What Are the Most Overlooked HubSpot Features?
In this episode, hosts Rich and Catelin will be joined by Antidote 71's COO/VP, Jessica Simons, to discuss some key features of HubSpot that are often overlooked. With her extensive knowledge and experience with HubSpot, Jessica has identified some great features within the platform that go unnoticed by many users.
Hot Pants
The Hot Pants cocktail was first introduced in the 1974 edition of the Old Mr. Boston Official Bartender’s Guide. This peculiar drink is made of tequila, peppermint schnapps, grapefruit juice, and powdered sugar and is shaken and poured into a glass with a salt rim. Although the original recipe may not have been the most pleasing, something about the Hot Pants captured Baltimore bartender Tammy Bouma's attention, inspiring her to create a revised version for modern palates. Tammy's updated recipe replaces the peppermint schnapps with fresh mint tea syrup.
Before recording the episode, co-host Catelin and her husband, who is also an in-home bartender, tried this recipe. Below are her husband's thoughts, and you can listen to Catelin's live reaction in the episode.
Ingredients:
- 2 oz. reposado tequila
- .75 oz. fresh grapefruit juice
- .5 oz. mint tea simple syrup
- 5-6 mint leaves
Steps:
- Combine all ingredients in a mixing tin and shake with ice.
- Strain into a rocks glass over a large ice cube.
- Garnish with grapefruit twist.
Mint Tea Simple Syrup:
Boil water, then pour over mint leaves and stems. Allow to steep about 10 minutes. Strain out the leaves, then add an equal volume of sugar.
Recipe Credit: Punch
Tasting Notes:
Mint and grapefruit create a delightful flavor that goes well with the light oak from the tequila. Although I can still detect some hints of agave, they are very subtle and muted. There is no alcohol burn and only a slight scent, making it more refreshing than spirit-forward.
For this drink, I used equal parts simple syrup (1:1). Sometimes, I use a 2:1 sugar to water ratio, but I think the lower sugar content is the right choice for this one. Too much sugar would have taken away from the tangy and sour grapefruit taste.
Overall, this drink is a great crowd-pleaser. However, I found it a bit one-note for my liking. I would like to try it again with an unaged tequila that has a little more vegetal flavor.
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Episode Transcript:
Rich: Welcome
Catelin: to this episode of The Plague, brought to you by Cocktails, Tangents, and Answers.
Rich: Yeah, because you've got a slightly different voice today.
Catelin: I don't know what you're talking about. This is what I, I always sound this bright eyed and bushy tailed.
Rich: Exactly. Exactly. And there we go. Oh my gosh. So Caitlin, she feels marginal, she said.
Rich: I feel better
Catelin: than I did over the weekend, but still. I sound like, I sound like I've been
Catelin: chain smoking in my apartment in New York for like the last 40 years. Soon.
Rich: She'll just take a drag.
Catelin: I've been waiting for this moment to be able to bust out my Bronx grandmother accent.
Rich: So we are here and dedicated to bringing you an episode this week though, uh, because we are back and we were catching up.
Rich: Um, and so Zach said, no, we have to record. Do not delay. So here we are. And,
Catelin: um, today I will do anything for you, Zach. Including prostrate myself on the altar of, I don't know, like, flu? I think it's the flu.
Rich: Flu's been going around, and some people are getting it mild, and some people are getting it nailed.
Rich: So, um, alright, well, this is not about that. Can
Catelin: recommend the send your kid to grandma's house and sleep for 48 hours. I think that's the trick to kicking this
Rich: thing. Ah, that makes sense to me, because, I mean, you do need rest. Of course you need rest. Yeah, unsolicited health
Catelin: advice today as well.
Rich: Yeah, and today is, um, your favorite attire for our cocktail, hot pants.
Rich: Yeah. We just, we love some good hot pants.
Catelin: I was thinking about this as I was preparing for the episode and I have actually in my head I was like the only place that I find it appropriate to wear hot pants as a Taylor Swift concert But then I remembered that I wore my heiress tour outfit for a presentation day which technically included What I would consider hot pants So I have actually worn hot pants to the office, so I can't be as judgy as I once thought.
Rich: There we go. So Caitlin, not a fan of hot pants in the last episode, if you recall, has now sort of rolled that back
Catelin: a little bit. I've rescinded my judgment.
Rich: She doesn't like being a hypocrite, so, um, but yeah, so today and Jessica is going to join us here in a little bit. Um, and we're going to talk about some HubSpot features you might be overlooking or missing out on.
Rich: Um, so that'll be exciting. Not a lot to
Catelin: overlook in a hot pant though.
Rich: No, no, the hot pant just puts it all right out there. All on display. But I do believe Caitlyn, like, as we come to the Hot Pants Cocktail, which is the name for this episode. Yes. Beverage. Um, you had the privilege of actually, cause we're recording in the morning, like, it's like.
Rich: Like eight o'clock in the morning, nine o'clock in the morning. So we are not drinking. Um, we're drinking coffee, but you had the privilege. You sent your in home bartender slash husband out on an errand to gather ingredients last night.
Catelin: It's the only time he doesn't get annoyed when I'm like, Hey, can you run to the store?
Catelin: And he's like, Oh, it's for a cocktail recipe. I'll be right back. Nice. He's already changed into his soft pants. And he was like, yes, let me go put on. Oh, he put on hard pants?
Rich: Oh, appropriate soft pants. Yeah, there's indoor soft pants.
Catelin: He was still wearing his flannel shirt and then he put on his flannel soft pants but they're not the same flannel or plaid.
Catelin: It was a look.
Rich: Interesting. So he went out for that. So do you ever do like, Hey, I need some things and he says it's for a cocktail recipe and you're like, sure. I need flour. I need eggs. No, he's
Catelin: smarter than that. Eggs could be for a cocktail recipe though, because he loves a flip. That is
Rich: true. That man loves a flip.
Rich: But no flip in the hot pants. The people in hot pants do flips. That does happen. Um,
Rich: that would have been,
Catelin: yes, he went, he was more than happy to oblige the request for, for a live tasting. Um, he provided much more succinct notes than I did. Um, we have some audio from my, um, included in the background of that audio is the child that bequeathed this plague to me.
Catelin: So, um, Results may vary, but
Rich: I I think Zach's gonna throw that in here so everybody can know what we're talking about because you literally did a live tasting with video and sent it to us in Slack. So, we'll give a beat for him to do that, and then we'll talk about it.
Catelin: Live tasting notes for you, Zach.
Catelin: Please note that this is done with a cold. So, results may vary. I don't know if it's my, like, current health situation, but it reminds me of, like, a Hall's Breezer. Do you remember those?
Catelin: I don't think mint and grapefruit are meant to be together.
Catelin: I'm gonna ask Tyrell
Jessica: for his, his opinion too, but
Catelin: that's a no
Rich: from me. All right. So I suppose before we talk about the cocktail though, we should probably tell people what's in it so they understand your reaction to it. Yeah. Um. So, two ounces of reposado tequila. I love a good reposado, that's not a bad thing.
Rich: Um, three quarters of an ounce of fresh grapefruit juice. We've definitely taken a turn here. Uh, half an ounce of mint tea simple syrup. That is a hard left turn. And then five to six mint leaves. Um, okay, so mint, grapefruit, and tequila. Um, okay, sure. It's a, it's
Catelin: a look. It wasn't my favorite.
Rich: Yeah. So you have to combine everything.
Rich: Um,
Catelin: well, first to note, make them minty. Simple syrup is boil water, pour over mint leaves and stems, allow to steep for about 10 minutes, strain out the leaves, and then add an equal volume of sugar.
Rich: Yeah. So you did note this is a one to one water to sugar versus a regular simple syrup that's like a two to one sugar to water.
Rich: Two
Catelin: to one. Yeah, and that was one of Tyrell's notes is that he usually does like a two to one I'm trying to
Rich: yeah But that the one was actually appropriate for this because it would have pushed it way too sweet if you'd done a regular two to one So yeah, yep So you put all that stuff in a mixing tin and shake it with ice Strain it into a lot rocks glass over a large craft ice cube.
Rich: You could do round or square You can also just use regular ice if you don't have craft ice. It's totally fine Yep And then garnish with a grapefruit twist. Um, yeah. Okay. So it's, it's punch. Um, I don't know if I would like this one. Tyrone was cool with it, right, though? Like, he liked it. He did.
Catelin: Yeah, he, um, he said it was a little bit one note, but he'd take another go at it with an unaged tequila that had more of the vegetal instead of like a floral to kind of balance, I think.
Catelin: I'm
Rich: guessing you would do this and just replace the tequila with gin and probably have a lovely time.
Catelin: No, so here's the thing is, I love a Paloma. It was the mint for me. Oh,
Rich: it's the mint and the grapefruit together. We
Catelin: talked about it after he had had a couple more sips and he said that he thought there was something in the reposado that he used.
Catelin: That mixed with the mint that kind of went menthol. Cause like my, all and, and that's not my,
Rich: I think that's on purpose. So in looking at the background of this, it was invented in, uh, Baltimore, Maryland by a woman named Tammy. Um, Hey Tammy.
Catelin: This is a recipe by a woman named Tammy.
Rich: Yeah. And it was. It's originally tequila, peppermint schnapps, grapefruit juice, and powdered sugar.
Rich: So when you say it went a little menthol, there is nothing more menthol to me than peppermint schnapps.
Catelin: Like. And here's the thing. That's what I, that's what has caused this voice. It's like, run down to the corner store, get me another pack of menthols.
Rich: Oh my goodness. Um, it was also introduced in 1974, so remember like, this is like my time growing up before most of you all were born.
Rich: But um, Hopefully people listening understand, but this is also the time of like jello trying to get you to do savory jellos and spam I'm trying to figure out how you can do like everybody was trying to make you eat things in a way They weren't intended to sell more stuff And honestly, it could have been that they schnapps on hand cuz nobody was drinking it and she figured this out and Made it
Catelin: Peppermint Schnapps is for hot cocoa. Yeah. Everyone knows that well.
And so, uh, I just wanna do like
slightly correct you on something. I was just gonna jump in. She didn't. Oh, okay. Yeah, she didn't invent the cocktail. Uh, she helped like, kind of like, I guess like change it for a modern palette.
Rich: So, so she took out the schnapps.
Rich: The schnapps was in there from an old timey thing.
Yeah, so I think the original recipe was from a specific book.
Rich: The Old Mr. Rauston Official Bartender's Guide in 1974. That's the original with schnapps. Tammy is the one who went, this is disgusting. We should instead do this with mint tea leaves. Because that'll be more bougie.
Rich: So. Well, you know, God bless her for trying. Um, I think I can't decide if I would like this or not. Um, we do have mint leaves at home because we needed them for some sort of a lamb thing that we're doing. I don't know, for dinner. Um, I would just have to go get a grapefruit and then we have all of the rest of this stuff at home.
Rich: Yeah.
Catelin: You should try. I mean, you should try it. I think I would try it again without this.
Rich: Yeah, you've also, yeah, you've got your tasters off anyway. Yeah. Yep. Um, okay. So with that, I think we can, um, put that hot pants away. Can we put this to bed? The hot pants will go into a drawer and wait for summer, uh, along with their cocktail.
Rich: And we'll be back after the little party break with Jessica.
We're back! We are
Rich: back with Jessica, Caitlin's gravelly voice, and Jessica, who has her usual voice. Hey Jessica!
Hi!
Catelin: So sunny! Good morning! She sounds like Cinderella with the birds helping her get
Jessica: dressed. It's cause I also have my coffee this morning, so it's
really the only thing getting me through.
Rich: Well, and I know the room she's in, and honestly If it was warmer, if it was like spring or summer, she could flip open that garage door window and maybe the birds would come in and like, you know, make a ponytail or something.
Jessica: Oh, I'd be singing with the birds like a Disney freakin princess.
Rich: Sure, sure. I'm sure you'd do
Catelin: plenty of that at home. Which Disney princess would you choose? Ooh, I don't, I
Jessica: don't know. It's too
early for that kind of icebreaker question,
Jessica: Caitlin. You know this. Not Elsa. That's
Rich: not an icebreaker. Not Elsa, because we're over the cold.
Jessica: No, and Hattie, my daughter, would absolutely freak out if I tried to take Elsa because she would always pick Elsa, so there's no way I could pick her. That's, you can't have two.
Rich: Hmm. Fair
Catelin: enough. It reminds me of, um, Kristen Bell's daughters dressing up as Elsa, and she was like
Jessica: What the fuck? For anyone who's not aware, because she plays Anna, who is Elsa's sister, and they didn't want to be her.
Jessica: Aren't people not aware? I knew that before I had kids. Some people might not. Yeah, but.
I
don't know. A child. Before I had a child. I know
Rich: she's married to Bat Shepard.
Catelin: Rich didn't know. Anna. You didn't know that she used the voice of a Disney princess?
No. Um. The more you
Catelin: know. Anna of Arendelle? No, but it makes sense.
Catelin: Queen Anna. Now. After Frozen 2. Spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. It's
Rich: true. Way to go. I
Catelin: haven't seen it. That movie has been out for five
Rich: years. Thanks. Spoiling it. All right. Well, no spoilers here. Just things that you may have missed, like not knowing that Anna was played by Kristen Bell. Um, I was going to say who knew, but apparently you both knew and I didn't.
Rich: That's correct. Um, but
Jessica: we're going to talk a little bit today. Zach, you could let us know if you knew at some point.
Rich: Uh, Zach is definitely into the Disney princesses. He's
Catelin: like, I'm not popping in for that. Move on. Although
Funko Pop
Rich: Elsa, he might have Funko Pop Elsa. I don't know. So, we're going to talk about HubSpot again.
Rich: And we're going to talk about some features that you might be missing if you're using it. Um, we do a ton of HubSpot onboardings, like upwards of about 100 a year, um, now. And it's one of, um, one of our core businesses and core pieces of things. We also manage HubSpot. Uh, for clients and for ourselves. So we're in there constantly.
Rich: And these are some things that we find out that people have this kind of, aha, I didn't know you could do that. Um, when we're going through an onboarding or showing them things. So, um, with that, um, not sensing any other tangents at the moment, Jessica, do you want to jump into one? Like what, do you have a favorite from the list?
Jessica: I don't know about a favorite, but I will say that if you're using HubSpot, these are things that everyone can do on their own. They're not like difficult things to get into, but there are things that you might be missing. Um, so don't be afraid to go in and dig for it. This is not, this is not something that you, uh, it's not rocket science.
Rich: It's just yeah, sometimes things get missed in a setting or in a menu My favorite is that HubSpot continues to move things around in the menus That's one of my favorites when I log in to do an onboarding and I'm like, where did that go? And they think I'm an idiot and I'm like no because I swear yesterday that was in a different spot in the menu I know it was
Catelin: I I Demonstrated this to someone like we were we Shared screens in the same meeting and their menu was different than my menu and I was like see I'm not crazy It's
not me.
Rich: This time. I have one help desk beta feature that's like all private. And I was like, I tried to get us into it so that I could understand it. And they're like, Oh no, that's like selective people only. And I'm like, then why is this brand new hub in this for select people only? And how am I supposed to talk to them about it if I can't play with it?
Rich: So anyway, that's not, uh, what we're here for. We're not
Jessica: here for this. That's a, that's a tangent. So much for, yeah, it was like so much
Catelin: for not another tangent. I know.
Rich: The edge. Oh, is that a rant in a tangent? Is that what a rant gent is? Oh, are we
Jessica: combining things again today? Let's not even start that. No,
Rich: no.
Rich: We had a bad combination yesterday. We're not doing that. We're not doing that. So Jessica, your favorite HubSpot feature that gets overlooked.
Jessica: Ooh, I don't, again, not my favorite, but I think that the first one we can start with is the never log list. Yes. So this is an area in HubSpot where you can put specifically, I always recommend for any company that we're working with, put your company's domain in the never log list.
Jessica: So that if you and just one of your employees are emailing back and forth, it doesn't create a contact and log it in your system.
Rich: So you're emailing HR.
Catelin: HR best practice,
right?
Rich: Yeah, so you're emailing HR about someone. I had a client who was like, Hey, um, everybody can see all of our internal emails. And I'm like, you didn't set up the number log list like we talked about.
Catelin: Well, and there's Two places to do it. So you can set up, super admins can set up a portal wide Neverlog list that would include things like your company domain or like vendors that you don't want, you know, if you
have a private
Rich: vendor. Your lawyer's domain, your accountant's domain.
Catelin: But there's also individual never log lists.
Catelin: So I had one client who put like his, cause he just had one email. So he didn't want to manage a work email and a personal email. So he had one email address that he used for everything. So he put like his personal accountant and his wife and his kid's school teacher on his personal never log list while we, while we built out the organizational never log list.
Rich: Yeah, I do wish. And maybe I'll jump into the community and suggest this. I feel like HubSpot should just, as a best practice, default to putting your company domain on the never log list because it's only, so Jessica, if I'm outside your domain and I email you and Caitlin who are in the domain, what happens to that?
Jessica: So it would still log that email because you have an external client. Like if you worked for another company and. Your domain was obviously different than ours. It would create a contact for you. It would still log all those emails Because it needs to be for that contact, but it wouldn't if caitlin and I were just emailing each other.
Jessica: It wouldn't log that
Rich: Yep Perfect. I of course knew the answer to that, but I want you to show me. What a softball. I know, but that's one that I have to explain to people because they're like, so what if, so then if I'm on it and I email somebody else, does it not log anything? And I'm like, no. It's only if those are the, that's the only domain.
Rich: But same thing, if it's you and your accountant and both of those domains are on the never log list, it's not going to create a contact or log that, um, because people do a little bit cleaner. Yeah. And people do go through and look at contacts and read emails.
Catelin: I don't know who you would be
Rich: talking about.
Rich: I don't either. We have no one in our company who ever does that just to see what's going on with an interesting situation. Sometimes it's like a soap opera like script as you're going back through it being like, wow, this is interesting. Well, and
Catelin: to that point, it is also helpful in terms of institutional knowledge.
Catelin: Like when you are consistently logging emails, there can be some nuance that gets lost in client notes or reports or you know, it is helpful to have that historical perspective if you need to go back and reference things and
Rich: you're out sick, you're on vacation and somebody else needs to go over for you.
Rich: They can jump in and see what the last emails were that you guys exchanged and be at least informed before they reach out or like try to help somebody. Yeah, that's a good one. And that's, that one blows my mind, but Yeah, it should just be a default. Your own domain should just be default in there, always.
Rich: Whatever domain you open your portal with, but it's not. I'm going to jump into the ideas form and put that in there. All
Jessica: right. Are you ready for another one? Okay. So this one came up recently on one of my onboarding calls, actually. And with the HubSpot meeting links, you can do group links to where it is going to check everyone's calendar, or you can do round robin links.
Jessica: So if If the three of us, for instance, because we are all sales pro users, we could be on a round robin meeting link and then every time a new one comes in, it would rotate through. But this particular client wanted to make sure that if it was a known contact, it would go to whoever was the contact owner.
Jessica: And I know we have one like this as well, um, already set up. That we use and you can check a little box that says prioritize the existing contact owner So you don't ever have to worry about you know, if one of my clients emailed they wouldn't get randomly assigned to Richard Caitlin They would always be assigned to me even if it wasn't my turn in the round
Rich: robin Yep, and that's extremely handy Because a lot of times like we'll have existing clients just use our meeting link on the website to schedule a meeting and it schedules With me and Jesse and Jessica and then we have to go through and like remove the people who don't need it Or if it's Caitlin's we have to add you and then remove us and it just gets a little weird But that's a really neat one I think there's a few other places that you can prioritize the existing contact owner as well So like even in workflows in some other places I
Catelin: always suggest In, um, in emails, like to say, like personalize if you're doing marketing emails, you can say default to the contact owner and use the reply to as the contact owner.
Catelin: So even if it is a marketing email, you can make it look like it's coming from. that person's contact at your company and just add that little bit of
Jessica: personalization to it too. You can also do it in like templates or templates that you're using in sequences where you want to include a meeting link. You don't want to have to have a template version for every employee in your company that you would have sending out them.
Jessica: So you could have it be, uh, whoever is the sender's. And then it would just default personalization token drop that in so that the individual that's sending it doesn't have to actually drop it in every
Rich: time. Yep. And the only caveat on that is it, it has to use their default meeting link. So like I have like 20, 25 meeting links because I have some for different stuff.
Rich: I've got combo links and I had to make sure when we set that up for us, that my default link would work for kind of all situations. So I have it set for like schedule. 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, you choose and everybody chooses the wrong thing no matter what you tell them, but At least they get it scheduled and I can make it adjust
Jessica: So one thing I will say is all of the Meeting link stuff that we've just been talking about is all for like professional paid seat users But one thing I always like to let people know because I love the meeting link so much is that every user in your system Actually gets a free meeting link Yes, just one.
Jessica: So even if you're not, you don't have a paid seat, but you're a user and you want to make your life more efficient with your scheduling of meetings, set up your meeting link and send it. Because no one loves the back and forth emails of, I'm available on Tuesday at 3. Oh, I'm not. What days are you available?
Jessica: And the back, and it saves so much time to just connect your calendar. Have that one meeting link that you can use for your contacts Even if you don't have all of the permissions as a paid user It's a benefit that everybody can take advantage of
Catelin: I used to tell like Before I understood more, more in depth about HubSpot, I was like, the meetings tool will pay for itself in like a week.
Catelin: Just with the time saved.
Jessica: Well, and Not having to email back and forth.
Rich: Yeah, and if they're paying for Calendly, it's like, well, if you have more than one meeting link, you'll need Pro, like, or at least Starter. But, um, Everybody gets one and like even if you don't have the sales hub at all, you're only a marketing hub group Everybody gets a meeting link.
Rich: I think that's a whole episode We should probably put a pin in that Zach all of the free stuff you can do in HubSpot without honestly anything because there's like There's not a huge ton, but there's quite a bit, um, that you can do. So that's another, another meeting, another topic. Yeah.
Jessica: Some of it includes like HubSpot branding, but on a meeting link, who cares?
Jessica: Like everybody knows that you're sending a zoom link. If you have a Calendly link, I think it says Calendly all over it. No matter what. So does it really matter if you're just trying to use it as a scheduling tool?
No.
Rich: So those are two good ones. Um, and we're doing really great on time today. Jessica's always efficient.
Rich: She's like, let's just hammer these out.
Catelin: She's got other stuff to do.
Jessica: You know, it's the morning. There's too
Rich: many things. There's one on here that I wasn't aware of, actually. It's your fourth bullet point on reporting. Reports
Jessica: collections? Mm
hmm.
Jessica: Okay. So, as we said earlier, HubSpot is constantly making updates and changing the menus and all of that.
Jessica: So, one thing that they've More recently done like in the last few months. I think I kind of see it updating every day is they've always had preset dashboards that you could select to be able to set up and utilize their default reports. But now when you go under reporting and into reports, there are actually below the list of all the reports you've saved.
Jessica: There's report collections. And when you click into them, you can actually get some of those. preset reports, but they're a little more refined. You don't have to dig through them. You don't have to know the exact name of the report that you're looking for if you're searching. So it just makes it more efficient to be able to set up your reporting just a little bit quicker and be able to find it.
Jessica: Like if you don't save it on a dashboard and you just want to be able to access sales outcomes or something along those lines, you can actually just jump in and see it from there.
Rich: Yeah, and I do remember this now. They've grouped all of that stuff. Like, cause it wasn't the beginning. Just your sales analytics were all together like that.
Rich: And now it's like everything and it's stuff like it's logical terms, right? Like these are a group of reports that sales managers might want. These are a group of reports that marketing managers might want that sales people might want, you know. Report on your team's performance like they're grouped in ways that are like this is what I want to do These are probably the ones that I want Yeah,
Jessica: like if you want to look at like one section is forecasts and pipelines so you can literally dive into the deal reporting super easy be able to get an idea of where you're at for the quarter or the year or whatever without having to recreate or Do custom reporting.
Jessica: Cause you can always adjust filters on the hub. So you can add
Catelin: data points too. Like it doesn't, it's not like customize any only way.
Rich: Yeah. Yeah. That's one of my recommendations is don't reinvent the wheel. Find a report that's close to what you want that might not be exact. And then hit that edit button and go and customize and go in and customize it.
Rich: And even if it's like, Oh, I want this exact like structure and format and look, but I want it on a completely different metric. Totally fine, go in and add your metric and remove the one that they've got. Um, it doesn't always work, but most of the time you can make that work. The other
Catelin: thing I always ask when people want these like, really granular, specific reports, is why?
Catelin: Like, like what What are you going to do with it? Yeah, like what point In your business is this serving and they usually are like well, I just want to know and it's like But aren't we knowing that by this other thing? That's like pre Like use the tool obviously and if you can get it to spit out what you're specifically looking for then Great, but more often than not what you're after or Pretty dang close to it is in the canned reports and you can just move on like you don't have to spend your time toiling Especially if data is not your strong suit, which is hello.
Catelin: Hi me
Rich: And it's designed right. It's for marketers, not for data analysts. Like it doesn't, I've used other CRMs and other marketing automation tools that you do have to hire like a group of analysts to build things for you and look at things. Um, and a lot of times when we're on with marketers, that's one.
Rich: Yeah. Um, If you take them into, like, I've stopped taking people to the, like, the start a custom report from scratch thing. They just are overwhelmed. Like, I'm overwhelmed in there, and I know what I'm doing and how to move stuff around. But it's a lot of trial and error. And I do think Upswept's done a great job of predicting, like, we think you might want these reports.
Rich: And there's tons of them in there. Um, and even if you're going to customize a report, there are ways to start it without starting from just a blank slate.
Catelin: I mean, it also speaks to the fact that HubSpot listens when people put stuff in the community to say like, Hey, I've been trying to do this for a year, where's it at?
Catelin: And they're like, Oh, let's put it on the roadmap and figure it out. And then those types of things bubble up because I remember when, when I started getting deeper into HubSpot and it was like, you need to be able to teach people how to build reports. And I was like, well. Then just fire me because I will never be able to figure that out.
Catelin: But now I have a pretty good understanding, partially because I've learned more, but also because they have made starting from scratch. less necessary from the, the canned stuff that's available.
Jessica: Well, and I think going back to your point about it's built for marketers and not data analysts, it's, there are some companies that have never had a system where they can pull reports, so they don't even know what they want and the pre at least give you an idea of where to start.
Jessica: You're like, Oh, I didn't even know I could do something like that. Or I didn't know that that data would be in there. So you can at least use that as your starting point. And then if you want to tweak it, go for it. But at least you know where you can begin, you know, what's possible.
Rich: Yeah. Reports used to be kind of a black hole for people.
Rich: And now it's like, Oh, like I don't have to just have this boring Excel list. I can actually. And I'm like, you can do a visualization, you can do a table. That's the other thing I think. All of those reports have a visual that's like a chart. It'll give you the
Catelin: option to change all the little
Rich: And there's a table underneath it and you can, if you like the table view, you can save the table view.
Rich: If you like the report, the chart view, you can save the chart. If you like them both, you can put both of them on a dashboard next to each other or below each other. It's totally fine. I love it when
Jessica: people are like, can I see it in a list? I'm like, well, yeah. Just click it! Like you can just click into it or you could make a list, but also, yeah, you can, you can save it as a table.
Jessica: Here you go.
Rich: Who knew like eight years ago or whatever it was when we, seven years ago, when we started doing HumpSpot stuff that we'd be sitting here on a podcast, geeking out about the reports tool would not have pegged that not on my bingo card.
Jessica: So the reports tool is not necessarily my biggest geek out workflows.
Catelin: Yeah, girl
love
Rich: a good workflow. And you've got one on here that is a ridiculous eye opener for most people that you can do it. And I love it.
Jessica: So, if you have been in the workflow tool, you know that there are an endless list, it feels like, of options of what you can do with the actions in a workflow. One of my favorite ones, and one that I use in, I would say, 75 to 90 85 percent of all workflows is that you can either copy or set property values in a workflow so for example, I have a Client that likes to they have a couple of deal pipelines for different pieces of their business and they need to copy like the deal name and the amount and some of the other date properties from one deal pipeline to another Because they want two separate deals.
Jessica: They don't want to just move the deal from pipeline to pipeline So they could actually say create a new deal and then copy from this record to this record or setting properties Like you want to set a life cycle stage based on how they're moving through your pipeline Or something along those lines or if they've filled out a form you want to set them to a special a special type of form You want to set a specific contact type maybe?
Jessica: You can put all of those in there and the workflow will just do it for you. So it's not, it doesn't have to be a manual process of when you see someone come through. You have to go in and select a property and set it.
Rich: Yep, and I love, so my favorite is the copy. And it's because I had a client who's like, Hey, so like, we're seeing that like the company name says, you know, blah, blah, blah, ink, but on the individual contact record, it just says, blah, blah, blah.
Rich: It doesn't have the ink. And I want to make sure that what's on the company record is always what's on every contact record. And it's like, Oh, well you just do a workflow. That's copy property company. Um, from company record to contact record company field and they're like, Whoa, it's like, uh huh. Yeah.
Rich: That's really cool. Um, we did
Jessica: it with, I did it with like, um, they wanted contact type and company type to match. So if it was a vendor on the, they were filling out, they were always updating their company record. So they wanted it to match on all the contacts. I was like, well, yeah, that's easy. You can do it in a workflow, like just set it here.
Jessica: And they were like, this is amazing. It's saving us so much time.
Rich: Yep, you can also set owners. Like, you can actually take existing contacts, and there was one I had, and they're like, we have all these old owners that aren't, like, shouldn't be in here. And I'm like, okay, well, let's talk through how we can do this with a workflow.
Rich: Like, one, we can clear out those people, if you know, like, the ten that are supposed to be there. If owner is not one of these ten, clear it, then we can take, say, anybody who doesn't have a contact owner, put them through a round robin. You know, or if you have zones or whatever, we can put them through there.
Rich: So I think clearing a property is also a handy one sometimes. Um, the other one for me is you can delete a contact from a workflow now. And it's like, so for me, it's the, um, if it comes in and we know it's a spam bot, we can automatically delete it. Um, or if it's, um, you know, you can choose kind of, you know, anybody who hasn't responded in the last year.
Rich: I don't want to just archive them. I just want to delete them. Like most people will archive them because you can store those contacts and it was not marketing. But, um, workflows have so much power. And it's especially just for data management. Pros that'll be like what I'm gonna use a workflow for like if I can't send marketing emails with sales pro and I'm like Oh, you could do all kinds of things and honestly, yeah, if your leads are coming in from a work from a form Or even from an email like we can do stuff with that like in a workflow
Jessica: Well and like salespeople no offense are terrible at data
Catelin: cleanliness so like either That, oh God, and God bless them because they're so busy trying to cold call and send emails and like do all of the outreach.
Catelin: That's not a skill set I have. I don't want to do it. But you can, you can leverage both workflows and then kind of dovetailing on that, like forcing in deal pipelines before you can move from one stage to the next, requiring fields, which is a workflow, right? It's an automation. You can require them to fill out certain fields before things progress.
Catelin: As
Jessica: a manager, that is something you should always be doing. Because if you are complaining about people not filling it out, like, set those rules. Make them do it. I hate it when people are like, well, I can't get my sales team to fill out these properties. I'm like, well, no, you really can.
Rich: Yeah, you can make those, uh, required, 100%.
Catelin: It's, it's funny to me, like, how quickly bad processes fall apart when you try and automate them. Like, that is, to me, the number one indicator of a poor process. It's like, if you can't automate it and repeat it every time, it's like, then you don't have a process.
Rich: Well, and I had one that was like, we're not really great at following up with form like requests.
Rich: It's like, we're great at emails that come in, and we're not really great at following up with form requests. And the one that they just unveiled in like October is you could now, um, with just sales pro, you don't need enterprise. You can enroll somebody in a sequence from a form fill. So they fill out this sales request form.
Rich: You can actually, so no salesperson has to even email them. You just start that sequence. And then if they reply via email, which they said they were good at. Boom, you're good to go. Um, and it's not just a thanks for filling out the form. It's a, hey, I see you requested a demo of XYZ product, you know, use my meeting link to schedule a demo and then following up with them like three or four times, um, to try to get that to happen.
Rich: You can also now finally unenroll from a sequence based on a form fill, which is huge because it used to just be schedule a meeting, reply to an email, schedule a meeting, reply to an email. And so now you can choose a specific form or any form. to, uh, unenroll them from, um, because like for us, we, we try to get collect info, right?
Rich: From like new clients or whatever it might be. And once they fill out the form, we don't need to bug them about filling out the form because they've, Oh, this is
Catelin: blowing my mind
Jessica: right now. Well, like think about it if you were doing like you wanted them to register for an event or something along those.
Jessica: Yeah And they're not replying back to your email. They're not scheduling a meeting They're registering so you can put that form in your sequence. And as soon as they take that action from in your template
Catelin: Maybe
Rich: yeah, and you get to that through the sequence feature That's an important note like once and you have to save your sequence before it ungraze, but there's an automation thing and you can hit create workflow.
Rich: And then that's where you get the option to enroll or unenroll, um, from a form. And there's one other thing in there. I can't remember what it is, but, um, There's very limited options that you can do in pro. I mean, in enterprise, you can do anything you want to. You can do is put a sequence in the middle of a workflow.
Rich: If you want, like
Catelin: for enough money, you can do whatever you want.
Rich: Well, and that's like, um, but the fact that in pro you can do that, cause sales pro is not that expensive, you know, it's a few hundred dollars a month or whatever. No. Yeah. Um, it's one of the more affordable tools. And if you automate that stuff, you can do so much more.
Rich: So automation,
Jessica: Like the arguments that I love to push back on when I hear it is well We want to make sure that the sales team is still being held accountable for doing all of these things. I'm like Okay, I get that. You want to make sure that they're actually doing the work to like nurture and bring in this business, but if you're automating some of the stuff that they're getting stuck on, they can focus on actually doing the follow up and selling your product or your service or whatever it is, instead of making sure that they're updating or moving a deal along a pipeline and things like that.
Jessica: Like, Automate the things that don't really matter and let them focus and the software is going to pay for
Rich: itself. Well, and also what's more important? Making 500 cold calls and seeing that they made 500 cold calls this week or seeing that they closed 10 deals this week. Right. Like, obviously closing 10 deals is more important.
Rich: So let the software make those cold calls and follow up on that or those cold emails. Oops, geez, I'm talking with my hands and um, And then as people respond or are interested, you know, they'll come back. You can actually reach out to far more people and, you know, just touch base.
Catelin: It speaks to scale too.
Catelin: So like, if your goal is to grow your business, put this process in place now when you have three salespeople where you can't, you know, like if you, if you want to know exactly what activities they're doing, that's fine. That's, that's. doable with three salespeople. What happens when you get to five? Then what are you going to do when you get to 10?
Catelin: How
Jessica: do you scale that process? If you're looking at tracking activities, they're in there. So utilize the software. You can see how many emails they're sending. You can see how many calls they're making and what those call outcomes are. So you actually get a more accurate, I think, depiction of what your team is doing on a day to day basis.
Jessica: Last one? The last one actually is one that I think, Caitlin, you are more of an expert on because I think you've been dealing with it, which is a support ticket inbox, which I think is like an offshoot of the regular conversation
Rich: inbox. Yeah, so Adriana has been dealing with this actually.
Catelin: Yeah, I was like, I think you're overstating.
Catelin: So, when
Rich: you've got a support form linked to an inbox or a support email linked to an inbox, um, you can have it create tickets automatically from that inbox. So, um, the other thing that's nice about it is when the ticket gets closed, the conversation gets closed. They're always linked.
Catelin: And you can automate the conversation being closed.
Catelin: And the, like, closing the loop with the client. Can you tell we like automation?
Jessica: Yeah.
Rich: Yeah, the whole inbox thing, that could be an episode all on its own too. Um, and again, everybody gets one free inbox. Like, we have our general inbox, we also have an accounts payable inbox. And as I was explaining to one of my clients, it's like, cause if one of Caitlin's clients, we send invoices out from our AP email address.
Rich: So if one of Caitlin's clients replies back with a question about her invoice, I don't need to deal with that. Jessica doesn't need to deal with that. It needs to go straight to Caitlin. And we have Service Pro, so we can route that straight to Caitlin, because she's the contact owner. And anything that's not going directly to somebody, either Jessica or I take care of, or we delete her, because there's still some crap in there.
Rich: Like, this is just a receipt. Well, I took care of that earlier, so just close it. Um, but those are really, really handy. But everybody gets one, um, that you can have. And it's very, very, I don't know. It's a really underutilized feature
Jessica: Well, and I think we've been talking a lot about like different features of like pro and whatever But utilizing those free features and the things that are included can really show you if there's going to be a benefit to purchasing The starter suite or you know, the starter piece of it or the pro And if you're going to utilize it because if you start using a meeting link and you're like, oh, I love this I wish I could do different ones or I wish we could do a round robin or group meeting Then that might be a selling point that convinces you that like, yeah, it's definitely going to be worth it.
Jessica: Same thing with the inboxes. Like if the conversations inbox that you're using, the free one is really saving your team a ton of time, but you're like, Oh, we could also use it for X, Y, and Z, or we'd like, you know, you're getting
Rich: that use case, you know, we'd like to automate it. And while you can, you need pro to automate.
Rich: Um, yeah, it's really, um, I don't know. Just using some of those things that are in there and free can really help you. That's part of why they make them free. Right. They want you to kind of be like, Oh, this is useful. I should upgrade. Like I should go do this. Um, and like request a demo. Like sometimes you can do your own 14 day trial of different things.
Rich: Um, so like, and
Jessica: also not to get like. salesy for us, but like you can always reach out and we help people every day figure out what's going to be the best, or if there's a workaround for something, because you really can't afford some of these things. Will the free work for you? Because we don't, I mean, we love to help people in HubSpot, but we don't have a skin in the game necessarily on what you pick, we just want to help make it most efficient.
Jessica: So like, we are happy to answer questions along those lines too. Yup. Yeah. That is a great call
Catelin: to action, Jessica. I
Rich: agree. Wow. I agree. I feel like that's a good place to end it. I'm also looking at the time and thinking that Zach, if he had his camera on, would be nodding like, wrap it up.
Catelin: Get it over with.
Rich: So, um, thank you Jessica so much for, um, jumping in and helping us out. Anytime. It was really great. Anytime. Don't. You heard it. Anytime. Honestly. Absolutely. She likes us y'all. We got her on the record. Obviously.
Jessica: I spend all day every day with you fools.
Catelin: True. But she likes us enough to talk to us on a microphone.
Catelin: We got a hot pant. We got a hot mic. Here we go.
Rich: Perfect. Alright, so we gave you some tips on some features that are less used in HubSpot, but I think the biggest tip was play around, look for those free things. You know, do that trial. Um, dig around a little bit. Capitalize on what you're already paying for.
Rich: I say this with a grain of salt because I've seen people like nuke things and break things pretty badly, but it's rare. You can't, it's really pretty hard to break something big time in HubSpot. It's unfuckable. Uh, you can, like I've seen some people who either take their whole website down or delete the, even if you delete the entire context list though, you can get it back unless you,
Jessica: but yeah, you can un you can unfuck it.
Jessica: You
Catelin: can unfuck it. It's not alright. It's not like un We just wanted
Rich: be explicit on this podcast episode. No,
Jessica: Caitlyn did it
Rich: first. Adam, all. So we want to thank everybody for listening, of course, and for, uh, dealing with, uh, our voices, uh, well, Caitlyn's voice, um, and a cocktail that seemed fairly, uh, it's perfectly fine.
Rich: I appreciate that you showed up because you could have said, no, I'm not doing this. And I would have just. You told
Catelin: me that it was not optional. I said, I could just do this with Jessica. Zach was like, uh, maybe. He said it in his tweet, Zachary, when he was like, yeah, we're doing it tomorrow.
Rich: He's like, yeah, we need an episode in two days, so I need you to do this. We've gotta do this.
Catelin: Buck up, cowgirl.
Rich: Um, so as always, definitely give us some feedback. We'll give you a note here in a minute on how to do that. Um, but you can always, like, thumbs up. You can recommend to a friend. Uh, give us a rating. Like, all of that. Hopefully you're enjoying all of this stuff.
Catelin: Yeah, you, you can find us at antidote71.
Catelin: com or antidote underscore 71. As Rich said, if you have a question, or you'd like to send, uh, some comments our way, you can go to ctapodcast. live. Send us a little message via a HubSpot form. Woop woop! Um, or, and this is even better, you can leave us a voice message on our hotline at 402 718 9971. Yep, also using
Rich: a HubSpot inbox for both of us. Yeah! We'll come into an
Rich: inbox and get assigned to Zach to deal with. And you might
Catelin: hear yourself in your own Bronx grandmother voice on the
Rich: podcast. Um, and I do need to just shout out for our next episode coming in a couple of weeks. Uh, the cocktail there is going to be the Rusty Nail. So we'll learn what that is all about.
Rich: Uh, there's a bar near my old house that was called the Rusty Nail that apparently had really good bar food and we never went, but so be it. Uh, just
Catelin: hearing the Rusty Nail makes me want a cheese ball.
Rich: Oh, that does sound good too, but the topic more importantly, uh, aside from the drink is going to be the power of a theme driven content strategy.
Rich: And my guess is that our special guest is none other than producer Zach, because he's doing it. Uh, so join us next time and definitely check us out, give us feedback. We love the feedback, uh, and we'll, uh, catch you then. Bye.