82 - HubSpot's Best Kept Secrets

Rich: Hey, Caitlin, you, Oh my God, I thought you froze for a minute there, but you're there. You're alive.

Catelin: You're alive. I know. I know. I am alive. Hi. Hi. It's nice to see you.

Rich: It is good to see you too. I am so cash today. Like it's, it's a Friday when we're recording this. Is this one of our

Catelin: 71 shirts?

Rich: It isn't. It's not.

Rich: Uh, this is a woven, which is a small business that supports local graphic designers. So,

um, all of

Rich: their shirts are from a graphic designer and they give credit to the graphic designer. You get a card about it. You can download a phone wallpaper for it. Um,

Catelin: do you get back to your phone to your shirt?

Rich: I could every day if I wanted to every day.

Rich: So I did it as a subscription a while ago. They're old, so now they're turning into my workout shirts. So, um, I haven't. I have been buying, um, some of our 71 shirts, so I do need to, um, take a look at that. Cause of course I get them at cost. So can you, uh, if you would like, um,

Catelin: do this roll over, do we have like a, no,

Rich: we get three per month.

Rich: Um, well we get them at cost no matter what, because we own the site, so there's no point in doing markup on it. Um, we get them 20 percent off of cost three per month. Okay. So, um, so yeah, if

Catelin: anyone needs a t shirt. I can make you a sweet deal.

Rich: You gotta call in first though.

Catelin: Oh

Rich: yes, that's

Catelin: true. What are we doing today?

Rich: It's not

Catelin: a secret.

Rich: It isn't a secret, but it's HubSpot's best kept secrets. At least a few of them. And it's one of our, like, we're ramping up the guests. Producer Zach has been producierging and, um, finding us great guests.

Catelin: Truly. Uh, Alex, a senior partner development manager at HubSpot. PDM. HubSpot loves a, uh, abbreviation.

Rich: Absolutely. So, uh,

Catelin: momentarily, we'll have Alex join us, but before, before we do that. Yeah, he was our, um,

Rich: well, he was, he's been, he was with us. He was our, uh, rep. He's had different titles. Um, I guess CSM maybe or something, but he was basically helping us be successful with HubSpot for a very long time to the point where he, you know what, I'll save the story till he's on.

Rich: So, um, let's talk about the cocktail, um,

Catelin: Jasper, Jasper sounds like a little, like a little butler.

Rich: I know. Oh, isn't it? Somebody has that as their AI name. It's Jasper. Like Jasper AI is a thing, but I don't remember. Maybe it's a whole company. I think. Jasper AI. Yeah. Well, this is not AI. It's not an AI cocktail.

Rich: You would need a human to create this. Yes. Um, it does come from Jasper Distilling Company in Charleston, South Carolina. Curious if Zach has visited Jasper Distilling Company. I know Charleston's fairly close to him, but he has not. That will be on his list for this summer to go down there because he loves a good beverage.

Rich: Um, it's super light and crisp, a little bit sweet, a little bit herbal, which is nice. Um, and they say it's the perfect drink to toast to good company and great conversation. Honestly, any drink, if the company is good and the conversation is great. Here's

Catelin: what I need you to know is that I recently made like a, uh, like an accidental version of this without even knowing it.

Catelin: And it was delightful. So I didn't measure. I measured with my heart. And instead of club soda, I topped with Prosecco because. Of who I am. Uh, so for this recipe you need 4 ounces of strawberries, sliced. You could use frozen, I think, in this instance. I, I don't know if we've talked about frozen fruit at all.

Catelin: Uh, but The flash frozen

Rich: stuff, like at Costco or wherever, Yeah, it's legit. It's actually really good.

Catelin: And it's much less expensive, because it's Yeah. Anyway. Okay, so four ounces of strawberry sliced, which you can buy. You can buy sliced frozen strawberries with no sweetener. Uh, two basil leaves, one ounce of simple syrup, a half ounce of lemonade, one and a half ounces of Charleston distilling companies.

Catelin: Jasper gin, which I'm assuming is where the name comes from. Mm-hmm . And two ounces of club soda. Or if you want to, you know, , you could do Prosecco. It's just a, you know, dealer's choice. You could first boil your strawberries with the basil leaves to create a puree, and then cool in the fridge. Muddle your simple syrup and two basil leaves, so really we need four basil leaves, uh, two basil leaves in a cocktail shaker, add the puree, lemonade, club soda, and gin.

Catelin: The end.

Rich: Yeah, but you don't shake it. Just notice that you just mix it in the cocktail shaker. Because the club soda goes in there and we all know we do not shake fits. We don't shake bubbles. It'll be a mess. When I first read this, I thought that maybe Jasper Charleston was the name of a bartender who created this, but it's just Jasper distilling in Charleston.

Rich: It's

Catelin: the name of the bar ish, I would assume. They probably have a tasting room, right? Yeah, and um,

Rich: free plug, JasperCharleston. com.

Catelin: There you go. You can go

Rich: see them.

Catelin: They do fully call this a Jasper gin fizz, and I love nothing more than a gin fizz. I can be good with a gin fizz. Yeah, so good. So good and delightful.

Catelin: All right, I

Rich: will try this one. I'm going to wait until summer because we have a lot of snow right now. We have like six inches of snow and it's snowing again, which is annoying. No, we're not doing that. All right, so let's put a pin in this then and um, we will be back with Alex

Catelin: from

Rich: HubSpot and I'll tell my story.

Rich: We're back from our break and Alex is here with us.

Catelin: Hi Alex. It's so nice to see you.

Rich: It's good to see you guys. It's like a little family reunion.

Catelin: It is. Yeah, it

Rich: is, kind of. So, um, we had a little debate before you came in, and I know we asked you because I couldn't remember and then felt stupid about your name, because, like, we live in the land of Des Plaines, Illinois, but also Des Moines, Iowa.

Rich: And so it's like, okay, Des Noyers, De Noyer, De Noyer?

Catelin: It's the Des Moines pronunciation, really. It is. It is because the middle S and the end S are both silent.

Rich: Yeah, but you

Alex: hit that R a little bit.

Rich: Now

Alex: that you point that out, that actually is quite incredible for where you guys are. Uh, Rich, you hit the trifecta though, which is the way to say it.

Alex: The way most people say it wrong, and then the way you should say it if I still, if I lived in France, and my ancestors were happy, um, fair. So, yeah, I mean, honestly, full coverage.

Catelin: Have we, have we angered the ancestors? No, I think they have a lot of other things to

Alex: worry about, yeah. Yeah,

Rich: we gave them a, uh, we gave them a tribute, we gave them a nod.

Rich: So Alex, you, we were just talking, um, before then I was like, Oh God, we should talk about this on the show. So you joined HubSpot, I think a little bit before we became partners in 2017. And, um, we went through a couple of, I don't even know what they were called back then, was it a CSM? Is that what it would have been?

Rich: Yeah. iterations

Alex: over the years. Yeah.

Rich: But basically. Our person at HubSpot to help us grow and be good people and learn things and all of that. Um, and we had Kate, who was great, and then Kate got promoted almost immediately. And we were like, okay, come on, like, give us somebody who's going to stick around.

Rich: And you promised not to leave us for a while. And then you got promoted and we're only working with Platinum partners and we were a Gold partner. But on your end, you were kind of lobbying, I think they'll be Platinum, can I keep them? And we were like, I guess we just have to be Platinum so we keep Alex.

Rich: And so we did. And we became a platinum partner. And then you got promoted again.

Alex: It has been good, yeah. But it seems like we were, we were doing a pretty good job of trading off who's getting promoted, you know? Like, I got promoted, and then you guys had to kind of get promoted and tiered up in order to come hang at the cool kids table.

Alex: And, uh, yeah, I mean, yeah, it's been quite a journey, right? The only thing that stays the same at HubSpot is change, in all senses of it. But that's how you stay been one of my constants, so it's great.

Rich: That's how you stay alive though, like as a software company or a software service, like you've got to continue to advance or you'll just die.

Rich: Like, um, and that requires, you know, changes in operations too and changes in people. Exactly. So part of why we give you a call is one, we love you, of course, but two, um, one of the things we always did was you would give us tips, tricks. You'd show us neat things. Hey, I learned this from another partner. Um, and sometimes we'd share those with you too.

Rich: And so we're like, Why doesn't Alex share his inside, like, secrets with everybody? Obviously secrets that won't get you fired. You can't do anything. Right. You would never release anything confidential. This is not,

Catelin: uh, material non public information. Not where the bodies are

Rich: buried or anything like that.

Rich: No. All of this is stuff that you can go find on your own. It's just some things that people overlook, I think.

Catelin: I think that's one of my favorite parts of One, being a partner, but two, running, like, through the onboarding program is that we have such a broad depth of, broad depth, that's, doesn't, that doesn't compute, but we have such a broad awareness of different use cases, and like, I just kicked off, uh, a new PSO client today where he's like, I want you to tell me the weird stuff that you've learned from other clients.

Catelin: And I was like, this is going to be so fun. How much time do you have? I know I was like, uh, we are 45 minutes is up right now, but, um, I'll see you in two weeks. Okay. Okay. It's going to be great. Uh, so that like right up his alley. And honestly, this is a good reminder for me too. Right. As I'm like trying to, to keep up with all of the feature developments, because that has been the other thing, like just in the last, probably.

Catelin: 12 or 18 months, I feel like the deluge of new features and changes has just been like so, so intense that I'm like, I can't learn another thing right now. So this will be a good reminder for me.

Alex: Yeah, no, you're so right. I mean, and just talk about this a lot, but yeah, the last, yeah, 12 to 18 months, it feels like there really has been a very intentional shift with the product team.

Alex: And you know, a certain amount of that comes with. The just like, you know, the operational scale of the business, there are more hubs, we're wider and we're going deeper in more areas, you know, the number of product teams dedicated to different nook and cranny parts of the platform is certainly proliferated.

Alex: So, you know, in the past, there were these development cycles where a tool might feel like it hadn't gotten a lot of TLC in like a couple years, and now it's like a couple months until we see updates for certain products and. Yeah. I mean, keeping up with product updates is kind of like a full time job, to be honest.

Alex: And, and I would say too, you got me thinking that like, there are a few different examples as well, where it's not necessarily like, Hey, this is a brand new feature and people aren't yet talking about it or using it, but like really cool use case applications that are maybe slightly different than what is out of the box intention.

Alex: And also I have, I just found over the last, you know, Several years working here. I also just like rediscover things in a different way, you know, so like the tool itself may have existed for five plus years, but if I haven't had a reason to spend much time in it and I kind of come back to it and I'm like, Oh, yeah, I forgot that that little superpower was hidden over here.

Alex: Maybe we can kind of co op that and use it in this very interesting way. So yeah, there's a lot of different ways to find these little tips and tricks and nooks and crannies and secret weapons. It's a lot of fun.

Catelin: One of, one of your, um, one of your secrets, the, the custom objects and the, the new object library, even just on the, I'm sorry, I've like spoiled it, but I was like, that's right there.

Catelin: Let's start with that one. Yeah, exactly. Um, the ability to use. Okay, so this is the object library on the starter platform. I spend a lot of time with like, with pro and enterprise folks, but personally use. Even just the starter suite on some volunteer things that I do. And so being able to customize appointments and classes and those types of like things that are used frequently, but aren't necessarily an out of the box, like contact company deal, right.

Catelin: That has been so groundbreaking in terms of like full organization management for this, like volunteer thing where I'm like, okay, now we can track. When our members are coming, how long they were active, what volunteer opportunities they were doing, and it is so easy. So let's back,

Rich: look back up a minute, Alex, why don't you tell us kind of what the object library is and kind of how it came about and why it's such a huge deal.

Rich: Can I just double check? Cause I thought I was going to correct you, Caitlin, but it is available on starter. Like I'm in my starter hub for one of my tests,

Catelin: which is just amazing. I know all the starter tricks.

Alex: So Alex, give us a

Rich: breakdown.

Alex: Yeah, I'll paint the picture. So, I mean, so when you guys became partners and when I started at HubSpot, you know, we, we, this was even before the.

Alex: And, you know, the development of custom objects, period, that's obviously coming when, and you know, that's historically been an enterprise only feature, right? So as you're saying, Caitlin, like, you know, us, us little guys who can only afford starter and pro like, gosh, we, a lot of the time we have really good use cases for a more complex custom data model and you just couldn't really do it.

Alex: So back in the beginning, you know, we were stuck with just the standard objects, your contacts, companies, deals, and tickets. And what I found was, was happening a lot was the version of the work around at the time was, Oh, we'll just use tickets for this other thing. And we'll just have to squint our eyes and pretend it doesn't say tickets.

Alex: And you know, every customer has a different tolerance level for that kind of work around. You know, some people will drive them crazy and some people they're like. Sure, I can just suspend disbelief and pretend that it's not tickets, it has a pipeline, I can create custom properties, like, let's roll with this.

Alex: So then fast forward a couple years, we launch custom objects. Okay, great. But again, it has been limited historically to the enterprise. Now, with this Custom object library or this object library really it's it's basically coming back and bridging that gap once again So I think the biggest difference again is that like you still have those standard objects Like if you have a real tickets use case like you don't you can still use tickets as they're meant for But now it's a series of a couple sort of predefined, and I'd say most importantly, pre labeled, pre named object types.

Alex: And so like, if you have that exact need, boom, it's right off the shelf. One click, you got it in your portal, even if you're on a starter or pro. What it also then does is like, maybe the name is still not perfect, but it's like, you now have other options, right? You're not having to occupy the preexisting standard objects.

Alex: You can kind of just make it work for you for what you need. So, you know, these kinds of. Decisions are always a little bit of pro and con and give and get, but I, I think it's such a, it's a best kept secret in a lot of ways because I think a lot of people saw it initially and were like, well, if I don't need those specific object types, I'll just keep it moving.

Alex: But as you've found Caitlin, it seems it's like, well, yeah, some people, this is exactly what they need, but some people it's like, again, if we go right back into the suspend the disbelief mode. There's a lot you can do, and now you have that firepower at the lower level.

Rich: Yeah, and one of the things we always tell people is poke around.

Rich: You can, yes, you can break stuff and do permanent damage in HubSpot, like deleting entire things, but that's actually gotten better, because now with certain product levels you can do a backup, so you can have a backup of your database, but also almost everything you delete in HubSpot, Is re, you can get it back within 30 to 90 days.

Rich: It sits in a place where you can go grab it. Um, and the stuff that's going to be a permanent delete. What I love is they've actually now added that second warning that said you will be permanently deleting this. This is irreversible

Catelin: forever. Goodbye. Like, are you

sure? Yeah.

Rich: And I've even had people who were like, Oh, like we changed all of these people to the wrong life cycle stage.

Rich: And I'm like, Oh, the history of it is there. You can use the workflow. Has ever been whatever stage and you can find those people. Um, so yeah, the object libraries like that, the listings though, cause we've, we've pitched a couple of realtors on using HubSpot because it's a great tool. And they're like, yeah, it doesn't integrate with the MLS really well.

Rich: And I can't do anything with my listings on there. I like my custom site where I can have my own listings. Um. Airbnb, you've got a rental, uh, you're an apartment building. Like all of those are fantastic. Um, so very cool. Um,

Catelin: I think too, that ties really nicely to the, um, kind of first order. Uh, when we talk about features that are only available at those higher tiers.

Catelin: How, how might we work around that if, if one wanted to?

Alex: Yeah, no. So I think this is like HubSpot's been around for a while. I think in like human years, HubSpot's like approaching its twenties, right? It's a teenager and a lot has changed. And with that, you know, like the product itself, but also, you know, the go to market and the way we price and package things.

Alex: So I think it was a long time coming, but I think without a doubt, you know, Second place comes to the marketing context change from a few years ago. This is certainly the biggest change in the way HubSpot has priced and packaged the product is moving to the seats based model. And you know, there was a, I think understandably, especially for longtime users and partners like yourselves, like this is a huge material change.

Alex: Like how is this going to affect me? How is this going to affect my clients? And, you know, I think. Uh, certainly it's never easy to make those big changes, but I think we all kind of understand why. And there's some reasons that are easier to point to and be like, well, Hulksweld's a publicly traded company and this is about monetization.

Alex: We all get that. Sure. The real practical reality of why we're here talking about it is like, okay, so what does this really mean for like boots on the ground? I think the biggest thing is, again, in terms of access to the historically Hard to reach features, aka expensive behind an enterprise paywall. Now you can buy a single seat of sales enterprise.

Alex: I think for a long time, and I know our old friend Peter used to say this too, my favorite skew at HubSpot, my favorite HubSpot product is sales enterprise. Not everyone can afford to spend, you know, 1, 500 a month, or maybe you get a nice discount, whatever. It sometimes is just cost prohibitive. But now you can buy a single seat.

Alex: And so you can pair it with Marketing Starter and Sales Enterprise and still keep that budget well under 1, 000 a month. And now you have all those enterprise features. So, the things that are specific to Sales Enterprise, right? Like, Rich, I know you're a huge fan of being able to enroll a contact into a sequence via workflow.

Alex: That's one of my favorite use cases. But even just the like, enterprise level across the board features like the custom object. Right? Like you, if you had marketing enterprise, you get custom objects, sales enterprise. So there's like the platform agnostic version of that, where it's like, as long as you have on enterprise hub, you get it, but then you get all the sweet juiciness of sales enterprise anyway.

Alex: So being able to mix and match and buy single seats is a huge unlock.

Rich: I think the other thing that comes in with a lot of our clients, especially since we work in like financial and, uh, services and we've done some medical stuff and things like that, is the enterprise feature where you can basically lock down any single property permission.

Rich: Yes. Like that one is huge because people will be like, okay, I want them to see everything except this one dollar amount. I don't want anybody to see but these five people. And it's like, okay. We'll just lock that down and create a permission set for those five people to be able to see that property. Um, yeah, that one is huge for me because I've also run into a lot of the people who are like, well, I only need two sales seats.

Rich: We've only got two salespeople. I don't need five. And it used to be like for pro you had to have five and with enterprise 10 to start with or something like that. Maybe. And they're just like, no, like I want the enterprise features, but I don't want to pay that much and I don't want 10 seats. I just need three and 450 a month is a lot different than.

Rich: You know, 1, 500 a month. And there are some caveats. So only that person assigned to that sales enterprise seat will have certain abilities like creating sequences and using all of the playbooks and some of those things. But those, like you said, platform wide pieces just are crazy. We actually just, we haven't moved to seats pricing yet.

Rich: There was an issue where our bill would have gone up by one cent. And Uh, it's just a bug that came up on our migration because we're so legacy, right? Because we're like, I mean, 2017, it's how many SKUs old is one of our products. So they're holding on that because they want to fix it. Cause they're like, this will come up again and we need to figure out what's going on and we want to fix it.

Rich: Um, and I was like, well, I want it so like we can go to sales enterprise. I'll give you the

Catelin: penny.

Rich: Like, yeah. And they're like, it's not about the penny. It's about. The number wasn't right where it should be, and I'm like, okay, great. But we actually ended up, um, because we had some legacy stuff in our portal, because Peter did some good things to help us with pricing a long time ago, um, we ended up with 10 Enterprise seats.

Rich: Uh, I won't share what we paid for those on here, but, um, we're loving having Enterprise. Like, we're not taking full advantage of it yet. But that big one of The cobbler's kids

Catelin: never have shoes, I think is the main point. I'm curious if you could say why Sales Enterprise is your favorite SKU. Like, what's the, what's the silver bullet on there?

Alex: Yeah, no, I honestly I think it's it's mostly around like for the bang for your buck I think that's so so in my mind I think about it is like if you really want the firepower you need to have some version of enterprise, right? So then you're left thinking okay of the five hubs, which one is best for me And I think it's largely because of some of the stuff we've already been talking about here, too but it's a really cool almost like the like the governments and the Like admin type stuff that just makes the adoption so much better.

Alex: So again, some of that's like enterprise agnostic, but I think like, I think playbooks are so underutilized. It can be used for so many other cool things.

Catelin: Yeah, like

Alex: to your point Rich about like being able to do like field level view and edit permissions. Just like the permissioning and the versioning you can do for team experience is just so cool at that level.

Alex: And so I think it's just like. I'm drawn to some of the sales hub tools anyway. And then once you consider like if I was only going to have one enterprise hub, which would it be? I think it's just even more so with the single seats, the most cost effective. Um, yeah, that's why it's my favorite.

Rich: I think my favorite custom package, and I've recommended this to a couple of people kind of offline.

Rich: So I'm just going to throw it out there. Um, is cause it exists. So you, there was marketing plus when content hub came out and it's changed to be, I think it's called HubSpot for marketers now. But it's essentially marketing pro and content pro combined and the content pro only costs a hundred dollars more.

Rich: Um, like it's this ridiculous combo that's really efficient. So for me, it's HubSpot for marketers. You get content and marketing pro you add on one or two sales enterprise seats, and you get all that functionality unlocked. And then if you need service, you can do that. But a lot of people, that's kind of the one that.

Rich: You either need it or you don't. It's not a secret service, but my other one is throw an ops hub starter. It's 15 bucks a month for one seat, and then you can do custom fields on integrations and it just opens up other stuff now.

Yeah.

Rich: Ops Pro is way better because you can actually have it clean up your database for you.

Rich: But, um, Ops Starter, like, I feel like every sales rep should add Ops Starter to everything, um, no matter what. And every time we're doing a shared deal, I just tell them, just throw in Ops Starter because it prevents us from having problems later. True. So. But that's my secret package that I love. Um.

Catelin: One thing I've noticed, and this is not a knock on sales people, but as we've gone through a lot of these.

Catelin: You know, partner scaled on boardings, salespeople are not data people, and so they want to be able to report on stuff, but then they, they're not always the best at tracking and actually putting in clean data. So it's like, I want to help you report, but I need you to do the work on the front end and make sure that your stuff is in the right place.

Catelin: And so, yeah, that like data cleanliness and then also some of those like field level controls are. Just one really easy way to help lock down that sales process and make sure that your I's are dotted and T's are crossed. Yeah. I mean, much love to sales people that we have, right? I will not do your job, however.

Catelin: Yeah. I'm sorry.

Alex: And I like the way you think about it too, Rich, where it's like, this is, it's like, what is the mix and match? Which, which again, now the seats enables us to like truly mix and match in a way we haven't been able to before. And you know, yeah, classic HubSpot is renaming something very quickly HubSpot for marketers.

Alex: That's what we're moving forward. You're spot on, I think it's such a great SKU. Um, and then obviously just like the full platform suite, right? Where it's like, you know what, screw it, let's an automatic like, I think it's like a 37 percent discount. Let's get all those pro hubs in there, that gets you that Ops Pro.

Alex: And I think like, especially just like thinking about the history of Operations Hub. And again, to your point Caitlin, like not everyone cares that much about data. Or it gets them very excited when we start talking about operations, you know? But, um, it really does change a lot. And, and I think a big part of it too is just sort of like market perception, right?

Alex: Like when we first launched it, the, in order to really get value out of it, you kind of needed to have some sort of developer savvy. Now, obviously at Antidote, like you guys have that, you know, and so, but, but if I'm, if I'm just like an SMB and I'm trying to figure out like, how do I justify the cost of this?

Alex: It's sort of like, how do I get any value out of this if I don't know Python or JavaScript, right? But where it's developed since then, and what Rich was alluding to, is just like, even just like all of the data hygiene stuff, that is no code. That is, is if you are at all familiar with the HubSpot UI, you can figure out how to change your data very quickly.

Alex: And I think that's a huge, huge, huge benefit. So for looking at it as a single SKU, again, it's like tough whenever we're looking at dollars and cents, but like with those bundled approaches, getting that operation to a piece embedded throughout the platform. I'll change your life. It'll make your marketers happier and your, and your sales people happier.

Rich: Yeah. And that's my, my number one go to is if you can do the full pro suite and you don't need any enterprise level stuff, just do the whole suite. I don't care if you don't want to put your website in HubSpot, you should. Ours is. It's great. We love it. But you get so much more with content hub now, like some of the AI features that come out with that and all of that.

Rich: Um, but yeah, so you mentioned Ops Pro and I know there's another like interesting thing that. Unlocks when you have ops pro or enterprise that was on your list.

Alex: Yeah.

Rich: Um,

Alex: yeah. And I think this just speaks to a little bit of, uh, again, it's like. If you don't know what you don't know, or you like don't know where to look again, it can be kind of spurious to sort of justify like, what is the ROI of paying for operations on pro and even just the sense of like, when I'm clicking around the navigation and HubSpot, you're kind of like, where is it, you know, some for other hubs, it's a little bit more obvious, right?

Alex: Where it's like, okay, here's the sales workspace, and here's my sequences, and here's my playbooks, right? Um, but one of my favorite things with operations are pros, because so much of the value is inside of the workloads. Right? So if you were on Marketing Pro before, you already had workflows, but it unlocks all of these other features, many of which are like the actions you can execute within the workflow, like formatting the data and custom coded actions and all that cool stuff.

Alex: But I think a super underrated feature that I love to point out to people is, um, basically like scheduling the enrollments of these workflows. So I think about this in my day to day, there are a lot of like. You know, call them programmatic or transactional type emails that I get on a daily or weekly basis or monthly basis at HubSpot, right?

Alex: Maybe it's, um, reminders for submitting tickets for getting things squared away at the end of the month or quota reminders, or here's a policy update that everyone needs to know about. And so, you know, we, we use a tool called Looker that provides a lot of our reporting internally at HubSpot. So it's like you can like schedule those emails to go out to certain people at certain times.

Alex: And so, With workflows, a lot of the times, you know, over the years, especially we've had a lot of like, how do I, how do I, how do I get this contact to re enroll? How do I, how do I get this to happen again? And like, how do I work around some of these pieces? And so it's just a simple toggle when you're setting up the enrollment triggers for workloads as schedule enrollments.

Alex: You can do it daily, weekly, monthly. So I always think about the use case for, I want my reps to hit the ground running. So I want to schedule this workflow to fire at 8 a. m. Every Monday. Basically Give them a summary email that highlights all of their urgent action items, or the leads that have the highest lead score, or basically like, this is in your inbox first thing Monday morning to help you prioritize your day.

Alex: There's a million other use cases I can think of, but that idea of like, set it and forget it, I want this. Action to happen on a recurring schedule is there's so many use cases for that.

Rich: Yeah, I have, uh, there's a PSO client that I worked with and he's bought some, um, consulting with us. Um, he's on vacation this week, so I didn't hear from him at all this week, but he's super nice.

Rich: I love him. He's great. But one of the things he does is it's a. Like a mental health treatment facility. And so when people graduate from the program, they have weekly meetings that are facilitated online that they remind all of these graduates and their parents of, and he's got a list of parents, list of graduates.

Rich: Well, he wanted to, he always sends them on Wednesday at. Like 2 p. m. Or something reminder. This meeting's happening tonight at 6, and I'm like, okay Well, and so he's got the workflow that enrolls the list and then it waits until Wednesday Which you can do just without Ops Hub and then it sends the email.

Rich: The problem is with the re enrollment It was only re enrolling new people who went on to the list It doesn't kick everybody back up and he's like, well, can't I just make it cyclical and I'm like, no you can't have a cyclical workflow because That's just, it's bad for everybody and so I didn't even know like with Ops Pro, that's what he needs.

Rich: He needs to actually enroll them every week from that list or trigger that every week, um, to try to get that going. So I might talk to him about that. Maybe we'll upgrade Ops Pro for him. Who knows? Yeah,

Alex: just being able to do that on a schedule I think is so important. There's so much in the day to day business world that we need to have that's like Scheduled and it makes a lot of sense as well.

Catelin: So like that brings up an interesting thing for me that a lot of folks don't know about, uh, with reporting dashboards that you can schedule those emails to go out on a regular cadence to just say like, here's your, you know, if you want it to be a, I think you can export it as a PDF or send a PDF. Or if you want it to just be a link to the dashboard, but you can schedule that like for your managers or your, you know, your C levels where they've got a, a weekly sync or a monthly, you know, check in, whatever that is, that like little secret extra button kind of like schedule those, those dashboards to go up that blows people's mind regularly.

Catelin: So it's just like some of those, like you said, repeatable. Things that you don't want to have to think about every week or every month like Remove some of that human, human error fallibility from the, from the equation. And, um, yeah, it just, it makes me want to automate everything. Can I turn my oven on with a workflow?

Catelin: Can I, I

Rich: mean, maybe you can do that with, uh, if this then that, uh, my air conditioner in the summer before I get home. I mean, so I will tell you, we did use, uh, if this then that we had a nest thermostat and we had, um, it was, it's the, oh, it's the. Haiku fans, the big S fan like residential version. So we had the haiku fans.

Rich: And so we did have it that if the temperature goes above X on the temperature center sensor then Turn on the fan to high and then it would wait like 15 20 minutes And if the temperature is still gone up

Catelin: in HubSpot or somewhere else. No,

Rich: it was if this then that not in HubSpot I don't know what that is.

Rich: But now that I've tangented us I was going to give you props for What was the perfect sick segue into the last? Secret, because you were talking about dashboards and the last secret is all about dashboards.

Catelin: I didn't even plan that. That was an accident. Thank you so much. I like that you

Alex: admitted that you didn't mean to do it.

Alex: Cause I wasn't looking

Catelin: at the notes at all. Uh,

Alex: this, this one, I will, I will follow a suit of, of being humble and say, this is one that I actually learned from a customer a while ago. That's another one of these things too, which is to say that, like, even if you've been at HubSpot for seven years, like me.

Alex: There are so many people out there, whether they're actually like solutions partners, app partners, or just like freelance consultants. There's so many stinking smart people out there that are finding these things. Um, yeah, I mean, reporting is so critical, right? It comes up all the time. And especially in the line of work that you guys are in, it's like these clients are expecting results.

Alex: And how do we show the results? We've got to report on it. And so, yeah, over the years, there've been a lot of cases where it's like, Gosh, like I wish I could just get this thing on this dashboard. You know, we've talked a lot about what I would call like, you know, like localized reporting and HubSpot, right?

Alex: So if I'm in like email marketing tool, there's like an analyze tab and I can see all this cool stuff. And I will say the product team has done a really good job over the year at shipping away at this. There's a lot of places where you can. Save a report to a dashboard, right? So, so that's good. But that, again, that's like there's still a pocket of things where it's like, Gosh, I literally just want to be able to get this thing I'm looking at here, over here.

Alex: Over here. And someone pointed this out to me. They must have been playing around with it. But one of the great features of the Daft Boards is that you can embed external content, right? And so the off the shelf use case is like slide decks, spreadsheets. Right? So think about maybe I have an executive summary slide deck that explains why we built this dashboard.

Alex: That's the perfect use case. That's why the product team built it that way. Someone smart enough to realize that you can literally, it literally just asks for a URL or an embed code. So if you have a URL, you can pop in the URL and it'll populate that basically into an I frame where a report would normally, normally live.

Alex: It's just the URL that you gave it. So. This very smart person, I wish I remember who it was so I could give them credit. They pointed out that, let's say you wanted to put the sequences enrollment page on a dashboard. You go to the sequences enrollment, grab the URL from your browser, plug it into the embed field in the URL field when you're doing external content, and voila, when you reload the dashboard, it will literally have a window into another page of HubSpot right there.

Alex: And the thing that I love about it even more is you can use it. So I can be on a dashboard and not just see the report, but I can literally click around in there and enroll a contact in a sequence from the dashboard. Now, we've also obviously seen the evolution of the workspaces, and I think there's gonna, it's kind of like a lightweight version of that.

Alex: But again, it's basically like, if there's a URL for it, if there's an index page somewhere in HubSpot that you wish you could just put in a report, You can.

Rich: The social analytics, so we did that, I feel guilty for not like telling you about this when we did it because it was like five or six years ago before you could click save on any of those reports, I as the executive wanted the social stats on the marketing dashboard.

Rich: So the beauty of that is also it only takes one space on the dashboard because you're limited in how many things you can have on there, how many reports. It only takes one, but you can have like the eight reports that are embedded on that page can be. all there. Um, but yeah, that is like, I didn't realize you can actually, it makes sense.

Rich: It's just a page. You can literally click and enroll and do all of those things. Um, from there, that's like, wow, that reporting

Alex: piece has been the best part where it's like, all right, I want this from the email tool, this from the ads tool, this from the social tool, put it all in there. Technically, it's a view, it's like a inception level hotspot inside a hotspot thing.

Alex: This is some inception level shit, like, going on. Into the

Catelin: wilderness, into the rabbit hole, yeah. But again,

Alex: it's because you alluded to it earlier, where it's like A lot of the time it's like, we're considering the audience, like who is going to use this dashboard. It's someone who maybe isn't super savvy with HubSpot or knows how to do all these things.

Alex: So we just need to curate it as much as possible for them. And so they are a view only user. They get that email once a month and they're like, Oh, cool. They can still log in and look at the dashboard. The dashboard now has all of the critical information on it. You don't even know how the sausage got made.

Alex: And that is one

Rich: caveat is those embedded pieces don't show up on the PDF. If you send a PDF to somebody, you know, only the native reports will. But if you send them the link and get them used to just clicking the link and logging in, it's actually a way better experience. Because my biggest thing is, well, I want to see last month and this month, and it's like, I can give you one dashboard and a toggle at the top that you just choose last month, this month, um, or I can do a comparison, um, but yeah, that's been a great, great feature.

Rich: Um, you know, you can also add images, you can add text, you can add, what is it? Google sheets, Google slides. I think the Google Data Studio, which I feel like is Looker. I think those are the same thing.

Alex: Yeah.

Rich: Yeah. Um, and then there's one other one, uh, Databox. Cause we use Databox for a little while when we have a bunch of stuff in there.

Alex: Yeah. Budo is great. The HubSpot, uh, HubSpot alumni, great HubSpot advocate. Databox is an awesome company. Yeah. I mean, cause it makes me think of the, you know, the much simpler version of this too, which was a big unlock at the same time, which is, again, it's like. The enablement aspect of reporting, which is to say, like, just because I can build a report doesn't mean it's literally going to lead to business change.

Alex: Someone still needs to be able to read it, interpret it, and take action based on it. So, you know, you can build all these beautiful reports. But like is someone going to understand what they're looking at? So even just the basic of like Having the top left field in the dashboard be a text field that explains what they're looking at

Like hey,

Alex: this is the purpose of this dashboard You will see these reports that are tracking these KPIs and this is how to adjust the filters, you know So the annotation aspect of that and then yeah embedding A slide deck that explains like this was the executive summary of this project, which is why you told us to do this.

Alex: And this is reminding you why this is saying what it says and all those things. And so, yeah, the, the multimedia aspect of a dashboard I think is a really killer unlock because, uh, again, like as much as AI and Skynet has taken over the world, like for now, we still have humans that are making these decisions.

Alex: So they have to understand what they're looking at.

Rich: Well, cool. And I know Zach will remind us he's been very gracious. We are pretty much at time. Um,

Catelin: what a treat. Can you hear that? I wanted to combine the first one. So

Rich: here's one that I want to do is, like, the top four mistakes people make when setting up HubSpot.

Rich: Oof, yeah.

Alex: You guys can probably teach me

Catelin: a couple things on that. Can we make it, can it be like, like, we're just going to title it, like, Unfuck Your Portal? Because it's been this, like, it's been this long since I've sworn. I made it through the whole episode. I said shit earlier. I said that's some

Rich: Inception level shit.

Rich: So when he was talking about Inception, so we already got our explicit, but we're good.

Catelin: That's brilliant. The novel. Oh my gosh.

Alex: Yeah. Okay, great. It's, it's, uh, as you guys know better than most, it's a persistent issue in this world is that like, whatever the latest version of the status, like some ridiculously high percentage of.

Alex: Implementations of CRMs fail, right? And some of them is because of adoption, and some of them is because they were just set up wrong, or poorly, or whatever. But, yeah, the amount of time spent, and dollars spent on untangling these Gordian knots is brutal, as you guys know. It's a whole business, though.

Alex: There's a lot of little things you can do. It's like, if you just take a breath, and don't press Just because you can,

Catelin: doesn't mean you should.

Rich: I think that is a great wrap up for this episode. So, um, you can schedule workflow triggers with ops pro or enterprise. That's a big one. And there's some other things that come up there with cleaning up data.

Rich: Uh, unlocking enterprise features with one seat. It's one 50 a month. And you get a whole bunch of those, one of our favorites, it will break your starter. package pricing though, I believe. So it gets wonky and each of those becomes its own hub at 15 a month. I've got it. Um, it's still pretty affordable though.

Rich: So just try it, see what you can do. Um, you can embed external content and dashboards and then that custom objects light in the new object library, uh, play with those. And squint your eyes and try to make them do something they're not supposed to do. That's, um, a hundred percent fun in HubSpot. Um, and okay, Caitlin, where can people find us?

Rich: What's going on? You can always

Catelin: find us at antidote underscore seven one. If you have a question that you'd like to send our way, you can visit CTA podcast. live or, uh, you can call and leave us a message on our little hotline. We're still waiting for zero two, seven, one, eight, nine, nine. 7 1. Your question or comment will make it into a future episode.

Catelin: That is a promise and not a threat. Uh, we would love to hear from you. Weren't we,

Rich: uh, weren't we now giving out a book and a t shirt code for 71 shirts? Like whatever. We'll

Catelin: give you, I can't give you my firstborn because I don't have cash to her, but yeah.

Rich: We'll send you a cocktail book for being a guest.

Rich: That's our guest prize. Two of

Alex: my favorite words in the English language, cocktail and book. So yeah.

Rich: We published our own, it's called Mixing It Up, a fan favorite. Cocktails and tangents, so I have the whole box of them here. I'll get one in an envelope off to you. So yeah, so

Catelin: I can't do that. I can't mail you a book.

Catelin: As always such a delight.

Rich: We'll have an episode next week. I have no idea right now what it's going to be. So Just tune in it'll be it'll be wonderful.

Catelin: It'll be

Rich: But it'll be fantastic.

Alex: It's gonna be tough to top. Alex. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me guys I look forward to the next time