Jeetu Mahtani, Sales Leader @Hubspot: How and When to Go International and Crush It | E1207

I do not like discounting. I do not like to lead with discounting. It is a disservice to the customer and to the company, and to you as a rep to lead with discounting. If your buyers don't value you as a advisor, I would question whether that buyer is a good fit customer, and whether they will do everything they need to do to succeed with your plan.

Ready to go? (upbeat music) G2, I am so excited for this. Listen, I just chatted to Brian at HubSpot obviously before this. He's said so many wonderful things. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, appreciate it, Harry, and uh, big thanks to Brian too. I'm a big fan of your show, so I'm excited to be here.

Well, that is very, very kind of you. But Brian told me that I had to start with some context, which was you first wanted to be in product, and he said that you didn't get the job. So talk to me about that moment-

(laughs) .

... and how you came to HubSpot then as one of the very, very first.

Oh wow, yeah, like, I joke that I was fired even before I started at HubSpot. So, uh, back in the day, uh, my business partner and I, uh, Peter Caputa, who was a former HubSpotter, who was pretty awesome, ran, uh, a business together. So Pete and I ran this, uh, event registration business that was a mix of, uh, Eventbrite and Facebook in those days. And you know, we made some good progress, but eventually we got to a point where we were like, "We need to sell the business and go get, uh, real jobs." So we drove to, uh, 1 Broadway in Cambridge. We walk into this office, Harry, it's probably 100 square feet. There are four people in the office, Brian in one corner, Dharmesh in the other corner, Mark Roberge, who was HubSpot's first VP of sales, you've had him on the show, and Patrick Fitzsimmons, the fourth person, the fourth corner. We walk in and we're like, "Brian, we're here to sell you our company." And you know, Brian goes like, you know, he just, like, rocks in his chair and he's like, "No, we don't need your company, but we'll give you jobs." So he looks at Peter and he's asking Peter, "What do you want to do?" Pete's like, "I wanna be in sales." So he looks at Mark and he tells Mark, "Mark, why don't you go write up, uh, Peter a sales contract?" And Mark's like, "We don't have sales contracts." And Brian's like, "Just download one and give him a sales contract since we're hiring Peter as a sales rep." And he looks at me and he's like, "Gita, what do you want to do?" And in those days, Harry, my background is in, uh, computer science. I was the product, the person who generated all the code with Peter in our start-up. So I was like, "Brian, I wanna be a product manager." And Brian goes again like this, and he's like, "Nope, I'm HubSpot's product manager, we don't have a job for you." So while Pete is writing his contract with Mark getting his sales role, I'm kinda, like, standing at the entryway of this 100 square feet office wondering, "What the heck do I do now?" You know, two years later, Brian and, uh, the recruitment team, uh, reached out and, uh, I ended up joining two years later as a sales rep.