Daphne Costa Lopes

Who they are

Daphne Costa Lopes is Global Director of Customer Success – Strategic Accounts at HubSpot — and hosts This is Growth!, a podcast on building and scaling customer success teams.

Person

Daphne joined HubSpot in July 2024 as Global Director of Customer Success – Strategic Accounts, stepping into a company already north of $2.6B in annual revenue. Before that title, she'd spent several years climbing inside HubSpot itself — from Senior Manager through Principal Manager to Director of Customer Success — so this is less a fresh start than a culmination. Prior to HubSpot, she ran Head of Operations and then Head of Customer Success Partnerships at WNDYR, and before that was Head of Customer Transformation at Retail inMotion. She holds a BABS from Griffith College Dublin, a Postgraduate Diploma in Product Management, and an MSc in Technology, both from Technological University Dublin. The through-line is a move from operations and implementation into strategic customer success, each step adding scope. She launched This is Growth! in 2022 — a podcast on building and scaling CS teams — and writes the Unconventional Growth newsletter, covering CS leadership, AI in CS, outcome-based pricing, and scaling CS organisations. She speaks regularly on the circuit: panels at CSN Cafe Dublin on proving CS value in downturns, CX Current on how AI makes CSMs more valuable strategic advisors, and Arrows' Onboarding Therapy on the AI wake-up call for CS teams.

Company

HubSpot's most recent headline is its July 2026 terms-of-service retraction — the company updated its ToS, faced customer trust backlash, and publicly reversed course, a moment that underscored just how sensitive its relationship with users is. On the product side, Spring 2026 brought a flurry of launches: Prospecting Agent (an outbound agent that identifies in-market companies via buying signals and sources contacts through ZoomInfo or Apollo), HubSpot AEO (an Answer Engine Optimisation tool now available without a Marketing Hub subscription), and Working Capital powered by Stripe for US and UK customers. In Q1 2026, HubSpot reported $881 million in revenue, up 23% year-over-year, with $3.45 billion in ARR and 299,458 paying customers. It also acquired Warmly on June 29, 2026, following earlier acquisitions of XFunnel in November 2025 and Frame AI in December 2024 — a clear pattern of buying AI and signal-intelligence capabilities to deepen its platform.

Market

HubSpot sits at roughly 5.20% of the CRM platforms market — well behind Salesforce's 25.29% — but is growing revenue approximately 20-25% year-over-year against Salesforce's 8-11%, making it the fastest-growing major CRM vendor. Its sweet spot is mid-market companies that want an integrated marketing, sales, and service platform without the complexity of enterprise systems. The most disruptive pressure right now isn't a direct CRM rival: OpenAI's foray into application software triggered a 7.2% stock decline on October 1, 2025, and a major hedge fund exited in 2026 citing concerns about HubSpot's seat-based model and AI competition — a signal that the market is actively questioning how AI reshapes SaaS pricing and bundling.

Network

Daphne's closest named colleague in HubSpot's leadership chain is Rob Giglio, Chief Customer Officer at HubSpot. She's also a member of CS Angel, a Boston-based customer success community. She has collaborated with consultant Matheus Gomes on designing a Customer Success department from scratch, and with Erica Isotta Surace at a D2 collective event.

Rob Giglio· Chief Customer Officer, HubSpot
Matheus Gomes· Customer Success consultant
Erica Isotta Surace· D2 collective collaborator

How they likely show up

Multiple promotions within HubSpot (Senior Manager → Principal Manager → Director → Global Director) before a formal title change in July 2024 → earns trust incrementally inside an organisation and plays a long game rather than job-hopping for seniority.
Regular conference speaking on CS value, AI, and economic headwinds → comfortable putting a point of view on the record and does not shy from contested topics.
Runs both a podcast (This is Growth!) and a weekly newsletter (Unconventional Growth) alongside a demanding global director role → high output, likely sets her own agenda and rarely waits to be asked.
Career arc from operations (Head of Operations at WNDYR) to customer transformation to strategic CS leadership → frames customer success as a business outcome problem, not just a retention function.
Advisor at Syncly since June 2023 → actively engaged with the CS-tech vendor ecosystem, not just an end-user of it.
Speaks explicitly on AI making CSMs more valuable strategic advisors → her public stance is that AI augments the human CS role, not replaces it; she'll have a considered view here.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific episode or topic from This is Growth! or Unconventional Growth — she'll immediately know you've done more than a LinkedIn skim.
→ Ask about the practical mechanics of running strategic account CS at HubSpot's scale (299,458 customers, $3.45B ARR) — she operates at a level where generic CS frameworks don't apply.
→ Her speaking on AI in CS is nuanced — she argues AI makes CSMs more valuable, not redundant. Engage with that tension rather than defaulting to 'AI will automate everything.'
→ She's Dublin-based and has built her career in Europe's SaaS scene — don't assume a US-centric view of customer success metrics or organisational structure.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on HubSpot's July 2026 ToS reversal — the company publicly retracted changes after customer trust concerns, which is directly in her lane as Global Director of CS for Strategic Accounts. Ask how that landed internally.
Reference the Arrows Onboarding Therapy episode 'The AI Wake-Up Call for Customer Success Teams' — she argued AI makes CSMs more valuable strategic advisors, a specific, defensible stance that sets her apart from the automation-doom crowd.
Mention Unconventional Growth by name — she built a weekly newsletter on CS leadership, outcome-based pricing, and AI in CS alongside a demanding global director role. That's a deliberate investment, not a passive hobby.

Discovery questions

You've argued publicly that AI makes CSMs more valuable as strategic advisors — what does that actually look like in practice when you're managing strategic accounts at HubSpot's scale?
HubSpot just retracted a ToS update after customer pushback — how does an episode like that change the conversations your CS team has with strategic accounts in the immediate aftermath?
You moved from Head of Operations at WNDYR to building CS functions to now running strategic accounts globally — at what point did you decide CS was the discipline you wanted to own, and what from operations do you still use every day?

Avoid

Don't frame customer success as purely a churn-prevention or renewal function — her entire public body of work is about repositioning CS as a strategic, outcome-driven discipline, and starting from the retention angle will signal you haven't engaged with her thinking.

Make it yours