96 - How Fast Can We Set Up a HubSpot CRM?

 

Rich: Hey Zach.

Zac: Hello. Happy to be here again.

Rich: Yeah, of course. Uh, it's weird hosting with you, but good, weird. Like it's just different than the vibe with Caitlyn, like mm-hmm. I dunno.

Zac: Mm-hmm. It's funny, I mean, for three it was like that for three years, so I think it's gonna take some getting used to.

Rich: Yeah, it was, um.

Yeah, we kind of, you kind of get into it like, and we don't talk as much or kind of that. And you're also not nearby. Like I can't talk to you just face to face. I will in September when I'm down there for a wedding, we will go out for dinner at some point. Oh yes. That'll

Zac: be awesome. I'm

Rich: looking forward to it.

Yeah. Somewhere around September 12th. I don't know, uh, exactly when. We'll, that's when the wedding is, so we'll be there before and after it. Awesome. Um, and it looks like we're probably staying in North Charlotte in an Airbnb somewhere. Like, oh, nice. Somewhere like fairly close to Concord, but still Charlotte.

I don't remember where that is, but

Zac: Concord, it's like 30 minutes from me, and it's also kind of like 30 minutes from Charlotte. So if you're like North Charlotte, you're probably in like a decent area.

Rich: Okay. But yeah, I don't know. I'm not in charge of the Airbnb, so I'm not worried about it. All right, but that's not what we're talking about today.

We are talking about, uh, how fast can you realistically get a HubSpot crm, HubSpot, CRM, up and running. Um. And how fast you can set it up and how fast we can set it up might be two different things. Yes, we have done some very, very fast Caitlyn and I tag teamed one and it was very quick. Um, so we'll talk about that a little bit later.

Um, we'll also talk about kinda what the process looks like and some watch outs that you have if you're trying to kind of rush through that and get it set up really fast. So, um, be, I'm interested to learn about it too. It's not

Zac: something that's like.

Rich: Super in my warehouse. You don't do it like, yeah, you don't do onboardings, you don't do HubSpot setups.

You, you assist, like there's little pieces of it that you might do for people, but. You're not typically running those.

Zac: I'll be right along with the audience.

Rich: Yeah. Well, cool. And you went, um, you went classic with the cocktail today. Uh, Zach, it's just, it's a Tom

Zac: Collins. We hadn't done one of those yet. No.

So wanted to save it. You had the idea for saving it for an episode of ri, but mm-hmm. So we can make it the Riley Collins, but. It's just, honestly, I think the Riley

Rich: Collins has to be a different drink. Like maybe it's not gin, it's something else, like it's tequila. Or maybe I just, whatever,

Zac: maybe, maybe I just show him the recipe and say, what would you change about this recipe?

And go from, from a, to make yours. Yeah. Like, that'd be fun.

Rich: Does the lemon juice become a different juice? Like it could be orange juice. That'd be different.

Zac: Yeah. You

Rich: know, there you go. I don't know. I think that's a good one. So, uh, what's in a Tom Collins, since we're kind of hitting on that? Or what, how do you, what is the cocktail?

Tell us about it.

Zac: So it first appeared in the 1876 edition of Jerry Thomas's Bartender's Guide. I feel like a lot of these classic cocktails that we've been going through, they all were in a a book somewhere and that's kind of how they gained fame. Yep. And it says the type of gin wasn't specified, but it was most likely old Tom or Holland Gin.

Which which means, which is widely imported. Yeah.

Rich: Tom Holland needs to pull a Ryan Reynolds and make young Tom Holland gin, and that'll be confusing. You'll have old Tom Gin, Holland gin, and then you'd have young Tom Holland Gin.

Zac: Doesn't he have like some kind of new drink like bureau or something? I saw it somewhere.

He, I don't know what it

Rich: is. I think Tom Holland's sober now. Um, maybe it's like a non-alcoholic drink then read It might be. Um, it might be. I can look that up though and see, so, yeah.

Zac: But I've never had one of these, but I'm sure it'd be pretty good. Uh, like it has things, all things that are like. Pretty simple in most cocktails I would like,

Rich: yeah, it's like a step up from a gin and tonic basically.

Um Okay. And a little bit different. Um, yeah, he does have his new non-alcoholic beer called B-B-E-R-O bureau brewing.com. Nice. So I literally

Zac: saw it, I saw an ad for it, and then I was in Target yesterday and I saw like a big display for it, but I still didn't know what it was. So it's good to know. Oh

Rich: wow.

So it's, it's an American. Uh, non-alcoholic beer, though. It's, it's made in America, which is weird. I might have to try that. So, yeah, their slogan is Born in London, crafted in America. Very exciting. That's so much in a, in a col, Tom Collins. Um, so you get two ounces of gin, which you would have in like a gin and tonic probably, and then an ounce of lemon juice, which you wouldn't a half an ounce of simple syrup.

You also wouldn't do that. And then this is club soda to top it off. So you do get a little sweet from tonic and agin and tonic. And you can put a little bit of lemon juice in it. Usually you squeeze a lemon or a lime into it. Excuse me. But yeah. And then you garnish it with a lemon wheel and or a Marino cherry.

I really don't like Marino cherries. They're, I mean, I sort of do in certain, like in a pineapple upside down cake, I'll accept it. Um, but if I'm doing a cocktail, I am absolutely, I would do a ldo cherry with these. I. Oh yeah, I know it's a little bit, it's a little highbrow for a Tom Collins, but I would still do it.

Um, so yeah, the gym, lemon Jim, lemon juice and simple syrup. Just go into a Collins glass you fill with ice top with club soda and then just stir it a little bit. Um, and if you don't have a good stir, you gotta get a good stir. They're like huge. They're like super long. And, um, then just, you know, garnish it.

So that's it. No shaking, no nothing. Um. Very simple. It's pretty easy and it's light, right? Like it's just juice and gin. It's gin and juice. Well, I'm sure different gin and juice. I'm love,

Zac: love this. She loves gin and tonics. Mm-hmm. That's like if she wears on an episode like, or her teeth fall, she would have a gin and tonic because that's what she orders at every, like almost every bar, but.

This might be like a new thing for her to try, so,

Rich: oh God. We could do, uh, we could do spouse spotlights. That'd be wild. That'd be funny. Oh, all right. So that's the Tom Collins. Um, super simple. And the initial setup of your HubSpot CRM can be simple depending on what you want to do. Um, so why don't we take a break and get into that Sound good.

Oh, I keep rolling off my desk pad, like the floor pad, like it's glass. Um, oh, and it's great to roll around on the carpet, but then the edge rolls off and I'm like, I went down. So anyway, little tangent there. Welcome back. We're all here. Um, and we're gonna talk about setting up a HubSpot, CRM. So, uh, yeah, Zach, fire away.

What do you wanna know?

Zac: Alright, so. Why would a business need to set up a HubSpot CM quickly? Like what are some of the reasons that you've encountered where people are like, we need to get this done as soon as possible?

Rich: Um, they're just super impatient. I mean, that could be one, but that's not the most common one.

Um, the shorter one is kind of maximizing their investment, like. CRMs aren't cheap. Um, you know, hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars a month. And so people wanna get using it as fast as possible. But the biggest one is they don't wanna double pay. So they've got a contract expiring with whatever system they're using previously for their CRM.

Um, usually you can ask them and they'll let you end your contract, but go month to month, you don't have to renew for another full year. Some places will lock you in for another full year, which is ridiculous, but they'll do it. Um. But most people just want to be out of that. They want to have this like 30 day transition period, or two week transition period, or 60 days or whatever it is, and then be done and out and not have to deal with their old CRM.

Um, it's also really weird for your salespeople or your marketing team to be working in two systems, like your old stuff's over here, but we started new stuff over here, which I've seen people just like set up the new one but not migrate anything. And that's like, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no. The other one that we see is, uh, the critical sales period for them, like their seasonality is ramping up.

Um, I had one of these not too long ago, and honestly it's, it's pretty difficult because it puts a lot of pressure on everybody. Um, ideally you'd make a software change in your slow season, your slow time, and then be ready to go for your biggest sales season and like actually have used it and understand it.

But we do get people who make that switch like. A few weeks before they're like, are critical sales periods coming up and you're like, okay, let's hammer this out then. Um, so it's, it's okay to do, but you do have to make some compromises and some decisions if you're gonna speed up a CRM setup, especially HubSpot's CRM.

Um.

Zac: So ideally you'd want to like give yourself, like what kind of a timeframe would be like ideal I guess for having that kind of a transition period? Or what would you recommend if someone's like looking for, to like start like onboarding HubSpot, but they still have their CRM.

Rich: So, I mean, it's typically 60 to 90 days, depending on how much you can do yourself, how much you can outsource to somebody else, um, and how much time you can dedicate it to it.

Right? Because the people running the CRM aren't usually just running the CRM. It's like a sales manager, a sales leader, or a sales assistant, or a marketing manager or marketing director. It's like it's somebody who's got another job. Mm-hmm. And so how much can you put off from your other job? That's again, why you do it in the slow time.

Because you're not so focused on sales or marketing or whatever. Um, so HubSpot's standards for service and sales are 60 days, and that's meeting with a, with a specialist like us, um, once a week. Um, and then you do everything yourself. You set everything up yourself. For Marketing Pro, it's 90 days because it's a little more involved with the drip campaigns and the workflows and some of those things.

Uh. Sales you can get set up in a week, like if you want to. So spoiler. Like we did one in seven business days, Uhhuh, uh, and it was insane. Um, but we had two people on our team dedicated probably 60% of their day for those seven days to it. We had a Slack channel for the client, so we were getting like, we would ask for something and get it in real time.

It wasn't. Emails back and forth and figuring that out. Um, and we had a kickoff meeting with the client and told them everything they, they needed to have before we got started on this. Um, and they actually within like 24 hours had everything pulled together and we're just dumping stuff into a shared drive for us.

Um, so typically though, realistically, if I were doing a sales or service hub myself. 30 days to get it set up. It also depends on the size of your sales team and service team, because you can have it set up and ready to go, but you've gotta teach them and get them into it and using it. Um, one of the things we've heard about HubSpot is it's different from, like we always hear, it's different from our old system and.

People resist that, but once they've started using it, they're like, oh my God, it's so much better. Like, we just transitioned a ver a large service team, like I think they're now like 63 or 65 people, um, on this service team. Yeah. And we took, it took us about 60 days to get it set up. There were some things we had to do and some things we had to change.

Um, but they were great because they picked the cutover date and time and we had a specific moment when they would clear up tickets in their old system and a specific moment when they would work everything in the new, the beauty is it was over a weekend and so they had people come in on the weekend and actually work all the tickets in their old system and clear 'em out.

So when we hit the ground running, it was actually on a Tuesday morning, 'cause it was a long weekend over Memorial Day when we hit the ground running on Tuesday. Um. Everybody was in the system and we were there to help them on site. It was great. And honestly, like we continue to get really great feedback from them.

It's not perfect. There's still stuff not quite right, but they said it's just saving so much time over their old system now, and it's so much more organized. Um, and so we've got time to do those little things now moving forward. So that was about a 60 day-ish, um, in the backend. And then we did a week of training.

We did. We did five training sessions with their team, and then we ripped the bandaid and our team was there to help them and walk through. Their supervisors were also trained on it really well. Um, and so we had like six of us or eight of us who were walking around and helping these reps, like when they had a question or an issue.

Um. So, yeah, so that was a service one. Um, sales would be similar. Um, those sales is less, um, I guess less routine generally and more unique individuals doing kind of their own thing with, with HubSpot. But anyway, long, long

Zac: answer to a short question, but, and those were kind of, you were just covering like the standard onboarding times.

Right. But you also touched on like some of the custom stuff, because I think like the standard stuff is good, but if you have Yeah. The need for custom onboarding, like it's really, it seems like it's really customizable to like the business's needs, so it's like really cool to like see that well.

Rich: And it's the same as everything.

It's do it yourself versus do it for me. Um, like if you're having windows replaced, you can replace your Windows yourself. It might take you longer, it might be harder. You might make mistakes, um, and it might be more effort, but it's gonna be cheaper in the long run 'cause you're not paying that labor. But if you have somebody else come do it.

It's obviously like we had our windows replaced. It was two business days and that was it. They were here for like all the windows came, we put 'em in the garage like on one day and then the crew showed up and they had every window done within two days. If I had tried that, I probably couldn't have had one window done in two days.

Um, so yeah, I think that's the thing that's helpful. Um, especially if you're like a small team or you've only got one person who can dedicate themselves to HubSpot, set up. We have, you know, we have 11 people on our staff and at least half of us can engage in HubSpot setup, and we can divide and conquer.

We've got people who are great at reports, we've got people who are great at imports. We've got people who are great at workflows, and so we can spread that out. None of us has to be great at everything. Um, versus if you do it yourself or do it through a standard onboarding, you've gotta set it up. Like you'll be guided, but you've gotta set it up.

No one's gonna do it for you. Um, and we do see standard onboardings that we get into it like two weeks and they're like, what's it gonna cost for you to just do this for me? And it's like, okay, we can get you a quote on that. Um, I mean, to the point where we have like standard quotes, like we can, I could pull a quote on that right now and have it sent to you in five minutes because we know what needs to be done.

Um. But

Zac: yeah, it's um, it's a well old machine. I'm in that, uh, slack channel. You guys are always picking up. We try new onboardings.

Rich: Yeah, if we try, I've got one out there right now that needs to book yet, so hopefully they will. Um, I think you might have

Zac: covered a couple of these, but like what are some of the factors that affect how fast like a standard onboarding can happen?

Because I know there's some hiccups sometimes where like, oh God, yes. If you're not like on your game, like. Actually doing like the tasks that you need to do to learn everything and get everything set up, it can really start to slow things down. So I was just curious on that.

Rich: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the number one ones, and I didn't put this in my notes, but I was just thinking about it, is for your old system, do you have an expert internally who knows that system inside and out?

They know how to export, they know how to import, they know how to change things. They know where all the bodies are buried, everything. Um, we run into that with Salesforce sometimes, where on the Salesforce side, when you're integrating or migrating to HubSpot, you have to do a bunch of stuff inside of Salesforce.

Yeah. And generally, like we're pretty good with HubSpot. Like we're, I would say we're HubSpot experts. That's probably fair. I don't like that word, but I think it's, it's fair. Um, we're not Salesforce experts and so we have to rely on you and your team, and sometimes we've got like more of an ad hoc team doing Salesforce and that can be difficult.

Um, so the number one is where's your data at? Is it in a spreadsheet? Is it in multiple spreadsheets? We had one that it was like, oh, every, it's just in everybody's Google contacts or Outlook contacts, and it's like, oh, great. What's funny though is HubSpot has, uh, an integration right now that will sync your Outlook contacts or you Google contacts.

The problem you run into is most people don't want all of them in there. It's like, oh, no, I only want the business ones. And it's like, well, do you have them? Labeled as business like, are they flagged in some way with a tag? Um. So, um, that's one of the biggest. And then are you migrating from another system?

And then if you are, that's great. Is there an integration to do that migration? So like if you've just been using MailChimp for all of your marketing emails and you want to expand out and get more robust features and you're moving it over to HubSpot, there's actually an integration that will bring over those lists.

It'll bring over those contacts. Um, it won't bring your email like. Your designed emails, you'll have to do those yourself. But that's one of the things to look at. So there's two places. One, when you go into import in HubSpot, there's an option to import from an app or sync from an app. So that's the other thing.

Some apps do an import and some apps sync two ways and keep syncing two ways if you want them to. Um, and then there's their, um, their marketplace that has, um. A whole, whole bunch of them, um, that you can look at. There's tons and tons and tons of those. Um, even if it's in a Google sheet, you can actually pull it from the Google sheet without having to export and then import.

Nice. So those are big, uh, what kinds of data? So bringing in 10 contacts versus a hundred thousand contacts isn't a big deal. That doesn't change the scope at all. Oh. Um. We would do the exact same thing for those, it's a matter of if you're bringing in contexts and companies and deals and tickets and notes mm-hmm.

And emails and you want all those things associated with each other properly, that becomes more complex. We typically break it down and we do context and companies first to get those in there. Then we'll look at like notes or deals or emails or tickets or those kinds of things. Um, the, uh. But that's a big factor.

A lot of people are, they're like, we're just bringing contacts and companies we're just starting fresh with deals. We're not importing anything. Um, or they're like, and this I think will come to, uh, in another piece though. They're like, yeah, we wanna bring in our historic deals, but we don't really care.

We just wanna bring, start creating new stuff Now we'll bring the history in next month. It's fine. Um. So that's one of the things is how much do you need to actually have running? Like do you really just need the ability to receive a lead and follow up on that lead and track it through a pipeline? And that's it.

If that's all you need to do, I. We can set that thing up in like three days, um, and then get other stuff done later. Um, but the more you need up and running together, the longer it's gonna take to get the onboarding done. Still can probably get it done in 60 days. It's not usually a huge issue. And that's like 60 calendar days, like two months, um, not 60 business days.

Um, which would be three months probably. Yeah, I don't know. However that works. Um. And then I think the other one is how much time can you devote? So, and this really is whether you need a consultant or an agency or an onboarding specialist, or if you're going to do it like self-serve. Um, you know, onboardings can take upwards of 30 to 50 man hours depending on what you want to do.

So if you can only dedicate two hours a day, that's gonna take you a minimum of. You know, 15 business days, if you've got a light one, um, if you've got a heavy one, it might take you three months to get to it. Um, so that's another big one. Um, with us, a lot of times on a custom onboarding, we'll do an upfront meeting and get a huge dump of everything.

We'll talk through strategy. What does your pipeline look like? What does your sales process look like? What's your customer journey? All of these things. Where's your data? Get that to us. Where are your brand stuff? Get that to us. And then we'll go away for two weeks and won't even talk with 'em, and we'll get as much done as we possibly can.

Then we'll do a check-in and sync up and adjust what needs adjusted. Um. And that's how we can get them done in like three or four weeks pretty quickly. Because if we get everything up front, there is zero that we need from that client. They can go do their job, do their regular job, not worry about HubSpot, and then we come back, we show them everything we've done, get feedback, make any tweaks, train 'em on it, send them off, and then we can, we're usually there for support as well for, you know, a little while after, depending on the agreement.

Um. Oh yeah,

Zac: that's So if you have the time to put into it, then you'll get what you get like put in. But if you don't have any time, then it's probably better just to go with the custom route. So it's like, just let us do our thing. 'cause we're the experts and we can take a lot of the headache off of it.

So.

Rich: And we've had some that we talk about how quick, but like we've had some that have taken almost a year to set up and it is so painful for us and for the client, but it's because they couldn't access their data. There was an issue with the data. They were too busy to get back to us. We were sitting here around our hands just waiting to do stuff.

Those clients typically won't stick with it because you've had this software for a year, you haven't been using it, you're frustrated, it's expensive, and you're just like, screw it. We're just gonna be done. So we try to do 'em as quickly as possible because it's a better situation for everybody. 'cause you can always tweak later if you need to.

But I'd rather do one in seven days than have one take seven months. That's, yeah, a hundred percent. I can

Zac: imagine. So I think honestly, uh, you've covered a lot of good points. My next question is, um, so we, we talked about some of the things that would like, basically like affect the speed of how we do these.

Mm-hmm. But what are the essential things that will kind of like. Are really important to setting up the HubSpot CRM, like when you first get started and what can wait till later. You've covered some of it, but Yeah. Yeah, I think I'd like to get more insight into that. Um,

Rich: uh, historical data, if you don't need it right away, can always wait.

Um, you've gotta bring in your contacts and companies or you're not gonna have anything clean, but you can hold off on some historical data if you need to. Um. I think that the essential stuff that you need to set up depends on what you want to do. So you're probably getting a CRM to organize your data better.

And sometimes we see that's all people wanna do. I just want my data organized. I don't wanna do anything with it, which is weird, but it's true. Like it this, I just want it in one place. We'll do stuff later. Um, and that's great. I mean, HubSpot's CRM is free. You can throw as much in there as you want. You just can't do automated stuff and make your life easier without paying for one of the packages.

Um. But if you're, if you're doing sales for instance, you probably want to be. Responding to leads faster, sorting leads, assigning leads, not doing a lot of that manual work. So we always look at what is your biggest pain point right now? Um, and if it's, I have to assign every lead that comes in manually to people, it's like, okay.

What are the criteria on how you do that? The critical thing for you is gonna be yes, get the context and companies in there, um, and then get your team in. And then the number one thing is gonna be a workflow that does a round robin with your leads. That's number one. So. Kind of looking at that low hanging fruit, and then what do you do with those leads?

Okay. The leads come in and our, our first thing is to try to get a meeting with them. We want to demo our product for them. Okay, great. We can create a sequence, which is a linear workflow that basically just sends out. A request for a meeting and then follows up and tells you, Hey, they didn't do anything, so call them for that one.

We look at, okay, your meetings have to be set up, which means your calendar and email have to be connected, which we really try to get people to do right away no matter what. Um, and if those things are set up and you've got a form on your website that's coming in with those leads, then we can actually assign the lead to a person, send an email that feels.

One-on-one from that person. Follow up on that email a couple of times so your sales reps may not even have to touch that lead for like a week. And that's only if they don't do anything. Ideally, we set out that link and either they reply to the email and your rep's gonna get it and they can do what they want, or they, they set up the meeting.

So really looking for that one automation that saves you the most time and headache. Um, you know, whether it's chasing down a meeting, whether it's gathering information. We can also like, oh, you know, whenever we get a new lead, we need to gather these 10 things from them. And it's always a pain in the butt.

And we do it via email. Okay, let's make a form. And then when the lead comes in, we'll send 'em a nice email that says, Hey, thanks so much for requesting this. We just need to gather a little bit more, more information to, uh, to be able to help you. You know, please fill out this form, and then it'll continue to bug them unless they fill out the form.

So I think that's really what's key. Um. If you're doing marketing, you should have an idea of your customer journey and a drip campaign of some sort that you want to do, um, or an email newsletter or something like that. That's the most common that we see, uh, is I want to be able to email these customers and be able to, you know, do stuff with them.

So those are kind of the essentials. Mm-hmm. But yeah, the short answer is, it depends.

Zac: Just a quick last one, 'cause I kind of wanna hit on it. Uh, we've talked about how if you don't put enough time in or if you're not like focused on like actually doing the things that you need to do, then it's gonna be a real headache.

But is there any like, final mistakes that people should avoid that are like, oh yeah, basically, like you really want people to know.

Rich: Yeah, so there's a few that we always touch on. Um, one is, um, when you go to import your contact, not testing with a few records, like one to 10, something that you can easily delete and try again.

Uh, we have had people who just import a hundred thousand contacts right away and don't test it. And then they're like, oh, these properties aren't right. This isn't going in the right place. And it's like, that's a lot to roll back. I honestly test usually with two contacts or I find one contact that has something in every field we want to capture info for.

Um, so that's, that's a big one because the. The number of times we get hired to just clean up the database is, it's wild. It's wild to me. Um, they just

Zac: threw everything in there and now they're like, mm-hmm. We don't know what we did. Please help.

Rich: Yeah. Why do we have 10 of the same company? It's like, well, did you use URLs on your company records?

And we imported them. No. Okay. Yeah, that's why. Um, but yeah, so having and having URLs for companies, even if to manually put those in is important. And having an email address for people is in, those are really critical on an import. Um, the other one that we see involves custom properties and even some standard properties.

So on standard properties, when you get to a deal, is closed, lost. I have no idea why this is the case. I've definitely put it in the community and the ideas forum. It's just an open text field, so you can type in anything you want. Zach was a jerk. Zach hated our price. You know, whatever. Well, I can't report on that, right?

Like it's just gonna be a whole bunch of text. Mm-hmm. So the number one thing we do, you can edit a cut, a standard property, most of them, not all of them. You can change the property type as long as it's not used anywhere. It's not in a workflow, it's not in a list. No, there's no data on a contact, record on it, anything.

So before you import anything, when everything is clean, we always recommend going to like the closed one and closed, lost anything that's an open text field that you wanna be able to report on and changing it to like a dropdown or a radio button, whatever you want. So like closed loss should be like.

Pricing or comp competition or feature set, whatever you want, you can always add to it later, but you really want to have it be that dropdown because then you can be like, okay, we lost 20% of our deals on pricing. We lost 30% on this. Uh, you can't do that with the text field. So that's one. And there's a few of those hub, it's been really good at some of them.

They cleaned up all the phone number fields finally. So you can dictate your formatting on the phone number field, like are there parentheses, are there not, are there dashes, are there dots, et cetera. So that's wonderful. Um, but the big one is. Trailing off that is sloppy custom properties. So the biggest one we see is everything is just a text field.

Every single custom property they set up, it's just a text field. Um, and that's it. Um, fine. The data will go in there, but you can't. Do anything with it. So if it's a date and you put it in a text field, HubSpot doesn't know that's a date, it just knows that it's some numbers and slashes. That's it. If you make it a date field, you can run calculations off of it.

You can run workflows off of it. Um, all of those kinds of things. So like, if. Birth date would be a great one. If you're a retail, if you've got a birth date in there, in a text field, I can't trigger a workflow to send somebody a sale email on their birthday or 30 days before their birthday or whatever it is.

If it's a date field, I can absolutely do that. So making sure you're picking the right type of field, whether it's a number or currency or date for the kind of data that you're bringing in. Um, and then also doing things like restricting that data. So we had one, it was really funny. Um, I was working with somebody.

And I was like, oh, like your postal code should be restricted to numbers only, which you can do. And he's like, uh, yeah, except we're in Canada and our postal codes are numbers and letters. And I'm like, okay, nevermind. I'm like, you could res restrict the number of characters, but yeah, that's something you have to think about.

But if you only deal with US companies, your postal code will always be just numbers. So make sure you keep that clean. Um, so. Looking at those, we clean up a lot of those, and the process is basically to create the right field in para the correct field in parallel to the incorrect field. Take all the data from the incorrect field and migrate it over to the correct field, and then wipe out the old field.

Change the type of field it is, especially if it's a HubSpot standard field, because those are in reports and things change the type of field it is. Then move all the data back. Um, and it's, and we do it, we have a workflow, but you still have to double check it. Um, and if you've done that with like, you know, 15 or 20 properties, it's a nightmare.

So those are the biggest because. You are your own worst enemy at keeping your data clean. Mm-hmm. Like, and it's all about how you do it in the beginning. Um, and making sure you set those things up right. It's, it's

Zac: definitely gonna bite you if you do not have it good in the beginning, especially if you try and move to Indu, CRM, like HubSpot.

Rich: Yep. I mean, even in ours, like, I mean we've had HubSpot almost 10 years at the company. I think it's been eight years, and we didn't know a whole lot when we were setting it up and we went through a regular onboarding and we used it for a year before we started, like, you know, working on it with clients or something with clients or any of that.

And, um, I, I'm mean there are sometimes, and I'm like, oh God, like this is a mess. Like we should clean up our own thing. Um, and we are working to clean up, especially like customer records, because if we wanna send a gift to every customer, like, how do I do that? I don't know. Like, I don't, I have to have a clean list.

If I need to send a notice that we're on a holiday, like that should be super fast. We should have a customer list in there. We create an email, boom, off it goes, and we say, Hey, here's our holiday schedule for the year so that you understand when we're not here. Um, but yeah, cleanup is like just, you know, do yourself a favor and do it right the first time.

Mm-hmm.

Zac: You know? Wow. I feel like I really learned a lot. It was mostly just you, like, I feel like I just yelled at you about things that go wrong in HubSpot. You covered everything Great, though. I, I liked it. I think that's, oh, I hope it was

Rich: about wraps

Zac: us

Rich: up. Yeah. Um, I hope it was helpful for folks. Uh, I didn't really, we didn't really have a lot of tangents either.

Like, I just was like, no, that was just on a tear, like going through that. So sorry to come. If you come for the tangents, you got some, uh, some good tips with HubSpot. So if you want tangents, just go listen to a different episode. There's plenty of tangents. We did

Zac: talk about bureau in the beginning from Tom Holland.

We did. We did. And Tom Holland. We got least one, didn't

Rich: they? Yep, that's true. That's true. Uh, alright, so, uh. I think that's it. We do have an episode coming up, um, and it's gonna have a guest. We've got a guest again, so I know we've been working on this one for a while. So Alex Waters is gonna be with us. Uh, he's a, uh, local Sioux City person.

Um, and I'm trying to remember like, is he, is he on the city council or is he not? Yeah,

Zac: yeah,

Rich: yeah, he is. Okay. He's a

Zac: fantastic person. He's gonna be awesome to have. And as always, uh, yeah. Thank you for listening. Um. You can find our agency at Antidote seven one. If you have a question you'd like to send our way, head to CTA podcast live to shoot an email, or you can leave us a voice message on our hotline at voice 0 2 7 1 8 9 9 7 1.

Your question might make it into a future episode of the podcast. Mom, if you're listening to this, you shouldn't be scared. Please call in

Rich: because she, or just have a question, email. You can

Zac: just email it.

Rich: Yeah. Zach's mom had a question and, uh, she, she just didn't wanna send it in. Um, the other thing you can do, like, so when you go to CTA podcast live, you can attach an audio.

Clip to that. So you can record an audio note on your, on your own phone if you don't wanna, you know, leave us a message if you want to like, try it and erase it and try it again. Um, you could also record a short video and pop it in there too. You, it's just attaching a file. Um, and then we can pop your.

Pretty little face right in here in our podcast. So, um, we'll see if we get any questions. It would be nice, uh, and make life easier for Zach on picking topics. But, uh, for now we will just, uh, keep going and we'll be back, back next week with Alex Waters.