Dive Brief:
- Chief Customer Officer Rob Giglio stepped down from his role April 12 after two years with the company, HubSpot said this week.
- The CRM company will not fill the position and will instead promote leaders across its sales, marketing and customer success teams. Now, SVP of Customer Success Jon Dick, Chief Sales Officer Christian Kinnear and CMO Kipp Bodnar will all report directly to CEO Yamini Rangan.
- Giglio will join Canva as chief customer officer, he announced in a LinkedIn post Thursday. Giglio did not specify when he would begin his new role.
Dive Insight:
HubSpot plans to emphasize making its solutions easy-to-use and easy-to-buy to differentiate itself from other CRM vendors, Rangan said during a February Q4 2023 earnings call.
This strategy will build on top of improvements the company made to its customer experience in 2023. The onboarding process needs to be simple, intuitive and “take 60 minutes to set up a website, take 60 minutes to open up and unbox a CRM and get going on it,” Rangan said on a Q3 2023 earnings call in November.
Putting the emphasis on customer success has paid off. HubSpot reached 205,000 global customers in 2023, up 23% over the previous year, the company said in its Q4 2023 earnings release in February. Subscription revenue was up 26% to $2.12 billion during the period.
While HubSpot is dropping the chief customer officer role, giving the SVP of customer success a direct line to the CEO is in line with the rising importance of CX leadership roles in general.
Half of customer success teams report to the CEO, according to a survey released last December by HubSpot, ChurnZero, ESG and SaaStr.
EVPs, SVPs or VPs led 2 in 5 CX teams in 2023, the survey found.
