Michael Redbord of Hubspot on How to Turn Customer Service into Profits
Listen to the episode (0:34:46)
“If you’re really good at keeping customers, you can spend more to get customers. It’s simple math. If your customer value goes up, everyone in sales and marketing gets a raise and bigger budgets to go after new ones. So if sales and marketing leaders want raises and bigger budgets, they need to be making noise in support of greater investments in customer service.”
Michael Redbord of Hubspot knows what he’s talking about. He’s done these things. Consistently. Proving that when a company invests in its customer service department, it can reap many rewards that will benefit the entire organization.
Player stats for today’s MVP Michael Redbord:
Michael Redbord is the General Manager of the Service Hub at HubSpot. Prior to that, Michael scaled the HubSpot Customer Support team from 20 people in a single office with single-language phone support to more than 200 people powering a global, multi-lingual, multi-channel support experience. In doing so, Michael turned HubSpot’s customer support team from a cost center to a profit center and one of HubSpot’s greatest engines of growth, with an unimaginable revenue retention rate of over 100%. Essentially, the revenue the sales and marketing teams generate is worth more because of the customer success team.
Michael also happens to be a noted writer, speaker, and former competitive classical pianist.
3 key leadership skills and insights Mike shares on today’s show:
- Hyperconnectivity is up and trust and patience are down — consequently, our circle of trust has shrunk considerably compared to the early days of the Internet
- Word of mouth has become powerful again — companies who can harness it will triumph
- Leaders who are former doers have to stay ahead of their teams and focus on leading, not retreating back to the trenches of doing (as tempting as that might be)
Mike also shares some awesome tips about setting soul goals you won’t want to miss.
Connect with Mike on Twitter @redbord and find him on LinkedIn, too.
Learn more about Hubspot here.