On March 26th, the Demand Sage team held two virtual roundtables on using HubSpot and Google Sheets to enable and support collaboration in the workspace. In this second session, Demand Sage co-founders Henry Cipolla and Randy Dailey welcomed Owen Scott, Managing Director of Concentrate Limited, and Christopher Antonopoulos, Founder/CEO of Measured Results Marketing, with Demand Sage's Ben Carcio once again moderating.
Enjoy the recording:
And for those who prefer reading transcripts to watching videos, here you are:
Ben Carcio:
Folks who are going to start joining, attendees are going to start joining and I am recording, as we speak. For the folks who are just joining the call now, we're going to give it a second, let other people join the call, so hang tight.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Henry, I like your background. Is that like a deep sea oil tanker or [inaudible 00:00:23]?
Henry Cipolla:
It's a pier on an island in the Caribbean for scuba diving.
Ben Carcio:
Great. So Chris, who just joined ... Chris was our other panelist. Christopher, I have Randy Dailey, Henry Cipolla, and Owen Scott live from New Zealand on the call, as well. So Christopher, you're in Connecticut, if I can remember?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Virginia.
Ben Carcio:
Virginia. Okay. Close enough. No, absolutely not. I mean, relative to New Zealand, close, But ...
Henry Cipolla:
Same coast. We'll give you points for the.
Ben Carcio:
Northeast, I guess. No, mid Atlantic.
Henry Cipolla:
Same coast. We'll stick with that one.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
We're supposedly the south, but I wouldn't consider northern Virginia the south.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah, that is true. That is true.
Owen Scott:
I used to work for a company in New Zealand that we had a branch in Richmond, Virginia.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Okay, yeah.
Owen Scott:
[inaudible 00:01:16] over there every year. It was back in the '90s, back in the corporate days.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Yeah. I worked for Cisco Systems. I spent a lot of time in San Jose, California. Not my particular favorite place to be, but their corporate headquarters were seven miles from one onto the next and they had alphabet letters for each of their buildings and number and they were all built the same. They had 23 buildings, exactly the same. And so you never knew where you were because they tried to make themes, but, anyway ... I think we're about to get started here, but it's good to be introduced.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. So I'm going to kick it off here. Hey, everyone. I'm Ben Carcio. I'm an advisor at Demand Sage. I'm also a mentor in residence at Techstars Boston, which is a global startup accelerator, as well as entrepreneur in residence at National Grid and advise a bunch of early-stage companies, like Demand Sage, on how to go to market. So they've chosen me to MC the virtual round table. This is round table number two. And at least for Randy, Henry, and myself ... Owen and Christopher are brand new, so if you hear us more practice in our joke and our repertoire, that's because we did it earlier today.
So anyhow, just to kick us off, we're here to talk about collaboration. And why we're here and why we're virtual is we were all intended to be together at the HubSpot partner day. This was intended to be happening around a physical event where we were all going to get together. We were going to get to shake hands and have drinks and have coffee and talk. And as it turns out, that event was canceled and that event went virtual. And then, the virtual event was also ... not canceled, but pushed off. So that's why we have two programs today, same exact program, but we're really here to talk about ... The intention of this meeting was to talk about collaboration on Google Sheets and HubSpot. But I think, obviously, let's just address the macroeconomics that are going on today and let's really dive into collaboration, sort of the future of collaboration.
So that's the topic, but before we do that, I would love to introduce our panelists. Again, for any of the attendees in the event, feel free to ask questions or use chat. I will loop in. This is going to be heavy on the Q&A. There's no presentation. There's no slides. It's going to be a lot of good conversation. So I'm going to go to the Demand Sage team first. I want to introduce Randy Dailey, who's Chief Product Officer. Randy, do you want to say hello and talk about where you are in the world and your love for spreadsheets, as we learned in the last session?
Randy Dailey:
Hey, folks. I'm Randy Dailey. I'm one of the co-founders and the Chief Product Officer at Demand Sage. I'm joining from Boston, the United States, along with Henry, who will introduce himself. A bit about my background. I've worked at really big companies, really small companies, startups, and sort of these big corps. I built collaboration software for Microsoft for a few years. I'm now sort of building in on the SMB side. I've got some perspective to share there. And, yeah. I'm just sort of generally excited about spreadsheets, kind of the resident spreadsheet aficionado here. So looking forward to chatting with y'all.
Ben Carcio:
That's great. That's great, Randy. So, yeah. To turn it over to Demand Sage's co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, Henry. Henry, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us why you are somewhere underwater, it looks like?
Henry Cipolla:
Hey, guys. I'm Henry Cipolla. Yeah, I'm the co-founder here at Demand Sage, as you said. Before this, I founded a company called Localytics, also here in Boston. We were an analytics company for mobile apps and then we also provide power to a lot of marketing tools, whether it was campaigns or messaging and measurement performance management on top of that, which is where I kind of got my start with marketing and data and all of that. And I'm broadcasting also from Boston, but I would rather be scuba diving. So that is the background.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. And just quick fact about Henry, you clean tanks at the [inaudible 00:05:35] aquarium. Right? I mean, you're the guy, when you go to the aquarium, who's in the tank cleaning the inside. Right?
Henry Cipolla:
Cleaning the sea lion pool, mostly. Yeah.
Ben Carcio:
And waving to little children on the side. Thanks, Henry. And to go ... Owen Scott, who I'm going to introduce next, obviously, is traveling by far the farthest of anyone we've had on this webinar. Owen is joining us from all the way down in New Zealand. So I'd love for you to introduce yourself, Owen, talk about your agency and tell us about yourself a bit.
Owen Scott:
Yeah. Thanks, Ben. I'm Owen Scott and I'm calling in from Christchurch in New Zealand. Way own here, we're on lockdown like the rest of the world. [inaudible 00:06:17] a bit challenging. We're all working fiercely, though. So I've been managing [inaudible 00:06:23] company called Concentrate and we're a diamond HubSpot partner. What's sort of, I suppose, unique about us is we work just on the technology sector. So all we do is work with tech companies on their software electronics and, basically, most New Zealand companies that are exporters of their goods, their software and electronics to the United States and Europe. So we're about helping those companies with their process.
So that's about it. What do I do in my spare time? Well, like most Kiwis, we're all serious DIYers and mountain bikers and outdoor people. So that's sort of what I do, diving.
Ben Carcio:
It's funny, Owen. I didn't realize that that was the thing that happens in New Zealand. You guys do a lot of household projects, a lot of DIY work? Is that true?
Owen Scott:
Oh, mate, we build anything. We're builders. We're a country of engineers.
Ben Carcio:
Oh, really? That's cool. And you prepared, knowing that Demand Sage is a Boston company. You did prepare with your Boston T-shirt. Right?
Owen Scott:
Yeah.
Ben Carcio:
That's awesome. Well, thanks, Owen. Thanks for connecting. I was commenting to Owen a second ago just how there's no better example of collaboration than being able to sync up with somebody so far away from you and have this type of conversation. So that's great. And just finally, last but not least, our last panelist, Christopher Antonopoulos.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
[crosstalk 00:07:47] I'll spare you the [crosstalk 00:07:50]
Ben Carcio:
Yeah, please. I'm pretty good with my great pronunciations, but help me out. And please, tell us about yourselves.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
[crosstalk 00:07:58] just a little bit Greek. So I'm Christopher Antonopoulos. I'm the founder of Measured Results. We really focus on setting up technology, connecting systems with one another, and running ongoing sales and marketing operations. I'm a veteran of working from home. Our entire company is remote. And then I had a global team in 18 different countries. So I'm hoping to share some of what we've learned and how to use some of these collaborative tools as you are trying to figure out how to do that for your company. I guess, claim to fame in the HubSpot world. I was one of HubSpot's first 40 customers. So really, have been there since the very beginning. And like Owen, I'm an outdoors man, but I'm in northern Virginia. And so that means bicycling and fishing, for the most part. So that's sort of what we do to occupy our time, now that we are not allowed to be more than a few feet away from a fellow human being and there's plenty of places to do that here.
Ben Carcio:
That's great. And Christopher, are those awards in the background that I see? Are you showing off your awards to us?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Yeah. There's a few. They got into a lot of glass ones, but they're from all different organizations and some of them are from our clients. The proudest one is the Cisco System one. I was Marketer of the Year for Collaboration Infrastructure. So we're for that entire group. It's that tall star one, but, yeah, there's a bunch of random pieces of glass there that do a pretty good job of reflecting light.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah, no. Clearly. They must be your former team and the folks on the Cisco side must be, obviously, under a ton of pressure right now to deliver all these collaboration tools that they've been working on for years. Right?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
They don't want anything to break. I think, the bandwidth [inaudible 00:10:05] what ... if you've been on any of these calls, you can see some of the video going out every once in awhile. It's the redundancy of network and all those pieces and they're selling tons of equipment right now. Multi-point control units, for all those people who have [inaudible 00:10:24] projectors on the calls and know what I'm talking about. But, yeah. Just that and video compression is particularly exciting. I also studied quantum mechanics and physics. So if anyone after this wants to have some very deep-thought conversations about science, I'm happy to do that.
Ben Carcio:
Sounds awesome. Yeah, I'm sure Randy and Henry would love to jump on that. So, great. Great to meet everybody. And again, the original intent of this was to talk about HubSpot, to talk about Google Sheets. But before we do that, let's just talk about collaboration. Let's talk about the challenges of remote work and how do we change how we work, right? I think the amazing thing, being part of Demand Sage, seeing what Demand Sage, and early-stage company of a half dozen people, just how quickly and easily they were able to move into remote work. So I'm going to start with the Demand Sage team, first. So Randy, give us your perspective because you're definitely in that camp of remote work is great. Talk about how we need to change and how we need to collaborate today.
Randy Dailey:
Absolutely. Unlike the rest of the panel, I'm the avid endorsement. I'm really vibing with the remote work. It's great. There are trade offs. It's great for doing this kind of flow state work where you're trying to sit down, get something done for four hours. You're uninterrupted. But there is a tax on sort of collaboration and productivity, perhaps, where you've got to manage that. You've got to reach out. You have to establish new norms. And the way I think about the sort of remote issue, I think it's two parts. There's a little bit of a lag in the tools in terms of catching up, being able to emulate that water cooler experience, being able to help prompts like these serendipitous conversations between people.
But I think almost the bigger concern is on the norms side, just sort of the culture people set about these things and the way we work. I would frame this up as I think success in remote work means success in adopting kind of asynchronous workflows. So instead of these face-to-face meetings that are super realtime, it's about adapting our workflows to where you can work with people, even if they're not in front of the computer at the same time, if they're in a different timezone, if they're flexibly working throughout the day.
So for me, what that means is ... I could talk a little bit about this probably later, but it means trying to move a lot of the work and the tracking to the places you're getting work done. That could be, if it's a bug, it means putting in [F cello 00:13:07] ticket. If it's a candidate tracking, it means putting in your applicant tracking system, putting your notes and collaboration there. If you're talking about DL, put it in HubSpot. There are circumstances where you get a lot, a lot of value by sort of aggregating things in a spreadsheet, but kind of the main push here is ... I think email and Slack and things like that don't scale super well, as you get into this collaborative world. There's kind of longer feedback loops to get answers to questions you need. You've got more threads in flight. Accountability and entropy starts to slip a little bit if you're not sort of tracking work items in a system where you can say, "Here's the conversation. Here's the follow up. Here's the due dates." Things like that.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah.
Randy Dailey:
I'll leave it there.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. So I'm going to come to Henry in a second because I know Henry sort of has the opposite opinion of remote work, but I want to go to Owen for a second because I would imagine, being in a country like New Zealand, you're almost natively remote to a certain extent and this is maybe not new to any of you. Talk about sort of what you've done before this change and is it different and is this different now and does it present opportunities for countries like New Zealand? We were talking about your internet a second ago. Talk about that. Talk about where you sort of have to be remote, as part of where you are in your geography.
Owen Scott:
Yeah. Thanks, Ben. I think one way to look at it is there's sort of two parts to this sort of collaboration. One is the collaboration that we have in terms of taking our products to market, where there are interactions between us and our customers and then we have sort of internal, which is, as a team, how do we work together online in a collaborative sense? And I think that, actually, the customer part of it, actually, being online sometimes really helps because we become more efficient. We only have to talk to our customers once a week and we have a nice, short meeting. It's a bit like this webinar. We'll have it, it'll be an hour, it'll be over. In some ways, it drives efficiency. I don't have to just pop in for a cup of coffee to get to know these people. We both know that we can't meet up physically, so we're going to have an online meeting.
But internally, it's a different challenge because you're trying to build the sort of team dynamics and get to know each other as friends. I used to be able to just yell across the room and say, "Hey, have you finished that yet?" Now, I've got to figure out how I interrupt their day and stuff. But New Zealand is a country, we're the same as everywhere. I think our challenge is that, the way we traditionally sell stuff, is we still hop on the airplanes and travel the world. It's almost like our role, in terms of the marketing agency, is we're trying to move people to sell more online, to become more efficient around their sale and marketing processes and do their online [inaudible 00:16:08]. But that's an opportunity for us. We're not necessarily embracing it.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. That's a great topic, Owen. I think sort of the fact that more people are being forced online is going to be something I want to talk about later and how that changes the tooling that we need to use. Henry, I'm going to come back to you because I know, from our previous conversation, that you sort of have a love-hate with remote. So talk to me and talk to this group about your opinion of remote and sort of the future of work from today on.
Henry Cipolla:
Yeah. I think that one of the silver linings in this situation that we're in is we're all forced to go through this remote work bootcamp. So we all have to get better at it and learn how to make it work. I have been incredibly resistant. I like humans. I like human contact. I like, when I send an email, I like looking over at my coworkers and seeing their reaction, physically, and knowing, "Oh, wow. I really pissed him off," or, "Oh, that person is super deep in thought. I didn't mean for this to be received that way." And you can't have that when everything is remote. So I find myself spending way more time thinking about how I'm wording this and how it's going to be interpreted. And a lot of the fun nuance to work gets lost. It's harder to make jokes about things and everything is ... The human piece is all gone. In exchange, we've traded that for a lot of efficiency.
And I think the answer, when you're not in this kind of post-apocalyptic world that we're all living in at the moment, is somewhere in the middle where you can get a lot of efficiency, you can access workforce outside of your local area, you can collaborate with people in different places, while also still having some human touch. And that's what I'm trying to find, is that nice balance in the middle.
Ben Carcio:
That's great.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
I have some ideas for you for that because I'm the same thing. I'm an extrovert. I like to talk to people that are [inaudible 00:18:12] those pieces. We've actually scheduled time where we are all working on video at the same time. And it sounds pretty awkward, but it's sort of ... It's a bit awkward to get used to, but once you do where I have a dry erase board where I have, "Here's the tasks we're working on," and I'll sort of write them down so everyone can look at that on a camera when they're working together. It's not the same. Right? It's not the same as yelling over a cube or physically seeing that reaction, but it does help.
Henry Cipolla:
That would probably help my other huge problem, which is I just don't have the discipline for this. At home, there's a lot of positive distractions, the dog and other things, whereas if I'm committed to a video with my coworkers, I have to at least pretend like I'm working. So I like that.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
You have to put clothes on, right? I mean, you have to [crosstalk 00:19:10]
Henry Cipolla:
Sure. I have to at least put a shirt on every day. Yes.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. And actually, back to you, Christopher, I tend to remember odd things and I remember that, when we had a conference call with you a few months ago, way before any of this, I remember a painting in the background. So I know that we had the same conversation, you were in the same spot. So talk to us about your collaboration and how you worked ... I think you were remote, if I'm not mistaken, even previously. So talk about sort of previous to this situation and then has anything changed?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Not much has changed from us, from a company perspective, but I think it's the helping everyone we're working with adjust to this environment. We have new people working for the organization who are not used to working remotely. We have clients who are trying to figure that out. So we're getting on a call and if people don't know when to talk and they're talking over one another and all those pieces in the call. So what's fundamentally changed is I'm working with many people who are not used to this environment and we're bringing in more people on the team that are trying to make that adjustment and really accommodating for them of figuring that out.
I mean, I can tell you, Henry, it drove me nuts when I first started to do this. I would drive and work at the local coffee shop or I would just make my way to sort of interact with people. We have a [WMOV 00:20:51] bike trail and so I'd join some cycling groups and things like that, but I think the adjustment it realizing that you need to work on video and stay focused and put yourself in that environment because it's really easy to want to do laundry. We have a new puppy, take the puppy out. My son is now home. And if we go through this call without him running in at least once, he's six years old ... It's just how we work is fundamentally different, even if you've worked at home for years and years.
Henry Cipolla:
What tool are you using for the video stuff? Are you guys just doing a Zoom call?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Yeah. We're just doing Zoom calls. I mean, Zoom calls, Skype calls. It depends on who has the best bandwidth at the moment and then what our clients are comfortable with. It's really weird how disconcerting, if you are used to Citrix, to switch to another platform, even though they're pretty easy to use.
Henry Cipolla:
Yeah, but you said, when you guys work, you also all work on video together, as well. Do you do that on Zoom?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Yeah. We do that on Zoom.
Henry Cipolla:
Okay.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. It's sort of like, the Zoom CEO has been preaching a lot of these sort of virtual collaboration where it doesn't have to be formal, a meeting. They have a virtual water cooler where they literally have a water cooler in their office and there's a video chatroom up all the time and you can just go in and talk to people. And if there's someone at the water cooler, you can say, "Hey, did you see the new Netflix show last night?" I think you brought up a really good point, Christopher, in terms of using ... that we are going to be in our home offices, that gives opportunities to go out. And Randy, you entered this into evidence, but you said you're an introvert. So I'm going to come back to you as someone that maybe feels more comfortable. Do you find that you have more human contact or less human contact and are you finding that, no, actually I prefer the digital contact as human contact? Or are you trying to get out a little bit more and be a little bit more extroverted, I guess, if you will?
Randy Dailey:
Yeah. Definitely less contact. It's not a good thing. It's part of a set of trade offs. Maybe you're doing a little bit better on the productivity, but you've got to manage those social relationships a little bit more. I find myself just trying to blaze a new path here. I joined a virtual conference the other day where you could meet event attendees by just pressing a button and then you'd be matched and you'd be put together for five minutes to chat and it'd automatically expire after that. It's almost like virtual matchmaking. So still trying to find my way. I don't think I'm seeing more people in this environment, per se, but I think there's some cultural inertia in terms of what are the new norms we'll form, how are we going to establish patterns to kind of get that back? I don't think we're there yet, but I imagine us getting closer to kind of cracking that nut with new tools.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. And as marketers, I think there's a lot of folks on this call ... Obviously, we have Demand Stage team. It's a marketing-oriented platform. We have two agency ... I'm a marketer. We tend to be more extroverted. So Owen, talk to me ... You said a second ago that the culture in New Zealand, the fact that you were remote, "Hey, let's get on a plane. Let's fly. Let's see clients." How are you reintroduced ... And I know it's newer in New Zealand, this lockdown, but what opportunities do we have with collaboration to bring the human element to the table, sort of in your estimation?
Owen Scott:
Yeah. I think it's sort of tricky because I still think the challenge is internal. So I think, with customers, it's not that ... In some ways, it's almost what happened, because we're in lockdown, it's forced us to go online. So what sort of happened with customers before is I sort of, "I'd like to do a Zoom call with you rather than flying," but you're sort of locked into that old pattern. It's like, "Oh, well, I'd better come and see you and have a coffee," whereas now, we can just say, "I'm not turning up. Let's do a Zoom. Actually, let's just do it tomorrow, rather than waiting until the next time I'm traveling."
So it sorts of presents a bit of a ... If everyone does online in a business sense, I actually think we're into it because we can be a lot more efficient. It comes back to that efficiency thing. So I'm quite excited about the customer side of it. I'm really struggling with the team. I'll come back to Chris' comment. I'm really interested in that video because the piece before, I'm sort of like ... I used to work at home when I wanted to, when I had a busy pile of stuff to do and I called it work [inaudible 00:25:42], but now I have to be here all the time. And what I'm really struggling with is that yelling across the room piece and I'm really interested in that video piece because, at the moment, I'm sort of going, "Oh, I'd like to talk to Ben." I'll send you an email or a message and say, "Ben, would you like to join me on a Zoom call? What's the link?" And we do the whole little dance and it's so sort of [false 00:26:06].
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Well, you can use Slack, as well, like a combination of [crosstalk 00:26:11]
Owen Scott:
Yeah. Good call.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
... this and Slack and availability. I think it's ... Maybe that's a question to panelists here, but I would say that it's still, even though I've been doing it for awhile, it's still figuring out what the best channels are. I like that you have to be a bit more planned, though. Some of these things, it was sort of too easy and you get distracted and people would get some ... I liken it to drunk dialing where people just picked up the phone or yelled over a cube because it was just so easy to do. And so it was unfiltered and people just did it. I sort of like the fact that it has to be calculated. And I love having conversations. I've had 30, 35 conversations over the phone with people over the last week. This is awesome. Forget these long email chains and these pieces and I am loving it. This is fairly old school, but I absolutely love talking to people. If I can't do it in person, people are actually answering the phone now. It's shocking.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. No, it's funny. It used to almost be a stigma of remote work and you'd say, "Well, I'll come meet you." You almost didn't want to admit to the fact that you were remote. And now, it's an advantage. We had a great question come in from the panelists, sort of the favorite tool question for collaboration. But instead of the obvious tools, I'd love to get your feedback, Christopher, on what are your favorite tools? What are the things out there that maybe people aren't working and using? And I'm going to bounce around and ask a few other people, but are there any cool tricks? I think, Randy, you and I were looking at one the other day, but anything that you're using that's hot on the streets kind of thing?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Fun Retro. Have you heard of that tool?
Ben Carcio:
No. FunRetro?
Christopher Antonopoulos:
FunRetro. It's a survey tool. So what you do is you can have a board, like a Trello board, and you can write questions out or sort of survey your team or capture that. So, "How are you feeling about this project? What do you think about XZY?" And so it's a quick survey and you can keep track of what's going on or provide feedback. It's a lot of fun.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
There's another one, I think it's called Pomodoro. It has an icon like a tomato. And so what it does is it helps you block out time to do work. So one of the hardest things when you get started working from home is that discipline and sort of when do you work on something. So it makes a bit of a game out of it for you in terms of how you schedule your time in blocks to do different things so that you're not getting distracted. This is a quarantine [inaudible 00:29:10] I like to call it. And so I need to be distracted into working. If not, I'm going to run upstairs to the refrigerator and probably eat something I'm not supposed to. But those are FunRetro, Pomodoro are two sort of tools that we like to use because it game-ifys working and then you can survey and put those things together and have a bit of fun.
Ben Carcio:
That's cool. I haven't heard of either of those. I'm going to come to you last, Randy, because I know you are just like the encyclopedia on cool tools. But Owen or Henry, do you want to jump in with some help to ... it looks like [Basia 00:29:51] on the attendees list?
Owen Scott:
I mean, we're a bit boring as far as we're just using the Zoom and the Slack channels, primarily. That would be our main channels.
Ben Carcio:
Okay, yeah.
Henry Cipolla:
So it's the wrong answer, but I like to use email for collaboration. Right? Slack is awful.
Ben Carcio:
Wait, what's that? Never heard of it.
Henry Cipolla:
Slack can be awful for collaboration. Right? You have a message you want to send to everybody. Well, you put in general, but someone wasn't looking then and then a couple hundred messages came by and they lost it. Or you want to follow up with someone and you kind of want them to see, "Hey, the last time we talked about this was a month ago. So what's that?" And there's a lot of ways of working that we've evolved and adapted that still work with email, even though it's not the hip, new, cool tool that all the kids are using.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. Randy, I'm going to turn it over to you. I appreciate that, though, Henry. I think that is a strong point. Email still is, arguably, the best, most effective tool ever devised.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
No, no. [inaudible 00:31:02] on how you use it. I hated Slack when it came out. I'm like, "Are you kidding me? You expect to send a message and I write you back right away and track all these different channels?" We just use it for internal communications. We don't do that with clients. And then we set expectations on responses for that tool, but I hate reading the email chain. I guess I'm just ... It's driving me nuts now. Like, "All right, is it all in the chain and did I miss the first thing and is there a different chain of conversation on that same topic," and, "Did someone change something?"
Henry Cipolla:
But at least it's all in a chain versus, "Oh, I have to find these messages in this channel. And then now we're talking about lunch. Oh, no. Here are the memes and the gifs. Oh, no. Here's the next chunk of message that's helpful again." It's very disparate. Right? Whereas an email, it's all in one spot.
Owen Scott:
You need to break up your Slack channels. Have your cat one and then have your work one. [crosstalk 00:32:08]
Christopher Antonopoulos:
We have daily [crosstalk 00:32:09] where people put pictures of their dogs and cats and birds and fishes. And then we've got the down-to-business stuff. But Henry, I was with you until about eight months ago. I was like, "Forget this Slack thing. We're never going to use it," and now it's like, to Owen's point, we have it structured so that we can work at internal projects and it's easier to find, but it's ...
Henry Cipolla:
[crosstalk 00:32:33]
Christopher Antonopoulos:
I suppose, the 501 version, you need to be comfortable working at home first before you try out these other things that are different than what you're used to. I think that's probably the [crosstalk 00:32:46]
Ben Carcio:
I'm going to let Owen have last word on Slack.
Owen Scott:
I was just going to say, it's really just [inaudible 00:32:53] Henry. That Slack, we use it for the conversation. Like, "I need to have a conversation right now," and we're going to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth real quick, close it off. Email is more ... we're using it for two different types of conversation. I'd never do something in Slack that they could get back to me in three days. It's like, "Right now, I want you."
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. And I think that some people are trying to use Slack as that record. And that, I think, can be a little tricky, but I'd love for Randy to chime in. Feel free to pile on Henry, but definitely would love to get some ideas that you have for additional tools that you think would be helpful for folks to considers.
Randy Dailey:
Yeah. I mean, maybe just a moment on the Slack/email thing. I think Slack and email are similar. They're great for kind of ad-hoc questions. They're great for a certain segment of work, but you wouldn't want to manage your pipeline in email or, if you had 50 applicants in your applicant tracking system or 50 support tickets or 50 bugs in JIRA or Trello or something, you reach a certain point where you're dealing with a lot of complexity and you need kind of that raised accountability of saying, "Okay, here's the work item. Here's the data attached to it. Here's the conversation attached to it in one place." So it's not to say don't use email. You're not going to assign a ticket to Henry and say, "Hey, how's your day? How's this project," or something. You're going to email him, but maybe there's ... The way I conceptualize it is Slack and email are almost that catchall. You try to filter what you can through these tools that will give you that task-based view, that filtered view, that all-in-one view and you augment with Slack and email where the use cases don't make sense.
Randy Dailey:
Let me quickly jump back to the other one. Let me share my screen for 30 seconds. I'll just put a couple of websites on for things that look kind of cool. Tandem is a cool one, just listening to this conversation. I haven't gotten quite the buy-in at Demand Sage, but I think it's interesting. If you look at the screenshot here, it may give you a little bit of an idea of what it's about. It kind of gives you presence in terms of where people are. If you click on someone's avatar, you'll go to the doc they're looking at. May be a little bit too much surveillance state, I don't know, but I think it's kind of a cool concept. And for that idea of always having your video on kind of thing, this almost has channels where you can persist in being in a channel with your headset, day to day. Again, haven't had an opportunity to use this one, but it's on my list. It's apparently very fashionable with the Silicon Valley crowd right now.
Other one, super quick, is Loom. So you folks probably have seen this on LinkedIn where, in the bottom left, you'll see someone's face along with their screen on the same time. This lets you send asynchronous videos to people. So it's really an extension of that kind of thesis on you're going to have success if you can kind of work asynchronously better. I use this for, if I complete a new customer report, I might draft a little demo of me walking through it and how to use the controls and I might seen the Loom to the customer. The Loom can then be read by the customer and they can, sort of like SoundCloud or something, at the two-minute mark, they can add a question, they can scrub along the timeline. So I think Loom is very fascinating and we're trying to operationalize that a little bit at Demand Sage on a go-forward. So I'll leave it there.
Ben Carcio:
Awesome, Randy. So just, we have FunRetro, Pomodoro, Tandem, Loom, obviously Zoom and Slack. Everyone's using Zoom right now, so everyone knows Zoom. And then last but not least, email. So, yeah. That's what the kids are doing nowadays, using email. I'm a big fan of email, but I'm always up for something new. So appreciate that. So to bring us back, Randy, do you have one more that you wanted to add?
Randy Dailey:
Yeah, no. Thanks, Ben. At some point, there is a study use case that's really good for that document-based collaboration, which is ultimately part of what we're getting at. So I don't have to pile that in here, but great to touch on that at some point.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. And that brings me back to the reason for this call or reason for this webinar, and that is collaboration as marketers, with our clients in key stakeholders around what's happening with our marketing. And I'm going to turn it back to you, Randy, as our self-appointed spreadsheet lover. We'd love for you to talk about Google Sheets, the role of Google Sheets, and is it a good collaboration tool?
Randy Dailey:
Yep. Yep. So I think the quick answer is absolutely, yes. You look at any SaaS tool and you look at their collaboration story. HubSpot is pretty good if you want to talk about a particular deal or a particular contact, a particular record, but there isn't a collaboration story for talking about a pipeline review or talking about sort of aggregates and metrics and things like that. At a higher level, there's not in-app chat with other stakeholders, things like that. And I think this is one of the places where Sheets really shines. You have tasks, you have comments, you have the ability to assign tasks to people, you have the ability to ... if I'm looking at a sheet of metrics and I see that the numbers don't quite make sense for January, I can say, "Hey, @BenCarcio, what's up with this figure?" You can log in. It's immediately contextualized. You know precisely the data I'm talking about. You know what question needs to be answered without going into three tools. You've got that chat layer, that collaboration layer.
So I think the test is, if you can bring HubSpot data into your sheets and other SaaS data into your sheets, you really unblock all of those platform features and maybe the gravy on top is, SaaS tools, they don't have a great chat story, but they also don't have a great way to blend data. And maybe you're trying to blend HubSpot and Google Analytics or something like that, but even more simply, maybe you're just trying to blend your HubSpot data with your own first-party data about how you run the business. Spreadsheets provide this layer to add annotations, to add goals, to add performance against goals, to add content calendars or budgets or resource constraints or the list of attendees for your offline field marketing event, things like that. There's a whole set of things where, if you look at kind of these native SaaS tools, they're never going to really be able to bring that in and weave that into a unified workspace. And for me, that's a lot of the power of the spreadsheet. You can have all of the data.
You can get it there quickly.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. I mean, arguably, one of the first killer apps ever developed was the spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3. And there's a lot of companies that have tried to, just like email, get rid of the spreadsheet. So I'm going to go to Owen to sort of get your perspective. Spreadsheets, Google Sheets, collaborative friend or foe, in your mind?
Owen Scott:
I'm a bit of a spreadsheet fan, actually, but not at Randy's level.
Randy Dailey:
That's healthy.
Owen Scott:
I think, really, discussions a little bit around sort of that contrast of structure, there's this flexibility. And I think, at one end, Google Sheets gives you an amazing flexibility, but it's highly unstructured. And so people go way down the other end and you buy some SaaS tool that gives you really structured data, but no flexibility. It's a little like, "I'll give you this one view and take it or leave it," which is what HubSpot metrics gives you. So it's just trying to find that sort of blend in the middle. Obviously, the great thing about Google Sheets is that you have your single source. If you go to Microsoft Spreadsheets, like, "This is a disaster. That's not going to happen." As as soon as you save it, it's out of date, sort of thing.
So the great thing we find is that Google Sheets, it's sort of one source. We're all looking at the same data. We can all change the data, comment on the data, and it's always the right one. And I suppose, what we've found, which was sort of weird with Randy on, is trying to get ... because we're not sort of real Google Sheet gurus, if we can get some structure, a template so it gives us the best of both worlds, I suppose, some structure, but then still have the flexibility to build and change it how we like it.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. No, that's great. And then, Christopher, would you sort of chime in on your perspective of Sheets, how you see it? I mean, your name, Measured Results, it feels very sort of spreadsheet-oriented. Talk about Google Sheets. Talk about spreadsheet as a collaboration platform for you and your clients.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
Yeah. What's interesting, for us, is that we only use Google Sheets internally to collaborate and we still use Dropbox to share with clients. So we've actually found some challenges with sharing Google Sheets, outside the organization or someone's on a SharePoint or access to serves in those pieces. They're not quite as confident with the security of Google and that platform for some of that data. So we've used them a lot, but we use them internally to collaborate. And then once a document is finalized, we get it to where we want it to be. Then we share with external clients. We work with tech companies, companies in the financial industry, healthcare and some of that. And so we're finding that Dropbox has some applications you can download on your desktop. It's not as easy to use and intuitive as Google Sheets and Google Docs, but we're finding that we're only able to use it for internal collaboration, not externally with clients.
Ben Carcio:
No, that's helpful, Christopher. I'm going to turn it over to Henry because, I think, some of what you mentioned in terms of people wanting the file to be secure and/or this is the file, it's not going to change type of view, sort of the structured versus unstructured and the fact that Google Sheets is collaborative, that came up on our last call, Henry. And I would love for you to sort of share your insight on the security side and/or the potential flexibility that happens with Google Sheets that could create issues with the numbers changing and things getting deleted and stuff like that.
Henry Cipolla:
Yeah. So the conversation that you're referring to from earlier was all about how ... It's kind of like the wiki problem of, well, if we have a sheet that is the center of business mass and it's just a Google Sheet, there aren't the same guardrails as you would have in a dashboard app. Right? There is no control over who's editing what. The logging is different or not present. So there is some risk that people can step on top of each other's toes, that people can clone the current tab and make a copy and change it just a little bit and now we've got two versions of the truth, but one is slightly different.
And so there are ways this can bite you in the bum, but all of this is handled kind of by the new norms and the new ways of working that Randy described earlier. You have to say, "This spreadsheet is going to be our sorts of truth and here's the templates. And if you want to make changes, fine, go ahead, but you edit the main. You don't make a copy. And these are the numbers, the cells that can't change because we use them for different things." And I think these upfront agreements are really important. Just like I made the wiki analogy, a wiki becomes a giant mess if you don't have agreement upfront in terms of what's going to go where, what the hierarchy in the organization is going to be, and go back and revisit every once in awhile. Same thing with spreadsheets.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. No, that's a great perspective. Randy, did you want to weigh in on thoughts around spreadsheets, based on some of that dialogue?
Randy Dailey:
Yeah. And I think, Owen, you kind of flagged that spreadsheets are harder to use and I think that's right. And I think that's sort of the challenge. If you think about kind of common objections to spreadsheets, you'll have SaaS vendors saying, "Ah, you still have your stuff in a spreadsheet. What are you doing?" One of the things they're talking about is sending around stale data snapshots, so old data, siloed data. That's bad. We totally agree. It can be hard to get started because you don't necessarily have a template or a dashboard that prescribes what you're supposed to do. And it can be hard to really unlock that power. You've got all these pivot tables and flexibility, but you have to build your own views.
To kind of just bring in the Demand Sage perspective a little bit, we view this as our challenge. The spreadsheet is the ultimate in power and flexibility. SaaS tools are easy to use. Can we bring the ease of use of SaaS tools to the spreadsheet? And for us, that's really about almost putting the spreadsheet on rails, taking the spreadsheet, making it a platform, extending it, making it easy to use. So for us, that means the big building blocks are realtime sync of your data, get rid of that ritual of importing and exporting, keep your data live. It is giving you a template gallery where you can sort of shop the gallery and say, "Ah, yeah. The win-loss analysis. That looks great. Let me press the button," the campaign, the report's up instantly. And finally, it's about just making it easier to use some of those Google Sheets tool. A pivot table is great, but a pivot table that we can build for you with kind of menu-driven easy tools is better. So again, we're kind of targeting this opportunity of building better building blocks for the marketer, rich functions, things like that within the spreadsheet.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah, that's great. That's great perspective. So as we're getting sort of close in our last 10 minutes here, the value proposition at Demand Sage is enterprise-grade analytics for marketers everywhere. So effectively, we're taking all of the available data and tools for large organizations ... Again, the founders are from Localytics, which was focusing really on Fortune 50, Fortune 100 companies and bringing it down. I would imagine, Christopher and Owen, your client bases are in a state of challenge. Tell us, starting with Owen, tell us what we can do to help them and what we can do with our reporting to help them get better so they can focus on what will amount to turning their businesses around and/or taking advantage of new opportunities that are going to present themselves.
Owen Scott:
Yeah. I think one of the issues that people have, if you go to look at where marketing sort of came ... where analytics, I suppose, and marketing, the journey is that, primarily, the only analytics that a marketer ever had was just Google Analytics, which is just this random data that it was basically all the stacks that we possibly could collet about someone's website. We presented that and then marketers reported that up the food chain. And it sort of has little relevance to the selling process or the business, itself. And I suppose, the challenge that we're finding with people is that now we have, particularly with a platform like HubSpot, much more sophisticated analytic data available to us and it's trying to reflect that data in a way that makes sense to the salesperson, the sales process, and the business person.
So it's about funnel metrics, visits to the site, how many leads do we get, how much business did we get out of that, then we can start drilling down. And just getting away from this sort of historical metrics of bounce rates, exits. I mean, who cares? That's a diagnostic tool for a web developer. I was trying to get marketers to focus on starting at high-level business metrics and sales metrics and building [inaudible 00:49:47], I think, sort of the fundamental shifts that we're helping people with.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah, yeah. Christopher, I'd love for you to weigh in on that, especially knowing sort of the position that you take with your company about sort of fusing sales and marketing together. Tell us what is underway with this sort of new opportunity landscape we have in front of us.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
I mean, we're starting to see some of the shift in terms of ... away from lead generation and to conversion metrics in those pieces. And so what we're seeing a lot of today is that companies want to get the most value out of people who are demonstrating interest in their product and service and how they better process to convert them into customers. And so with all the events being canceled and shift to marketing programs, it's really about, what am I generating and how am I engaging my base? And then, how am I converting those individuals into customers in a much more programmatic way? And so we're seeing the shift in metrics and focuses on companies there. So companies are either in an industry where it's, "Oh, crap. I'm trying to survive."
I was on a call earlier today where we were having this conversation. They're trying to survive. They need to adapt. So fundamentally, their salespeople always visited clients and you can't do that anymore. Or they're in growth sectors. So if you're in the finance sector, if you're doing video conferencing, there's a lot of growth sectors in the economy today, even with all the challenges we're having. And so how do you help people shore up their client revenue base or adapt to this reality so that they can generate revenue and either make it through until we're beyond this point or create their new normal? Because this virus has leveled the playing field for hundreds of thousands or millions of companies that were all in the same bucket. And who adapts more quickly to take advantage of it?
So the shift is really the sales, converting leads from a lot of them marketing their demand generation programs that we've sort of traditionally seen.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. It feels like, just from my perspective, for what it's worth, is it feels like we can't get away with sloppy marketing. And the approach that, I think, your two organizations are taking and, I think, the approach that Demand Sage is taking is let's look at real numbers and let's look at it to drive real results. I think, Owen, I want to try to capture, having been a digital marketer basically my entire career, worrying about things like bounce rates and things of that nature, you're right. Who cares? The real important part is the number of sales that you're generating and the number of actual measurable results you're making is the most important.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
One thing that drives me nuts is I'm getting all these COVID-19 from companies saying, "We are still in business and we're working for our clients." And it drives me absolutely nuts. This is a great opportunity to help people and you're wasting your time sending that out. If your customers don't know you're doing business and you have to send them an email to remind them, you've got some other challenges with your companies beyond just sort of communicating. Some of that stuff is just ... There's huge opportunities to help people. Don't waste it by sending an email saying, "We are open for business and here to help," because that's not going to get you to that next stage in development. [crosstalk 00:53:35] crazy. Right?
Ben Carcio:
There's a mantra at Techstars and it's called give first. And the point of giving first is give something. Don't say we're here to wait for you to ask me to do something. Give something. So I think that approach is a really ... And I think you hit the nail on the head, Christopher. Don't just sit back and be like, "We're here to help. We're open for business. What's up?" It's like, "No, I've actually done something for you and here's what I've done." That's a little bit what we're trying to do here, but obviously you want to be mindful of that.
So we've got five minutes left. I always love to sort of put on ... everyone have their magic balls out and try to think about the future. So I'm going to go through each of you and I'm going to start with you, Owen. Give me what the world looks like from a collaborative standpoint in 12 months. If we get back on this call in 12 months, what are we talking about?
Owen Scott:
We're actually, I suppose, we're going through this thought process the same as everybody. And personally, I'm quite excited by it in that I work in the technology sector, I work with exporters. And everybody has been forced to experience working collaboratively online. And what I'm looking for is, I think, we can break a little bit of that sort of ingrained behavior of, like I sort of said at the start, is, "I've got to go and visit you to introduce you to our product. I've got to go and have a coffee with you," et cetera, whereas we're actually saying, no, I'm expecting an uplift in companies trying to do more of their sales process completely digital. So that's putting technology behind the marketing team, putting technology behind the sales team, and getting off an airplane. And it's that I'm just hearing like this. That's just a fantastic opportunity for sales and marketing companies to help companies do that.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. No, and I would imagine that you're never going to completely replace it, but at least saying it's not required, but it would be great ...
Owen Scott:
No, it's just plucking out a chunk of it. We'll take another chunk. There's still some that you still need to, but we're just taking a chunk and we managed through that month and we can talk that language. Everyone knows what Zoom is now. We could say, "We've got a Zoom call."
Ben Carcio:
Yep, for sure. No, that's great insight. Christopher, do you want to weigh in on where we'll be 12 months from now? If we have this same call, tell us what we're talking about in 12 months from now.
Christopher Antonopoulos:
I think we'll be talking about how people have changed the way they behave and shift that ... I'm seeing people calling one another, people chatting on the street. I hope what happens is that people will get reconnected with the outdoor world because they're going to be stuck inside for a number of months. And so I think that's going to adjust where, if it's safe to be out and you're not going to easily catch the virus, I'm hoping in 12 months we have the Tamiflu version for COVID. So if you're not feeling well, you take it and, in two days, it's done.
I think we'll be ever shifted to communicating more digitally, but I think the second it's safe, people are going to make that switch and want to reconnect in person. I'm like Henry. I want to see someone face to face. I want to go on these cycle rides. I want to have that human interaction. And I think we're going to be talking about a lot of people are working from home. They're going to use the technology. Companies realize that they can save on overhead and have a diversified workforce, but I think this is going to autocorrect from a personal relationship perspective that everyone's going to want that human contact again. It may not be a sales call, but they're going to want it. I crave it now. It's driving me nuts to not see people.
Ben Carcio:
Yeah. That's great. And so with our last two minutes, Henry, hopefully 12 months from now you're going to be on an insane scuba diving trip, but where do you see us, 12 months from now, what do you see us talking about?
Randy Dailey:
Muted, Henry.
Henry Cipolla:
Dammit. I think it's what we just heard. Companies ... I use United as an example because they're very kind of old fashioned in how they operate organization. There's no casual dress code there yet or anything like that. And so they're one of the last companies you'd imagine to have ever considered remote work. Well, they had to let everybody that wasn't critical work from home. And they're going to see that there were some advantages and people that were previously opposed to it are now going to start opening their door to remote developers. And so you're going to see an influx of small consulting firms and things that are able to get away with things they couldn't before now because remote work and remote vendors and remote everybody is more accepted.
You're going to see some of the norms that people liked ... The reason why I have this background is I'm in my room and my room is way too messy to show you guys, but I've been on a lot of calls where people have showed off their messy background and their half-eaten food still on the kitchen table and whatnot. And I think that's going to stay because people like that. The fact that I'm allowed to be a human while I'm on the call and it's okay if the six year old runs in or my dog run in to the middle of a call. So I think some of these new norms will stick and it'll be normal to have people be remote because now everyone in the world's gone through the bootcamp. So I think that's neat. And you'll see, people will invest in these tools earlier in their companies' lives. It'll be part of the culture more. So a lot of the resistance to it won't be there.
Ben Carcio:
Cool. That's great. Randy, why don't you give us that final, epic, Nostradamus-esque vision of the future? More spreadsheets?
Randy Dailey:
More spreadsheets, Ben. Yeah. I'd echo what Henry said. I mean, I think we're going through a big AB test. A big, forced AB test on ways of working. And at the end, we'll have some interesting results and it won't be a binary. It won't be remote verse co-location. There'll be some smaller AB tests in there. We'll realize, for this type of activity, actually, you still want to co-locate. For this type of activity or an engineer in your head sound, okay, yeah, that actually is better this way. I think, in a year, we start to have, really, just language to describe these trade offs a little bit better with that experience kind of in the rearview mirror. And some things will change, some will stay the same. That's a little bit of a cop out, but yeah. We'll see.
Ben Carcio:
Cool. Well, I'm going to wrap it up and say that, in 12 months from now, I'm expecting to be having a beer with all you guys at a Demand Sage sponsored event around HubSpot partner day, in person. To Owen's point, we'll be talking about how we've done all this amazing work and we haven't needed to see each other, but I'm definitely going to be excited to do that in person. I agree with you, Christopher. But again, wanted to thank all you guys for jumping on the call. Christopher, Owen, Henry, Randy, this was great. I've recorded it. I'm going to share it with everybody. But again, thanks for taking a chunk of your day to dedicate to this. Enjoy the rest of your day and make sure to wash your hands. Take care, everybody.
Owen Scott:
Thanks, Ben.
Randy Dailey:
Thanks, all.
Ben Carcio:
Take care.
