Ep. 120 - One Customer. One Revenue Record. Why HubSpot Is Bringing Payments Into the CRM.

Joe Perro (0:00)

We're hearing this from our customers, where quoting used to take them three weeks, now can be done in under a day.

Grant Evans (0:05)

Three out of four revenue leaders say deals stall because the quoting process cannot keep up.

Joe Perro (0:11)

Time kills deals, it's true, and the disconnected systems are just killing time for people. The Franken system, we were trying to replace the Franken system and turn it into something that felt like all in one and native. No missed renewals, something like 20 plus hours of admin time saved a month. So often, there are like four different versions of the revenue number out there, right? There's finances number, there's the ops teams number, there's the sales teams number. You have a conversation and it's triggering the upsell for you. It's triggering the upgrade and drafting it for you. ACH settlement time combined with deposit schedule is brutal. So I don't know how else to put it. I can't operate my business. I can't be waiting seven plus days in some cases to get funding.

Grant Evans (0:57)

Welcome back to The Payments Shed Podcast. This afternoon we are filming live in New York City and we are delighted to be joined by Joe Perro, who is Product Lead for Commerce and Payments at HubSpot. Joe, welcome to The Payments Shed.

Joe Perro (1:08)

Thank you for having me guys.

Grant Evans (1:09)

Now we always ask our guests to tell us a little bit about themselves, their background in their career and how they end up in the role that they've got today, obviously yours being at HubSpot. So the floor is yours, Joe.

Joe Perro (1:19)

Sure, yeah.

So I'll give the abbreviated version quickly. So I've been at HubSpot for about five years, building more or less the journey that we've been on with embedded payments since the start. I'm affectionately what we call a boomerang to HubSpot. So I was with the company for about five years left. I chased the startup scene a bit and then came back and yeah, have been with the company through its evolution of starting with payments, building towards what we've filled the gaps on around billing and quoting, and have relaunched recently as Revenue Hub.

Grant Evans (1:51)

Embedded payments is very close to my heart. So I'm quite excited to have you on the show today because that's kind of my world. So we want to talk about revenue data living outside of the CRM and how that can possibly break everything as well. So just to kick off, three out of four revenue leaders say deals still because the quoting process cannot keep up, right? Like what is actually happening in the business day-to-day? Like those businesses, like where are you seeing those problems occur real-time?

Joe Perro (2:19)

Yeah, sure. It's a great question.

I think for most of the customers that we work with, the quoting system breaks down because it's somewhere else. You know, there's a handoff that's happening and it's moving to another place and those systems can be complicated, complex for sales reps to work with, and the time it takes, whether that's because the approval systems happen offline or the pricing restrictions and rules that need to be put in place or the governance happens somewhere else. Right at the time that's kind of most important when you're ready to close the deal and get a quote out the door is when you experience a lot of friction and things slow down. Our GM of Revenue Hub, Sarka, she likes to say, Time kills deals' and I think it's true and the disconnected systems are just killing time for people.

Justin Hanna (3:07)

And working in sales, there is nothing more frustrating when you can't get the deal through quicker. And this might be a silly question. Why hasn't nobody solved this sooner? Yeah, it's a good question.

Joe Perro (3:17)

It's not that it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve, but I think there's a couple of things at play here. One is that building items that have historically been managed by the back office and moving them to a place where it feels consolidated and in the same place that you're managing the customer relationship is new and different. And that is something that I think we embarked on because of the, again, the power of all in one, really, for our customers has been like that now, having that data alongside your customer data is game changing versus having to stitch it together. And I think that's just kind of the assumption that most people have made is that I think for a lot of teams as they need each new solution, they hire some platform for it. And so you end up with sales, it's a quoting tool and RevOps needs to manage it. And of course, you have finance that spins up the accounting system and the ERP.