, or dislike about your product. And now with AI, if you [00:38:00] run a survey like that, you can take all of those text responses and just get the core themes very quickly.

And what your job is with any customer surveying, and why I think NPS is so good. Is to not have problems be festering and systemic. You always want new problems. So it's like, Oh, our customer support's back. Great. Let's fix our customer support. And then you won't hear anything about customer support.

You'll hear about a new thing like product speed or, Oh, our client portal is tricky, something that you'll hear all these things. Right. And so I think the net promoter score question is the best because it gives you where the big root cause are. When you ask specific questions, you often get the symptoms without the root cause.

Hala Taha: I want to close out our interview with some scenarios that I think are going to be really fun. Okay. So you are a brand new entrepreneur. You have like a little bit of money, but you mostly you have time, so you have time to invest. What would you do for your marketing strategy launching a new company?

Kipp Bodnar: All right. If I'm time rich and money poor, what would I [00:39:00] do? The first thing I am doing is I am figuring out what type of creator I need to be. Right. Am I going to be YouTube, LinkedIn? What's my product? What's my market? And I got to start creating and I got to create on the daily. Cause I'm time rich. I got the time to make every day and I got to make something every day.

And I got to, I'm going to use AI tools to help me keep up the pace of production. And they're free to very low cost. So I can take advantage of that. And then the second thing I'm going to do is I'm going to find one area where my target audience spends a lot of time that I might be able to reach them in a very interesting way.

Like an example of this is the early days of LinkedIn groups, right? What you could do in the early days of LinkedIn groups is sponsor. Messages to that the group owner could send to the entire group. And we would go and we would spend money to do that. And nobody else was doing that. And we got hugely efficient lead generation by doing that.

And it's just like, oh, a million marketers in this [00:40:00] group. Nobody is really going after them. How do we get them? 

Hala Taha: I think the whole theme of this episode is unfair advantage. I remember when I started my podcast, I started on LinkedIn. I wanted to target young professionals and nobody was talking about podcasts.

Nobody was putting up anything about podcasts and then I became the number one podcaster on LinkedIn, but it was already a channel where people were hanging out. They just weren't doing what I was doing. So what is your way of cutting through the noise and getting in front of a lot of people in a creative way?

Okay. Let's Now, what if you exited a company, you're slightly older, you've got more experience, you've got some money, but you've got a family, you've got a lot going on, but you do want to start a new company, what would you do to market your company? 

Kipp Bodnar: Money richer, time poor. Time poor, yeah, exactly. Okay, if I have some resources to do this, it's not going to be that dissimilar.

I think the channels work, how I'm going To accomplish those channels, I'd probably still be a creator, but I would hire an agency to help [00:41:00] me do all the post production, to do the research, do all that. And I would use AI to prep and, but I would need somebody if I was time poor to tell me, Oh, These topics suck.

They're not working. These are the new topics we should do. They kind of give you the cheat sheet of editorial and iteration for sure. And then if you have some money, you can use programmatic ad platforms. You can use Google, you can use meta that will give you enough. Baseline revenue to kind of start reinvesting.

And so I would probably use YouTube ads to be honest with you. YouTube ad targeting is great. And the cost is so much lower than Google and Facebook and Instagram that I would probably do that. 

Hala Taha: Yeah, there's plenty of agencies like my agency, for example. 

Kipp Bodnar: Yes. Just 

Hala Taha: show up. We do everything for you. Just if you want a podcast, you show up to record or we literally just write everything on your behalf.

So if you've got money, you can invest, like you said, in an agency. I know we only have a couple of minutes left, so I got to wrap up, even though I really want to keep asking you more [00:42:00] questions. So the last questions that I have, I asked all of my guests. And this doesn't have to do with, you don't have to even talk about marketing.

You can talk about whatever you want. So what is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? 

Kipp Bodnar: Start using AI. Pick a foundational model, chat GPT, Claude, Google Gemini, and use it every day, once or twice a day, every day, build the habit. 

Hala Taha: It's very important for the future.

And what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond financial. 

Kipp Bodnar: Uh, I just bought a piece of art that says, if you don't know, find out, be endlessly curious. Be endlessly curious and ask questions. Never feel like you're stupid. Just go and ask all the questions. And if you're curious about something, just call somebody up.

You'll be shocked. People will give you time. People will give you information if you care enough to know it. And then once you have that knowledge, your life is just way better in every single way. 

Hala Taha: And where can everybody learn more [00:43:00] about you and everything that you do? 

Kipp Bodnar: You can check out HubSpot. com, product, everything there.

I host Marketing Against the Grain over on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts, you can check out Marketing Against the Grain. 

Hala Taha: Perfect. And I'm really excited that I get to go on your show soon. Yeah, you're coming on Marketing Against the Grain soon. So I can't wait, we get to talk again. And maybe I'll play that on this podcast so you guys can get more of Kip.

Kipp Bodnar: I love that. I'm excited to have you on. We'll catch up again real soon. 

Hala Taha: Awesome. Thank you, Kip. 

Kipp Bodnar: Thanks, Alla. 

Hala Taha: Well, that about does it for this episode, and I thought Kip Bodnar touched on so many of the key themes that I've been preaching for a while now. For example, I love his approach to entrepreneurship. You don't actually have to start your own company to be an entrepreneur. You just need to think like an entrepreneur, even when you work at a large company.

Like Kip said, entrepreneurship is about solving problems and finding ways to do so that others miss. And one of the best ways to do that is to find out where you have an unfair advantage over somebody else. That is where your [00:44:00] opportunity lies, and that's where true value can be created. Marketing is likewise about locating opportunities.

What are the market inefficiencies? Where can you take advantage of arbitrage? What is undervalued? Where can you buy at a low price and sell at a high price? So where are all the opportunities in 2025? KIPP pointed to several good ones. First events, bringing people together for shared experiences and to demonstrate your own value.

Next, YouTube still an incredible channel to drive awareness. We also talked about blogging, including your own website, which can be an effective way to reach people, especially as more advanced AI search tools drive users to relevant content. And also lastly, don't sleep on email marketing. It can be really useful, especially if you use AI tools to target and personalize your messaging.

Finally, whatever method, I really want you to think about what you can teach others. What do you have to offer that is thoughtful, that is interesting, that is [00:45:00] unique, that is gonna grab somebody's collar and make them pay attention. That after all, is what the best marketing does. Thank you for your attention, and I know that there's so many places you can direct it, and I'm so grateful that you're spending time with me and Young and Profiting podcast.

And if you listen, learned and profited from this conversation, please bring it to somebody else's attention. Share this episode with somebody who you know could benefit from it. And also why not drop us a five star review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, castbox, wherever you listen to the show. Nothing. Thanks us more than a good review from you.

And if you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, you can find us on YouTube. You can also find me on Instagram at YAP with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. And of course, I gotta shout out my talented YAP production team. You guys are amazing. Thank you for all your hard work. This is your host, Hala Taha, AKA, the podcast Princess signing off. [00:46:00]