How Sales Teams Should Leverage Technology to Maximize Their Time

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask into action and become the Hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers.

Chat.

It's just you and me. Yeah. Can we land the plane? That's the question.

I have the. I have the. I have the plane landing button this time.

Okay, good. So I know how the plane lander, then we're good.

I'm very happy about that. But yeah, now that we've really done a deep dive into a case study of what it means to be a professional in podcasting. Welcome back to another episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. What I am really excited about today is that we've got our guy, Bastian Paul, back from Hubly IO. How you doing, bud?

Yeah, welcome.

Yeah, great, thanks. Thanks, guys for having me to again. And this time I took my headset to have a better sound with the mic. It was for the PlayStation 5 at the beginning for the headset, but it works also on Mac, so that's perfect.

I say you do sound like you're crushing noobs.

Yeah, it's kind of business expense, but for purpose. What? Sorry, Please. I said, is that what that crunching noise was? The crushing news?

Yeah, it's. I said it sounded like he's crushing noobs.

Yeah, Crushing noobs. I think I'm more crushed by boys for 14 year old now than before, you know. Oh, man, I don't want to hear their voice, you know?

Yeah, well, you know, there is something about when you're just a teenager, how good you are at video games for no apparent reason.

Bastard. I'm hearing some trauma in your voice. Do you need hug or perhaps the consult? Yeah. Yeah. Whenever you come back here in the US we ask you for.

Oh my gosh, it's incredible.

Well, Bastian, for those of you. For those of our audience members who may have missed you the first time around, can you tell us a little about yourself, who you are, what you do? Crushing noobs and crying about 14 year olds. Obviously. Obviously the audience heard that. I'm French, so living in France, Paris, it's pretty cold here. And CEO and co founder of Hubbleed. Hubble is a Chrome extension to track sales activities from LinkedIn inside HubSpot. So we are doing like kind of HubSpot LinkedIn integration. And in few words, you can import contacts, conversation invitation activities inside HubSpot and draw incredible, I would say incredible dashboard report. List whatever you want with LinkedIn activities inside HubSpot.

Hey, everybody. Yeah, so Liz's connection's cutting out a little bit there, so she's turned off her camera, but she's still here for the episode. But just thanks so much, Bastian, for giving us an intro to what it was that you talked about last time. It's definitely really awesome to have that LinkedIn activity inside of your HubSpot. I mean, really having everything completely in HubSpot is the most important thing if you want to be able to truly report on your sales activities like you guys do. So super important piece for people who are leveraging LinkedIn as a platform. And we couldn't be more excited to have you back.

Thanks. Thanks for having me excited too. Last time it was a good talk. So I think we have a good talk now. Yep. Yep.

Do you want to. Should we move on to the next one? Yeah.

Hi, can you hear me okay?

Yep. Yeah, we can hear you. Great. Yeah. Yeah. So one of the things that we've heard a lot is, you know, from other sales teams is that they really struggle to tap into like HubSpot's automation and CRM functionality. Right. And to allow those automations to increase their selling time rather than just spending time manually managing their data. You know, why do you think that is? And is this something that you know can be fixed in the, in the sales team land?

I guess, like you can bring a lot of data and since you have AI now, you can do a lot of automation really easily, especially with AI. Like you can create your own ChatGPT custom GPT or you can create now custom GPT by API so you can create specialized GPT with your knowledge plus accessing some, some knowledge and performing API requests for you so you can really trigger some automation. But at the end they access to the data online, but they can't access to your data. So you have to have let them the opportunity to access to your data. And I think today, yeah, the major thing, the major problem, I think you will be with me on this one, but it that like most of iteration and workflows don't work because data is missing in the CRM or data is not up to date like missing from.

The front end like data entry standpoint on the front end or just in general?

Yeah, I mean like as we spoke last time, like for example salespeople and marketing people don't speak the same language like sales people prefer to. When you have, when you hire salespeople what you want to maximize is time spent on the phone speaking with customers. You don't want to maximize, you don't want them to do the data entry. And of course for example, when I'm doing sales code, I don't want to do data entry too. I just want to perform and say the best speech. I don't say or.

Well, you want to be present with the customer, right?

Yeah, sure. Asking the best question, you know. And so at the end you, you might miss some data to. If you want to do automated follow up post demo task and if you do automation that doesn't work that based on the wrong data you might over task your salespeople with the wrong task at the end they don't like the test they get, you know and they were like hey we HubSpot is working against me and not with me. And if you do some automation of your emails. Yeah, yeah. You know like the sales adoption is really hard when you have too much automation. So and at the end you will remove that kind of automation and you lose the benefit of having HubSpot going back to do everything manually. So I think yeah, from the front end we do have a problem but with AI with maybe more into like using that just for mining the information from sales call because you get more and more information now and this is storable and this is more accessible. But before you didn't know how to treat them, how to transform that and now you have some possibilities like last time I wanted to for every call I made get the transcript of course having to log inside of spot but maybe having some properties feed automatically or a next task created automatically plus an email personalized, you know. But this was again a bit tricky to implement. I don't find any. If you have any ideas I am all over it but I didn't find a tool or simple way to do that, you know.

Yeah, well I think one of the just a HubSpot tech thing since I'm the HubSpot tech guy. They just recently launched call based workflows. Right. Which is actually a really really cool thing. So like you can trigger a workflow when call properties are updated. So let's say like when the recording URL is known or when the transcript is complete, you can start a workflow now and then you could theoretically run that through a GPT and identify pain points and then put that into a property and then run that same transcript through another GPT identifying something else. Right, but like that's a huge step in the right direction when it comes to being able to try and alleviate some of like the bulk data that just gets stored in your sales calls or in your meetings. Right? Yeah.

And I think when you're doing sales call or csm, kind of when you're speaking with clients, as a client, you expect that person in front of you to have all this information and the next step, you don't want to spend your time to re explain what you're looking for, what is your use issue or so on. And normally CRM has been invented for that. So I think for example, this kind of automation, automation should be one of the main thing to do right away because you will save a ton of time because every rep going back to the company knowing like okay, what did we do this company? What was the last time we contacted? And so on. And you see some opportunities and these opportunities are easier to implement than before. But it's still hard to get data, be sure the data is correct and then transform it well and to make.

Sure it's in front of the right people at the right time. Because just because it's in your activity timeline doesn't mean that somebody's going to go dig through it or even if it's in a couple of properties in your HubSpot, that doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to benefit somebody unless you know, you have really thorough training processes and things like that. But yeah, man, I think when you were saying like oh yeah, even in customer success or when you're talking with clients, they expect you to know the last thing you talked about. Like, I mean, how frustrating is it to call like CenturyLink Internet support and then they have no clue who you are, you just got disconnected five seconds ago, you know, and then you have to call them back and re explain your whole life story about this thing that's going on. Good gravy, man. Is that just frustrating? You know, like it's just so. Because like it's just such an awful user experience on the customer side and like when it comes to support. But even sales it's like oh yeah, well your buddy just called me. If you have more than one sales rep working leads. Right. I mean that's frustrating too, right?

Yeah, sure. Like it's so funny, we Speak about that because last Friday, for one week I was, I was trying to reopen an account for an accountant tool that I closed like one month ago. And I wanted to reopen, to reopen it. And I tried to reach out the support team. No answer. It was really hard. And so at the end I got someone tell me like, yeah, someone will call back on Friday. Someone called back, explain all, everything I, I know I have and say, okay, you have to see with your accountant and so on. We cannot unlock that for you. And this morning I received a code at 10am by the same guy telling me like, did I answer to you? I say, okay, man, I don't know. Take your note. Do something, you know, after, like the, the opinion you will have to the brand after you can speak to your friend and say, yeah, this brand is good, but their support is not good and so on.

Right?

This will affect the brand. So I think like, yeah, especially for sales, of course, because this is the first touch point when you're prospecting. But of course for the customer service, it's really important.

Yeah, 100%. Well, when it comes to like HubSpot in general, one of the things that HubSpot really has a ton of is integrations. Right. And because of their super robust API as well as their integrations platform and how they support app partners, I'm sure Max will have something to say about this. It's too bad that he's not here. But how they, they try to do their absolute best to support app partners as much as they can. I'm sure there's small gripes between we need this and we need that, you know, and I totally, totally understand that because roofing business partner also has like one public app that we support. So I get it. You know, but they do have a, like compared to most any other CRM. I mean, they're definitely industry leading, if not the leader when it comes to the like robust ecosystem of integrations. Right? What are like E tools or integrations that teams should prioritize, prioritize. And obviously I know Hublead is in there, but is there anything else you've seen? And then we absolutely. I think we should talk about Hublead in that stack for people in that particular B2B space. Right?

Yeah, sure. Like, as you said, first of all, the integration is way easier than plenty of other CRMs. Of course, compared to Salesforce, there is no, no talk about that. Like Salesforce, something horrible when you want to integrate.

But it's because they're like so many different Chunks of softwares that make up the software. That's what makes it difficult. I think it's pretty siloed.

It's pretty hard. Yeah, yeah, it's very siloed. And HubSpot documentation is kind of accessible. It's really straightforward. So integration is way, way easier for sales tool. So first of all, before picking the tools I think one of the most important thing sales people or sales team rev ops teams, they want to implement new tools or going to HubSpot for example, they need to redefine what are their needs so their strategy, you know like for example the sales tax won't be the same if you want to talk with 10,000 customer a year or 1,000 for example. And I think the point of targeting how many companies, sorry we want to speak with per year is something really interesting because like for example if you say like I want to have 10 clients for that I have to have 100 deals for that I have to have 100 companies. So I need to speak with 1,000 new companies per month. That's false because at the end in three or four months you will be speaking with the same company you spoke again like in January for example. Sure. So it's more about like how many companies you want to outreach on one year and then you can select the right tools. So if you aim for like I don't know, you have like two, three sales team top, maybe five top and your market is kind of big. Also your tabern market is kind of high. I think you can go for like Lemlist or a gross machine. For email LinkedIn automation, you have also some LinkedIn automation tool doing only that like wallaxing, they have a good integration with, with HubSpot you can like sync your emails, LinkedIn outcome and so on. Inside HubSpot actually we are using LEM list with Hubble and so these automations are really good and of course for finding phone numbers, of course you have Hubble but you can use also Casper Lucia if you want to do cold coding that's, that's kind of mandatory I guess for if you want to do some, if you're doing a lot of email automation I really suggest to have an outbound email warm up. You know this kind of tools that.

Warming up your email like I've heard of like mailgun or some different email warm up tools. Basically just trying to get your email domain and just for like people and you know who may never have heard of this before but to make sure that your domain isn't immediately flagged as spam because it just came out of nowhere and then all of a sudden started sending a thousand emails and boom, insta spam. So you got to like kind of send a few emails and then a few emails and then a few emails and a little more emails and then it warms up that. So that all the servers don't just immediately flag you as spam. Just for people who've never had that.

For, for hybrid, we use Mail Reach, so. But also others. Yeah, it's really important. It's kind of a bit expensive when you're adding the cost when you have like four, five, six emails. But if you're sending emails, if you have one email, one domain that is in spam, you at the end losing money. So that's really important to have it.

Yeah, you got to protect your main domain. I mean, I think that's something that people don't really think about as much.

This one. Don't use HubSpot.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, you can use your, you know, your HubSpot email health tool and you really need to make sure that it's only your people that you know, need to hear from you with your, you know, within your HubSpot. Right. Those are the people who are like, they're already buying things from you or you know, stuff like that and you're not bothering them too much. Right. Yeah, you really got to protect that main domain.

Yeah. Main domain you shouldn't do like, of course if you're, if you're starting you can do some automation, but not, not so much. But at the end, like for, for hubl IO, we don't do any automation on it because if you're getting spam and you want to speak with your customer, you will be. It will be a bummer if you have your tech team emails that work internally, something like that. It will be you, you will have some people against you at the end of the day. So you have to be careful.

Yeah.

And, and like for me there are again, depending of your time and how many people you want to target on the yearly basis. But if you want to source companies, of course, if you're going to like, most of our clients and Prospects are using LinkedIn and LinkedIn says navel to find companies to target. No, but I'm not sure for these tools for this. Sorry, Step. I don't have any preference in terms of sales stack because I do have a preference for having something that is scrapping LinkedIn Sales Navigator on a daily basis. Why? Because for me this is the primary database in the world. And you cannot get closer to the truth with this platform, with another platform. But you can, of course, it's harder to scrap. So you can use Apollo, you can use clay and so on or AI agent to create your companies and so on. So for the beginning, I do advise most of my customers, I do advise them to use clay or things like that. Especially if your time is big and you don't have a lot, like for example, your time is, I don't know, 10 million companies and you want to have 10k companies per year, you don't care to have this kind of big database, you know.

Right.

But for us, for example, we do have a target of 200k companies, clients of HubSpot and we want to reach, I don't know, like 10k per year, for example. So let's say you use an AI agent, you're asking for companies and at the end they give you like no more companies or fewer companies or companies with a scoring that's not working or something like that. And at the end you don't own the process. You know, you don't, you don't know because when you ask to a clay agent or something like that, you don't know where the data come from and you don't know if it's still up to date, something like that.

So I prefer a lot of companies on LinkedIn, you know, some of the company records there are just orphaned. Right. So there's nobody there. Right. It's just, oh, hey, we made a company on LinkedIn and we've never updated it because some people don't actually like, do much with their LinkedIn company. Right.

So I prefer to own the process internally and for that so funny because I spoke to Liz like two weeks ago and we're still working that on that on Hublid, you, you this if you want to have it internally, it brings like a lot of pain and a lot of things you need to think about. So for example, how do you scrap Sales Navigator? Because you can use some phantom buster or tool like that that is using your cookie, Everboot things tool like I like a lot, they're using your cookie, you have Sales Navigator and they scrap the list for you. And export as a CSV, these ones are really good. But sometimes if you want to go at scale, it can be harder because if you have the LinkedIn detection, you know, one thing I'm trying right now is I'm trying, it's working. You get for example, a list of company and you're doing A query on Google and you're trying to scrap people from a certain company trying to find associated contacts. Yeah, with a Boolean search, that's what we do. It's easier to. It's cheaper and easier to scrap LinkedIn. But I prefer to have the list of full employees inside companies, especially the one you want to short targets. Because at the end you can use ChatGPT for example, by API telling him like, for example, hey, I have this list of people, here's my decision makers, here's my target. Can you pick one of them, craft a copywriting and then send to him?

Yeah.

And if you want to do something like really scalable for outbound, I do think sometimes you need to use BigQuery kind of SQL database outside of HubSpot. Because there is one limitation I do from a source that is really sick, really not good, is when you're doing the search API to search contacts, you have a limit API request limit +.

Yes, a number of searches that you can pull back. So curiously, have you attempted to use the GraphQL API? It may be able to return more. I'm not sure if it can or not. I mean I've found GraphQL particularly helpful for getting from one association to another association all in one API call.

Okay.

Yeah, but I wonder how many, how many? Because there's a maximum weight that you can have to your GraphQL query. So like it gives you a certain number of points you can spend per call and that may be more than the search API limit. So that might be worth. Yeah, maybe exploring briefly.

Yeah, I need to explore because the second thing they had is that. But I think they raised up. But last year it was. When you're doing the search API, you are limited to only three filters properties, but I think they now added up to five.

But maybe GraphQL, you can do a lot, right in GraphQL. Yeah, you can really drill down into the very specific information you're looking for. From my understanding, often it's used for CMS actually in web pages so that you're making less API calls on somebody's browser side. Right. Or like to populate the data of a web page because like often in a web page you need to know information about a company and a contact and their support tickets. Right. And something along those lines. Right. And so you need to be able to make those associated queries. But GraphQL lets you just get right to what you're looking for by formulating the query in a certain way when you're on a Certain page. Right. It could be possibly useful for what you're saying. Just throwing again, you know, since I'm in the driver's seat. We're doing, we're doing Tekken sales today.

Yeah.

Since that's, that's my job.

I did, I did so. I did see that, that announcement, but I didn't, I didn't try it. But now I'm reading the doy. Kind of interesting.

So, yeah, if you go to the CRM Development tab, inside of your HubSpot, there's a GraphQL builder that you can build your graphql. You can just click through all your objects and go down further. So you can build your GraphQL query before actually having to like try and do it in a development environment. And you can actually even test your calls and you just paste in your ID and the ID that you're looking for or the filters you're looking for, search or whatever. So often though, you start from an object. So like, you'll notice you're going to start from a specific contact and then it'll give you all of its associated stuff. But it may be worth, you know, exploring depending on what you're trying to accomplish. But I guess, you know, like, as far as integrations, you know, I know Hubleed is like very surrounding all of these different types of sales activities. Is there anything that you want to dive into specifically on that, that assists with that, you know, streamlining of the process? Right. I know. It's like the extension and all that, right?

Yeah, sure. So as we spoke, like, for example, when you're, when you're scrapping a ton of lists, when you're doing this amount of work, when you're, I don't know, you have a new market, you're opening your company, you, market is blank, you did nothing. You can easily do a lot of automation, like scrappy injecting. Sorry, but when you're on companies, you're already called qualified. They were interesting for you, but not interested right now. And you want to go back in three or four months for this kind of nurturing part. When you need to follow your account, when you need to go for the dream, 100 customers, for example, really the biggest customers, for me, there was no real tool for that. And this task was not for the marketing team, but for the sales team. And that's why we created.

Prospecting is nurturing. Right. Like it's somebody, you know who's already like the right kind of business, but you need to get them across the finish line.

Yeah. And for me, this was more for the salespeople and most of the tools we want we, we saw in the market was really marketing oriented because marketing and salespeople do not have the same skills plus the same processes when they are working. So we created Hublit to be on top of LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to import contacts, conversation, also to track the activities, invitation sent and accepted inside of Spot and with all the time inside of Spot. So you have like for example, the last invitation send date, last invitation accepted date, things like that. And one, it's saving time for salespeople. Second, you can really stay organized inside of Spot from LinkedIn. So inside LinkedIn at the end and the other thing was people and salespeople, I mean they need to be more into the networking system. Like for example, when we develop more and more SaaS or B2B consulting online and so on, we were okay, there are plenty of people, we can email everyone. You can do plenty of things automatically and get leads. But at the end if you want to grab, if you want to get like high value company, high ticket companies, it's all about networking. It's all about knowing people, getting referral and so on. And LinkedIn is the place for that. It's a place like, or of course in person event, but LinkedIn is really the place for that. And that's why we added the contact messaging capabilities to import conversation and also seeing your invitation. Because how do you pilot your network and how do you handle your network as a salespeople or salesperson, sorry. Or a founder? It's very hard in LinkedIn but within HubSpot it's easy because in HubSpot you know all your ICP, your targets, you have everything, your calls and not. So we bring back the data from LinkedIn inside HubSpot for salespeople to be really the owner and so they can work on their network. Because at the end for me that's, that's the true added value from a salesperson. It's the network they can build inside the industry, the relationships they can have. And that's how they can bring the best customer to the company.

Well, and it brings it completely inside a HubSpot so you have an accurate picture of really all the interactions that your team has had. Right. And one of the things I've noticed recently that's been particularly helpful is at the top of different record pages, the summary of activities that have been recent that has been really helpful. Before I go dive into, you know, dealing with a company or a customer, if I'm working inside of HubSpot and with the HubSpot sales extension offering like your Breeze AI in on any domain has been particularly helpful. When you actually go to somebody's website to take a look at it, you can kind of get that associated activity and some summaries there. Have those particular features been like insightful or is that something that you know? Because like sounds like HubLead is helping you get all that data back to HubSpot. But getting that complete summary I think will be, you know, particularly useful for people. Right?

Yeah, so I didn't try right now because I don't think, I mean maybe now I have access, but I didn't have time to check.

Sure.

But I know that say I did the personalized sequence for one, one person and normally one of the product manager told me like we can take into account the LinkedIn activity. You know, when you, when you have activities, you have LinkedIn activity type and this one, that's how what we, we fill in for the message and so on. So technically if they can really use that. Technically you can use a LinkedIn conversation to build this personalized sequence. But I didn't test it myself right now, so I need to verify that. But when I wanted to do that was like end of the last year and the beta was still closed. It's not for everyone, but I think maybe now it's for everyone. So I need to try it again. Yeah. Unfortunately we do Also log the LinkedIn mutation, you know, as a property but also as a timeline event. I'm not sure they use that. I don't think so. That use that inside the personalized sequence, but maybe one day.

Yeah, well, you can log LinkedIn messages specifically, right? Yeah, like, and that is that currently restricted to the LinkedIn integration only or can you log those via the API now?

You mean about the native integration with LinkedIn?

Yeah, like the actual like LinkedIn timeline activity. So like you know, the timeline come from an integration but then the activities can be LinkedIn type.

Yeah, yeah, the activity of LinkedIn type, we do, we do create and update that one. So for me this one should be reusable inside the personalized sequence from Breeze. So I think that one can be really handful. And of course like since our product is on top of LinkedIn and we try to match the LinkedIn contact to HubSpot, you have now the Breeze enrichment where you can enrich your contacts. Of course, I guess you can enrich with the LinkedIn URL. And the more you have the URL, the more you can do things, for example, when you go back on the contact, it will be automatically identified, reducing the number of duplicates and so on. But of course if you have the LinkedIn URL you can do automation, plenty of things like that. So that's perfect because most of our customers going using up lead, they say hey, you don't recognize this contact and this HubSpot contact with this LinkedIn contact. And I say yes. So you don't have the LinkedIn URL. So we have to try to guess with the first name, last name, company name and so on.

Right.

But if the company domain is different from the LinkedIn page or the name is not the same in the LinkedIn page, then we cannot be sure it's the same. No. So I hope one day all HubSpot CRMs from all customers will have the correct link in your head. But this is not in place.

It's one of the most difficult things to solve, even just phone call, getting phone numbers formatted properly in such a way that you can link up for your VoIP system to make sure that the people that it thinks are you know, like, and that's just one number, like it's a number but there and it's you know like you think oh, it's not that hard to format it with regex or something but it's just dirty data man. Like I mean how it comes in and out stored on the Internet and you know, anyway it's just, it's notorious, a notorious issue for HubSpot admins around the world to try and figure out how to make all that junk line up with the integrations that are feeding it data.

Yeah, it's really hard because with CRMs and I think more with HubSpot because it's really open, you can do plenty of things but at the end it's really hard to know like okay, you don't have any framework, you can just follow and say okay, we will report like that we will do the life cycle this way. The research is this way. You know, you can really personalize plenty of things and at the end you try to personalize so it stick to your business. But it's really important to have the take the time to simplify what, what your people are doing in the real world so you can translate in CRM, you know, in CRM world. And this is the hardest path to part instead of really knowing like HubSpot how to use workflows and so on. But the hardest part is how do you simplify your process so it's easier for everyone to understand and then having inside HubSpot.

Well, I think one of the interesting things to think about is just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. Right? Just because it's possible doesn't mean it needs done. And I think that all, you know, especially what you were just mentioning leads really nicely into this next little segment which is, you know, for teams that are overwhelmed by the amount of things, the amount of tools out there, you know, like the different email scrapers, the different or like warm up tools, like there's all these different integrations, there's all these different things, you know, and you were talking about like well there things are so customizable, there's not quite a framework. But what would you say might be a simple framework for helping decide which HubSpot native or integrated solutions to invest in or which ones to avoid? Right. So like there's so much stuff out there like for everyone who's overwhelmed, how would we try and determine which things we want to use more easily? Do you have maybe a framework for deciding on integrations and for sales teams?

So first of all, everything inside HubSpot, the more you can the better. And for me HubSpot should be always a source of truth everywhere. Every application you want to work with, whatever the source of truth should be HubSpot. So you need to be sure that the integration works in both way and most of integration works in one way, HubSpot to their app, but not their app to HubSpot. And I think that's the most important thing. They do not forget for the reverse when they are coming back to HubSpot with information. So if you want everything inside HubSpot whenever you are evaluating something intention to HubSpot you need to think to ask for okay, I can access to my data from HubSpot but can I access the data from the app is now generating inside my HubSpot and then you can look at it. Do you have to do it? Is there any native integration or do you have to do it on your by yourself and so on. Right, so this is the most important thing and second one I will say so it's a bit linked. I would say the more you stay inside the spot to manage everything the better. So especially for your salespeople you don't want to give them like five or ten tools you want. I mean five or ten dashboard, ten things, ten different web app. You want to stick to Upspot and of course LinkedIn to prospect for example, or I don't Know if you want to listen to conversation for training and so on. But if it's in upsworth that's the best. So how can you manipulate this tool from upspot or from the website you're targeting people that's on like does it integrate inside the sales flow on a daily basis? Or do. Do you. Are. Are you adding a new web app, a new thing to do for the sales people really important and yeah think. I think that kind of the main things for me and of course like just preventing that duplicates error, things like that. But if you have a good integration, if you're evaluating the good intention as I said like going back to HubSpot getting back the data inside of then inside the spot you can manipulate the data. So be sure you don't have duplicate having your dashboard to be sure that you're not doing, you're not doing wrong things to your database on your.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

I think one of the things, yeah, yeah. One of the things I've seen HubSpot integrators do and this is just like a software says hey, we want to have a HubSpot integration. So then they get their developer to build a HubSpot integration but they don't use HubSpot. I think those integrations often are. They just integrate with an object and put some data on there or something. But they're not as useful if that makes sense. Like the integration doesn't help you work out of HubSpot. It helps them get their data to your HubSpot if that makes sense. Like a lot of those, those systems want you to use their user interface, whatever it is. Right. Rather than allowing you to deal with inside of your HubSpot. Like and one of the things that, that we added to our integration for our CPQ software it's like a roofing specific one because I work with roofing business partner. It's called Sumoquote. And you know, at first we built our app so that it would like drop a link to the Sumoquote project and then you open it and it, you open it in a new tab and you work on the quote. But now we've added obviously the iframe card so you can just click the button it opens up and inside a HubSpot yes, you're manipulating their user interface in their software but you don't have to leave the tab you're on and it pulls up the project that you're already in. Right. For the linking to the deal. Right. And I think that's something that a Lot of integrators, you know, they're almost not even wanting to do. They're not wanting to allow you to just stay in HubSpot and never leave. And I think that's been one of my. One of the most difficult things for choosing integrations is finding ones where the people are HubSpot first, if that makes sense. Right.

I mean I can't agree more because that's what we do. Yeah, I do agree with you. When you, when you're looking at some like if I'm trying to not be biased.

Right.

If you're looking to, to people, companies doing different, of course, if you do like at the end, if you do four or five integration with your app, normally at the end you will have kind of Pareto law or something like that where most of your customers are coming from one kind of CRM or CMS for example. And then everything you're shipping is for them. So the other one, they won't get the same features that the other one is getting. So you cannot go a deep dive. You cannot go really deep inside different CRM because one, you have to understand what the CRM about how they are structured, the API, what kind of new things they are implementing, how people are working with that CRM as you said. And of course having still a no HubSpot for five years now, it's easier for me and when I speak with my co founders to say like hey guys, like customer are doing like that and like that because this is impossible inside of Spot. And I know because I already experienced it. So when I speak to customer, sometimes I'm like, like okay, show me your dashboard and I'm just like consulting them on their HubSpot, how they they use it behind beyond Hublit. But at the end it helps you really like as a founder to better understand what your customer are experiencing and to provide this kind of thing. You said like CRM card iframe and. And you have more the spirit of not developing things inside your app, but more inside HubSpot.

Yeah.

So yeah, I do agree. And one of the main thing I need to work on for our customer kind of customer care point of view is okay, now we update some properties, you know how to do some reports. But what can I do more? You can create tasks, you can create feed, you can create workflows, you can create plenty of things, you know, and then like for example, you have the new sequence, as I said before, personalized and so on. But this one, you me as Bastian. I know but most of our Customers they don't know. So I need to craft some content to them to explain to them what they can do and so on. And it brings like a level of opportunities really, really huge. So you can bring a lot of value to your customers. So yeah, I do agree with you. It's still, the ecosystem is still in the beginning of that. We are, we are seeing more and more companies, only HubSpot Focus. But I guess like there will, there will be more and more and more and it will be way better for HubSpot users because they will have dedicated team doing more things with HubSpot and detection will be more useful for everyone.

Yeah, I mean if it's called HubSpot, it should be the hub where you work out of, right? The central point of where all your data goes or at least it should be aware of your data. And I think that, you know, when we come back to source of truth, right? My thought is if it's not coming from HubSpot, HubSpot should at least be aware of wherever it's stored in real time, right? And like for example, I'm never going to do my accounting in HubSpot, but if I need to attribute expense data back to my sales or something like that, I should be able to see that expense data related to my sales, right? For example, but that's not the source of truth is in that case QuickBooks, right? Or whatever my accounting platform is. But I at least need to bring that data back in real time from an integration. That's good. So it's a window into the actual thing, right? For example, yeah, completely.

I did that for Stripe, for example, for every, not mra, but really the amount we invoiced and we really had inside the bank for every deals. So whenever you were speaking with a client, you know, for example, the, the Mr. So you're saying like, okay, this is a good huge account or not. But you know, also the amount you bid the guy. So let's say for example the MRI is 60 bucks per month, for example. But you see, you see like I don't know, 1000 bid, you know that, okay, it's a small customer, but it's 1,000. So I need to be maybe more careful or something like that. So you, you, you change the mindset, you know, and for your sales that's so it's easier, it's better because they can see like, hey, this deal I closed like six months ago, it brought like I don't know, 6,000 to the company. So they are proud, they are happy about their work, you know. So yeah, I do agree with you. Like, even, even if it's not used inside the workflow or something like that, having everything inside HubSpot to better know your business, it's really good for your daily operation for sales team, marketing team, whatever you want.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I have one more question, but before that, just a little birdie told me from the Commerce Hub team that payments may be getting custom properties at some point. I don't know exactly when, but how cool would that be inside a HubSpot? Because I mean, I've had to have a custom object to represent payments in the accounting software because I can't do anything to the payments in HubSpot. And I'm pretty sure there's a beta out where you can edit invoices via API now. So you still have to opt into beta. But like being able to manipulate HubSpot invoices, that's pretty slick. And you can put custom properties on the invoices and everything and all that, you know too. But just, you know, so that you're aware if you hadn't seen those come out, that's. And then there's some stuff on the horizon there that might be particularly useful for some of those use cases, especially for salespeople.

When you have custom invoice and so on, it can be really interesting.

Yep, it can. But anyway, I guess, you know, coming back to the sales topic, right, so everything's kind of related to sales at the end of the day, isn't it? Yeah, right. You could go in so many directions from sales just because like everything ultimately comes, comes back to, you know, it starts with sales or something touches sales in some capacity. But anyway, for like people who are sales leaders in HubSpot who feel like they're not getting everything out of their tech stack, what would be the best place to start in your opinion, to turn that around? So like, hey, I feel like I have all this stuff or I feel like I'm not leveraging everything in this platform that I pay all this money for. Especially smaller teams really feel the burden of that expense a lot more than bigger teams, you know, just because of the size of organization, where's a good place to start to really start turning that ship around and feel like you're getting value out of your HubSpot.

The best thing when, when, when you're in this situation, normally you, it's been like maybe three, four months, you tried different tools, try different processes, you might created some properties and so on. So I think at the end. What you need to do is just to get a blank paper or whiteboard, whatever you want, and just try to okay, what is the process in a simple way. And if you cannot explain it in a simple way, then you didn't understand. Then you need to rework and you need to erase everything and restart. Because the goal here, it's not to fix the thing, the goal here is to remove what doesn't work and to remove things you tried because maybe three months ago your understanding was like that and now you tried and now you know that your understanding changed and so.

You don't work anymore or didn't work ever, right?

Yeah, it didn't work and brought something else, something. So this is something I do like. It's a second order thinking. It's when you're bringing something, a solution because of a problem, then you're bringing more problems and then you're bringing more solution. So instead of going at the end and trying to fix the solutions, fix the new problem, you have just get back to the real problem you had in the beginning and maybe that at that time when you implemented solution, you didn't really get the problem. That's okay because that's experience.

That's how you have more information now, right?

Yeah.

And so, yeah, you understand more.

Yeah. So to get back to the root of, to the root of the problem you have for me to restart with nothing. So go for a white paper and just write down like, okay, what are the sales journey, what are my sales are doing and so on and try to find things they are doing in duplicates or things that are doing but are not useful anymore or something they are not doing. And you can maybe replace, not use it again, you know. Yeah, so that's, that will be the first thing. I won't have any blank white paper where I not all my tools and trying to articulate it now I will just go back to the process, what people are doing, what my sales people are doing, maybe asking them, you know, and trying to have something really simple. And then you really find out, okay, this one is not useful. This one we need to fix. We can check another tool and so on and so on, you know. But yeah, yeah, that's great to add things that remove things.

Yeah, well, it is. I mean, and that's. I think one of the difficulties that people get into is they just keep adding on top of layers and layers, like you're saying, rather than, you know, I mean, I guess in engineering the best part sometimes is no part. Because if you don't have a part, it won't break. Right. And so, like, when you're architecting a solution for your sales, you want to have as few moving pieces as possible. Like, you should almost be taking away so much stuff that you have to add stuff back. Right?

Yeah. And one advice, of course, is to read the book High Output Management from the front of Intel, I guess, if I remember. Yes. Well, incredible. Like, he explained how production factory works with explaining how you do your breakfast for. For restaurant doing breakfast. And when you have this level of simplicity when you're speaking, like when you're explaining, that's at that point you really understand. So every time I'm rethinking about my process of sales automation and so on, and I think truly inside me that I'm not sure I really understood, I'm like, okay, you need to rework. You need to go back blank white paper and try to understand what's not clear in your mind. Because if it's not clear, it won't be clear anywhere.

Yeah, no, that's perfect. Well, Bastian, I wish I didn't have another meeting coming up because I really, really enjoyed our conversation today. And you know, I'm sorry you were stuck with just me, but hey, I'm.

Really grateful for it.

I really, truly enjoyed, you know, getting into all these little nuggets of information from you. And thanks so much. And. And we'll definitely have to have you back another time, I think. Going to, you know, back to sales church, if you will. Right. Is where we are. And that's always just such a good time because it touches every part of the business. So thank you so much for your expertise and thanks for being on.

Thanks, Chad, for having me. It was great even if you were alone, but we had so deep subject discussion together. So great. And yeah, sure, next time I'll be there.

Yep, Cool. Thanks so much. We'll see ya. Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the. In the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast, make sure you tune in and find out. In the next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hubbyerospodcast on any of the Socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And, of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.