David Benson Inbound Talks: Maximizing Productivity with HubSpot Tools

Welcome to another episode of Sidekick Strategies Expert Interviews Inbound talks edition. Today we're thrilled to have David Benson, the Chief Operating officer and founder of Traction AI, with us. David is a seasoned leader in the Rev ops as a service space, helping companies grow faster and more efficiently by unifying their systems into a seamless revenue architecture. Sounds very complicated. I bet you make it very simple. His experience spans over a decade, working with platforms like HubSpot to streamline operations across marketing, sales, customer success, and finance teams. David recently spoke at inbound 2024 on a critical topic for modern businesses, Best practices for unlocking the power. Listen, ladies and gentlemen, of integrated data. His talk focused on eliminating data silos and maximizing the impact of connected data across go to market teams. We were excited to explore his expertise on how to leverage integrated data to drive growth and efficiency. David, welcome to the show.

Glad to be here, George, and thank you for the glowing intro saying all about data.

I do what I can with those intros. How the heck are you doing today? Doing good.

Oh, doing great. Got nothing to complain about. Weather's great in New York City, so you know, you know it's the best three weeks of the year here.

I love that. You got three weeks and these are them. All right, David, let's go ahead and dig into the good stuff. In your inbound 2024 talk, there was this emphasis of the importance of connected data for go to market teams. Can you kind of explain why integrated data is so critical in today's business landscape?

So when you connect your data from disparate systems, think about it this way. If everyone's rowing the boat in the same direction, you're moving faster and more efficiently. But because of the nature of technology and the complex nature of all businesses trying to drive revenue for the team, Marketing, sales, customer success, oftentimes these people are paddling the oars in a different direction. They build data silos that creates data sprawl and that slows down businesses as they try to collaborate to. To achieve their goal. So integrated data is about a system strategy, a process strategy to bring that data together, to align the teams to make everyone work more efficiently.

Love it. Love it. You know, I'm sitting here listening to this and I'm like, it makes sense to me. However, I always try to put myself in the shoes of the viewer or the listener. And I think, David, many companies struggle with data silos. And some people are sitting there going, I don't know if I have data silos. So, so what are some common signs that a Business is facing data silo issues, and how can they kind of begin to address them?

The first thing to think about is that it's a natural part of a growing business for silos to emerge. Right. This problem usually originates because businesses are working and they're focused on specific jobs within their specific functions. And marketers are trying to drive more leads. Salespeople are trying to close more deals or prospect more inbound inquiries. They adopt tools to make their individual jobs easier, but because they're thinking about their problem, their piece of the puzzle, they're not thinking about it in the big picture. And usually small, growing businesses adopt tools. It's sort of an implement first, ask questions, integrate later. And that's really where you start to see data silos. So if you're a salesperson and you need to physically send an email to the marketers to get information about the latest lead list, if you're a finance professional and you are fielding questions from the customer success team, like od customer X, Y or Z pay, that usually means that those are the signals of a data silo. Right? Where manual work replaces what tools can do to make everyone's job easier, sort of referencing the information the other teams have that you need to do your job.

I love that so much. All right, so let's keep digging in. In your inbound 2024 talk, there was mention of this concept of unified revenue architecture. Can you walk us through maybe a little bit of what this looks like in practice and how it benefits different teams across an organization?

Unifying the revenue architecture is the company's deliberate approach to start breaking down those silos. Right. It's thinking holistically about the needs of the business. Right? From a what data do we need to make decisions effectively? How can we pass that reference data that different teams need into the systems? And how do we establish another buzzword, a source of truth for our business? Now, to demystify that, usually what that means is this is a system in common HubSpot, oftentimes for people using it as a CRM, it's a system that many people come to. It's the sort of collective well at the center of the village. So a unified revenue strategy is about identifying the systems used in common and connecting them through a series of integrations to other tools so that teams don't need to go digging for the data that they need and that the data that they and that they can streamline their work across the systems with those data. So an integrated revenue set of systems benefits your business in many ways. Now, first and foremost, right, if connecting your systems breaks down data silos, it reduces that manual work created by data silos, and it helps your teams work more efficiently. So first and foremost, everyone's working faster because they don't need to go digging for data. The second benefit is when data's connected, right, all the things are talking to each other. You can see where the leads came from, you can see how much you paid for those leads, and you can see where those leads are in their customer journey with you. It allows you to put your data to use, right? So this can be as simple as I'm a marketer and I want to bring in data to further personalize a message, right? It's as simple as that. But it can be as complicated as pushing that data to an AI ML model, right? To enrich it with valuable concrete learnings about your customers. So from, you know, sending an email to driving the AI revolution, it can create a whole host of benefits. Now, the last hidden benefit that I'll mention is that, and this is oftentimes why people come to us, is that they'll realize they have an integrated data problem when they can't calculate the metrics that they need to do their jobs. And what that really means is like, when you think about the KPIs, the key performance indicators for your business, these are oftentimes data that needs to come from multiple teams, right? You're the leader of a business. You want to see, well, how much does it cost to acquire our leads? How much does it cost to acquire our customers? What's our lifetime customer value? These key business metrics require that you take data from multiple systems, right? So the cost to acquire leads, you need the expense data, the cost probably hidden in your general ledger. You need your marketing data about where your leads are coming from in your CRM or your marketing automation platform. So the other added benefit is that it allows you to calculate those, like, critical ROI metrics for your business.

Man, I'm telling you, that might be the rewind point of this interview. People need to like, re listen to all the gold that you just dropped. And what's fun is it's going to get better. Because I love all the questions, by the way, because, well, I came up with all of them. But this one right here I think might be one of the most important that we ask ask because, well, it just is. So I'm going to get into the question. David. How can companies ensure that their data is accurate, up to date and accessible to the right people within their organization. I think there's a mindset here, but I think there's also some action that can be taken. So talk us through that.

And that's a really, really good point, George, because just connecting your systems together so the data is flowing is no good. And if the fundamental, like if the oil is bad flowing through the pipes, it doesn't matter that you can take it anywhere. Data integrity is a fundamental tenet of this. And just in general, I think it's the, it's the hidden killer of most businesses. When you can't trust your data, it's going to make everyone spend more time recalculating, doing manual work to report and make decisions. But it also may make you make the wrong decisions. So to put it in a different way, right, the requirements of good data in your integrated data strategy is that it needs to be clean and complete, right? So it's not just that the data about your deal is correct, it needs to be holistically correct, right? Knowing how much the value is and the start and stop date of a contract is no good if you don't know if it's a renewal, right? This is a contract that's renewing. This is new business. This is with this customer or that. You need a full record that is accurate and complete. Now, the other part about accurate data, and this is something that we also see a lot of teams struggle with, is that some teams have different definitions of what accurate is. Right? Now, this usually comes down to definitions of what certain things mean, right? Not to take the, you know, the Socratic method into a data discussion, right? But you need to define your terms before you debate, right? So what that means from a data perspective is everyone needs to be in agreement, right? This is what a close date means, right? This is what a contract start date means, like for seasoned sales and customer success professionals. That's probably obvious, but it may not be if you're talking with a finance professional who's not as up to speed on how to do sales forecasting to incorporate into a financial projection. Finally, the data needs to be up to date. Now, up to date also is one of those deceptively simple concepts because that definition is very different for different types of data and it's very different for different kinds of teams, right? So like, you know, as marketers, I need my inquiry data to be as up to date in real time as possible, right? I could have three inquiries come from a person over the course of a month. I need the most accurate and up to date and the most recent information about what they're looking for to make the sale. That's not necessarily the same though. When you're doing an expense analysis, you're doing an end of year assumption, you're doing like a cash out Runway analysis. As a financier, they measure that data in up to date as of this month, this, this quarter, this year. So upto date is one of those really important criteria when you're thinking about data hygiene. Defining like, what does it mean? Like, do we need these deals to be updated in real time? Do that. We need it to be every week, every day. So aligning on that, right? Making sure it's complete and clean, understanding what it means, right? So how we act on that data and then making sure everything is up to date specifically based on the requirements of the teams that will be using it.

I love this because I know that you heard me say all those words and you're like, yeah, that sounds really professional and dope, but every word you said is squishy. And let me take you to school on the things that people need to think about. That was amazing. David, in your talk you also discussed the role of CRM systems like HubSpot in integrated data strategies. So I love to give people some best practices, some tips, some tricks. So what are some best practices for integrating a CRM with other systems like marketing automation platforms and finance tools and so on and so forth.

The HubSpot CRM for a lot of our customers is that central source of truth, right? Think about the central hub in the wheel of, of your business, right? With all the different tools connected through the spokes. Oftentimes you're going to want to start your strategy around that source of truth because as you connect it, it's creating the most benefit for the most teams, the quickest, right? So a great best practice and a great tip to get started, right, is if you plan your integrations and your connected data strategy around your source of truth. Now, for most businesses, that's going to be your CRM. And for most front office teams, marketing, sales, customer success, that's a great way to get started. The next piece of this though is, right? This is a very complex and sometimes long process. There's many ways you can bring in data with many degrees of complexity. So the best tip I would bring forward first is plan incrementally, right? We are big believers in building a function by function integration strategy in consultation with our customers, right? So to say, okay, we're going to start by connecting the systems in to the CRM. We're going to start with the marketing teams, right, we're going to bring in their event data, we're going to bring in their ads data, we're going to bring in their lead, their lead capture data, right? So that that team gets online. Everyone using the CRM gets the benefit of seeing the marketers data more easily and cleanly. And and so then as we go team by team, everyone starts benefiting. But you also see these wins, right? Quick wins that show the value of your project and build momentum. Because you know, if you are listening to this and you're a CRM admin and you believe strongly that you want to build a integrated revenue Data strategy with HubSpot as your source of truth, you're going to need to get organizational buy in and doing it on a team by team basis and then showcasing the benefits for those teams is a great strategy. Now the second piece of this is, and we went into a lot of detail about this in our talk, so I'm going to try to summarize this to make it as actionable as possible without some of these visual aids is you want to really understand where you are as a business and plan accordingly, right? There is a perspective of this from a teams element and then there's a systems element to this, right? So if you are a business that has a data engineering team that can build their own data pipelines and you have technology like Snowflake that you can do a full data warehousing strategy, your what's possible and what you need to think about is very different than if you are just starting to adopt systems, right? You're just adopting your CRM, you're just adopting your marking stack. You're just getting onto a general ledger, right? So think about like think long and hard about the resources you have in terms of personnel, right? Do you have an admin, do you have an analyst or an analyst team to help with the reporting development? Do you have developers, do you have data engineers, people specifically who can think long and hard about integrated data strategies, that's their full time job. Think about those resources that you have or don't have and tailor your strategy from a systems perspective, right? Are you mostly just using one tool like HubSpot? Are you sort of in that early silo standpoint, have people started to try to integrate systems themselves between each other to sort of build a, you know, a point solution, integrated data strategy to solve specific band aid issues? That's really, really important. And then once you know that, you got to pick the integration tools that are right for you. Now, one of the things I love about supporting customers on HubSpot is the out of the box native integrations in the App Marketplace do a lot for this purpose, right? Data Sync is amazing, right? And if you have opsub Starter, you can add additional fields between the systems and customize it. It's incredibly valuable. And before, before Data Sync and after Data Sync, the amount of what's possible to teams with lower levels of developers and not as much technical acumen to run write custom integrations. It's way wider than before. The next bucket that you can look to if you don't have coding resources is that Operations Hub Professional has a lot of tools that are specifically designed to kind of bridge the gap between like no code to the low code integrations, right? Tools like sending web hooks to throw data from HubSpot to other systems. Custom events that can bring data in through integrations like Amplitude or Pendo. That's where I would get started. I know there's a mouthful of information, but just to recap it at the end, right? Centralized around your source of truth plan incrementally. Right. I always say waterfall usually equals water fail. When I think about building things, figure out where you are from your internal personnel resources and your tech resources and then pick the tools that are going to be the best fit for your integration needs. Right? Looking first, is there an App Marketplace? Is there a HubSpot tool before looking at external tools like Zapier or going full custom code. Right? Because it's expansive, it's powerful. But you know, when you're writing the book from scratch, it takes time to make something.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you're taking notes because David is dropping pure gold on this interview for you and giving you directions. And it's so good. I want to go kind of like fast forward to like what we'll call maybe the end of the process or maybe not the end, but where a lot of companies focus, David. And because we're talking about a lot of getting it right, getting it in place, looking at it the right way, let's just hit it. How does integrated data empower sales teams to work more efficiently? Efficiently, effectively. And maybe if you even want to add some bonus benefits or tips towards the end of that, what about marketing and customer success? But again, most organizations are like, show me the ROI of it. Like, how does my sales team close more deals? Where does your brain go from that with the data? Integrated data empowerment for these teams.

Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's one of the things, right? If you are internally trying to get buy in around one of these projects. This is exactly what you need to, what you need to think about. You need to come armed with data. If you're having a data, integrated data discussion, I will butcher a Churchill quote to give what I think about integrated data strategies, right? Like when you integrate your systems, connect your data, that's not the beginning of the end, that's the end of the beginning, right? That allows you to actually do your work as a business, but it allows you to do it in a more empowered and measurable way. Now, you said specifically some case studies, some examples around how it benefits sales teams, right? I'll give an example of what we did for one of our customers, integrating their data strategy, right? The team needed a set of robust leads tailored to a specific need. This is a cyber security company. And, and so they need a steady stream of leads that need to be qualified and assigned to people based on the need, like the capacity of their outbound prospecting. And they need to pass it into different systems to scale their efforts. So what this means in simple language, right, is you need a lead generation tool, right? To source new leads, right? In this case, looking at intent driven data around certain topics that are relevant in the cybersecurity space, syncing those into the CRM, making sure that they meet the criteria for sales prospecting, right? They haven't become customers since we last tried to call someone there. There's not an active deal and that the company is either net new or it's managed by a current rep flowing them into their respective sequences in HubSpot and then using additional tools, right? Like parallel dialers to scale the amounts of calls, right? So that they don't have to just do manual calling one by one. They can scale out that effort. And so the moment that they convert, that information passes back into the CRM and then they can create deals so that because it's connected, right? We can see exactly the profile of leads that are converting at a higher rate because we have the data from the lead, we have the call conversion rate, we have the deal sourcing rate, and we know where all those leads come from and we know what sequences, right? With different call scripts and that have led to those conversions. And then we can track those deals through the pipeline. So in this case, right? Q1 of this year versus Q1 of last year, they increased their pipeline by 54% qualified new business pipeline through this process. So that's the kind of ROI that businesses can get with the right integrated data strategy. So you Know a few other numbers, right? If you're not convinced on the sales number, just in general, businesses with this kind of data driven strategy. Now to demystify that buzzword, simply what that means is you've connected your data and the data underlying all these systems is accurate. So you can make a hypothesis and test and learn to see if it works. Right? That's what we mean by a data driven organization is you're making refinements to your go to market strategy with data. Right? Now, when you have that, this is McKinsey research, not ours, um, you're 26%, 26 times more likely to get new customers when you're using data versus the old siloed disconnected data approach. You're six times more likely to keep the customers you already have. Right? You have a bigger spectrum right now. You talked about customer success, right? When data is connected, you can see, oh, this person gave me a terrible NPS score and their invoice is 30 days overdue. Without the data being connected, you may not be able to put the pieces together to get ahead of, of a bad customer experience. Right? So customer success is all about reading the tea leaves, connecting a full profile of your user and then taking action on that before it's too late. You want leading indicators, not lagging indicators. So that's why they're six times more likely to keep the customers that they have now. Finally, they're more efficient and therefore they're more profitable. McKinsey in fact found that they're 15% more efficient. Right. Without those data silos, not needing to grab expense data through spreadsheet requests via email. Right. If that is all connected, everyone can work more efficiently. So I think, you know, sales teams, customer success teams. The thing I'll mention with marketers, right, is that if you're a marketer listening to this, right. Integrated data is going to benefit you because you can't just pass leads over the fence and hope that the team are converting them. Right. I think the marketing world has done a very good job changing the perspective of them being a cost center to a revenue center. But just a word of warning for anyone in marketing listening to this without integrated data, that you can't prove the impact of your work because you bring in leads in a B2B business flow and then give them something to someone else to close. So this is fundamental to validating your existence and your budget marketers.

I hope you jotted that down. Oh my gosh. Okay, so earlier you kind of teased out machine learning a little bit of AI hey, let's be honest, there was just a few AI inbound talks that occurred, but specific to this, David, I want to ask you, what role do emerging technologies like AI, like machine learning play in the improving data integration and, and the insights that companies can gain from their data. Like talk us through kind of this. I want to say future, even though I truly know we're there now. But some people might be watching this, listening to it, and they're not here now, even though it is. So just talk us through like emerging technologies like AI and machine learning and how they're going to data integration in, like walk us through that.

Yeah, I think you hit on something when you said it's already here. You're, you're right. The AI revolution has already arrived. The thing that's. And it's already underpinning a lot of the services we use and a lot of the technologies that we as sales marketers and customer success arrived. The thing that's. And it's already underpinning a lot of the services we use and a lot of the technologies that we as sales marketers and customer success professionals rely on. The difference now is, is that it's so apparent to even the end users, right? You can go into ChatGPT or the HubSpot agents and have them help you craft language images, even videos for you, right? So it's, you know, it's not hidden behind a Google search algorithm or an ad buying optimization that like someone who's not working in the space doesn't quite grasp because they're just seeing the outcomes now. You can kind of reach out and touch it. Now. I think one of the things we are in the entry point of right is like people are asking ourselves, well, how do I employ this to do my job and what is my role, right. If I'm a sales professional or I'm a sales leader, what do I need to do to leverage this? And those are different than if you are the CTO thinking about your part to play in the integrated data strategy for your company. So I'm going to start at sort of the systems piece and then give a couple of thoughts on the individual roles within front office teams and the leadership teams who may not necessarily be technical, but are looking for ways to make their jobs better. Now, when you're thinking as like a systems leader, right, you have a data warehouse like Snowflake. The critical piece about why where AI factors into this integrated data strategy model is that tools now, right? And one of the things I was really excited about this inbound was there are now integrations with tools like Snowflake. You can bring your data right into Snowflake from HubSpot. You can bring data from Snowflake right into HubSpot. Now, now, what that means, right, for those of you who aren't familiar with Snowflake, right, this is a data warehouse and a AI machine learning powerhouse. Technology, right? You can bring your data in, meaning that the information about your customers can be used to inform decisions. The fundamental thing about the AI revolution is that the data is the most valuable part of it, right? With things like llama, like open source versions of the chat GPT LLMs, right? The algorithms are getting more and more democratized, but the data is more and more getting locked off, right? So like chat GPT bringing in those really high quality stack overflow ratings, that's where they're going to improve their coding algorithms, right? For your business, if you have a very clean, very accurate and very up to date assessment of all of your leads, your sales and your customer success opportunities, that information is absolute gold for your machine learning efforts, right? So you got to think about like how do I make sure, right? It's not necessarily about the car, it's the quality of the oil you're putting into it. So that's really, really key because technology, they're making it easier to make that data portability, it can just flow right into your Snowflake now. So you don't have to worry too much about the data management strategy. You just got to focus on the data quality part of the puzzle and then give that to your technologists now. So that's, I think the big, the big play next for businesses at the sort of the technology level, the systems level is how are you going to put your data to work that your business is already generating on the individual contributor, the sales manager, the front office teams. I think it, the, the jury's still out on the optimal way to leverage all of these tools. But I will say a couple of things that I found extremely powerful from my, from our experiments with some of our partners, personalizing, like personalization at scale, right? We've experimented feeding in intent data from like tools to personalize, like sentences to cold emails. We've seen some really positive developments there, right? So that you're not using AI to just generate a generic response. You are taking that data, the good quality data about your prospect, feeding it into something so that it feels like it's relevant to me. You know, based on my title and my position at my company, I get 60 cold emails a day, if not more, right. You gotta stand out in some sort of way. And so there's, there's some capability with the right data strategy of personalizing and weaving that in using these tools. The other thing that I've seen to great effect is especially on the image generation side, is that where previously, right, you're trying to tailor a presentation, maybe you're doing a presentation, you normally work in North America, but you're doing a presentation to a Middle Eastern counterpart, right? The image generation can be used to personalize the content so that it's relevant to that community, right? Instead of getting a whole set of new stock images for a whole new community, a whole new part of the world, you can generate things much more easily to create just that little bit of personal touch, right? To help move the needle, to show that you've done your homework, that you care about their business as a marketer, as a customer success professional. But that part of the puzzle is still being, is still being solved, right? And I would just say experiment, right? See how you can use it to help streamline your work. But the big, the big neon sign blinking for every business is incorporating it into your broader data strategy and using it to put your business's data to work.

I love so much of this interview. I can't believe where we're at as far as time. Time flies when you're having fun. And David, I'm definitely having fun listening to you wax poetic on all of these things of integrated data. I do have one last question and then we'll kick it out of here. I want you to maybe crystal ball, maybe, or just future thinking, like looking forward, what do you think the biggest challenges and biggest opportunities for companies trying to leverage integrated data in the next five years will be?

I think the biggest opportunity is because tools are getting better and better to like work with each other. It's going to become like the opportunities to just connect more and more and more of the full picture of your prospects, your opportunities and your customers. That's the big opportunity. We're already doing that. But it's becoming the barrier to entry is getting easier and easier and easier, right? It used to be anytime you wanted to connect a tool, you had to build an integration. Right Now a lot of those integrations out of the box work. It used to be you needed to know how to code end to end. Now there are a litany of low code tools. Zapier tools like that come with recipes like operations have custom code actions where you can get started with. Right? And Then you have tools that make bridging the gap right, between not knowing how to code to getting something working. So I think that's the big opportunity is that it's getting easier to make all of your disparate systems behave and act like they're one system. I think the biggest challenge though is how are you like as people are getting better, right, in their marketing, their marketing is going to be even more personalized. Their sales reps are going to be even more prepared and be even more, even more adept at following up with concrete, clear and valuable next steps. The biggest challenge is going to be how do you stay ahead of the pack, right? This is the expectations of customers are going to rise commensurate with what's happening, right? So the better the systems can integrate, the more complete and holistic your business is going to be. But the customer is going to expect that experience. So the biggest challenge is going to be how do you make sure you don't fall behind in this? Because if you're keep, if you keep sending generic cold opens with no thought, no effort, no even attempt to solve the problems of a specific customer, you're just going to get lost.

And we don't want you to be lost. David, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today on this interview. It has been amazing. The insights you provided on unlocking the power of integrated data are invaluable to the people who are watching or listening to this. Especially in a world where companies need to move fast and make informed decisions based on the right information, AKA the right accurate data, from eliminating silos to aligning teams across the board. Your advice will no doubt help our audience take their data strategies to the next level. David, if people want to connect with you, what. Where do you want to send them?

Yeah, so you can always visit our website, gettraction AI G E T T R A C T I o n AI or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or even Twitter DB ProductionLTD love it.

Okay, hub heroes, the key takeaway is clear data isn't just a tool, it's a strategic asset. Integrating your data across systems and teams can provide the insights you need to drive growth, improve decision making and stay ahead of your competition. Thank you for joining us on another episode of Sidekick Strategies Expert Interviews, the Inbound Talks edition. Don't forget to subscribe for more insights from industry leaders like David. And remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human and do some happy hubspotting along the way.