How we grow with Agent-first GTM Clio

This is part two of a three-part series on how HubSpot has transformed itself with AI. The first part explains how we build with artificial intelligence. The third part explains how we operate as an AI-first company.

Over the past three years, we have systematically rebuilt how we attract, engage and delight customers by creating a new go-to-market model. With AI, we’ve added hundreds of thousands of companies to our total addressable market, increased qualified leads from response engines by 1,850%, and now book over 10,000 meetings per quarter through personalized outreach, with a 13% increase in success rate for deals where guided selling is used.

Today we run an Agent-first GTM: a flywheel where agents do real work at every stage and humans operate with greater impact, connecting more deeply with customers.

Attract: find the right customers faster

The top of our funnel looks nothing like it did three years ago. Where we once relied on form fills, content leads, and inbound chat teams, we now use an AI-powered question engine.

Rebuilding it required three bets: finding the right companies, converting those that showed interest and showing where buyers have moved.

The first bet started with the Demand Agent. Identify our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and find new companies that match it. The agent enriches these leads with signals from a variety of data sources and generates a prospect value score for each account – a prediction of both the probability of closing and expected ARR. Last year, Demand Agent added 345,000 accounts to our total addressable market – accounts that reps otherwise wouldn’t have had enough data to pursue.

Next we looked at automating the process once a prospect shows interest. We built Incoming agenta chatbot on our website that handles 82% of all incoming chats without any human involvement. The agent qualifies visitors, handles competitive inquiries, uses propensity scoring to identify real purchasing intent, books meetings with our sales reps, and closes what they can. Now it’s starting to sell HubSpot Starter when there is clear traction.

The third bet was for a completely different type of buyer, one who hasn’t raised their hand yet, but is asking questions elsewhere. We quickly moved on to response engine optimization (AEO) and built AEO Agent to make HubSpot visible and credible in AI-generated responses from tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity. HubSpot is now the most visible CRM in LLMs. Qualified leads from AI-generated responses grew 1,850% between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026. These leads convert up to 3x faster than traditional search.

Engage: Allow a deeper connection with the customer

Converting interests into pipelines is where we have invested a lot. We created agents and assistants at every stage of the sales process, each of whom taught us something we didn’t expect.

The first lesson came from our Prospecting agent. We assumed that email sequences would do most of the work. They didn’t. Only a small percentage of meetings are booked exclusively via email. We then rebuilt the agent to orchestrate it across all channels: tracking intent signals, generating custom multi-touch sequences, and creating tasks for reps at the right time. Today, AI-powered personalized outreach sees over 10,000 meetings per quarter.

The next lesson came from active negotiations. We started by creating a single place where reps could see everything about a deal, like risk scores and similar deals won. It was helpful, but we learned that reps didn’t just want a dashboard. They wanted to ask questions. So we built Guided sales Assistanta native conversational interface that allows reps to query their pipeline the same way they would ask a colleague: what is the risk of this deal, how have we won in similar situations, what should I do next? This context is helping to get results: we are seeing a 13% increase in the win rate for deals where AI guidance is used.

We also thought about the evaluation phase of the buyer’s journey. A presales agent handles complex technical issues that would otherwise require a specialist. A Demonstration agent creates a bespoke on-site demo environment, customized to the prospect’s specific industry, geography and company size. These features remove friction in moments that previously slowed down negotiations.

Delight: Scaling success and support with AI

When we brought the AI ​​into the delight stage, Support found product-market fit almost immediately. Customers got faster responses, our team regained capacity, and CSAT increased. Our Customer agent now resolves approximately 60% of our internal support requests without human intervention. For companies considering where to start with AI, we recommend Support. The results are predictable and the path to value is the fastest.

But customer success was a different story. The path to AI was less obvious and the outcome more surprising. Instead of replacing human connection, agents enabled a deeper connection.

The problem we were solving was attention. CSMs have large volumes of business and cannot give each account the attention it deserves. The question they ask most often is: what accounts should I focus on today?

Our Customer Success Assistant answers this question. Identify who needs attention and why, develop outreach, and flag opportunities to drive deeper engagement. Over 80% of our CSMs use it every week. What we noticed wasn’t just efficiency. CSMs who use the assistant have better conversations that are rooted in context, focused on outcomes, and happen before customers even need to ask for help. The result: a 7 point higher customer savings rate.

For customers without an assigned CSM, our Digital success agent guides them through the product, recommends next steps based on usage patterns, and introduces new features.

The Agent’s first GTM flywheel

This is what Agent-first GTM looks like in practice, which continues to evolve with new experiments every day.

The most important part is what it means for our teams. Marketers now reach every customer with something relevant. Representatives enter every conversation with full context. CSMs know exactly who needs it and why. Each team gets better at achieving their goals.

This is because no agent works alone. Demand Agent expands the people we can reach. The Inbound Agent converts those who have expressed initial interest. AEO captures buyers who have never been in our funnel. The Prospecting Agent and Negotiation Assistant accelerate the deals that matter. Customer agents and success assistants retain customers longer and help them get more value. This is the flywheel. And it gets stronger with every interaction.

We built Agent-first GTM with twenty years of data, hundreds of thousands of customers, and a front-row seat to how the best teams in the world market, sell, and serve. That’s why we share our approach.

A note on availability: Many of the features described in this series are a mix of tools created by HubSpot, third-party agents, and custom integrations. Some are available in HubSpot: AEO functionality, data enrichment to drive demand, and agents for customer support and research. Assistants like Guided Sales Assistant and our Customer Success Assistant can also be created as custom assistants.

We are a larger company than most of our customers, and some of what we have built reflects that scale. This has always been our model: try it on ourselves first, then make it for customers. Our commitment to innovation allows us to learn faster, and those learnings feed directly into the product, so our customers don’t have to figure it out themselves.