YourRevOrg: How HubSpot’s go-to-market team evolves with its customer

When it comes to choosing the right customer relationship management platform (CRM) for your business, a series of considerations arise: How big is the operation? What’s my budget? Are there specific integrations we’re going to need? What are we optimizing for? Investing in a customer-facing tech system this essential isn’t a task any revenue leader takes lightly.

HubSpot has long been a standout in the CRM sector, alongside the likes of Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Monday.com, Pipedrive, or Zoho (all catering to a myriad of different requirements). Since its 2006 launch, HubSpot has scaled to support a diverse range of users, from small businesses to large enterprise clients (DoorDash and Crunch Fitness are among its testimonials). Today it serves just under 290,000 clients in over 135 countries, a 16% YoY increase from the end of 2024. In Q4, HubSpot beat analyst projections and issued strong forward guidance. Full-year total subscription revenue for 2025 came in at just over $3 billion, a 19% YoY increase on an as-reported basis (not including one-off items).

The company’s go-to-market team is no doubt a part of the success story, and it’s led by chief sales officer David Cohen and chief customer success officer Jon Dick. Rather than a traditional funnel, they’ve curated a GTM model around a flywheel, putting customer experience at its core.

“We call it the flywheel team because we have this model that we’ve been running for a few years now with this idea that you have to attract customers, engage them, and delight them,” Dick said about HubSpot’s go-to-market posture. “If you delight them, that helps you attract more customers.”

The benefits of synchronicity

Dick and Cohen created a GTM strategy, along with chief marketing officer Kipp Bodnar, that aims to reduce friction between departments.

“In a lot of technology companies…there’s a pretty fierce tension and debate that happens between especially marketing and sales, but often customer success as well,” Cohen said. “What I think we’ve done very effectively at HubSpot is to iron out where those points of tension are and really dig in when we see tension.”

Cohen says they do this by spotting “a potential gap in an important metric,” or a goal they’re trying to pursue, and attack it together with an eye on the same outcome. He said a unified company mission helps him and Dick address pain points and eliminate them. 

“We have a pretty good mechanism in place under the flywheel,” Cohen said. “We’re constantly tweaking and tuning and looking for new opportunities to improve.”

Ironing out possible tension between departments is no small feat, and in some cases it is becoming clear that the introduction of AI-powered tools can actually exacerbate it. A recent report from Clari + Salesloft found that generational disputes over the adoption of some technologies was potentially costly in more ways than one.

Evolving with the customer

HubSpot’s flywheel model makes the customer an essential component in feeding company growth (Dick even refers to himself as a “customer obsessed go-to-market leader” on his LinkedIn profile). HubSpot also has a customer advisory board, composed of clients who work with HubSpot leaders to help shape the product.

“We’re seeing shifts in channel dynamics and customer expectations that are causing us, as HubSpot, to need to evolve our go-to-market. Our advice to all other businesses and all of our customers is to evolve as well,” said Dick.

Dick said he’d seen much of this evolution in the first “attract phase” of the customer success cycle, as clients shift away from search engine optimization (SEO) in favor of answer engine optimization (AEO).

“We are really seeing that traditional search traffic, which so many of our customers, and HubSpot, has relied on for so long, is now being replaced by answer engine optimization, by [large language models],” Dick said.

While SEO tools have long been a platform feature, HubSpot has since early 2025 been on a mission to strengthen its position in the AI search space—among the likes of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Microsoft Copilot. Last October, it acquired XFunnel, a platform that helps businesses increase their presence across LLMs. HubSpot also released a free AEO Grader: Think of it as finding out if you speak a language that AI systems can understand (and if you don’t, HubSpot can perhaps help optimize for it).

“What we’re seeing is that when customers interact with answer engines, they are coming to a vendor way more prepared, way more informed, way more ready to make a decision,” Dick said. “It’s changing the whole dynamic of the sales cycle and deal cycles.”

AI is changing sales as rapidly as any other business function. Cohen said that the number of leads is shrinking, though the quality of those leads has “massively expanded.”

“We’re basically getting similar, if not better, results on the top of the funnel,” Cohen said.

The move from volume to value is something that LLMs show great promise in delivering, and most importantly for sales teams, the possibility of more qualified leads. Dick added that growth in the business was coming from a variety of client profiles.

“Over the last year, we’ve continued to be successful at both attracting bigger customers who are interested in an easier and faster way to get growth out of their platform and continued to see a lot of success with smaller customers and SMBs who are going through the process of digitizing and transforming their go-to-market,” Dick said.

Human 🤝 AI

Cohen said HubSpot’s sales team ramped up its AI usage internally last year, with nearly 95% of that org using AI tools on a monthly basis. In the last six months, HubSpot sales reps have generated over 24,000 AI assisted follow-up notes. “That’s helping with postcall outreach, and it’s really taking a lot of that administrative time off of their plates so they can spend more time talking to customers. Managers, as well, are taking advantage of it,” said Cohen.

Dick says it’s a similar story on the customer success side. He says he thinks about how to “effectively prepare to have a really helpful call with a customer” and that “assistants have incredible product-market fit for that.”

He explained the team is keen on experimenting to see how these tools can help employees and deliver positive outcomes.

“We put together teams of sales, CS, marketing, ops, data, and product. We really go out and try and push the limits,” Dick said.

Dick touched on a core theme that revenue leaders are managing on a daily basis: alignment. This might mean teams not only have access to a single source of truth or data but are using that information effectively to collaborate and solve problems. In our reporting, we’ve found that this can hinge on a collective sense of mission. We recently spoke with Amanda Forth, head of partnerships and sales at lifestyle membership company FabFitFun, who told us that alignment starts with a “shared definition of success.”

The perfect meeting point

Both HubSpot executives talked about the future of AI being a sort of hybrid between humans and AI tools, which can highlight and enhance people’s innate skills. This meeting point between agentic innovation and the human touch is another recurring theme for us at Revenue Brew. Overall, effective AI deployment appears to be a hard needle to thread.

For 2026, Cohen sees the company shifting away from experimenting with AI tools and working toward embedding them in day-to-day processes.

“We’ve learned that there are a number of places where things just work really well, where we can remove some of the administrative burden from a sales rep or a manager’s plate, and we can just automate it so that they can focus on the things that they do really well,” he said.

It seems the larger go-to-market strategy is staying focused on alignment to continue delivering value to HubSpot’s growing customer base.

“As [customers] get value against problems, that creates new opportunities to solve more problems,” Dick said. “We really deeply believe at HubSpot [in] the idea of adding value before we extract value.”