It’s September, and if you work with HubSpot customers, or use the HubSpot CRM in your business, there’s a good chance you’re going to Boston for the annual Inbound conference.
My first trip to Inbound, in 2014, hooked me. I had never been surrounded by so many smart, creative, data-driven, nerds. And I say “nerds” 🤓 with total respect and honor to have been amongst them. They’re innovators and change-makers helping to create a better world 🌏 for all of us. Growth-minded people who recognize challenges as opportunities and they’re willing to take action.
Marketers, entrepreneurs, sales professionals, techies. The conference included learning sessions, happy hours, group dinners, a few quiet moments in between, a bit overwhelming for sure, but they created lots of opportunities for making connections.⚡️ I still remember some of the conversations I had that year. There were more than 10,000 attendees, and less than 800 HubSpotters.
For those of us who aspire to build companies that can scale beyond ourselves, a fun fact is that HubSpot now has around 10,000 employees. We know size isn’t everything 🧐, but adding 9,000 people to your team in 10 years is impressive by any measure. Imagine the change that occurs in an organization with that kind of growth.
Our team at Denamico is tiny in comparison, and yet change is even hard for us. A huge advantage as a small team is that you’re nimble, can act fast, and don’t have levels of bureaucracy to jump through in order to make a decision, or take advantage of an opportunity.
But still. If you don’t communicate those decisions or changes, or the why behind them, problems arise. ⚠️
Getting Everyone Rowing in the Same Direction…
"Making sure that that is a smooth, smooth bridge and that those folks, you know, feel connected with whatever final decisions were made." This is how our RevOps Champions podcast guest, Colleen O’Sullivan, described the critical need that everyone involved understands and feels aligned with important decisions.
Colleen helped launch Hubspot’s Dublin office, which accelerated massive growth in EMEA. She talks a lot about alignment, both within the EMEA team, as well as with the other global regions. Colleen believes that smart, passionate people with a shared goal were critical for their success.
One other thing they had going for them then, was that most people still went to the office. She says that "making sure that there is a collaborative, connected process that is communicated often, at the highest level and through all various levels," is necessary, and acknowledges that this is much more difficult in today’s remote/hybrid environment.
But we have to figure it out. Keeping our people aligned is essential if our ultimate goal is to provide great service to our clients.
Intentionally creating moments of connection for our people, in a way that they feel safe and comfortable, so that they can build relationships with each other is the answer.
In full transparency, we are still trying to figure this out at Denamico. The majority of our team is hybrid, and we also have a few remote folks. We can plan relaxed lunches for the hybrid group, but doing that over Zoom, in order to include remote people, makes conversations challenging.
To help with this, we’re taking our largest group ever to Inbound this year. Most years we have 3-5 people go, but after experiencing the team building that happens when a group of people are together learning, we stretched ourselves this year there will be 7 of us going.
But that’s not our whole team, and all relationships need continued nurturing, so I appreciated a HubSpot example Colleen gave to continue creating opportunities for connection. HubSpot created “Employee Relationship Groups” (ERGs) for different interests, and then planned programming around these interests.
As a small business, I could imagine this as being a presentation over Zoom on topics our team members might be interested in, such as how to maximize your travel budget using points, Investing 101, or learning about a nonprofit that needs our expertise and showing them different options if they’d like to volunteer.
The bottom line is that being this intentional about creating connections takes time. And for most small businesses, it’s not typically part of any one person’s job description.
Ultimately though, these connections, amongst our team, and with our clients, are what makes what we do fun.
Let me know if you’ll also be at Inbound - I’d love to meet up and ⚡️connect⚡️in person.
All the best,
Kristin
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Kristin Dennewill
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