Google Data

Posted by Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot

Editor's note: From the founding of Faneuil Hall in 1740 to the opening of Franklin Southie in 2008, Boston’s businesses have embodied an enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit. When we looked at several recent lists of the top startups in the Boston area - from Bostinno, Quora and the Boston Business Journal - we were pleased to discover that about 75% of these companies are running on Apps. 

Today, we’re wicked excited to hear from Mike Volpe, CMO of HubSpot, the industry leader in inbound marketing software and one of those top startups. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Back in 2006, two MIT alumni decided there had to be a better way to do marketing. Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan knew that loud, interruptive and unwanted advertising wasn’t the way to help businesses attract customers, not to mention that new technology like caller ID and spam filters was simultaneously rendering those legacy efforts less effective. So they started HubSpot, and with it, a new paradigm that would be better for both marketers and customers, replacing loud, interruptive advertising with marketing consumers actually love.

HubSpot has grown to 450 employees since launching in 2006, and along the way, we've settled on a core mantra when it comes to how we work: “use good judgment.” We don’t tell employees where they have to work or when they have to be here - we care most about results. It’s imperative, then, that we leverage enterprise tools that make work easy and accessible anytime and anywhere. That’s why we use Google Apps. It lets us work together whether we’re at our desks or halfway around the world. That, combined with the fact that it grows with us and is simple to use, makes it the perfect solution for our company.

Our employees use Google Apps every day on nearly every aspect of our business. With Docs, Sheets and Slides, we’re able to collaborate on our most important documents with our colleagues, no matter where we are. We can store all our files in one place with Drive, so each team knows they can find their templates and notes whether they’re sitting down with their laptops or traveling with their smartphones. And Google Forms makes tracking executive speaking requests simple and seamless. Any time an organization wants a HubSpot expert to talk at an event, we send them a form with a set of standard questions, and the information they submit about the opportunity is automatically populated into a spreadsheet that houses all other requests. It's perfectly efficient.

Google Calendar helps us stay transparent, which we consider essential to empowering our employees. Many of our executives book office hours on Google Calendar and share them with our company. Any employee at any level can sign up for an hour with them, where they can bring up anything from product development ideas to problems they’re having at work.

Working for a fast-moving company isn’t easy, but with Google Apps, we’re not burdened by the hassles that can otherwise grind busy days to a halt without a strong technology platform. We don’t have to deal with attachments, version history screwups, email outages or fussing around with our phones to get our email to sync. We open up Google Apps and it works. It’s the same experience we offer with our software – simple, effective and lovable.