Dharmesh Shah—The Tech Guy at the Center of it All: The CRM Influential Leader Awards
Self-described “technology guy” Dharmesh Shah is the software guru behind HubSpot, a company he cofounded with current CEO Brian Halligan in 2006.
Shah serves as the Cambridge, Mass.-based company’s chief technology officer and has largely been responsible for many of the company’s moves toward becoming a top provider of all-in-one software for inbound marketing and sales.
HubSpot was very active this year, and among its many accomplishments was a successful expansion into customer service with the launch of Service Hub, an all-in-one customer service system. When combined with HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, Service Hub integrates customer data with lead and deal data to give marketing, sales, and service teams a complete record of all customer interactions with their organizations.
And while HubSpot has often been described as unique because of its all-in-one approach, the company is keenly aware of the need to connect to other business applications as well. Shah and his team were especially busy on the integration front this past year.
Its most recent integration, announced in June, involved Taboola, provider of a content discovery platform. The partnership enables the two companies’ joint customers to seamlessly initiate content marketing campaigns with Taboola through the HubSpot platform.
In May, HubSpot introduced key integrations with Workplace by Facebook, Shopify, and Slack. The integration with Workplace by Facebook, a work collaboration tool from the social media giant, delivers notifications from HubSpot directly into Workplace. The integration with Shopify allows merchants on the Shopify e-commerce platform to share their Shopify sales data with HubSpot. The integration with Slack turns Slack conversations into HubSpot CRM tasks, sends notifications to Slack triggered by activities in HubSpot, and enables slash commands—initiated from the message box in Slack—to search and post contact records from HubSpot.
HubSpot also expanded its long-standing partnership with Google, which in February culminated with HubSpot adopting Google Cloud for its cloud-based services for international customers. The partnership provides increased data security for HubSpot customers and allows HubSpot to invest more in its Google Cloud product integrations and accelerate the growth of its free CRM.
A year ago, HubSpot acquired Kemvi, and Shah has since been working to apply Kemvi’s artificial intelligence and machine learning to help sales teams.
Prior to HubSpot, Shah was founder and CEO at Pyramid Digital Solutions, which was acquired by SunGard Data Systems in 2005. He also founded and writes for OnStartups.com, a start-up blog and community with more than 700,000 members. He is also an active member of the Boston-area entrepreneurial community and an angel investor in more than 60 start-ups.