{"id":14660,"date":"2022-02-18T10:50:06","date_gmt":"2022-02-18T10:50:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/18\/ecosystem-marketing-part-2-a-conversation-with-scott-brinker\/"},"modified":"2022-02-18T10:50:06","modified_gmt":"2022-02-18T10:50:06","slug":"ecosystem-marketing-part-2-a-conversation-with-scott-brinker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailinvest.blog\/index.php\/2022\/02\/18\/ecosystem-marketing-part-2-a-conversation-with-scott-brinker\/","title":{"rendered":"Ecosystem Marketing part 2: A conversation with Scott Brinker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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This is a follow-up to the post B2B Ecosystem Marketing: Three App Marketplace Plays<\/a>, in which I make the case for investing more marketing resources into the massive B2B app marketplace opportunity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an interview with Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot<\/a>\u2014and the brains & brawn behind Chiefmartec<\/a>, the definitive blog and community for marketing technologists. Oh, and he wrote the book on agile marketing: Hacking Marketing<\/a>. Oh, and he\u2019s the guy behind the famous, annual Martech Supergraphic<\/a>, the visualization that launched a thousand debates (the data behind the graphic feeds a very cool, free tool called Martechbase<\/a>, by our own Agustin Rejon). <\/p>\n

This smart shouldn\u2019t be this nice.<\/h2>\n

Few people know more about the power of B2B app marketplaces than Scott. His day job is building a healthy app ecosystem for Hubspot, the CRM platform for the rest of us.<\/strong> And it\u2019s working: IDC forecasted<\/a> that \u00a0revenue for partners in the company\u2019s app ecosystem will rise from $2.1 billion in 2021 to $4.2 billion in 2024. That\u2019s just the app sales part of a $19 billion partnership opportunity (which includes services and commissions on HubSpot sales). <\/p>\n

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Your logo here: the mighty Hubspot app ecosystem, organised Brinker-style.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That kind of growth is why we\u2019re writing this series. Because Ecosystem Marketing may be one of the biggest opportunities in SaaS\u2014and best practice is only starting to emerge. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Luckily for us, Scott\u2019s default setting is generosity: he\u2019s always<\/em> sharing his time and knowledge with fellow marketers like us. So I exploited the shit out of that to bring you this:<\/p>\n

Why did you take the VP of platform ecosystem job at HubSpot?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It was really one of those, \u201cYou had me at Hello\u201d moments!<\/p>\n

I\u2019d been working for six years in and around the modern martech landscape. And I saw ecosystems as both one of the greatest opportunities but also one of the greatest frustrations\u2014there was all this innovation happening across martech, but open platforms didn\u2019t seem to be emerging.<\/p>\n

It was the opposite of how it happened in other markets. For example, in mobile devices, there was the platform (like Apple IoS) and then all those apps emerged around it and thoroughly plugged into it\u2014and it all just worked for the user.<\/p>\n

With Martech, there was hesitation on the part of many of the major players to really lean into the idea of platform ecosystems. The strategy that the big platforms were pursuing at that time was still to either build or acquire. As if they could be the single source for everything you need.<\/p>\n

That strategy was pretty dominant and so it kept people from even thinking about an ecosystem as actually an opportunity for growth, not a constraint to it.<\/p>\n

So when Brian and Dharmesh reached out to me, asking if I\u2019d be willing to come help HubSpot become a true platform and lean into that ecosystem\u2014I was like, \u201cAbsolutely. Let\u2019s do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

How many apps were in the marketplace when you joined four years ago? I know you broke the thousand mark recently.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Probably under 100 at that point, and a good chunk of those were because HubSpot built the integration to other products\u2014which made sense to get things started.<\/p>\n

So the mission I took on was to make it less of a partnership motion and more of a platform motion. That\u2019s a really different mindset with lots of implications across the company.<\/p>\n

So 10X in app growth: how\u2019d you do that?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I can take very little credit for it! There are basically two primary things that drive healthy ecosystems:<\/p>\n

First and foremost, you actually have to have true extensibility in your product<\/strong>\u2014if you don\u2019t open up the API, it\u2019s a non-starter. HubSpot had some of that already, but they were committed to investing more in it.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s where it all begins. Then the second thing is, frankly, the biggest factor: the scale of the total addressable market<\/strong> you can offer partner apps. When HubSpot had 10,000 or 20,000 customers, with a certain budget profile, it\u2019s a harder sell. It\u2019s not an attractive enough market to invest in.<\/p>\n

But as HubSpot grew, both in total the installed base and in attracting larger companies doing bigger adoptions, then the opportunities for companies to build things on top of HubSpot became really attractive.<\/p>\n

The 100,000 customer milestone felt like a real tipping point, when inbound interest in integrating with us just took off.<\/p>\n

Then, on top of the investment in extensibility and the growth of the customer base, there\u2019s the program layer: how do we put structure around this, and good governance, you know, to create a fair and level playing field and to make it an easy, good experience for developers and product teams. But the coolest program in the world is completely worthless if you don\u2019t have the other two factors.<\/p>\n

What department owns the integration with HubSpot from the vendor side of things? Is it the channel partnership team or the product marketers? Are marketing teams stepping up to own this?<\/h2>\n

This is still a pretty new motion so it hasn\u2019t settled down to one answer to that. <\/p>\n

I\u2019d say it\u2019s probably 50\/50 partnerships people and product people. The marketers tend to get involved a little bit later like once something\u2019s actually been built; when there\u2019s a clear commitment from the team.<\/p>\n

Then marketing and the go-to-market channel teams will then come in and take advantage of that integration.<\/p>\n

To me, marketplaces should be one of the chapters in the product marketing playbook. They\u2019re the natural people to figure out, okay, what\u2019s our ecosystem strategy and what\u2019s our operating system for those channels?<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve mentioned that the average HubSpot customer has seven app integrations in their stack. Is there a small cluster of no-brainers you see every time, or is it really diverse?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s definitely a long tail. So at the head of the tail are the obvious integrations like Outlook or G-mail\u2014whatever email client the customer is using. Then things like Zoom and Slack are very popular ones.<\/p>\n

But it doesn\u2019t take too long before you start to get to the really long tail, with specific integrations for different use cases and sectors. That\u2019s the beauty of the platform model: SaaS companies with specific domain expertise\u2014or deep process knowledge\u2014adding that depth and coverage to a broad, horizontal platform.<\/p>\n

Does the best-integration win or the best-marketed integration?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Well, the definition of \u201cthe best\u201d integration can be quite nuanced\u2014it\u2019s really about: does it best-serve the needs of the customers your marketing it to? Because if you push people to your integration and it doesn\u2019t actually meet their needs or expectations, they\u2019ll write bad reviews and you\u2019ll wish you hadn\u2019t pushed people to it.<\/p>\n

Certainly marketing has a huge role to play in this, just from a visibility perspective: if people don\u2019t know about the integration it doesn\u2019t matter how great it is.<\/p>\n

But you have to be careful to not let the promotion get ahead of the product. Once you can fulfil that promise, it comes back to marketing\u2019s job, with, \u201cHow do we break through the noise, how do we make sure that the right people are actually even seeing it?\u201d<\/p>\n

Have B2B SaaS marketing teams come to grips with the marketplace opportunity yet?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

in B2B markets it\u2019s still relatively new, but it\u2019s changing fast. If we look at the consumer apps in the Apple and Android app stores, there\u2019s a real discipline about how you market these things systematically and effectively.<\/p>\n

In B2B, you\u2019re starting to see the platform marketplaces\u2014whether HubSpot, Salesforce or platforms like AWS, Shopify or Atlassian\u2014these have become significant growth engines for their partners.<\/p>\n

More and more companies are now seeing them as a big part of their go-to-market. So you have pretty large companies that have grown up entirely on the back of those ecosystems.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s taking off like crazy, so we\u2019re probably\u2014right now<\/em>\u2014at that nexus, where it starts to become a defined discipline. People are writing the playbooks today that others will eventually follow.<\/p>\n

What makes companies successful in marketplaces like HubSpot\u2019s?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s a wonderful combination of things. It starts with the quality of the product and then the integration itself. Those are actually two separate dimensions: you can have an amazing product, but if the integration into the platform is not very good, it just won\u2019t get people excited. So that\u2019s the baseline.<\/p>\n

Then discovery becomes a factor. We\u2019re always happy to do things like press releases and social announcements and all that sort of stuff. \u00a0But that isn\u2019t really what moves the needle. Two or three things that I\u2019ve seen really successful partners do is, first and foremost, they really invest in their marketplace listing.<\/p>\n

Not everyone does that. Even with some big companies, you can see listings with a sort of generic screenshot and some lightweight text that doesn\u2019t really describe how the integration works. It\u2019s not a compelling pitch.<\/p>\n

Feels like a big miss for the lazier ones\u2014and a massive opportunity for companies to leap out of the pack.<\/strong><\/h2>\n

It\u2019s crazy, because when you think about it, a visit to your marketplace listing is a sign of serious intent. Here\u2019s someone who\u2019s searching for your kind of solution and is considering evaluating your product. Talk about intent!\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the same dynamic you see when people are doing searches in Amazon\u2014you really do want to put a good foot forward at that moment.<\/p>\n

The ones who invest in their listing\u2014with, say, a well-produced video walkthrough, a clear description of how the integration works and its value, maybe customer testimonials, and great reviews and ratings\u2014they can dramatically out-perform the average listing.<\/p>\n

We could do a whole masterclass just on managing ratings and reviews. Step number one is actually just showing up: inviting your customers to review your integration, engaging in those reviews, even when they\u2019re negative (a big opportunity to solve a problem).<\/p>\n

What are the best marketplace performers doing beyond investing in the listing?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The next big thing is to engage in the community around the ecosystem. Companies like HubSpot have really large online communities, where the power users help each other out.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s just a ton of opportunity for solutions partners to come and engage in that community. Not by going in and spamming people (for the love of goodness, please don\u2019t do that!). But by actually engaging to understand what people are talking about and contributing to those conversations.<\/p>\n

It starts with just having someone in the team whose job is to build reputation in these communities by being a good citizen within the ecosystem.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s another flywheel effect: once you\u2019ve got loyal customers and loyal channel partners, you can really get a lot of value from that over time.<\/p>\n

An acronym I hadn\u2019t seen before is ASO: App Store Optimization. Do you share a lot of data about a partner\u2019s listings to help them optimize?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

At HubSpot, we definitely have further to go with that. We\u2019re providing pass-through data on actual outcomes\u2014people installing\u2014but we\u2019re nowhere near the granularity of data that would help people to truly optimize their listings.<\/p>\n

So those who are doing ASO are still doing more manual work. But we\u2019re tracking that process to look for ways to add value for partners.<\/p>\n

It feels like the number of partner integrations a platform has is becoming a major selling point, not just a nice-to-have. Are you seeing that?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Oh, yeah. It\u2019s become a very important question, \u201cIf we\u2019re gonna adopt this, it has to work with everything else we have\u2014we\u2019re not going to rip and replace everything\u201d.<\/p>\n

Documenting this has become a mini hobby of mine. Over the last five years I\u2019ve collected every single survey I come across about why martech buyers buy\u2014and, every time, integration is number one, number two, maybe number three.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s kind of funny: product managers and marketers keep asking this question and the answer keeps coming back, loud and clear: buyers want integrations.<\/p>\n

It used to be a feature that was very much considered \u2018below the line\u2019 but that\u2019s changed now.<\/p>\n

And for a lot of the SaaS startups I see, integrations are a primary feature. For them, it\u2019s like bootstrapping your go-to-market: \u201cI know you already use platform X. Why not try this thing that adds new functionality and value to Platform X?\u201d. It\u2019s just an accelerator.<\/p>\n

Do you guys do some kind of quality assurance that says an app is going to work well on HubSpot?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Yes, we have two levels today. It starts with a relatively modest review process that we use when someone is just getting listed. Then, after they\u2019ve gotten a few customers, they\u2019ve started to prove out the use case and we have enough API traffic to analyze, we have a certification process.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an added trust signal in the marketplace and also unlocks some of the additional marketing opportunities that we reserve until someone\u2019s reached that certification level.<\/p>\n

For SaaS companies, is there a danger that the platform owner can just decide to add your functionality to the core\u2014and put you out of business?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

This is a potential issue in every ecosystem. I still remember when there were hundreds of flashlight apps in the iPhone app store and then Apple decided to put the flashlight in the iOS. It\u2019s like, \u201cOh: that\u2019s that, then\u201d.<\/p>\n

There are a couple different strategies for this. Most platforms are very much playing a game of horizontal scale, so if what you\u2019re building is a horizontal feature that\u2019s core to the market the platform is playing in\u2014and you\u2019re not going super deep with it or super vertically specialized, then it\u2019s a bigger risk.<\/p>\n

You do see companies actually still succeed even when competing with the platform\u2019s own functionality. An example: HubSpot added conversation intelligence as a feature, in a market where we have partners like Gong, who specialize in this. And a huge number of the HubSpot customers who ended up adopting that feature were folks who actually never even had conversation intelligence before and they couldn\u2019t have even afforded Gong.<\/p>\n

So in that case, I think we helped grow the market and probably ended up driving more customers to Gong, when they were ready to go deep on conversation intelligence. We introduced the concept to a much broader set of people.<\/p>\n

So I think the ecosystem relationship is still viable. It\u2019s very much to the credit of Dharmesh and Brian early on, when they set the goal for the ecosystem as making the customer experience better. Yes, we\u2019re going to compete with a set of our ecosystem partners at different times, but we\u2019re ultimately going to be guided by customer choice. And so we\u2019re not going to exclude people from the marketplace or cut off APIs or anything.<\/p>\n

We also have a policy to try our best to give a partner a heads-up if we\u2019re going to enter the market or compete with them at some level. We don\u2019t always succeed in this, but we do our best. We really don\u2019t want partners to get surprised by that.<\/p>\n

So anything else you would say to a B2B brand that wants to make the most of the ecosystem opportunity?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

I think it\u2019s a great opportunity, right now, because this isn\u2019t yet a mainstream motion.<\/p>\n

It feels like the early days of search marketing\u2014and getting into it early creates big opportunities. Marketing is a constant search for the greenfield and a lot of these ecosystems still have a lot of low hanging fruit.<\/p>\n

So my two pieces of advice: invest the effort to treat this like a marketing channel. And do a good job on the product. Internet rules apply and reputation matters.<\/p>\n

There are entrepreneurs who are building products exclusively for the HubSpot platform. That gives them the opportunity to go even deeper in crafting the whole experience so it feels like it\u2019s native.<\/p>\n

Any great examples?<\/strong><\/h2>\n

One company I would point to is called Org Chart Hub<\/a>, out of the UK actually. They let you easily build and store org charts for your target accounts, right inside HubSpot.<\/p>\n

Their product is beautifully crafted for this, a super-intuitive plugin for HubSpot. It\u2019s an incredible experience. And then they certainly followed the best-practice for their marketplace listing<\/a> and their community engagement is phenomenal.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve built a pretty impressive business on that.<\/p>\n

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Didn\u2019t I tell you this guy was smart and generous?
Thanks, Scott!<\/p>\n

Explore some more:<\/h2>\n

The first post in this series, B2B Ecosystem Marketing: 3 App Marketplace Plays<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For a drill-down into Scott\u2019s experience growing the Hubspot app marketplace, read his excellent post, The Power of Combinatorial Innovation and 4 Other Lessons on the Journey to 1,000 Apps<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Hubspot\u2019s App Marketplace<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scott on How to Build an App Store Devs Will Love<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Scott on Platforms, Networks & Marketplaces<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Clement Vouillon\u2019s excellent post, How To Leverage SaaS App Stores for Your Go-To-Market Strategy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Clement\u2019s terrific Google Sheet, an App Store Landscape<\/a> of 50+ App Stores compared.<\/p>\n

Bee-Tee-Dubs:<\/strong>
I interviewed Scott once before, discussing how his famous Martech Supergraphic<\/a> is an example of great content marketing. But that whole Chiefmartec thing?\u2014the blog, the event, the Supergraphic, the tweets\u2014isn\u2019t even this guy\u2019s day job<\/em>. It\u2019s a f*cking hobby<\/strong><\/em>. (When someone\u2019s side hustle runs circles around whole companies, something\u2019s going on).<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n