Creating a Marketing to Sales Hand-off Process in HubSpot CRM with Doug Davidoff

All right, Hub Heroes community, it's your boy, George B. Thomas. And we're back with another Hub Heroes interview where we're going to talk about the marketing and sales handoff. Maybe a little bit about HubSpot. Heck, maybe a lot about HubSpot. But what's great about this interview is I got a chance to sit down with Doug Davidoff and have this conversation to help you, the Hub Heroes community. So let's start out by getting Doug to actually let us know who he is, what, what he does and where he does it.

Well, first off, let me just say how excited I am to be on, on the new show, George. You know, I've been a fan. We've done podcasts together. Very excited. Really appreciate, love what you're doing. Longtime listener, first time caller, you know, that whole, that whole thing. So I am, I'm, I'm Doug Davidoff. I'm the founder and CEO at Imagine Business Development. We are a HubSpot Solutions partner, an elite tier, if I may say. We are, we are elite. You know, we've always taken a little bit of a different path, and I think that's why we're talking about this today. We actually came from the sales side. Even back when HubSpot barely had a marketing platform, we were actually selling it to sales side companies. And where we've really evolved is. And when I describe, you know, at the core what we are, we're a business process design, business process optimization, business process management company. As technology has become more and more critical, people lose sight that it's the business process. We actually refer to this as the prime directive. The business process has to drive the technology. And we found that's really where our sweet spot is in driving change. So that's where I do it at Imagine Business Development.

Love it. Love it. And here's the thing. What I am excited for the Hub Ed Helper community is that we have years and years of experience. We have a very smart brain that's going to go down this journey. Because one of the things that I've found historically with working with people inside of HubSpot Sales and Marketing teams is the handoff is typically one of the most important places. By the way, today we're talking about marketing and sales. But you can think about sales to service or any other handoffs. And much like a relay race, this is where you can win or lose the race. If you drop that baton, if you don't have a process in place, it could get chaotic. So speaking of chaos, Doug, when you think about the marketing to sales handoff process. What keeps you up at night? When you think about most companies, what.

Keeps me up at night, what keeps me up at night is they suck at it. You know, it's just, it's just really, really bad and it's getting worse. I'll kind of leave it there. I'll let you go. I'll let, I'll let you take that path. That's really what I keep, that's what keeps me up at night is, I think it's, it's viewed and thought about through the wrong perspective, which means people continue to try to get better. And actually, you know what, this doesn't keep me up at night as much as it, as much as it makes me sad. People are getting better and better at doing the wrong things and it's a really frustrating game because they don't understand why this isn't working. And you know who really doesn't understand why this isn't working? The buyer doesn't understand why this isn't working. Buyers are more frustrated with their experience with sales and marketing organizations today than they were 20 years ago. And honest to God, George, that makes no sense. How can you be, you know, I'm much more satisfied with television. Like, the complaints I have about television now are, you know, like I, you know, the other day our electricity went out, I turned the generator on. I'm like, oh my God, thank God I'm able to, you know, stream. What would I have done 20, 25 years ago when I would have actually had to go a day without electricity and just, you know, sit around in a 95 degree house? So like, how have we gotten worse? That's what makes me sad. That's what keeps me up at night.

It's a very interesting statement and a line of thinking. And so I'm glad that we're actually doing this interview and we're going to dive into how can you make it not suck? How can we kind of show the level importance, how can we take, kind of steer the ship, if you will, in the direction of man, you've really got to be paying attention to this. And these are the things that you should be paying attention because a sad Doug is a bad Doug. We don't want that to continue on the Internet. So Doug, when you think about this, just so everybody understands, like the high stakes game that we're playing here with these handoff points, how important is the marketing and sales handoff to success and why is it that important?

You know, if you look at, at the data that, that's out from most research organizations. Somewhere between 98, 99%. Big range there. Somewhere between 98, 99, depending upon who you look at of marketing. Qualified leads never result in sales cost, customer acquisitions going up, loyalty is going down. So, you know that, that, you know, transforming interest into engagement, into action, into purchase, into loyalty. That, that is. I mean, Peter Drucker said it. This is the other thing that frustrates me. Like, this isn't a new issue. Peter Drucker probably like a hundred years ago or something. Okay, maybe not quite a hundred years ago, said the purpose of a business is to make a customer. That's why businesses exist, is to make customers. So, so, yeah, I mean, it's pretty important because if you don't do that, then, well, there's no, there's no oxygen. And. And you know, you know, and when you're bad at it, you. You put yourself under more pressure, which leads to the tendencies that make you worse at it. You got more pressure. You feel like you have to, you know, you're in a have to moment. Like, you know, they say never go to the grocery store hungry.

Yeah. It's almost like you're. It's a snowball that starts rolling in the wrong direction. Is the visual that actually comes to my mind as you kind of paint that. And so let's get a little bit into the granulars.

I want to give you a different. It. It's actually muscles that are atrophying. So you're getting weaker and weaker, which means as. As the need to stand out and orient. And, you know, the nuance that matters is bigger than ever before. There is less difference between offerings than ever before. But there's also, you know, greater opportunity to create distinction. But that distinction is in a nuance. You have to be strong. You know, in the 1980s, you could be 80s, 90s, you could be, I'll just say not strong and still carve out a reasonably profitable business. Employment, you know, tens to hundreds of people. Now it's a. It's a lot, lot harder for something like that, I think. You know. You know, Brian Halligan probably said it best. It's never been easier to start a business than it is today. It's never been harder to grow one.

So true. So true. So let's dive into the granulars. Doug and I want to take the two teams that obviously we sort of want to be one, but we really don't, because I know your perspective on like, marketing. Supposed to do marketing. Sales. Supposed to do sales. But if we take these two teams, marketing and sales, and we break it into which the things that each of these teams should be thinking about during the handoff. Let's start with marketing. Are there some major mindsets, thoughts, processes? What say you?

So. So I got to take us. I gotta. I gotta take us off the beaten path, if that's all right. If you've noticed, I've been struggling a little bit to answer each of your questions so far. And the reason is I don't think about the handoff. You asked me, when you think about the handoff, what keeps you up at night? I don't think about the handoff. I think the handoff is. I think defining it as the handoff is for 90% of businesses, 90% of the problem. And here's my. All the questions that you have and all the prep that we did, they're really good questions. They're really common questions. The problem is we've been asking those same questions for 20 years, right? And really smart people have been asking these questions for 20 years. And has it gotten any better? I think it's gotten worse. Right? And so if after 20 years of smart companies digging into this, asking the same questions, what's the definition of insanity? Do the same thing again and again and expect a different result, right? So. So, like, the difficulty is this handoff idea is the whole pursuit of sales and marketing alignment, which on one hand has some. You know, there's a lot of mythology to that. But. But outside of the mythology, let's just put that aside. That's kind of where I go and nerd out. Your objective should not be to align your sales and marketing team, because when you do that, you are internally focused. That's about you. We want to be aligned with our customer. We want to be aligned with the how of our customer. We want to be aligned with. What is their buying odyssey like? I've actually stopped calling it journeys, because Journeys, you know, has a linear element. Then we go. No, it's a long and winding road. No, it's an odyssey, right? It's a buying odyssey. Things happen from, you know, from the outside, it looks like it's random. You know, it is, you know, the embodiment of chaos theory, if you will. And I think fundamentally, with how technology has come to play the role of the Internet, the way people learn, communities, et cetera, et cetera. I think the entire basis of how we think about sales and marketing has fundamentally changed. And I don't think people are grasping it. I think that people are Looking at, you know, we think about the old way, right? And that's the, you know, marketing happens here and then sales happens here, right? So it's, it's that. And that's where we really think about the handoff. And inbound really brought in the new way, right? The idea behind the new way, which is parallel, but that's actually not the right way. The right way is you can't tell. You shouldn't be able to tell these teams apart. It's not a handoff. And by the way, I used to, 15 years ago, I talked about the relay race and I said, one problem with the handoff is that we tend to think of it as a football handoff where the ball is exchanged at one point in time. And I said, the better way to think about it is the relay race where the handoff occurs together and there's actually two groups holding it. But, but today, if, if I hand it off to sales. And by the way, what does it mean to hand off the sales? Is it. Am I handing off a brand new customer for a brand new sale? Is it a brand new customer for a strategic programmatic sale? Is it a transactional sale? Is it someone that maybe bought from us five years ago? Is it right? All those things, Come on. What does it mean to have a handoff if I hand something off to a salesperson, right? And now it's the salesperson and marketing's not doing its job. We suddenly, we stop paying attention to our online presence. We're, you know, our nurtures or our whatevers aren't. Aren't aligned with what the salesperson is saying. Is the salesperson effective? No. The salesperson loses 70 to 80% of their effectiveness if we don't have that ongoing content. And the same types of experiences that led those conversations to start with move to complex sales. The idea of a marketing to sales handoff says it starts with marketing. Well, if you're, if you're involved in complex large market sales, I'm telling you, your salesperson's gonna be the person that moves it. Content's not enough to move people off of their path. Sometimes I need, I need a rep. This is where we use sales development reps. We actually call them market development reps to kind of get the initial element going. They look more and feel more like a marketing tactic. One of the things that we teach is, guys, the goal here is not to get a meeting. The goal here is to start a conversation. Here's an interesting metric. You'll love this one, George. How many Website visits come from the regions that your SDR is calling into the 24 hours after they call into it. Because guess what? You don't have to reply to me to be intrigued by what I said. And if you're not doing anything with me, my goal is to get first action.

So.

So again, the whole idea and the whole problem with handoff is it brings a bunch of presuppositions to what's happening and we begin to enforce our way on a market that's just not going to do it anymore. It's still fundamentally looking at sales or customer acquisition being done the way you did it. A. When sales organizations had control because buyers had no choice. And that's just not how they. That's just not how they behave anymore.

So it's.

I.

First of all, I love this whole conversation. For years, I've said it's not really about conversions, it's about conversations. I love that we're moving in kind of this buyer centric mentality versus internal focus. And Doug, I want to stay off the beaten path with you. I've officially decided I might just rip up the actual starter questions for this conversation because of the direction that we get. I mean, literally, ladies and gentlemen, the next question I was going to ask was, if people are watching this and have no handoff process, where and how should they start building a handoff process between their marketing and sales teams? I don't want to ask that anymore, actually.

I want to. I want to comment on that. Before you ask, I want to comment on that. Right, Because. Because I hear a lot of people say that. And here's. And here's the thing. That's. If you have a customer, you have a handoff process. It might not be documented, it might not be purposeful, it might not be repeatable. But when someone says, I don't have a process, you're. You're wrong. You have a process, right? You do something, it might be bad, right? But you have a process. And. And the first thing you got to do is understand what is your process right now. Right? So. So you're. You're actually further along than you realize because you do have one. And now it's a matter of, okay, well. Well, how does it have to change?

Yeah. Okay, so here's where I want to go. When I saw your graphic, Doug, my brain. And it works in analogies. It works in analogies and stories, right? And so that third graphic, the right way, to me, that almost looked like the pattern of a dance. You know, it's the Right foot here, it's the left foot there. And so really, the question I want to ask you, and it's a different question, one that I don't think maybe we have been asking, is how do you teach sales and marketing to dance together with the customer, with the experience? Like, how do we have to shift our mindset and what do we have to pay attention to to be able for it to be like an amazing tango or two step where the customer's like, oh, my God, this feels amazing.

So. So there's two analogies that come. That come to that. To stick to your analogy on. On dancing, what is the thing. What is the discipline called that enables dancers to play the way that you played? It's called choreography. Right? Now, do these dancers just show up and say, okay, hey, we're in rhythm, right? We just show up and okay, hey, we're gonna have a tango competition. And so we bring the two best tango dancers. And. And they go. They've never met each other. They've never done anything. They come on the floor and they. Right. No. What are they gonna do? They're gonna rehearse it. They're gonna map it out, right? And by the way, the tango is a clearly defined dance. We know what, who does what, when, how does it play. And, and, and what it does is it's so clearly mapped that it frees up the creativity of the performers. It's the mistake of process being restraining, when in fact, good, bad process is restraining, good process is freeing. And the reason is. And by the way, every dancer, every time they dance, the dance is going to be different for whatever reason. The quality of the air will have an impact, how they feel, energy levels. You know, it will always be different. And so there's a jazz element that happens. You know, it's like great improv. Great improv doesn't just make it up, right? There are underlying rules and conditions that enable everyone to understand what's going on. And then there's the ability to debrief it. I'll tell you what I love. I love the Blue Angels as an example of this because they so clearly defined and realized their choreography. Like, what's the worst thing that happens if the dancer messes up? I step on your foot, or maybe on a lift, I drop you, and you break a bone. The Blue Angels, if they mess up, there's explosions, right? But when you look at what they do and how they do it, it is all very clearly mapped, all very clearly choreographed. That opens up that genius. So the question is, are you choreographing your customer acquisition, customer management process. It comes down to mapping business process. And if your business process isn't mapped, clearly, it's. I can't, you know, I can help you around the edges, but you're, you're still going to have a mess.

I love this so much because obviously we're talking to HubSpot users. And ladies and gentlemen, as you have figured out, we are kind of not talking about a handoff now, but talking about sales, marketing, dance, the choreography that needs to happen. Mapping out the process, understanding when to bob and weave and turn and all the things that you need to do. And so, Doug, because we're talking to HubSpot users, I want to kind of dive into your brain and be like, how does HubSpot enable this choreography? How does it enable the dance? Like, what can you put in place? Or what should you be thinking from a tech stack technology standpoint during this conversation?

Well, so, so I think the, I think the problem, you know, I, I got a new puppy. I don't know, maybe you heard her a couple seconds ago. She's still learning. Hey, Dad's on a, on, on a podcast, so it's time for you to be quiet. And you know, she's, yeah, she's a great Pyrenees. Great Pyrenees are, are. You know, they have a wandering instinct to them. And so she's gotten out a couple times, was meeting with the trainer, and I'm like, hey, look, are there any tips or tricks that, when I'm trying to chase her down? Because she, you know, she's like, go time, like once she's out and, and what, what the trainer said to me, she said, well, I can give you some tips and tricks, but unfortunately, those are all things that you need to do before she gets out. It. It's like. And like one of the things that she told me about, and I'm like, holy cow. Because my puppy, she's, by the way, she's 8 months old, 63 pounds. So this is a big old dog. And, and, and she'll do this thing where, like, she'll start playing with me and, and she'll come and then she'll bounce away and she'll do this. And I like, it's entertaining as you know what to me. And the trainer said, never ever she actually saw the dog do it when, when we were, you know, they're just kind of where she played and jumped away. And she said, here's the first thing. The dog never moves away from you. If you're moving to the dog for any reason. Never play where the dog moves away from you because she's outside and you're trying to trace her down. Well, she thinks it's playtime, right? So you've got to begin. You know, those behaviors have to come in before the point of execution. And so if you want to think tech stack, and here's the thing that I love, right? How does HubSpot enable you to do it? They enable you to do it because it's so easy to build what needs to be built. But if you don't know what needs to be built, that's where the problem comes. And so I actually, George, for you, and you know, from previous podcasts and things like that, I don't usually do this. I actually brought some specificity. I'm actually going to share with you and, and share with your listeners kind of what we're talking about. So, so if you think about customer acquisition flow, and I want you to understand that, you know, this is going to be, this is like, you know, basic to mid. There's more advanced elements. I wanted to keep it like, I didn't want to jump to the, to the most complicated thing. But if you think about it, you know, the first thing that we do is we say, okay, well, where do these quote unquote sales and marketing handoffs? Where do these interactions occur? Well, you know, someone could be anonymous, right? They could be identified or registered. It could be part of our target outreach program if we're doing any kind of outbound or something like that. Or they could be an existing customer, right? So that's kind of, you know, the first thing we say is where are the doors? Where can they come in? And so when we look at Anonymous, that's typically going to come in from a lead generation campaign or some lead generation tactic. It's going to typically be digital, right? I mean, if they show up at a trade show, it's not actually anonymous. We can see who they are. Right. And, and in this case, it's either going to come in as, you know, a conversion. And by the way, I'm not saying that there aren't other options or that you should, and please don't do it like this, don't copy this. But hopefully this, you know, brings some, some inspiration. Is this a conversion or is it a chat engagement? Right. On the conversion side, is this a general conversion, meaning, you know, it's a thought leadership piece. It's, we kind of use general means. There's no clear intent by nature of the download. Like if I download 7 Ways to Generate leads. That doesn't mean I've expressed an interest to hire you to do my lead generation. It means that I was trying to learn about lead generation. Right. That's not actually high intent versus direct response, which indicates that I likely do want to talk about something. Right. So we're going to handle those things differently. We're going to look at this. Maybe, you know, we do a thing called lead triage. If it fits, we enroll them into a direct response nurture. And this is, you know, do we always do this? No. But, hey, maybe they downloaded this. Maybe they do want to talk to somebody. But before we sick a salesperson on them or something like that, we're gonna let them tell us what they want to do. Right here. I begin to run different plays. I begin, you know, so now sales is moving through when in that play, there's that choreography for. What is the rep doing? What is marketing doing? What happens if we connect? What happens if we don't connect? Chat engagement. Are they talking to a chatbot? Are they talking to somebody live? What begins to happen? So once they've come in here, they start coming back. Are they coming from retargeting? Is it a nurture? Is it a straight revisit? Here's our target outreach program, right? We're determining what makes somebody a target account. And we've got a whole set of activities that begin to manage and map that out. Existing accounts. I'm going to show you something that we call opportunity quadrants in just a second. Where does this existing account fit? What's the play that we're making? How do they play out? And you can see that we just kind of map on and build that process out from there. And before you know it. The difficulty is, the reason this is so hard is we have a tendency to think about it at the bottom and look up. So we're at the bottom where there's, like. If I showed you the completed chart, I think we have. I think it's over 250 endpoints on. On that chart. But if you look at it from the top down, the most you ever have is four. And that's at the very beginning. Every other place, it's. It's. It's a 2 to 3. It goes down into 2 or 3 Avenue. So you're never really building that much complexity. And that's where you can begin to find, hey, where are the inflection points? The last thing I'm going to share for you here. Let's go back to Our, so we, we have a concept that we call opportunity quadrants. You can apply this to your data, you can apply this to your database. You could get this done today. Every account's going to fall into one of one of four quadrants. High value now they're producing good revenue. Now they're a good customer. Now. Low growth potential. What does that mean? It means we've got it. We've got everything we're going to get from them. This is a maintenance account. Sounds bad, low growth potential. But that's actually where we want everyone to be. They're buying everything that fits from us. High value, high growth potential. They're good now and there's growth potential. These are the complicated ones because they're maintenance accounts. You can't lose them. I had an early sales manager who said to me, doug, we have, you have two jobs. Keep what you got and get more. So he said, those are your two jobs. Keep what you got and get more. Right. This is, keep what you got, get more from the same customer. Okay. This is where we might take a far more orchestrated approach. We may have multiple people working on this account, some to manage it, some to grow it. Low value, high growth potential. Right. These are your growth accounts. Maintenance accounts, growth accounts. Low value, low growth potential. So for some people, that's the quadrant we don't play. Like for us, for most of our business, like our services business. Low value, low growth potential. They're non fits for us. But we've started to offer courses, we started to other offer other programs. This becomes a transactional business. Right. So this becomes community. Right, but, but again, you're now identifying different protocols. You know, the big conversation for a long time and I still hear it, you know, SLAs and you can see as we're talking about it, service level agreements. What's the marketing? Sales, service level agreement. And I'm like, well, okay, well which part? How many leads is marketing going to deliver for us? You know, what is in today's game? Now there are markets where leads, like identifying leads is a big issue. But I see so many organizations that have far more access to far more data and intelligence than they've ever had before. Not taking advantage of it. Right. I can identify who my market is. And by the way, if you have salespeople in the field, they should be able to identify who is our addressable market, who are our people, right? So do you want me to generate a new lead? Do you want me to generate greater engagement from somebody that's our, you know, somebody Visited us once. Do we want to get more engagement? Do we want to get more. More sales from somebody that's exist? See, it becomes so. I mean, it becomes so complicated that you have to map this out so that you can begin to. So that you can make it simple to manage, to apply the right play the right. The right court. You know, you got the tango over here. We've got the watts over here. Right there. There. There are different dances for different situations and different ceremonies. It's the same thing.

Yeah, I love this. And gosh, talk about time flying and. And value being added. I got a couple more questions that I just want to squeeze in here. I'm again transitioning where my brain is going versus this dramatic. Stop thinking about it as a handoff. Start thinking out as a sales and marketing dance and mapping it out. And Doug, as you were kind of.

Doing the sales market and service, Sales, marketing and success. It's Everybody, it's. We're, we're. It's the revenue facing dance. I've never seen a marketing problem, a sales problem, or a service or success problem. I've only seen revenue generation, revenue management problems.

I love that. So the. When you showed that kind of matrix, that flowchart, if you will, my brain went into this level of like, holy crap. Talk about a complex dance. Talk about needing to map out and practice like you mentioned. And so when you think about this, you know, I want to think about two things, Hurdles and success as we kind of land this plane for today's interview. And so let's go success. First, though, let's talk about. I have it mapped out. We're practicing like, you know, a guilty pleasure. I will sit down with my wife and watch Dancing with the Stars, right? And they've got the paddles and there's like 10, 10, 10. How does a team. Sales, marketing, and service. Let's throw them in there. How does a team know that they got a score of 30, they got all tens from the judges. What does that look like?

So I would say that's the wrong goal, that's the wrong objective, it's the wrong game for, For. For. For a bunch of different reasons. Number one is if you. If you tell me that you have it mapped out, I'm going to be worried about you because you never have it mapped. Math is past tense. It's done. It's complete. No, it's. It's always like, it's, you know, when. When someone tells me up, no, we understand our customer. The thing that I've learned is the people who understand their customers, their number one fear is that they don't understand their customers well enough. They never, you know me, I'm a baseball guy, somebody who's hitting well. They'll never talk about their swing when, when someone comes up, I got my swing figured out, coach. I know that there's a problem. So, so that's number one. Number two, the problem is Dancing with the Stars. That's a finite game. That, that, that, that's a win, lose game. You have to perform for a short period of time, pleasing a very defined group of people. Right. It's, it, it is a very artificial interface. And by the way, we could apply that to, to any other sport or game. We're playing an infinite game. Here's how you know if you're getting a 10, you're getting a 10. Because you can look at it two ways. You're better than you were yesterday. The way I look at it is we suck a little bit less than we did yesterday. Because I know I'm always more out of alarm. You can't, like, it's just, it's too complicated to be our, our friends at HubSpot. Like, my favorite thing when I visit HubSpot is I realize they're running around like a tornado, just like we are. I have this vision that there's. Oh, here's the choreography. Okay, H4, let's, let's run H4. Right. And, and, and so I. Is it clear yesterday? And by the way, especially in the beginning, you know what, here's how you know, here's how you know if you're getting it here. I can actually answer the question now. The number one way you know, what did you learn today? What did you learn about the interaction today? What did you learn? Because, because that's all you can. And especially, especially in the beginning. Man, you're so wrong. You don't know so much of what you don't know that, that it's actually, and this is why people don't do it. It's a hard, you know, it's not, it's not fun. We want to. Oh, I don't have time for that. Let's jump in. I bought this. But the technology is going to solve it. And by the way, all that stuff that was complicated, but, you know, and if somebody wants to challenge me, I'll share a part of it and I will challenge you to tell me where is it not accurate. My point is that's happening, you know, all those choices, all those things that is happening. And we Talk about eliminating friction. If you haven't built that into your back end, then the people that are making the decisions and trying to figure things out and move to the right place, they're on the front end. Everybody. That's the friction, right? And so when you start off, you learn so much about where it's not right that it's, it hurts. Right? But that's why you got to measure it by, by learning. And you got to play, you got to play by the rules of an infinite game, not the rules of a finite game.

I love that so much. And it's, it's funny when you said, what did you learn? And I, my brain went to, what did you learn? And what did you execute on that? Learning to get better. Because you talk about that progressive, you know, getting better portion.

So I, so I say learn. I say learn and adjust because I find execute puts on a level of pressure. And, and by the way, the other thing that execute does is it causes people like to execute. The natural thought is I to do something. Here's the funny thing. The biggest lessons that I learn and the most common lessons I learn are where I'm doing something when I should be doing nothing. Right. We humans have a tendency to think we have to push the button to cause something, when in reality, like, you know what? Sometimes, like I learned, hey, you know what? I gotta let the buyer be the buyer. I gotta let the buyer, you know. Yeah, I know. I sent him an email at 4 o' clock yesterday and it's 9am this morning. They haven't responded. And I understand why they haven't responded. Right, But, Right. So, so learn and adjust. And what I would say is if, if there's no adjustment, then you didn't learn. So we're, we're saying the same thing. But, but learn and, or, or learn and apply. How are you applying that? Learning.

Yeah, no. Words matter. And I do actually like that. Learn and adjust or learn and apply. So, Doug, as we close this out, I got two questions left for you. One, I'm gonna just open up Pandora's box and ask you what are some words of wisdom that you want to leave the listeners? It's your answer. You can do whatever you want. But before that, what are, 1, 2. What are a couple hurdles, potholes, if you will. I don't know, big deep pits of snakes and spikes that people who are thinking about once a, you know, handoff point now are transitioning to. Well, shoot, I don't know anything about choreography and dance and how do I get Sales and marketing and service in the same rhythm, in the same beat. What are some hurdles that you've seen companies kind of fall prey to? And you would say, hey, watch out for this. Pay attention to that.

Well, so I think it all boils down actually to fear, because people do say, I don't know anything about that. And the funny thing is, what you're less likely to know something about is the idea of a process handoff. And as this whole sales, development and quote, unquote, sales and marketing handoff thing has become a question that people ask, do you know what an increasing complaint on the customer is? I feel like I'm being processed, right? It feels really processy that, like, that's how you know your process has gone wrong. When it feels processy, just like when it feels like you're selling or someone feels like they're being sold to, you're doing it wrong. What's interesting is if you've ever made a friend that lasted more than one conversation, then you've orchestrated and you've danced. If you've ever had multiple people engage on something, you've orchestrated something and you've danced. It's actually a much more natural element to us. It's. It's something that we're so much of. What I do, actually, George, is to help formalize and purpose and get. Get our heads out of it. You know, it. I know you're a happy, healthy human, right? It's humans being humans. It's, you know, letting that. Letting that peace be there. So the fear is operating on the path of, you know, the fear that you don't know. So you're afraid that you're going to be wrong. Hey, guess what? Being wrong is great because you learned. You had the opportunity to learn. The other pitfall that I see, which is why we go to this handoff, is we seek certainty. We have this illusion that of absolute clarity. This, then this, then this. I talk about it. You know, what we're trying to do is may the odds be in our favor. We're trying to move the odds to our favor. There are no guarantees. There are no set plays. What we're doing, we're so focused on efficiency. And I think the 20th century, I think we're still just learning this for just picking this up. The 20th century was about efficiency. The 21st century, increasingly. And I think what it's going to be about at the end of the day is resiliency and adaptability. And so, so it's a mindset shift. And. And it's scary to do that. And you know, the scariest thing about mapping your process is we feel better with ambiguity because we fool ourselves into feeling like there's less that we don't know. Mapping things out is really scary. What if I'm wrong? What if I don't know? Look, I do this naturally. We've mapped thousands of scenarios. I now map just about everything. It's a natural element. But in the beginning, it's really, really hard. And it's, you know, you don't feel like you're. You don't feel like you're going anywhere. And sometimes you actually feel like you're going backwards because it's like, well, well, I don't know. What, what, what, what could happen here, by the way, the cheat for that, just throw in other category. So, so where could someone go from here? Well, there's these three, these three things. By the way, one of the faults of any process that I see, and it's why automation I've seen, you know, why do HubSpot workflows go bad? No one accounts for the other categories. There's almost always an other category, right? Sometimes the other category is 50%, sometimes it's 1%, but there's always others. So again, focus on progress, not perfection. Don't focus. That's why I love the Navy SEALS philosophy. You know, embrace the sock, right? Joe Madden. Hey, guys, let's try to suck a little bit less today so that, you know that, that, that's how you handle it. It's. But let's, let's get a little bit better at this today. Let's get a little bit clearer on that path. Let's move that for that. Those are the pitfalls and that's how I would handle it.

I love it. So final words of wisdom to leave the viewers and listeners with.

End of the day success comes down to this boring little thing called plumbing. Map your plumbing, you know, map it well.

Hub Heroes community, did you enjoy that interview? I sure hope so. There was a ton of tips, tricks, hacks along the way that hopefully you can use for your sales, your marketing, your alignment. I have to ask, what is the actual execution item? Let us know on socials or hit my inbox. Hey, remember, head over to George B. Thomas. If you need help with HubSpot, remember to hit subscribe to this channel and also remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and we'll see you in the next Hub Heroes interview.

Move that for that. Those are the pitfalls and that's how I would handle it.

I love it. So final words of wisdom to leave the viewers and listeners with.

End of the day success comes down to this boring little thing called plumbing. Map your plumbing. You know, map it well.

Hub Heroes community. Did you enjoy that interview? I sure hope.