Cleaning Up Dirty Data with HubSpot Data Hygiene [HubHeroes, Video EP94]

Okay, so George and I gotta talk. I gotta say something for the audience at home.

Oh, boy.

This is. This is a cry for help. I have never seen you so zippy, so feisty to get on the mic. Because what listeners at home cannot see was. You were punching the air. You were holding snacks up to the camera.

I got my mix nuts.

We didn't even get to do our usual banter beforehand.

You were ready to roll. I'm ready to roll. Today I. I'm ready to roll a.

Conversation about my feelings. And you were like, you know, what else is better? Female.

Yeah, no, I was so excited, I hit the wrong button. So, you know, there's that guns. But. But here's the thing. I'm just excited because it's Friday. It's Friday, and we're talking about cleaning up stuff, an organization. And I'm just. I'm down with this conversation. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

It's because when I read this prompt, I was like, you know what? I should pop into the old happily portal.

Should I let folks at home know.

What we're talking about and go ahead and click on the data quality control panel?

Yep.

Ladies and gentlemen, guess what we're talking about today.

I don't like what I see. Yeah.

Whoopsie.

I don't like what I see. Property nightmares now been a review. All property insights now been a fever dream. I am. I hate this.

Look, as a teenager who eventually was like, totally, dad, I cleaned my room, but he opened the closet like it was a OSHA violation. People were getting hurt. Hard hats were required.

You mean other people did that too? I thought that was just me.

Your teenage daughters are only running because I walked before them.

That's.

Yeah, my first word was no, George. Oh, nightmare.

I think that's any kid, to be honest with you.

No, I was like mom or dad or something like that.

Or duty.

Anyway, speaking of duty, we're talking about dirty stuff today. We're talking about your neglected HubSpot portal. Because let. Let's be honest, can kids, for you listening at home, when was the last time you opened up your HubSpot portal and went, man, I know where everything is? I know what final, final, untitled workflow means and who built it. I know what landing page copy, clone, clone, clone.

I know we're talking about job title and title.

Max, by all that is holy, do you have like somebody screaming sound effect? Because in my brain it's like. Like, yes, right there. Oh, my God.

Keep your finger pointed on that screen. Max, do you know what's totally normal having 10 John does in your portal who are all totally named John Doe.

Oh, oh, oh. Do you want to know the one thing that completely like, I just, I giggle and then steam comes up my ear when I go into a portal that somebody's in for about a year, two years, by the way. I seen one that was like four years. And I search for Brian Halligan or Maria and. And there's a cool robot and they're still in there. And nobody deleted default. We're going to put some contacts in there. So they're still in there. And I'm like, are you a problem like Maria?

You don't, apparently. So this is what we're talking about today, kids. Data hygiene. The thing you think that doesn't harm your results, doesn't harm your bottom line. But we're going to be talking about the real implications of dirty data today. Not just messed up marketing campaigns, not just wasted unproductive hours, but many. And George, this is a topic. I got to be honest. If people were to hit up SidekickStrategies.com the number of articles you have published over the past two weeks that are like, have you heard about data hygiene? Did you look at data hijack? Ladies and gentlemen, Data. Hi. Do you have some feelings about this?

Yo, we just finished a couple weeks ago our first super admin training. And when we talked about data hygiene in that training, well, super admin training while we, I mean, I guess I can show for Big Sidekick. Is that how that would go? I don't know. So which, by the way, we do have a new super admin training starting September 27th. If you want to go and actually sign up, you can go to psychicstrategies.com go into the main navigation under Solutions. You'll see super admin training. If you're somebody who has been risen up in your organization and you're taking care of what feels like everything and you're not sure how to talk to the C suite or the people beside you or below you. If you're dealing with data hygiene or not dealing with it because it's in your closet, well, you might want to check out the super admin training. Anyway, Liz, thanks for that beautiful segue. But we were doing a super admin training, by the way. Last time it was 12 weeks. This time it's 10 weeks. But there's additional content that you get. Okay, I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna stop. Ladies and gentlemen, the amount of epiphany moments and rap moments that happened during that session was like, mind boggling. And the amount of clients that we've historically helped in cleaning up their data and showing them ways, like through portal audits. And then, like, look at all of this. Like, it is. It's like. It's like a HubSpot. Like, I don't know. It's. It's bad. So, yes, Liz, I am passionate about getting people to focus on more regularly the duties. Poo poos, pieces of garbage that people are leaving lay around their HubSpot portals. And helping admins figure out quick ways to visualize and clean up said duties. Poo poos and garbages.

Maxi said duty.

I'm gonna see how many times I can say that in this episode just because I feel like it's my duty to say duty.

Okay, what's that line from Family Guy? Hey, Lois. Judy. Peter, I'm holding ice tea.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, my Lois is unparalleled. Hi, Max. After the existential dread you experienced once you realized what we were talking about, and that is a call coming inside from your own house. Tell me your feelings about data hygiene. In fact, why do you think people overlook it? You know, it's important. And even you were like, oh, yeah.

I mean, I don't know if it's so much that they intentionally overlook it as much as it is that they just don't pay attention.

Right.

And it's also funny how other things can just. Other priorities can just get in the way of this, but then you don't realize how much it can slow things down and screw things up. And then you stumble across this list of 877,000 companies that I'm looking right now that came with. From Built with, and I think heart attack seeing all this stuff in here. Yeah. I mean, the data hygiene stuff. I mean, we talk about it a lot. I don't know how good everybody is at it. Like, HubSpot has a lot of these awesome, flashy features that should be helping you, but, like, clearly, even someone who eats, drinks, and sleeps and lives hubspot24.7 Like, I do, you know, I'm. I'm taking a good, hard look at the mirror right now at this portal that I'm in charge of and very disappointed in myself.

Well, Max, let's dive in there. Right?

Well, here's the other thing. Here's the other thing. The only other thing I'd say about. I think everyone's constantly looking at, like, what's the new cool thing that I can build? And the new idea that we have and the next thing that we can do the next strategy we can deploy that we can support with HubSpot. And here's this cool stuff that we can build to make it happen. And then you just, like, keep forgetting about, well, let's get rid of the old shit that doesn't serve us anymore that isn't working. The old workflows, the old processes, the old lists, the old properties, the old sections on your records, the old this, the old that. And it's just like, man, you don't pay attention to that stuff. It builds up so fast over time that when you start looking at everything, you're just like, wait a minute, I don't know what is still being used, what's not. And then you have this fear of, like, well, that obviously looks like it's something that's, like, old, dead and gone. But, like, what if it isn't? What if it's tied into something and it's like, you know, operating something in the background that I just take for granted that I didn't realize is, like, tied into this giant web of old that I haven't. It's just.

Damn, dude, did you even breathe? Yeah, like, did you breathe during that last segment?

Well, look, this topic is bringing up a lot of feelings because, George, you may have noticed I have taken my mic off the stand, which has only happened one time in Hub here.

Yeah, it's. I'm kind of scared right now, I gotta be honest.

I completely agree with you, Max. I completely agree with you. This is something that people are not paying attention to, right? Because we're focused on the shiny objects. We're focused on more important things. But I feel like I'm back at the episode we had about do you just like pain? When we were talking about not embracing AI as a marketer or a content creator, Are you. Are you really an artist? Or do you just like pain? And it makes me feel. I'm having the same reaction to this conversation right out of the gate. Because how are we overlooking it? Because literally, we are. Like, I was making a joke at the beginning, right? Clone, clone, clone 15. John does like. We are interacting with obviously dirty data all the time. And for some reason, we consider it the cost of doing business within HubSpot, right? We consider it the cost of doing business without taking a step back and saying, man, let's say on the conservative end, I'm wasting 15 minutes a day, maybe 30, right? That's a few hours each week. That's how many hours each month? That's how many hours each year. Like, this is the kind of death by paper cut situation that continues to pile up and pile up and pile up. So it's weird. I totally agree with you, Max. We will be in the portal, but. But we will be handling clearly bad dirty data all the time. And George, why are we ignoring it?

Yeah, so why? I answer this, by the way, look at your riverside settings and change your mic from your imac microphone built into the actual mic that you moved away with. That didn't actually stay with your voice. But it's not. Because when you moved away from the. When you did, you're like, I am about to position myself away from my computer, stupid. No, you're fine. It sounded good.

Still.

It sounded good, but it sent me down a road of like, let me go. Look, if that's the mic that actually.

Is like, she, like, who's going to tell her? Let me hold your hand while I tell you this. All right? I actually have to leave and come back because for some reason it's not allowing me to switch.

I'll be. Oh. See how. Okay, so wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you leave, Max, do you remember the question?

No.

Oh, my gosh.

I'm having a heart attack. She left my portal right now.

She left the squirrels alone. Come on, she's supposed to heard the squirrels. Okay. All right. By the way, no, I don't take this part out because this is just how the show is.

Are you serious? You have to make me look like an asshole?

No, no, I mean, I'm just saying, because I literally, like, when you left, I go, crap, what was the question? And Max said, I don't know. I'm having a heart attack looking at my part. Oh, my God.

Mom leaves for five minute seconds and you can't keep the show. George, I. Yeah, you know what, Noah? Keep this in. Keep this part in.

God. Here.

So let me cut this straight. I leave for five seconds and the whole show falls apart? I just want everybody to acknowledge this. I may not be able to pick the right mic. I may not be able to pick the right mic.

It's the right mic now.

So my question to you, George Muffin, light of my life.

Yeah.

The question was, why are we willfully turning a blind eye to something we deal with every day? How. How have we developed dirty data blindness?

I don't. I don't think we're willfully doing it, but I do agree with you that it is a blindness. And here's the thing. One, my brain goes to the fact that. Listen, I get it. It's not sexy. It's not the shiny new thing. However, like Max said, you're chasing the shiny new thing. But what I want everybody to understand is you're building the shiny new thing on a shitty foundation. Like, the data is your foundation to be able to do all the smart things that you want to do from a sales, marketing, and service perspective. And so not paying attention to that data being clean, paying attention to setting permissions. So not everybody can create properties. Not putting things in, like teams and actually like organizing and having a method to your madness is opening you up for this playground where people can just drop the duty, the garbage and all the stuff in your portal. And so here's the thing. If you're sitting here listening to this and you want to get rid of this blindness, blindness to dirty data in your portal, then here's the thing. You have to come up with systems and processes that focus on letting you know when there is new data or dirty data that should be cleaned up. And you need to create a time frame in which this process actually happens. So, for instance, one of the things that we love to do is we love to create cheat sheets or checklists or. And so literally there's like, here's what you should be checking to see if it's clean daily. Here's what you should be checking to see if it's clean weekly. Here's when you should be diving into your portal to look at this monthly, by the way, every six months, you might be able to do a mini portal audit because it's easier to clean every six months than it is every six years. And so literally start to think about what are the lists and folders that I can create, what are the notifications and permissions that I can set, what's the time frame that I can map this around, that I don't be blind to it because I have automated tasks that remind me or I have list notifications that inform me.

Okay, Max, I need you to hit a buzzer for. Do you have a buzzer? Noise. Does any of you have a buzzer?

Yo. Yeah, no, no.

I want a bad buzzer. I want a bad buzzer.

What the heck? All right, there was nothing bad about that, right?

But you started giving me a bunch of homework, and I don't even know why it's worth for me to do all that work. Look, I'm just putting myself in the position of the listeners now, right?

Okay. Okay. Lisa. Lisa, I'm going to explain to you why dirty data sucks. Lisa.

Thank you. That's what I Want to know?

Because Lisa, we're now on the Bad People podcast and Lisa from Sheboygan, because that's where you live and that's who.

You like a swear word.

And so Lisa from Sheboygan, who's on the Bad People podcast, I have no context to who the heck you really are, know where you really live. So how am I going to communicate with you in the right way at the right time with the marketing and sales efforts that.

What do you mean?

I don't know why it's important. Everything crumbles and falls apart if my data is not clean. Everybody wastes more time looking for the ish they need because it's clone, clone, clone or God forbid, new workflow 76895 new workflow 7x9 God, like what? And no folder structure. You have no naming convention, so you can't actually search it. You have 13 cities in your properties.

Actually heard of a horror story once from someone in sales. I won't name the company where they had a deal that was close to close over six figures and they sent a Lisa.

That's who they sent it to. They sent it to Lisa.

So here's what actually happened, George. They didn't have clean data in the contacts. So for some reason they had merged the last name and the first name of two different people into one contact. And when the personalization tokens triggered it gave the wrong first name paired with the wrong last name to the wrong person. And the the actual contact wrote back and said, I was about to sign my contract and PandaDoc and you have now lost my business. So that is one of my favorite horror stories to tell about why data hygiene is important. Because you might be able to sit there and say like you're telling me I'm going to save an hour a week and you want me to do two to eight hours worth of work. It's not just lost productivity, it is lost revenue.

Yes.

That is like, that's like, like think about can you imagine going to your boss and being like, well I could have done this daily, weekly or monthly checklist that would have gotten us that three hundred thousand dollar contract. But I didn't do it because I needed to be productive. Can you imagine?

Liz, I feel like I need to simplify this a little bit.

Do it.

It's important because you're a human trying to do good things for other humans and you don't want to mess up the payday for all the other humans in your organization.

I love that. Max.

I just did something.

Was It a duty.

No, no, it didn't make a duty. I didn't make a duty. I went to ChatGPT and told me to give me some funny names for just like the common junk people leave behind in a. In a portal that has bad hygiene. And it also.

Integrity.

The forgotten funnel. Right? The sales funnel that nobody remembered. The campaignus interruptus. The marketing campaigns that was started but never finished. The template of doom. The email that was never sent. The phantom pipeline. Sales pipeline that mysteriously appeared and never went away.

This is a Halloween article waiting to be written.

Ghosts of leads. Past leads that were once important but now just haunt your CRM Data dump. The place where all the important test data went. Important in quotation marks. Test data went to die. Deal or no deal. That deal that's been pending since the dawn of time. The invisible cta. A call to action that was never visible to anybody.

Here's the thing. Somebody's out there listening this, and they're like, my God, did ChatGPT look at my portal?

Can I tell you to help with.

Harry so it gets it.

I got to tell you one other horror story because you just reminded me of this, Max. There was this one time I was involved with a portal where they had over 400 workflows, and in two different instances, the worst case scenario happened at the opposite extremes. In the first case, they're like, no, totally. This ambiguously written workflow isn't going to cause any problems. That was a workflow that excluded about 10,000 people from getting automated messages. So then they turned off the workflow and. And the next morning, over 10,000 contacts got blasted.

Oh, God.

Then on the other extreme, about two weeks later, they're like, no, now we figured this out. We've totally figured out this naming structure that we have no clue about. So they turned off another one. And you know what happened? It removed the lifecycle stages from every contact in the database because it reversed the contact lifecycle assignment.

Dude. This is why, speaking of hygiene, like, descriptions, descriptions on workflows are so important, right? But also, this is why they're so bad. Because when you're looking at the workflow itself, what do you have to do to actually see that description, right? You're either going back to the workflows page or you got to like, click somewhere on it the name.

Like, go click the name now.

Yeah, click the name to edit it. But it's like, dude, why don't you somehow serve me up that context of what's actually happening with this workflow while my eyes are trying to follow down these branches, wondering if that one little property that's getting set is actually the thing that's stopping 10,000 people from getting emailed when they shouldn't be. Right. They need to add more. They need. You know what, you know what they need to do? They need to make a sticky note feature where you can literally just take a note that says, hey, idiot, don't delete this because it does something important and stamp it right on top of the workflow.

There's a problem with that, though. I've been in a portal.

Problem with that?

No, because I've been in a portal where I had. No, here's the thing, though. I've been in a portal where more than 10 just literally said, do not touch. And I'm like, well, what do I do? Like, all of them said, do not touch.

Yeah, but that's more than do not touch. It's like saying. It's like, here, here's like a little just like big note that you can't miss next to this one little set property value of something to something to say, hey, I know this looks like an innocent little value changed, but this is doing some really important stuff that you can't see here.

Teacher. Teacher. Isn't that what the comment feature would be for? Like, the comments are hidden.

They're hidden.

Well, true comment. True.

I gotta hover over every corner of every action to click it and then see it. That.

That.

It's so dumb. The comment feature does nothing unless you're, like, working on building it. But, like, there should be a thing where you can put a big red stamp on it that says, listen, you lunatic, don't change this because it's going to do something really bad.

Can it be nicer? So far they've been an idiot. They've been a lunatic. How about, dear HubSpot user, please do not touch this button.

Max, we've talked about this offline and I'm just. I feel like you're not going to hear me unless I put you on blast publicly. My guy. When are you going to start emoting? When are you going to start telling us how you actually feel about things? I'm feeling very unclear. You're feeling a little diplomatic here.

When HubSpot starts letting me tell people what the frigging workflow actions are actually doing, that's. That's what I'm.

There you go.

So, George, let me turn to you for a minute. Max, I need you to, like, find someone. Someone to take a breath, hug a puppy. You'll Be okay.

Turn on your calm app.

George, we've outlined.

Sip some tea.

Yeah. Have us have some mixed nuts.

I got some right here.

I know it was a callback to the beginning of the show because I'm a good host, but, George, I know we've talked about some of our biggest horror stories, right? Oh, my God. He took it literally and brought the puppy.

Yeah.

This is why you joined the live studio audience.

He's chilling.

This is why you joined the live studio audience. But we talked about some of the most common things that we've seen.

Right.

Like naming issues with workflows, contact, merging, duplicate contact. What are some of the other symptoms that people might be kind of blind to by accident? The most common things that you see that make you go, warning, warning. We have a data hygiene emergency.

Other.

Than a puppy licking around.

Yeah. So it's funny where my brain goes when you ask me this question, because I feel like there's this secondary level that maybe people miss. So, for instance, when I think of data hygiene, I wish I had a live audience because I'd be like, if you're driving in the car right now or you're in your office by yourself, when I ask you the question, when I say the words data hygiene, what immediately comes to mind? And I'd be curious what people are shouting out while they're driving down the road or in their office by themselves right now.

Father taking a shower.

Wow. That's probably Max.

Max, I told you this time and again, this isn't therapy. It's not therapy.

We're so canceled right now.

When you say data hygiene, I go, man, I stink.

I didn't say dad hygiene. I said data hygiene. Yeah, dad. So here's the thing. I immediately. And it's funny because I'm just like, I'm super passionate about this because I've seen hundreds, if not thousands of portals get this wrong. I immediately think of Personas and the Persona property and the fact that people don't use the description as an I'm a statement. And they don't realize that that actually shows up in the form. And it's a psychological question that actually enables somebody to be like, I'm seeing that'.

Me.

Let me select that and self segment. But what I just quickly did was give you a second level of something that you should be paying attention to. The amount of people that aren't using those second layer things to then organize or clean things or display or show things in a way that they need to be shown or displayed is like, mind Boggling to me. And so you can kind of quickly tell when you're talking to a HubSpot user if they're like surface level HubSpot users. Not a bad thing, by the way, versus somebody who is paying attention to, like, the deepness, the secondary and tertiary levels that one could go.

The word you're looking for is depth.

Depth, yeah. That's great. That's a good word. So, like, I have a super admin person who went through the training. Again, not shilling for big sidekick here. I'm just saying. And I immediately knew, wow, this person gets it because they were doing something where they were daisy chaining presets, permissions, teams, and record customization together. Not only display what people needed to see when they needed to see see it, but to understand what didn't need to be there and could be cleaned up and removed at such a granular level. I was like, how from this day forward, hence, by the way, we're doing a podcast on data hygiene, and you mentioned that I've done several articles. How from this day forward do I get more HubSpot users to focus on this right here than where we've landed? And. And most people are living.

It just made me think of.

So my brother's a dad.

Hygiene, like a. Yeah.

Deepness.

Thinking about. Yeah. My brother's a chef, right? He works in, like, really. Yeah. Really fancy restaurants. He's like, a very, very good chef. And something that he told me, he's like the. The kind of, like, test that they give cooks. And I don't know where this. I don't know if this is, like, a Gordon Ramsay thing or if it's like a more common thing, but the way that they'd, like, interview people is the first thing they'd have them do is basically say, make scrambled eggs. And they look at the technique in which they make scrambled eggs, and just from that, you can really tell if someone actually knows what they're doing or not. I feel like the scrambled egg Test for a HubSpot admin should be go make a form that asks what someone's favorite color is, and then make me a report and show that on a contact of what everyone's favorite color is. Right? Because where you're gonna weed out the good ones from the bad ones is that the bad ones are gonna go create a form, and then they're gonna create the property in a full sentence that says, what's your favorite color question mark? Instead of calling it favorite color and just changing the label. Right. Those folks that Think. Wait a minute. Well, I need this to be easy for someone to find. I need this to be easy to like to look good showing up in a record. Right. And not just be in the form of a question where it gets concatenated and I can't tell exactly what the property is. Right. Those people are thinking on a much different level than someone who just like, you know, is going in there willy nilly making properties full sentence questions.

I'm going to double down on what you're talking about because now what you could also do to add to that test is tell them. And by the way, we want to be able to actually have a different shades of yellow, different shades of blue, and a different shades of red page where we're asking those and go see how many create a red property, a blue property, and a yellow property versus realizing they could create one favorite color property, have all of the different shades in that property, and when they create the form, remove the yellow, remove the red, and remove the blue, but still only re reporting on one property instead of needing to create three. That's how you create some real great scrambled eggs with properties.

And I don't even know what you just said, but yeah, so there's a.

Feature, there's a feature in HubSpot forms where you can have a whole list of stuff and decide you only want to show certain parts of that property on that form. Right? So. So now, because again, I've seen this where they'll be like, oh, I need a red version and a blue version and a purple version. No, no, no, no. You need one property that holds all of your colors and now you can separate it based on the form and what you actually want to ask in that. Because what have you just done? You've made reporting way easier. Instead of having to report off of three properties, you're reporting off of one property, but you've used it in three different places in three different ways. Now that's some scrambled eggs right there. I'm just saying.

I also remain pro egg. So question.

Although scrambled or sunny side up?

Scrambled. 100%.

With cheese or without?

No, no cheese.

No cheese on top.

Little goat cheese on top.

See if I do scrambled eggs. All right, all right.

You want me to put you onto the best eggs you'll ever have in your entire life?

Easy there. No, no, no.

Chill, chill, chill, chill, chill, chill. This is how you do it, right? And. And this is me testing this like you have no idea. Okay, a little sidebar. All right. I am an Amy. Scrambled eggs connoisseur I can do them how Gordon does it. I can do the whole, you know, you mix them for the entire time, all that stuff. The best way that I've found to make scrambled eggs lately is this, right? And for you.

Listen up, everybody.

Appreciate it. Okay. Is what you do four eggs in a bowl. You take a big pinch of kosher salt, you scramble the out of them, all, right? And then you get your pan on medium low. You put butter in the pan, you get it all around the pan, right? And then it's very important that you have a rubber spatula. A rubber spatula that bends to the curvature of the pan. If you can get yourself a hex. Hex clad pan, which maybe one day they'll sponsor the podcast, you know, you can try to get that right. And then all you're doing the entire time is you're just making sure the eggs don't stick to the pan. Just move them around, move them around. And as soon as they're, like, juicy and finally, like, in a clump, right? And they look like scrambled eggs, you can't overcook them, right? You take them out, you put them into a bowl. This is what you do. You go take out a little bit of Borazan. You know, the Boursan herb cheese. You know what I'm talking about? You ever had Borzan?

Yeah.

It comes like a little hockey puck. It's super creamy and delicious.

Yeah, that's what you do. You take a big scoop of that, you drop it in your hot, loosely scrambled eggs, and then you mix that shit up like crazy.

So, yeah, you literally just added cheese to your scrambled eggs. But can I back up?

Like, putting sprinkled shredded cheddar bullshit in it? It is so different, but so different.

But can I. Can I just. Can I? Yeah.

Guys, we've now gotten to the point where the audience is apologizing to Noah, our producer, on our behalf.

So.

So here's the thing. What amazes me.

I want that list for LinkedIn. Send it to me right now.

I will. Liz, you. You want to see Max's head explode. Max, I'm surprised you got all of the way through that and you didn't give me no.

George. No. I don't want to lose a friendship with you right now.

I'm just want to watch someone use a friendship. Do it. Do it.

I.

Careful. I can't believe be a problem if you tell me you do some.

Max, let it happen.

I can't believe you got all the way through your scrambled egg tutorial. And you didn't add any milk to your eggs while you're whipping it.

You cannot add milk to your eggs, Jord. Are you crazy?

I told you his head would explode.

Why did. Wait, you're. You're with me right now, right? You don't actually put me.

He is the man who does pickle and peanut butter sandwiches. Max, let's think about who we're talking to.

It makes it fluffier.

No, it doesn't. Dude, you're not. No, no. You're not telling me. I'm gonna have to make you eggs at inbound.

I'm down with that.

Bring a hot plate to Club Inbound. Let's do a live demonstration and really show the people at HubSpot why we should be allowed to have a live show next year.

Which. Which. Speaking of inbound, by the way, you're probably listening to some questions as properties.

George, that is like, don't.

So hang on. Speaking of inbound, you're probably listening to this on Monday.

If they're still listening.

If you're still listening. If you're listening to this on Monday, just know that this coming Tuesday, the 27th session registration opens. So make sure that you're ready on Tuesday to get those sessions. And don't forget to come see mine about AI. And also on Friday, we do Max.

And watch that. Know it in the back of your head that this puts milk in his eggs. So take it with the grain of salt and put that grain of salt in your eggs first before you mix it. Not milk, dude.

So speaking of milk and eggs, what are your favorite ways you can use HubSpot to keep your HubSpot data clean?

I'll let you go first.

I think he needs. Jesus. Why don't you start, George? Well, I know you have two tools you like.

Yeah. So there's.

This is what my job is, listeners. This is why I'm here. So first of all, this is a cry for help. Continue, George.

Yeah, so first of all, let's go basic to a little bit more advanced. HubSpot has the deduplication tool where contacts and companies. I can't tell you the amount of humans I've talked to. And they're like, oh, yeah, I just ignore that. You have over 2,000 duplicate. Like, pay attention to it. Every time the email comes through, go fix it. Once you get it down, it's easier. The deduplication tool, however, next level of that is if you're like, I'm swimming in a sea of duty Operations Hub gives you a bunch of different Tools to actually keep your data and your portal clean. So they're there. Everybody has a hard time, or some people, not everybody. Most people have their. A hard time wrapping their brain around why they need to spend money on operations. Hub. My honest opinion is because when used right, and you understand what it does, it saves you time and your sanity. Part of that sanity is around the cleaning of the data, restructuring of the data. Make sure first names have this, make sure phone numbers are this. Make sure, like there's just so much you can do without getting too nerdy to make your data clean. The other thing is workflows in a way that it sets properties or moves things or cleans things up in a way that it should be clean. So definitely like focusing in on that. But I even go back to just old school, normal human tactics of documentation around a process for folder structures, naming conventions, and like just being a good human inside the portal with the rest of the folks that have to live there too. Yeah.

God, I'm. I'm so triggered by everything that happened before.

George just brought him back. Come on.

Yeah, yeah.

We literally had someone in the comments say, I'm only here out of sympathy now. So like.

So here's the thing. No one, no one likes a big cleanup project, right? You can do just a little bit of data hygiene. You spend one minute a day, right? And you will slowly whittle away the stuff that you have slowly built up without noticing over time.

Yeah.

And so, like, the one thing that I would kind of recommend anyone here is like, go two times a week or maybe like, maybe just one little calendar event at the end of your day, right? Just give yourself a reminder. Hey, go delete a property you're not using anymore. Go delete a property that doesn't have any values in it. Go find a workflow that's just like off. It's just off and just not operating anymore. Go find a couple. Just go sniff out a landing page or two that is clone, clone, clone, test, clone, clone, unpublished, delete later. Right? You don't have like, I get it. A lot of the times, a lot of the big reason why people don't deploy good data hygiene is because they go, oh, and I got all this stuff I have to clean up, but I guess it's not really having a big detrimental impact right now. And so I can just go ignore, ignore it. Right? And that's, that's how you end up just building up all this bad in your portal forever and not do anything. Just give yourself just one thing to do each day, whether it's just deleting something simple, even if it doesn't seem that consequential, right? You do that enough, it'll become a habit. You'll start maybe rediscovering some of the darker, dingier parts of your portal that haven't had a lot of love in a long time, right? And you'll start to say, oh, you know, maybe tomorrow I'll go like, you know, clear out the rest of these workflows instead of just that one or like, whatever it may be, right? And you'll start discovering a lot of stuff, right? I say that's one big thing. The other thing, too is like, don't sleep on, like, data formatting workflows, right? Especially with operations hub, especially if you've got a lot of outside systems dumping a lot of shit into your HubSpot portal, right? It's much better to clean things up the second they get there than waiting and making it a much bigger job later on, right? So, you know, give yourself like, you know, just. Just one little task each day. Make it part of your routine. Don't feel like you have to take on these giant cleaning projects unless it's an absolute emergency again. And over time, your stuff will become cleaner. But then two, like, try to solve those problems the moment it gets into your portal versus, like, waiting for it to build up later is the biggest.

Things I would.

Recondo that.

I love that Nick from Fargo said, just delete something named Delete this.

How do you solve a problem like Maria? Delete it.

This. Delete it.

Delete her.

It's telling you what it wants. It wants to be deleted.

That's really existential and dark.

Max, I have a. Max, I have a present for you, by the way.

No, no, George, no.

At the end of the podcast. At the end of the. Max, I have a present for you.

All right, all right, hold on, George. Like, I'm not taking egg advice from a dude who eats a.

No, no, I said I have a present.

Thank you.

I said I have a pepper and.

Peanut butter sandwich is a present, George.

No, I have. I said I have a present for you at the end of the podcast.

You know what, George? This is why Max and I have trust issues.

He's going to send me a video of him, like, dumping fair life into a bunch of eggs and.

No. All right, let's. Let's talk about data hygiene.

Now George wants to stay on topic. Now George wants to stay on topic.

For a minute or two.

Just for a hot minute.

A couple minutes.

George, actually wrap us up here because we started talking a bit about kind of like Max, you started with, you know, do a little bit here and there. But George, earlier you also talked about some daily, weekly, monthly practices, which begs the question, how often really should these hygiene checks be happening? And who should be checking?

Wow. Okay. So that part just is interesting because one, if you're an organization that you have somebody who is a designated super admin for the portal, then the super admin should be checking on data quality, data hygiene. However, a smart super admin would also enable, you know, VP of marketing, VP of Sales, VP of Service. It might not be V be vp. You get my point? Like, you can enable a team to know the things that they need to do on this. In my honest opinion, I like where Max went with, like, each day do a little thing that might not be scalable for a lot of the listeners, because there's a lot they do in a day. Trust me, that is not missed on me at all. But I would say at least once a week, you're spending 30 minutes to an hour looking at a different part of HubSpot. And by the way, when I say that if you are the type of HubSpot user now that since HubSpot enabled bookmarks that you only have the three to seven places that you go because of your bookmarks, then when I say 30 minutes to an hour, I'm saying journey to places outside of your bookmarks and see what's happening on the other side of town. Because you've literally like boxed yourself into a certain portion of HubSpot versus looking at it from a holistic standpoint. Okay, but I would say like a light 30 minutes to an hour once a week. I would say for sure, like an hour to hour and a half, maybe two hours once a month. But this hour and a half to two hours is like you have found something in your previous light dive in that you know is going to take you more time. And so you've booked on the calendar focus time for workflows or focus time for contact properties, or focus time for creating documentation to give to the rest of your team about naming conventions and file folders, like, whatever it is, but it's, it's that kind of thing. Now, I would say once a quarter to maybe twice a year, dependent upon how big your organization is, like a mini portal audit. And this could be you doing it. You could be hiring somebody to do it, but like, which, by the way, a new set of eyes is never a bad Thing because again, sometimes we just get blind to what we're used to being in. But you know, once a quarter or maybe twice a year, I would then do like a, a portal audit of all things, not only from a cleanup, but from even like a cleanup and strategize moving forward standpoint. That, that's my thoughts, Max. I'm curious what your thoughts are.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give the same piece of advice not only to your run of the mill HubSpot users, but also the admins, right? Because not, not always does like a user have the same power to clean up as much as an admin might, Right. Depending on your permissions and how you do stuff. If you see something, say something, right? It's very, very easy to just like overlook little goofy things happening with your data because you don't think it's going to affect you or a process or whatever, right? But like, you know, if you're an admin and you give your users the ability to create properties and they're doing stuff, don't just describe. Assume that there is like a use for everything because they might not be thinking about it the same way you are as someone who knows how to, or hopefully would know how to keep a HubSpot portal nice and clean. Right? Ask, right? Hey, what are you doing with that? Hey, I noticed that you guys built this property, but there's nothing there. Are you planning on using it for anything? Right? Or if you're someone and you stumble upon some stuff that maybe doesn't have anything to do with you, but you're like, hey, that looks kind of messy or hey, we don't seem to be using that, or hey, this thing seems dead. Say something, right? Do your admin a favor. They can't keep an eye on everything all at once, right? If you see something, say something. And that is like sometimes the little one thing that you need to do to like, you know, head these little data hygiene issues that spiral into big, you know, snowballs off at the pass, right? So you know, don't just like see it and go, oh, that looks kind of weird or it looks kind of pointless or useless or sure, they're going to use that for something. Just ask, right? And try to like find it when it's a smaller problem before it becomes into something bigger.

Yeah.

Watch it like a treated like an unattended backpack on the subway. If you see something, say something.

Oh, wow, that's scary. I just was like, don't let it be the snowball effect. But yeah, backpack works too.

Yeah. Yeah. Is that a favorite color field? No, it's a pipe bomb. You don't know.

Okay, we're canceled.

Nick in the audience, can you go ahead and apologize to Noah, our producer again?

Yeah. Just one more time. Sorry. No.

So I'm hearing a few things on if your organization does. Organization doesn't have someone who own owns HubSpot, whether as their whole ass job or like a buck stops here kind of responsibility, that's an area you need to address because it's kind of like content, right? If there is no single owner where someone is accountable to their boss in one on ones in performance reviews about HubSpot or what is or is not happening with it. This is. Everybody's going to be passing everything around. There's. There's no hall monitor. Nothing's going to get done. Right. So there's that piece of it. The other piece I'm hearing is it's kind of like when you have a house, right? You don't just fling everywhere. You don't just throw your dishes in the sink until that one time a week or a month when you're actually cleaning stuff up, clean a plate.

Is this why my wife yells at me?

I mean, yo, Liz, you're getting hella personal right now.

You might wonder, is this from yesterday or today? Let's not ask.

Just, just for the listeners. Just for the listeners. Liz just held up a bowl and a spoon into shot of the camera.

So that's.

I got.

It was delicious. I will not confirm if it was delicious today or yesterday. But anyway. But what I'm hearing is that if you're leaving it to the bare minimum touch points and you're just acting like a complete ding dong about your data the whole time, you're always going to continue to create problems for yourself. So it's about building healthy data, hygiene habits. Right? You don't wash your hands once a month, guys wash them every time you go to the bathroom. You don't brush your teeth once a week. You brush them every. Yeah, Max, let's not. Yeah, Max, let's not. Max, let's not. Hey, Max, let's not. Agree.

Totally.

Fantastic. And then we have our daily, weekly monthly rituals. Jesus. I am.

Boy, oh boy.

Oh, I'm just saying, I do those things that Liz is saying.

Yeah, me too. Yeah.

I'm not gonna blacklight Max's house. That's just not something I'm just.

I'm gonna. When Noah's editing this, I'm just gonna Put my ear up to the door and honestly. Noah laughs or not.

Leave this all in. This is called being authentic, George. You want us to be whole ass humans here? We are.

Yes, yes I do.

We're here. Okay, George, before we wrap this conversation up, I am curious if you have any favorite non HubSpot tools that you like to bring into the mix or any other kind of softer strategies that you like to involve in terms of HubSpot data hygiene.

Well, I think in a couple episodes ago we talked about De Dupli, which people could maybe check out if they don't have operations hub or want to do something different. Honestly, when as soon as you said out of HubSpot I rushed to like mindset, right? Like how do you invoke a mindset around something once you have seance candles? Yeah, well, once you have the mindset invoked in your organization, how do you give them the best practices to follow? Like so like there's a framework that you can kind of start to think about like well, what's our methodology on data and what we use data for? What's the mindset that we never need everybody in the organization to have? And once they've figured that out, what are the best practices that we, we need them to do on a daily basis to help us potentially do less of what we've actually said super admins or leaders of the departments will need to do to keep the portal organized. So I think a little bit of this, it goes to like the people, process, platform conversation outside of HubSpot. A lot of this is about the people, to be honest with you. A lot about this is the process and only today we've kind of been talking about platform and what you can do inside the platform. And that's only one third of the conversation that needs to be happening inside of organizations.

Maxi, are you okay?

Yeah. Wait, well, I mean I think I was going to mention in Cycle is another cool one. If you want to do something.

There we go.

I think if you want to be able to do your own contact deduplication off of different properties or something like that, I don't know, that might be for talking other tools. I think another one that comes to mind is super, right? Super is really cool because you can add in a whole lot of extra context like this like context layer like over your CRM. So like sometimes the reason why you have bad data is because people don't understand how to use it or like why they input it. Right. Or they have a bad process in place. Right. And like super is a really neat tool, not only for HubSpot, but for a bunch of other things that can provide like business level context that's unique to that business on top of the systems that you're using. Right. So, I mean, that's also a really cool one too, that people should check out.

George. Okay. You and me, bud.

Yeah.

So I'm about to hand over the reins to the podcast to you.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

I want you to understand that Max's sanity is in your hands with whatever is about to happen.

Yeah.

So I would love for you to take us out by reminding our listeners of the key takeaways you'd like for them to, well, take away from this conversation. But I also understand. But I also understand you have a surprise.

Yeah.

So I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna say Liz. Liz is going to be taking a step back from the mic.

Yeah.

Whatever happens next, not my fault.

Yeah, well, absolutely. Absolutely. So first of all, listeners, the actual actionable takeaways is if you don't have documentation that you're educating your team with around data hygiene, data management, naming conventions, folder structures, all of that, create that and then have a internal workshop where you're training everybody on that. If you don't have a rhythm, a rhyme to what you're looking at inside the portal, you need to go ahead and set up a rhythm and rhyme schedule the time weekly, monthly, and then quarterly or twice a year to do the things that we talked about. And also I would say this, have a little grace and empathy on yourself. Like, there was a visceral response when we started this podcast and Max opened his portal and it was like an oh, crap moment. You gotta be easy on yourself when you see those things and just realize, just like life, data, hygiene inside of a HubSpot portal is going to be a journey. But if you take a step each and every day and make it 1% better, then you're going to end up in a good place, just like you can as doing that as a human. Max, my present to you, my friend, is I realized another way that I understand that I grew up poor because I went over to ChatGPT and I said, what's the best way to create scrambled eggs with or without milk? And here's what it told me. And I'm gonna do with milk first. Okay. It said, it says this. No, just hang on. I said, this is a present. It says texture, by the way. It breaks it down to texture, volume and flavor. Okay, so with milk, adding milk makes the eggs fluffier. And slightly less dense. However, it can also make them a bit watery or rubbery if too much is added volume, the milk stretches the eggs. And when I read that, I go, this is why my parents added milk to eggs, because we would have more with less, making them appear larger, which can be useful when cooking for multiple people. The eggs, by the way, flavor can taste milder because the milk dilutes the natural richness of the eggs. Okay, so Max, this part right here is my present to you. Without milk. Scrambled eggs cooked without milk tend to be creamier and more custard like, because they allow the egg's natural richness to shine through the flavor. The egg flavor is more pronounced and pure. Since there's no dilution from milk control, it's easier to control the cooking process and achieve a desired consistency of soft, creamy, and firm for a rich, creamy texture. Most chefs recommend cooking scrambled eggs without milk. Instead, focus on low heat, frequent stirring, and patience for the best results. Yes, now that since HubSpot enabled bookmarks that you only have the three to seven places that you go because of your bookmarks, then when I say 30 minutes to an hour, I'm saying journey to places outside of your bookmarks and see what's happening on the other side of town. Because you've literally like boxed yourself into a certain portion of HubSpot versus looking at it from a holistic standpoint. Okay, but I would say like a light 30 minutes to an hour once a week. I would say for sure, like an hour to hour and a half, maybe two hours once a month. But this hour and a half to two hours is like you have found something in your previous light dive in that you know is going to take you more time. And so you've booked on the calendar focus time for workflows or focus time for contact properties, or focus time for creating documentation to give to the rest of your team about naming conventions and file folders. Like, whatever it is, but it's. It's that kind of thing. Now, I would say once a quarter to maybe twice a year, dependent upon how big your organization is. Like a mini portal audit. And this could be you doing it. You could be hiring somebody to do it. But, like, which, by the way, a new set of eyes is never a bad thing because again, sometimes we just get blind to what we're used to being in. But, you know, once a quarter or maybe twice a year, I would then do like a. A portal audit of all things, not only from a cleanup, but from even like a cleanup and strategize moving forward. Standpoint. That. That's my thoughts, Max. I'm curious what your thoughts are, so I'm gonna.

I'm gonna.