Better Governance for Your Business | HubSpot Admins HUG | November 3, 2022

Did it work?

All right, we're now recording. So welcome to what did we call this event? Better governance for your business. Super excited to have three of our product managers from HubSpot here with me. These, these three people have, have led teams who have built a lot of the cool features that you've seen in the admin space over the course of the last year, or even two Floor has been working in the admin space for a long time now and we've made a lot of strides at HubSpot. And so I'm really excited to have these three sharing things about permissions, things about approvals, things about various admin aspects of the tool to help you make the most use of it. Get the Most out of HubSpot since you already have it. So I will go ahead and kick it over to Flora. Are you the one starting?

I am the one starting. Awesome. Can you hear me okay?

Yep.

Fantastic. Cool. I'll kick off the slideshow and make sure I am sharing.

Okay. While Flora is getting her screen up, I'll be monitoring the chat. I just turned on the Q and A. Sorry, I forgot to do that earlier. So if you have questions, go ahead and drop them in and we will, we will answer them as many as we can.

Fantastic.

Awesome. I'm definitely having one. I'm feeling. I definitely work in tech. I can share one window. I got this. Great. Can you see my screen now?

Sure can.

Sweet. Not that. Share slideshow. Awesome. Well, thanks everybody. Really excited to be able to join you all today and just wanted to say, really appreciate having the admin community here at HubSpot. If it's not too much to say, I feel like you are our people, we are the people who are building product for y'. All. So as we're thinking about you and your day to day and how we can improve your lives and really give you the tools you need to be successful at your companies. So just a quick overview. Kyle, thank you for the wonderful intro. I'm Flora. I'll be jumping into talking about permissions and user management things. I'll be followed by Alice, who has got some really exciting stuff about audit logs and beta. Opt in there and finally Pearly will be finishing us out. We'll have plenty of time for questions also and then we're also going to be accessible. If you'll have our emails and any other follow up questions, you can see something really interesting during this that you'd love to follow up on, let us know. We're always excited to chat and yep, that's us. These are the relative teams that we are leading. Cool. So I'll jump into my portion talking about user management when I've talked to admins, some of you all. Hopefully I'll get to talk to more of you all throughout the conversation and in the future as well too. There's a pretty big common theme I'm hearing. You want to make sure your employees are enabled to do what they need to do, so they have all the right access to all the right tools, but you don't want to just give them the keys to the kingdom. You don't want to just open the gates and say, come in, do whatever you want, upload whatever, delete whatever. That seems incredibly stressful. But you don't want to also set up too much red tape so that you're spending your days just unlocking areas of HubSpot for other people, whereas you can be more effective doing other things. So as I talked to admins, I kind of felt like it had a bit of a vibe of maybe a very old school story about Goldilocks, right? Not too hot, not too cold, maybe the soup is too hot. You know, too many people are coming in, just changing things, uploading, importing with all that chaos. But you don't want the soup to be too cold either. And it's a really tricky balance that admins have to play because and going either direction, you're not saving yourself time. And also it could be really frustrating for, for your employees and for people on your teams to be using HubSpot. So it's not just figuring out the exact permissions, but how to communicate that out as well. So in light of this, what we want to do is really help create some tools that'll give you the balance. One thing that we're constantly doing in the HubSpot in the attempt of striking that balance is to get really more specific and granular permissions. This is overwhelmingly a huge piece of feedback we've heard from y', all is that we want more permissions, we want more specific permissions, we want permissions so that they can be assigned in sets as well. So this is a bit of a laundry list and I know that some of these permissions are ones that have come out earlier this year and we are definitely going to continue to work on more permissions as well too. So instead of reading through the list, I'll leave it here and definitely I'll check the chat later for more specific questions and follow up. But in that idea of making sure that the soup is not too hot or too cold, and that your users don't have too much access or too little access. We continue to create more and more granular permissions so that you can go ahead and fine tune the entire permission experience for your team as well. So that's something that's going on. Always an ongoing effort here. And then we are also doing a lot of work internally to make this process easier. So you are actually doing more versions more consistently. But the idea isn't just to, you know, grow a list of permissions, right? We want this to be contextual, we want it to make sense. And frankly, we don't want you to feel like you have to keep kind of doing the same thing over and over again. In fact, if you feel like you're doing that, in some ways, I feel like I might not be helping you succeed as much as you can. There something that we built to help that are permission sets. So every time you're onboarding a new user, you can start that user from a series of different tools. We have default permission sets at the professional enterprise level. To say if you're setting up HubSpot for the first time for a company, you're just saying, hey, hey, what's HubSpot's thinking? What's the best set of permissions for a sales rep? You can go ahead and select that and then go ahead afterwards as that sales rep is onboarding, learning their job. If they need more access to different things, go ahead and adjust that. And what we've seen is that this is a great starting point for if you're new to HubSpot and you're setting up permissions for users for the first time. But I know a lot of people on this call are gonna be old hats at this, right? So at the enterprise level, it's very much about going ahead and doing a custom permission set so that you can go ahead and say, I know the set of permissions that are needed for these types of users and customizing that as well. Going on from there, I'd love to show you a demo of a couple of different things that will give you a sense of as you're setting up users, how we can help make that process a little bit easier and a little bit more repeatable as well too. So Jumping into the HubSpot portal here, you can see that we are able to from here, just having a couple of quick tools just to help you filter through the list of your users as well. You can see here there's a status of your users. You can filter and See who hasn't accepted their invite yet or who is deactivated. We're also going to be able to filter by the various permission sets that you set up, as well as by skim status, if that's relevant to you. As well as we're creating a new user, then you have a couple of options here. So you can start with those default permission sets I mentioned earlier, being able to then go ahead and create perhaps a sales rep from a starting set of permissions, or you can say, actually, I'm going to create it from here, but then also you can adjust these permissions later on too. So maybe it's for a content marketer, you want something else? Then next on permissions you can say, you know, I know this person's a content marketer, but I also want to make sure that they're going to have access to a couple of other things in sales because. Because they might be working with that team as well. You can go ahead and make those adjustments and then in the final step, you can save that as a new permission set, so you get to review. And then in the final step here, you can go ahead and say you want to save this as a new custom permission set or not. Or maybe when you're creating a new user, you know that there's already another user who has a pretty similar set of permissions. So under the actions here, you can go ahead and copy the permission to a new user or then vice versa for another existing user, you can assign them a permission set. We want to create permissions to be a continuously flexible system so that you're always able to adjust the needs of your users, so you're constantly in that sweet middle spot where you have the tools that you need to make sure people have the right access to what they need as well. This is just a preview of a bunch of the work that we've been doing in the past couple of months. But more importantly, this is also going to be dictating a lot of the future direction of what we want to do as well. So what I mean by that is that in the future we'll be thinking a lot more of expanding permissions, how to get more granular, how to create more consistent permissioning access for everybody as well too, so that as admins, you're giving people the right set of permissions. So let me see if I can go back here. Hey. And only thing left is if you have any thoughts or questions, I'm always reachable@florahubspot.com and definitely we'll have some time for questions at the end here. Now I'm going to be passing off to Alice who will be talking to you about auditing.

Thanks Flora. Let's do a screen share.

This.

Screen share. Okay, can we all see audit logs.

And my email it's coming through.

Awesome. Hi everyone. This is my first hug. So I'm really excited to be here talking to admin experts. I'm from the Admin Governance product team at HubSpot. Our mission and purpose as a team is really focused on how we can help admin users troubleshoot, diagnose and resolve issues that come up in their account. Today it's specifically focused on one of the small features. We've been building audit logs and would love to get feedback on this, get you guys trying out the beta. But then in general, if you have any thoughts and feedback on troubleshooting as an admin in HubSpot would love to hear from you. So to talk about audit logs, first of all, what is an audit log? People probably know this, but it's used to trace a specific event, operation or procedure. It can help enhance internal controls, data security and business processes. And they can also help you, the customers, detect unauthorized use errors and fraud. For our use case we're really looking at audit logs of the users themselves of the account so we can help admins troubleshoot when something goes wrong like oh what user did that or you know, maybe what's the issue coming up. Specifically today we're looking at the account login history and security activity history and these have been available for about a year and a half at least in the app as export only features. And I just want to highlight the knowledge base article around it for anyone that's not familiar, but it's export account activity history and the two areas my team is influencing is this account login history which basically shows like when an employee or user logged in and some details of that login. Then also security activity history which shows what we call critical actions, but we consider them security activity actions that the users have taken in the account, such as adding and removing security features, adding and removing, impersonating users, deactivating users API keys, all the things listed there. Until now though, these were available only as an export option. So it means you have to download the data, you're opening it up outside of HubSpot and it means as soon as you export the data review it, it becomes stale. So if in 10 minutes I need to think oh did somebody do something else? I have to re export the download. It's not a great user experience. We've been working on this and working on creating a UI experience in app so that you can just get that data straight away and very easily look for specific actions. Just a quick demo of how it will look if we go to a portal. This is my portal here. Go to Settings and then under the left hand side you have account defaults and security tab. And if you do this in your portal now and you're not part of the public beta, you'll see the old link which would have just said export account login history and export security activity history. So it would have read like these two here. We've now changed these so it's a view and it's an in app. So just clicking on the link itself brings up the new UI. Oh, that's great. I'll go back 90 days when I might have been more active. And so you can see here this user, Alice Sykes, is a bit of a pest. I'm creating API keys, I'm deactivating them, I'm tracking, enabling tracking. I'm removing users. There's some filters here to filter by a specific user if you want to check. And some of the use cases we see for audits are maybe a user leaves the company and you want to just check specific activity related to that user. And then we can go back at the minute as far as a year of the data. And then if you still want to go ahead and export your security activity history, you can do that. Maybe you need to show it to an external company and then it's the exact same process for the login activity history and the login ui. I also wanted to just call out that to sort of align with these two audit logs. We have account activity APIs. So they're public APIs of the exact same data. So if your system actually wanted to just pull that information and create your own maybe alerts or actions to follow up when certain events happen, you can do that. I'll link all of these in the chat afterwards. But just a quick demo. If you want to then join the public beta, we'd love to have you. It's available for the security activity audit log. We haven't released to public beta for the login one because we're just tweaking a couple of things on performance to make sure it meets standards. We're hoping that'll be resolved and out next week for public beta. But if you want to do it now, just go ahead to the public the product updates section of your portal and then early access and you should see public beta for security activity audit logs and would love any feedback that you have on it. You can reach out to me directly on my email and if you want it, we can set up even a zoom and chat and connect. I would love to learn more about how we can improve these specific logs. Our remit is extending to audit logs. Beyond this scope of just security actions, we want to incorporate other user actions into our audit logs. We'd love to learn about how you'd use these types of features and anything else in general. That's me. I'll hand over to Perley.

Trying to share, but for some reason it says they can't access it. Oh, let me try to.

Oh, dear. Well, during the pause here. Oh, wait, she's back. Wow, that was fast. Never mind. Oh, you're muted. You're. You're muted. Purely.

Yeah, I'm saying, like, I'm trying, but it seems like I'm just trying to follow the troubleshooting steps here.

I can. You want me to just run slides for you?

Yeah, if you can, that would be great.

Yeah. Let me just get to. Here we go.

Let's see.

Thanks everyone for bearing with us here. Ta da.

Great, Great. Perfect. Thanks. Hi, everyone. My name is Perli and I'm a product manager on the approvals team here at HubSpot. So today I'm going to talk to you more about what our team is working on. So if you can go to the next slide.

Come on, computer. There we go.

All right, so we know that upmarket customers have complex processes when it comes to collaboration, which makes it challenging and risky because there are many team members involved, which makes it very difficult to have everything, to keep track of everything and have a streamlined process at the same time. But most of all, the fact that they're not able to contextually review and approve a risky action before it's performed makes individual contributors, managers and process admins anxious. And sometimes it can even damage their reputation and brand. So we can hear from other customers. So we have one senior account manager who's saying we want to make sure there's a review process process for everything before it goes live. And then we have another revops director who's saying that we want to have multiple eyes on something that is associated with our name. It's not up to one person. So it's crucial for these customers to have a review or approval process in place. So today, customers have to jump through too many loops and use a lot of external tools to manage their content. Next Slide. So this, this is an overview of how the process looks like if we want to talk about managing content. First they need to create the content and they probably use a tool like Google Drive to create it and collaborate on it using comments. And then they use a lot of project management tool, for example Asana to make sure that they the tasks are assigned to the relevant team members and it's all being reviewed. And during the whole process there's like an endless back and forth communication happening in these messaging apps such as Slack, Microsoft Teams to collaborate for example on changes that need to be made to the content to align on the final decisions and maybe get everyone, make everyone accountable for the task they're supposed to review. Finally, when they get to sign off from everyone, they can go ahead and just copy paste the content into HubSpot and publish it. So as you can see, it's a lot of friction for marketers, for their managers and for admins. The other problem with that, if you can go to the next slide, is that because the process is not streamlined, it's very hard to keep track to identify any potential error or mistakes that could happen before a content gets published. So how can we make sure that these risks don't fall through the cracks? Our vision is that tomorrow customers can use HubSpot to make their content publishing process easy, streamlined and seamless. So how are we going to do this? Of course there's a lot that we need to do to get there, but we started by adding a contextual approval request flow into the marketing email editor. So I'll show you how this works.

This will be tricky.

Yes, I cannot share my screen.

Okay, hold on. I bet I, I know some stuff that was that. Were you gonna show email or.

Yes. Okay, let me, let me see, let me see if I can. Actually, I'll, I'll try to share it again just to see if it works.

Yeah. Oh yeah.

Can you see my screen?

Yeah, perfect.

Okay, great. So now I'm logged in as a super admin in my HubSpot account and I'm going to show you how to turn on the approval feature. So the first thing I need to do is go to Settings and go to the marketing portion, click into email and then I see the approvals tab here. Then I can just switch to toggle on. Once I switch it, it means that all users will need to get approval for all emails before they are able to send it. We've also added this new permission to allow admins to decide who can approve emails. So it's Very simple to do. I can go to users and team, choose the user. For example, Andy here. Go to the Account tab, expand the settings section and switch the toggle here to allow this person to approve content. Basically, this person will be able to approve any emails. If someone requests this from them, go ahead and click on save. Okay, so that's for the super admin side of things. Now let's imagine that I am a person that wants to request a review. So I'm just going to share another tab. Okay, I think I'm gonna have to join as another. Maybe another session. Let me try something. Sorry, I had my all my tabs open, but now that I'm trying to get them into the same browser, should be okay. So now I'm logged in as a regular user. I'm a marketer. I am going to try to send a new email here. Go to email, click on Create Email. I'll select the template here. Let's. So we have the email editor that's opening. Let's imagine that I'm done with my email and I want to send it. So before that I want to request an approval. So I go ahead and click here on request approval and then this modal will open up here I can select the approvers, I can select up to 10 approver and if I select for example, five approvers, all five of them need to approve. So I can send the email for the sake of this demonstration here I'm just going to select one approver. I can even leave a message to give more context. And then what will happen is that this person, this, the person that's supposed to approve, will receive notification letting them know that a request has been sent. For example, I'll show you how it looks like wasn't showing. Sorry about this. That's fine. So here I'll receive a notification by email saying that I can see which user has requested approval. I can see the, the title of the email and the message. And then when I click on review here, I'll be brought up directly to the email editor. Right. So here you can see the this collaboration sidebar has opened up automatically. I can see the status of the approval, the request note, who are the approvers? See, this is the approval tab. Okay, so. And then I can see that it's pending. I just, I'll just save and exit because I need to log in as the approver. Promise you this was way smoother when I practice, but because I can't, I have a problem with my screen sharing. Okay, so now I am the approver. I'll go to that specific email. If I go to the approvals tab here, I can see the same information that I was seeing before, but now I can either request changes, for example, if I don't like the font or anything that needs change, or let's make sure that the links are correct. I can just click on request change and it will bring me automatically to the commenting section here. I need to tag the user with their name, otherwise they won't be notified. So I need to tag them, for example, and say can we please change the font, for example? And then they will receive a notification letting them know they can make the change. And then if I check again and I'm happy with everything, I can either approve from here or click here and click on Approve. It's the same result. And I can leave a message here, gone, ready to go. And then the marketer will just be able to go ahead and just review and send the same way they used to do before. So that's it in a nutshell. Sorry again for the back and forth.

No worries. I'm gonna jump in here. We do have some questions and things, but I'm running this thing, so I'm gonna ask my questions first. First of all, thank you, all three of you, for sharing these, all this stuff you've been working on. I think it's so exciting. I'm gonna try to go in reverse order and hope that that helps me not forget anything. So pearly. The approvals in the collaboration sidebar is new, right? Is that still private beta? Is that something our friends here can get their hands on? What's the status of that?

Very good question. So all of this demo is currently in private beta. We are launching the public beta next week. So please enroll. You can use the feature that Alice demonstrated to enroll in the beta.

Nice. Okay, I. I anticipate a LinkedIn video in my future on that topic. One.

One other. Sorry, one other thing that I need to mention is that this is a feature that's available for marketing enterprise portals.

Okay, cool. And then the other thing, when you. When the marketer submits it for approval and there's that drop down to select approvers. That is that list, I assume, is every user that has that approver permission turned on.

Correct? Exactly. By default can also be approvers. We recommend super admins to give permissions to the specific users who are relevant to be approvers, so that this list is relevant for everyone.

Right. Awesome. And then Alice, not a question for you so much as a funny story. I was doing a session for this HubSpot admin hug, one of the first ones I ever did. And I was talking about things every HubSpot admin needs to know and I was talking about logs and I was like and you know you have to download them as. As an Excel spreadsheet. That's just the nature of it. And I clicked on it and this beautiful UI came up and everybody was like, how do I get that? And I was like, I. I guess this is live now. But nobody had it but me. I think friends and family portals got it first. And so everybody.

Yeah, HubSpotter portals, that's.

I jumped into the Slack channel later that day and was like, hey, how do I. Sorry I spoiled the surprise on this surprise. Also got enrolled in the. The private beta for that before is out. But I love that it's. It's those two and I'm excited to see the others. And then Flora, I had a question for you and I've forgotten it. Going in reverse order didn't help. Well, oh no, I remember the permission. The default permission sets is that Pro and Enterprise. Now I was under. That was an enterprise feature. I've been telling people the wrong thing.

No, all good. That's a pro and enterprise. Yeah, we just want to give new admins a starting point and a lot of times the first time you're setting up a user, you're just trying to figure out how to get them started right away. Looking at a big list of all these permissions, we want to make that experience a little bit more straightforward as well. That's Pro and enterprise.

Okay, I need to, I need to correct all the people I've told there's an enterprise feature. Pro is so awesome now. Okay, all right, so those are my thoughts and questions. Let's get to the ones in the. In the Q and A here there are several. So Shaddad wants to know Alice, I guess this is for you. Is activity log history timeline going to be extended? Extended?

Yeah. So at the minute we have. We're planning the data to go back a year but I would be really interested to hear because that's how long we can. We'll store the data but if there's use cases for it to be further than that I'd love to hear right then.

So Shah in the chat put some use cases and some, some. Some scope there. Alice is here now is a great opportunity or email me as well if.

You can think of things later.

A sykesubspot.com yeah and then Jen wants To know will the approval features roll out to other areas like blogs, website pages, knowledge base, articles and more? Pearly, I think you just dropped something in the chat there, but do you want to.

Yeah, exactly. It's coming soon to blogs, landing pages and web pages, but we get the long term. The, the long term vision is to have them across many other tools in HubSpot. So stay, stay tuned for, for everything that's coming next.

So yeah, I saw some requests for workflows in the chat and since the collaboration sidebar is there, maybe, maybe we could get there sooner rather than later. And then is there a way to see a list of all waiting for approval emails? Maybe add a report to the dashboard?

Yes, yes, I can share again. My screen. Let me see if I can share this. Can you see my screen?

Yes.

So once you enable the approval feature, you'll get this new column approval status in the marketing email listing page and their status approved pending. You can see all the status there, so should be what you're asking for.

Awesome. And then to approve them from there, just click into the individual email editor.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Seeing you on that page reminded me. I have another question for you, Flora. The actions button on users I have not paid enough attention to. Clearly there's some cool things in there. There were two different options you pointed out. One is to copy the permissions of a user to another user. Is that right? Is that just for. Net new users you're creating or is that flow for existing? What happens when you push that button? Can you show us?

Yeah, definitely. It is a bit of a question like chicken and the egg. The user, the permissions, what came first? When you do push the button of copy the permissions to new users, then it takes you to the new user creation flow. So then you're creating a net new user with those permissions. That being said, we're exploring and trying to understand a lot of the use cases to try to make sure it is easy. So perhaps you can like save it as permission set and apply that permission set to an existing user. But lots more there to come.

Yeah. So then just as you go through that new user flow, those permissions will already be there when you already set. That's awesome. And then the other one was apply a permission set to the user whose action button you've clicked. So whatever permissions they currently have, if you use that and select a permission set, that would override, bring them into alignment with that.

Exactly. I did get a Q and a question from someone about the multiple permission sets and we're starting to. If you can apply multiple permission sets onto one user. So we're exploring the use cases from that and seeing what we can do there too. So more to come there.

Cool. And Laura is asking, can you set custom user permission sets?

Yes.

So that one. Yeah, you mentioned it briefly. I guess so one way to do it is as you're creating a user, you set their permissions. And then there's that checkbox you showed where you can save it as a permission set. Is that the easiest way to do that?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think we're approaching it from two different places. One is that if you're, let's say old hat, you know what you're doing with HubSpot, right. You know, when you look at the list of permissions, this means a bunch of words that means a bunch of things to you. So you can go ahead and create a permission set from scratch and then go ahead and select those various permissions and then create a set from there. Or as you're creating a user, you can select from that default set of permission set. So what we recommend is a starting point for like sales reps or sales managers. Then save that. And then if you customize on top of that, you can also save that as permission set. So we actually have permission sets of its own tab here. You can take a look at those sets of permissions collected here.

Cool. So, attendees, there were questions in the Q and A I saw earlier that are now gone. I don't know if that's a system error or if you deleted them or if they got answered. And I wasn't paying attention. So I. Is there anyone here who has a question, whether you asked it or not, that you feel like didn't get answered? I'm a little nervous that the system just ate them and now people's questions won't get answered. Charles is asking the entry level price for social media scheduling. That is a Marketing Pro feature, right?

Yeah, I believe in Marketing Pro.

None of you work on schedule social stuff, huh?

But I can do a quick check though.

Yeah, the pricing page. Honestly, of all the HubSpot.com pages I visit, the pricing page is the one I visit the most because I'm always trying to figure out what's in what tier. So there's that. Yep. Okay. Flora beat me to it. There's another great page. Here's a. Here's a great tip you should all be aware of. I always forget this page exists, but if you're ever curious about where a particular tool lives or what you get, you should check out this much more exhaustive page from our legal team which tells you exactly what the limits and tools and features are for every subscription. It goes very deep and granular, whereas the pricing page is more like trying to get you to buy stuff. This is like giving you for real what's there. Cool. Well, if anyone else has questions, feel free to drop them in here. All all three of these product managers have shared their emails, so you can also reach out afterward. I would really appreciate it if you all would fill out this survey. It's just a two question survey. One is NPS question rank this event on a scale of 0 to 10, 1 to 10 and then just free text field if you have any feedback or requests or ideas or thoughts or if any messages you want to share. I'd really appreciate it continuing to try to make these meetups as valuable as possible to all of you who are coming. So thank you for everyone who's here. If there are no further questions, I think I'm going to go ahead and stop the recording.