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120 - The HubSpot Features Clients Ask Us About the Most

 

HubSpot Can Feel Overwhelming

Clients often ask about the same handful of features: what they do, how to use them and whether they’re worth adopting.

In this episode, we unpack the HubSpot features clients ask us about the most and break down what they solve for, who benefits from them and how they fit into modern marketing workflows. The goal? To make HubSpot feel less overwhelming and help you prioritize what matters most.

 

PINEAPPLE-STRAWBERRY-LEMONADE-SANGRIA

 

Grilled Pineapple Strawberry Lemonade Sangria

The Grilled Pineapple Strawberry Lemonade Sangria leans into the idea that sangria doesn’t have to be heavy, syrupy or overly sweet to be enjoyable in warm weather. By grilling the pineapple first, the recipe caramelizes natural sugars and adds a subtle smokiness that balances the lemonade’s acidity and the wine’s brightness. The technique is simple, but it introduces depth that you don’t typically find in fruit-forward sangrias.

Recipe Credit: averiecooks.com 

 

Ingredients:

  • 1 fresh pineapple, cleaned & sliced
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil = 1/2 oz.
  • 2 cups strawberries = 16 oz.
  • 1 lemon sliced (optional)
  • 1 1/2 cups lemonade = 12 oz.
  • 1 1/2 cups pineapple juice = 12 oz.
  • 1 750 ml bottle light white wine = 25.4 oz.
  • Garnish: mint sprigs (optional)

Directions: 

1.    Preheat grill to medium-high heat or if using a grillpan, preheat over medium-high heat.
2.    Lightly brush the pineapple wedges on all sides with olive oil to prevent sticking.
3.    Grill for about 3 to 4 minutes per side, or as necessary until char marks develop. Remove from the grill, slice into bite-sized pieces, and add pieces to a large pitcher. You may not need all of them; extras are great as garnishes.
4.    Add the strawberries, optional lemon slices, lemonade, pineapple juice, wine, refrigerate for at least 2 hours (overnight is better), optionally garnish with mint springs and serve.

Episode Transcript

Zac: With new tools rolling out constantly, even experienced HubSpot users can get stuck. That's why we're tackling the most commonly asked questions about features we're asked to explain the most and breaking them down in a way that makes the platform easier to navigate.

Rich: Hey Zac, we're back with another episode.

Zac: We're back.

Rich: Yeah, it feels like we've been on a break forever, but we just haven't recorded in a while. So we're gonna talk today about HubSpot features that we get asked about the most. So the most common questions, basically three features that people always have questions about that can kind of be overwhelming, but they don't need to be. And we'll talk a little bit about that. HubSpot can be super intimidating. It's a big piece of software. And I actually had an onboarding this week who was like, “I didn’t want to do anything because I don’t want to break it.” And I’m like, you’re not gonna break it. Most things you do, you can roll back. It’s very hard to nuke the entire account. You can, but it’s very hard to do.

Zac: Well, and there’s so many tools, right? And there’s so many product updates that are coming out that it just seems super hard to keep track of everything.

Rich: Yeah, it can be. And I think that’s where it can start to get overwhelming. If you just chunk it out and look at what you need to do and how you need to approach things, it can be a whole lot easier. So we’re gonna unpack some of that and look at those features we get asked about the most, break down what we always have to solve for, what the benefits are, how they fit into your modern marketing scheme. And our goal, ideally, is that when you come out of this, HubSpot will feel a little less overwhelming and a little bit easier to prioritize.

Zac: Yes, exactly. So we can get into the cocktail.

Rich: Yeah. Grilled pineapple strawberry lemonade sangria. That’s a lot of words. That’s five words. Grilled pineapple strawberry lemonade sangria. So what the hell is this, Zac?

Zac: So this is from Averie Cooks, who's a food blogger. She’s been food blogging since 2009. She lives in Florida, which is probably why she said this is like an everyday kind of drink for her, because, you know, she lives in Florida, the temperature. But this leads into the idea that sangria doesn’t have to be heavy, syrupy, or overly sweet. It sounds super sweet, but by grilling the pineapples first, it actually caramelizes a lot of the sugars in the pineapple and adds a subtle smokiness that balances out the lemonade’s acidity and sweetness and the wine’s brightness. So yeah, I thought this was a super fun one. It’s getting cold here now, which I’m not really used to. I’m used to more mild winters now. So I guess I just wanted this to be more of a warm-weather drink so that I can look forward to summer. But yeah, it sounds good to me.

Rich: We’re all hoping for warm weather with this drink. That’s fine. I think so. Grilling fruit is something that a lot of people go, “What? Why would you do that?” I will tell you, Zac, grilled mango—amazing. And you’re right, it just cuts the sweetness a little bit by caramelizing some of those sugars. You get that char and that smokiness. You can also, if you’re doing them on an actual grill, throw smoke chips in if you want to.

Zac: I’ve heard of grilled peaches before too, and that’s kind of where I got this one. I know a lot of people put pineapples on meat skewers too, because it really cuts the sweetness and it’s a really nice complement to the really rich meat.

Rich: Yeah, it’s a great kebab thing. I mean, there’s also pineapple burgers that have like a grilled ring of pineapple on top of the burger. All right, so what do you need? One fresh pineapple, cleaned and sliced. And if you don’t have a pineapple corer, you’re going to want to get one because it’s so much easier to use. One tablespoon of olive oil, two cups of strawberries, one lemon sliced (that’s optional), one and a half cups of lemonade—freshly squeeze it if you can, but if you can’t, it’s totally fine to buy a really good lemonade. One and a half cups of pineapple juice—very hard to squeeze that, so just buy some of the little cans; you need 12 ounces of that. A 700ml bottle of light white wine—so I’m thinking a Pinot Grigio or a Sauvignon Blanc would be really good in this. And then some mint sprigs to garnish, ideally.

Rich: You’re gonna want to have your grill on medium-high heat, or if you’re using a grill pan, preheat it over medium-high heat. That’s what you’re really gonna want. And I do recommend: use the grill outside if you can. So much different, so much better. Lightly brush the pineapple wedges on all sides with the olive oil so they don’t stick, because that’s gross. Grill them for three to four minutes per side. They should start to get char marks—you should see that caramelization. When you see that, you’re good to go. You can also flip them two ways so you get crisscross grill marks on each side, which is kind of fun.

Rich: Take them off the grill, cut them into bite-sized pieces, add them to a large pitcher. You might not need all of them; you can use some as garnish, but basically these are going to be the first fruit in your sangria. Strawberries need to go in—take off the tops, nobody wants to eat that green top on the strawberry—and you can slice those as well if you want. You can put the lemon slices in for a little more lemony punch. Then lemonade, pineapple juice, wine all goes in there. Just stir it a little bit to mix it up and put it in the refrigerator for at least two hours. If you can leave it overnight, it’s fantastic, because all that fruit soaks up the booze and then you get this boozy fruit salad dessert at the end of your sangria, which is just so good. And that came from AverieCooks.com—grilled pineapple strawberry lemonade sangria.

Zac: Yeah, might be a good summer party drink.

Rich: Who knows? Yeah, it could be. I don’t know where we’re doing our summer party this year. It might be a trip. Who knows?

Zac: That’d be fun.

Rich: Yeah, there’s rumors that I heard from a little bird that it might be in Chicago.

Zac: Oh, yeah?

Rich: That’d be really cool. I was the little bird. I’m the one who said it might be in Chicago because I was like, we can all get there easy. It’s a direct flight for everybody, including the Sioux City people. We got somebody in Des Moines, or whatever. All right, well, shall we get into HubSpot?

Zac: Yeah, let’s do it.

Rich: All right. We’re back. We’re gonna talk about the common questions we get about HubSpot features. So we’re gonna tackle three features today that can be overwhelming or intimidating or frustrating for people and just talk about how to break those down. Those are gonna be workflows and automations, dashboards and reporting, and then HubSpot AI, which is actually pretty new. Lots and lots of questions around that. So let’s get into workflows and automations.

Zac: From my perspective, when I was first learning about HubSpot, workflows were one of the things that got brought up a lot when I was doing the learning in the academy. And I think it’s one of the things that people think about when they think about HubSpot. And that can be really intimidating, especially if you don’t know how it works or you don’t know how to get into it. HubSpot has a lot of good courses and academy stuff, but obviously there’s a lot more complexity to it. Do you feel like clients ask about this a lot too?

Rich: Yeah, 100%. So workflows and sequences—the two primary automations in HubSpot. And for people who don’t know, sequences are just linear and you want somebody to do one thing; workflows can branch and split based on what the person is doing, and you can kind of have multiple forms of communication and other things in there. So that’s really the difference between the two. If you just want somebody to schedule a meeting, a sequence is great with the sales tool because it stops when they schedule the meeting. If you want to send a drip campaign and resend emails for non-openers, or do something with people who click or download—put them in a list or do something else—or have multiple branches split apart based on anything, that’s a workflow.

Rich: And even just that description sounds a little bit intimidating, right? So I think the thing that we started doing in the beginning is we would actually draw them out either by hand or using Visio—the Microsoft tool, not the TV—so that we could kind of see where things go.

Zac: Actually visualize it before you make it. That’s a good… yeah.

Rich: And do it on paper with a pencil where I can scratch on it or whatever, or do it in a computer program. Anymore, we just do them in HubSpot natively now. We just start building them. HubSpot didn’t used to let you use placeholders—you had to create all of your emails for the workflow before you could even start making the workflow or you’d get stuck at that step. Now you can throw steps in for tasks, emails, everything, and leave them blank and it’s just a placeholder, which is really nice. So that made it much easier for us to build everything in HubSpot and then go build out the content that we needed to fill out the workflow.

Rich: I know it can feel complex, and I know a lot of people are like, “Oh, workflows take forever to set up. Is it worth it?” Maybe. If you’ve got something that is taking you a lot of time and that can be automated—things like assigning leads, triaging service tickets—those types of things are much better handled by a workflow. And yes, you might spend… it might be a hundred five-minute tasks that you’re going to have this workflow do, but you may spend five, six, ten hours building this workflow. But think about over the course of the year: you’re not going to have to do a hundred, a thousand, two thousand of those five-minute tasks.

Rich: And that’s where I feel like the setup is worth the payoff. If you’ve got something that doesn’t happen on a recurring basis, it’s probably not worth it for a workflow. I’ve done them for one-offs. I do them for cleanup—so you need to reassign 10,000 contacts from person A to person B? Just do a workflow. “If this person is the owner of this contact, enroll them, change the owner to this.” That workflow takes two minutes to set up and 60 seconds to run, and you’re done.

Zac: And I mean, just start with something simple, right? You don’t have to create this overly complex workflow. You can just start with a simple task, like you said, to really get started. And kind of how I was saying earlier: there is a lot of good learning and videos that make workflows a lot easier to understand, but getting in there and actually doing it and just experimenting is probably a good way to start. Focusing on an easy task that won’t cause you to overthink or fail to launch the actual workflow is a good starting point.

Rich: Yeah, I think the biggest ones that we see people make—and there are two that we kind of make first for everybody—one is to clean up your data. So if someone unsubscribes, remove them from your marketing contacts. Obviously you can’t market to them anyway, why pay for them? So there’s a bunch of those. But the real one that’s really useful, and you can clone it and copy it, is: whatever the enrollment trigger is—it could be a list, it could be an event, it could be you manually put somebody in there—the first step is always set them as a marketing contact, because if they’re not already, they will be then. Otherwise they won’t get your email.

Rich: Then send a marketing email, wait one day, check to see if they opened it or didn’t open it. If they opened it, check to see if they clicked or didn’t click. And if they clicked, you’re kind of done—they’ve done everything you wanted them to do. But if they didn’t click, you can send a second email with a stronger call to action. On the other path, if they didn’t open it, they didn’t like your subject line, so you could resend the same email content but with a new subject line that’s maybe a little bit more aggressive.

Rich: That simple one is really easy to do. It’s just one email and six or seven steps. The beauty of it is you can copy all of those steps together and paste them after the “they clicked,” wait seven days, send them a different email about a different topic, and everything is there to flow, so you don’t have to build it all over again. You can copy a single step or multiple steps and paste them wherever you need to in the workflow.

Rich: That one’s great. The other one—assigning leads—you can do a round-robin to different people, you can do weighted round-robin. Sorting people by state is another one that we've seen. Those are easy to do quickly and can save you so much time down the road.

Zac: Yeah, that’ll snowball too. You’ll be able to create more workflows, and the more you do these simple ones, the more you’ll see new opportunities to implement other workflows. It’s probably worth the time if you have a lot of repeated tasks.

Rich: Yeah. Marketing automation is what HubSpot is, right? A marketing automation tool at its core. I think the other thing to remember is the biggest mistake we see—this isn’t a mistakes episode, but I’ll just throw this out there—is people forget to put a time delay before you wait to see if the prospect did what you wanted them to do. They’ll do “send email, check to see if they opened it” and it’s like—that’s going to happen immediately. You’re going to send the email and check to see if they opened it. Nobody’s even really received it yet. So you’ve got to have that delay before you check to see if they did the thing you want them to do. Otherwise you’re going to run through like 40 emails instantly with one shot, which you don’t want.

Rich: Workflows are something you can always back up from and redo stuff. You can run yourself through the workflow as a test—it’ll show you what would happen at each step and skips all the delays to show you where a contact would go down that path. It’s pretty easy. You just have to get in there and start with small ones, and then you’ll get more complex.

Zac: Yeah, I agree. That’s awesome. I think workflows are definitely worth doing. I think a lot of people avoid them if they’re really new to HubSpot and they weren’t following along closely with their onboarding or stuff like that, but it’s definitely something people should look into.

Rich: Yeah, I see a lot of people who just do one-off emails or they’ll schedule 20 emails. And it’s like—except the way you’re scheduling these, they all work together in a series, right? You want this one to come a day after this one, so you’re having to think, “This one’s going to go out Monday, so I’m going to schedule this one for Wednesday and this one for Friday.” If you just do it in a workflow, it’s going to be so much easier. And then the nice thing is if you’re always running these campaigns where you send three or four emails a month, like one a week, clone the workflow, pop in the new emails, and you’re good to go.

Rich: You’re basically just creating templates for yourself for the future, right? And I recommend that with people a lot. So if you’ve got a workflow that’s going to be used for multiple things, create it with placeholders everywhere. Don’t put in any emails, don’t put in any tasks—just put in the task placeholder and the email placeholder, and then label it like “master email send template—do not delete” or whatever. Then when you go to use it, create your emails, clone that, name it whatever the campaign is, pop your emails in, and you’re done. Super easy.

Zac: Yeah. Well, that’s the first one. That’s the first one we wanted to cover with workflows and automation. I think the second one that a lot of people ask about and a lot of people are confused about are dashboards and reporting—which is funny because our last episode was why reporting and dashboards are creating stress for you and why they’re kind of a headache.

Zac: This is more about HubSpot’s dashboards and reporting and properly using them. There’s a lot of crossover between this episode and the last, so I highly encourage you to listen to “Why Your Reporting May Be Causing You Stress Instead of Clarity.” That was last week’s episode—definitely look that up. I’ll probably just pop in the link.

Rich: I mean, just give them the link. Make it easy.

Zac: So like I was saying, a lot of it is lots of data but not a lot of clarity on what the data is telling you. You’re looking at a lot of vanity metrics and also a lot of confusion on how some of the custom reporting in HubSpot works and some of the different reports you can do and the potential there. So yeah, I kind of wanted to see what you thought about that, Rich.

Rich: Yeah, I think the biggest thing with reporting—and we get this a lot—is, “Can you just make a dashboard for me?” Well yes, but what’s important to you? HubSpot has standard dashboards, and that’s where I always recommend people start. If you need a marketing dashboard, there are two or three marketing dashboards. There’s a sales rep dashboard, a sales manager dashboard, an overall sales dashboard, a web traffic dashboard. You can just go in and create one of their stock dashboards that’s going to have six, seven, eight reports on it. That’s a great place to start because HubSpot created those templates based on what most HubSpot users are putting on dashboards.

Rich: Does that mean they’re things you want to track? Not necessarily. You can always remove a report from the dashboard if you don’t want it. Then you can start adding reports of other things you want. Same thing with that: when you go into the reports section of HubSpot, there’s a menu on the left that has standard reports in marketing, sales, service, and website. You can start there, open those—that’s going to be the most common stuff. Your sales pipeline waterfall, deal stages, basic social reporting—it’s all right there.

Rich: So that’s two things, and you’ve never actually created anything at this point. You’ve just looked at what’s available, matched it with what’s important to you, and then popped it on a dashboard. Then the third area is when you go to create a report—before you even get into the full custom builder—there’s another template library with hundreds of templates. You can pick the topic: marketing emails, sales calls, whatever. It’ll filter the reports for you. I always say: find something that’s really close to what you want and then hit customize and modify it.

Rich: Lastly—and this is where people get frustrated because they start here—you can go create a custom report. You’ve got to pick what you’re reporting on: contacts, deals, tickets. Then you’ve got to pick the other information you want: marketing emails, social opens, ad data. Some things work together and some things don’t, so as you check boxes, others get grayed out. The good news is if you get close, you can go back and add another data source and then come back into your report and pull its properties in.

Rich: I never recommend just starting with a custom report. The basic things you want are usually already there, so there’s no real reason to start from scratch.

Zac: I agree. I think custom reports can be really confusing to new users. I think reporting and dashboards in general can also be really confusing. Like we talked about in our last episode—if you don’t have a clear plan for a dashboard, you’re probably just tracking vanity metrics. HubSpot has a lot of templates—using what they have as a starting point and customizing is probably the easiest thing to do.

Zac: I’ve been looking a lot into reporting and dashboards lately. I’ve been writing blogs and the podcast episodes, so I feel like I know everything you’re saying.

Rich: I think the other thing is each of the different sections in HubSpot usually has an Analyze tab. So if you’re in marketing emails, there’s an Analyze tab; if you’re in social media, there’s an Analyze tab. That’s where they’ve surfaced the most common reports for that area. It’ll show you things like email opens, clicks, interaction rate, bounce rate, all of that. And in a lot of those you can grab one of those reports and save it to a dashboard if it’s something you want on a broader dashboard.

Rich: If you’re really just looking for social metrics, the fastest way is: go to the Marketing menu, choose Social, click Analyze, and there you go—six or seven reports about how your content is performing, how your audience is growing, all that stuff.

Zac: And you can update those with filters. I think they just added a blog one too—I was looking today. You can actually analyze total blog views kind of like how it has for social. It said “new” in the top right corner so I was like, okay, this is useful. I was pulling together some stats for a case study.

Rich: Nice. So it’s just really interesting—there’s so much in there. There are thousands of reports you could pull plus custom ones, but you don’t have to use all of them. That’s where, before you even open the reporting tool, knowing what is important to you is huge. Do I need to see revenue? Total revenue from this month, this week, this year? Pipeline? Closed lost? What’s important? Then when you go dig for those reports, you can find them.

Rich: I also think people will sometimes do a mega dashboard, and you only get so many reports on a dashboard—I think it’s 20. That’s too many. If you have a dashboard on website analytics, just have that. Have another dashboard for your social, another for your sales. Keep them cleaner.

Rich: The other thing that people do—and I’ll give one mistake—is a lot of people will create their own properties, which is great, but a lot of custom properties you create can’t be reported on the way you think if you set them up wrong. If you create a text property and you populate it with a dollar amount, that dollar amount is just text—you’re not going to be able to sum it or average it. So create the property with the right property type, like number or dropdown. And don’t duplicate HubSpot’s properties.

Rich: We had one where somebody duplicated the state property because HubSpot’s is “State/Region,” and they created one that was just “State.” HubSpot doesn’t know that’s a special kind of field—it’s just text. It doesn’t tie into the built-in geographic stuff and it won’t pull into stock reports the same way. Especially if you’re doing something like revenue—if HubSpot has a revenue property, use theirs. Otherwise you’re going to be down a rabbit hole of custom reports and it’s going to be a nightmare.

Zac: It sounds like a nightmare.

Zac: All right, so we’ll get on to our final one. This is the one I’m most excited to talk about, because with how many new AI tools HubSpot is pushing and how many new agents they’re pushing, it can be really overwhelming to users to know what’s worth their time, what’s not exactly there yet, and what each of these tools actually does. If you’re not closely following these product updates like we are, you’re not going to really know or understand what this new tool in your portal is doing or going to do.

Zac: Honestly, I’ve been doing a lot of reviews for some of these AI tools, so in my opinion the best thing you can do is test it yourself to see what they do—but don’t put anything live, especially if it’s something that creates content from scratch, without changing it. We’ve covered it a lot of times: AI as an accelerant, not as a full-blown replacement.

Zac: And there’s a lot of new AI tools—there’s AI recaps on dashboards now that kind of tell you what a specific report does.

Rich: Those are pretty good ones. They’re pretty good, and the recaps on contact records or deal records—because it’s just looking and summarizing what happened on that record recently. Those aren’t bad. I think the Assistant isn’t bad because that’s just helping you with things inside HubSpot.

Zac: There’s a new video editor within Social—I saw that in the media composer—and within that there’s AI voice isolation. So you can actually, in there, clean up audio. If there’s something in the background, it’ll isolate the voice for you, which we did a full review on in a blog that’s coming out very soon. So stay tuned for that. But there’s a lot of stuff that’s useful and saves you time, and there’s also stuff that’s not exactly there yet.

Rich: It’s kind of a balancing act, right?

Zac: Yeah, 100%.

Rich: The things that I like about HubSpot’s AI tools is that they’re self-contained unless you unleash them. You can now connect Gemini and ChatGPT and Claude to HubSpot and you can get some of that going. If you do, I’d make sure you have a business account with those because a business account functions way differently than a personal account, especially with privacy and data.

Rich: But HubSpot’s native tools deal with the information you tell them it’s okay to use. You have to tell them it’s okay to use CRM information—you can even tell them which fields are okay and which aren’t. You have to tell them it’s okay to use your website pages or your knowledge base or a third-party website. You can also give them individual answers to things. That’s part of what I love about it.

Rich: They are starting to have their HubSpot agents go out and do things on the web and come back in. There’s a new one in private beta and we got into it—it actually uses website information to enhance data on a company record or a contact record. A good example is: HubSpot’s enhancements don’t have market share by default, but this agent will go and look for information from Nasdaq, from third-party sources, anything it can find on the web about market share and bring it back and populate it.

Rich: Even with those, you have to create the prompts and tell it what you want it to go find and where to put it when it comes back. It’s not just going to wake up one day and suddenly have all this garbage data in your CRM.

Rich: I think those are really good. I think the summarizing tools—which, again, ChatGPT is great at—are really good. Some of the other agents, like you noted, that create things like content: don’t just let them post content without you looking at it.

Zac: Yeah, definitely don’t.

Rich: You’ve also got the ones that can talk to your customers, and those can be great and can work really well—you have to set them up with the right data, make sure you’ve given them a good voice tone, trained them, taught them.

Rich: The other one that I love is the knowledge base agent that can scan your help desk tickets and look for gaps in your knowledge base, then look at the answers your reps have given and write a knowledge base article for that gap. That’s a great one in my mind.

Rich: With AI, what I usually tell people is: what’s the most important thing you want to solve? Grab that agent or AI tool in HubSpot and work with it. If you’re paying for video cleanup right now and you just want to try that audio cleanup tool in the video editor, great, do that.

Zac: And there’s pros and cons to some of the AI tools. That video editor, for example—it’s not fully AI powered, but it’s also not going to replace a higher-quality long-form video workflow. This is more for quick fixes. If you don’t already have a video editor and you don’t want to use a separate tool outside of HubSpot, it’s really good for quick timeline edits. You can add captions, so if you’re making a Reel, do that too. I think there’s music from what I remember. But like I said, it’s kind of just simple and for quick fixes, and that AI voice isolation can really save you in a pinch, but it’s not going to replace an actual editing software.

Rich: Yeah, so it’s not replacing Final Cut by any means—not even close. But what I do think it replaces—and they have a beta out on this too that I think I opted us into, I gotta see if we got into it—you can actually record video inside of HubSpot. That one was pretty cool. It’s working to replace Loom, obviously, because that’s exactly what it would do—screen + cam recording right inside HubSpot.

Zac: It’s so funny too because I was trying to do a screen recording the other day for a different video we’re putting out later, and I tried to use Loom and then I realized how limited a free Loom account is. I was like, I wish I just had a free tool—turns out I just did it on Riverside.

Rich: Riverside is great. You can also do it in Google Meet—start your own meeting and record. You can also use QuickTime on a Mac. But I think the thing about having it in HubSpot is: if you’re doing a demo video for your customers or a client or a knowledge base, it lives in HubSpot, you can edit it in HubSpot, and then put it on the knowledge base or wherever you want in HubSpot.

Zac: And you can create social posts from scratch or short one-minute videos from scratch now in HubSpot and you don’t necessarily need to go out of your way to go into Riverside like I did. That’s nice.

Zac: I think a lot of the AI tools are designed to do that: save you time so that you don’t have to leave the platform. But yeah, I don’t know—I have mixed feelings about some of the AI tools. Some of them I love and some of them I’m like, okay, this needs a lot of work if I’m ever going to use it.

Zac: But 100%, treat it kind of like workflows: if there’s a task that’s super repeatable that you think AI could help with or could save you a little time, then definitely look into those tools. We’re always looking into tools and sharing our thoughts on them, especially this year. One of our big focuses is reviewing a lot of this stuff so you guys actually get a full rundown—not just a short rundown of what it does, but also if it’s worth your time. So definitely stay tuned for those.

Zac: That’s kind of my overview of how I see HubSpot AI.

Rich: Yeah, and I think that’s good. The biggest one with that is accelerator, not replacement. That’s absolutely it: where can it help you do more faster? It’s what Darmesh said at INBOUND—let AI do what AI is good at and let people do what people are good at.

Rich: And I just always think: find one thing that you have a problem you want to solve or just one AI thing and play with it. See what works, see what doesn’t. You’re right, some of the agents I’m like, “Oh, these are really, really good,” mostly the ones that do research—the blog research agent, the social research, the one that goes out and looks for “National Whatever Day” that relates to your company and brings them back with suggested posts and stock images. That’s interesting. That’s kind of handy, because otherwise you’ve got to go look for those calendars and hunt through them.

Rich: Then you do have to read them and go through them, make sure the voice is right, tone is right, wording is right, images and all that. But if it gets close, you’re just editing instead of creating and researching on your own.

Rich: All right, so that’s three things that people find a little bit overwhelming that hopefully we’ve made a little simpler or at least given you some tips to approach in a slightly simpler way.

Zac: Yeah, you should have some decent starting points from this, hopefully.

Rich: 100%.

Zac: As always, you can find our agency at antidote71.com and all of our socials are there as well. And if you have a question you’d like to send our way, head to ctapodcast.live to shoot us an email. Even better, leave us a voice message on our hotline at 402-718-9971—your question will make it into a future episode of the podcast. I cannot remember off the top of my head what next week’s podcast is, but it’s gonna be a good one.

Rich: I’m sure we’ll have one. It’ll be a surprise for you and me and everybody. All right, with that, we’ll peace out and see you next week.

Zac: See you next week.