How we Grow with Agent-first GTM
This is part two of a three-part series on how HubSpot transformed with AI. Part one covers how we build with AI. Part three is 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 have added hundreds of thousands of companies to our total addressable market, grown qualified leads from answer engines by 1,850%, and now book over 10,000 meetings per quarter through personalized outreach, with a 13% increase in win rate for deals where guided selling is used.
Today, we run an Agent-first GTM: a flywheel where agents are doing real work at every stage and humans are operating with higher impact, connecting more deeply with customers.
Attract: Finding 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 run a demand engine powered by AI.
Rebuilding it required three bets: finding the right companies, converting the ones who showed interest, and showing up where buyers have moved.
The first bet started with the Demand Agent. It identifies our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and finds new companies that match it. The agent enriches those contacts with signals from a variety of data sources, and generates a prospect value score for every account: a prediction of both likelihood to close and expected ARR. Last year, Demand Agent added 345,000 accounts to our total addressable market – accounts that reps would otherwise have lacked sufficient data to pursue.
Next we looked at automating the process once a prospect shows interest. We built Inbound Agent, a chatbot on our website that handles 82% of all inbound chats with zero human involvement. The agent qualifies visitors, handles competitive questions, uses propensity scoring to identify real buying intent, books meetings with our sales reps, and closes what it can. It’s now beginning to sell HubSpot Starter when there is a clear fit.
The third bet was about a different kind of buyer entirely, one who hasn’t raised their hand yet, but is asking questions elsewhere. We moved early on Answer 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 answers grew 1,850% between Q1 2025 and Q1 2026. Those leads convert at up to 3x the rate of traditional search.
Engage: Enabling deeper customer connection
Converting interest into pipeline is where we have invested heavily. We built agents and assistants at every stage of the sales motion, each teaching us something we didn’t expect.
The first lesson came from our Prospecting Agent. We assumed email sequences would do most of the work. They didn’t. Only a small percentage of meetings get booked through email alone. So we …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
