HubSpot AI Data Sources: a Brand Voice + Tone Deep-Dive (+ an Intervention)

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.

Welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes. And the gang is all here today. Chad, George, and Max, who is no longer driving.

I should have. I should have just kept it on.

Yeah, he pulled for the podcast.

Just kept rolling for it.

Yeah.

Was a very important topic we got today, which.

Well, first of all, Liz, we. We have to. We have to address something before you get into too much of the topic. Yes, Chad officially got his cartoon this morning. His hub hero. Yeah.

What?

So I will be redoing the podcast artwork to have the one and only Chad Captain America on the podcast.

To us all.

Chapter America. Yeah.

Wait, does that mean that my name will actually be correct on the artwork going forward?

Oh, is it still the old name?

In some places it is.

Oh, well, I mean, if I'm updating it, I guess I'll just update it all, so might as well.

Might as well.

There we go.

It's my secret identity. That's what's going on here. Well, how are we all doing today? Let's not all be so excited. We doing okay?

We're doing good.

Yeah, we're doing good.

We're doing good, Max.

We're gonna do the whole spent the.

Morning out in the. Out in the corn fields and you're absolutely right, Max.

Brand voice and tone is a very important topic. What we need to get.

This is my brand voice.

Oh, God.

This is my brain tone.

For anyone confused, I've been playing a lot of farming simulator.

Max now thinks he's like a 65 year old South Carolinian truck driver with all sorts of equipment and fertilizer for this episode.

Listen, if you get on that horse, you got to ride it. That's all I got to say.

So where can we find you playing farming simulator?

I haven't had the guts to go live yet. Probably soon. Yeah, I probably will.

I think it's no more.

It's no more. It's no more embarrassing than playing my Pokemon card shop simulator. That I've been playing, too, as well. So that's a. It's a whole other episode, though.

Work Work simulator where you get to be the boss.

Yeah, I played.

Yeah.

All right, all right, all right, kids. All right. Are we ready?

Yeah.

Ready to be adults?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, maybe I've been ready since I'll do my best an hour ago.

Don't start. Don't start, because I. Okay. I am very, very, very, very, very, very excited about what we're talking about today because I have been listening for weeks and happily and steadily taking notes from all of you.

Wait, what?

You guys Nerdy.

What was the first word you said about happily?

Really? Max? Seriously? You got a show right now? She was in the middle of just, like, laying it down, getting this going.

We were.

We were rolling, and Max is like.

We were going. I was on the. H me to write it. And then you stop writing.

Wait, is this an opportunity to shell.

We're talking about one of my favorite today.

Take two.

Clap.

All right, beautiful.

Leave it in talk.

Talk about one of my favorite topics today, talking about one of my favorite areas of passion and expertise. It's brand, voice, and tone.

You know what one of my favorite brands are? Sorry, Knocko. Go.

Is it happily? Is that. Yeah. Okay.

All right. All right, big popsicle. Calm down. Ooh. Never. It's uncomfortable. No. Okay, so I want to take us back in time, because this is not the first time brand, voice, and tone has come up in conversation here on this podcast. The last time we talked about it was when the AI powered rollout of the HubSpot Content Hub happened, and it had a lot of cool bells and whistles. And the brand voice and tone thing left a lot to be desired. We were excited to see it recognized, but the ability to add one, maybe two sentences worth of stuff there left me a little emotionally chafed. I'm going to be perfectly honest. Didn't feel great about it. But since then, the brand voice and tone feature has undergone a massive makeover within HubSpot. So we're taking a trip down this road together to help us understand the tool and to have a more substantive conversation about what brand, voice and tone really is. So, George, I actually want to start with you.

Yeah.

Can you take us through this transition of what the original brand voice and tone feature was versus what it is today?

Yeah. Well, I mean, when it was released. And by the way, let me just preface. I love HubSpot. I love all the humans that work at HubSpot. I even love the Fact that we started a journey down this road with this tool, but when it first came out, I looked at it and was like, nope, not right now. Yeah, yeah, it was like, no, not happening right now. Because I knew what I was doing in other AI platforms. I knew the richness, the depth, the context that I was able to give it. And, and like even going in the setup phase when it originally came out, just, just in setup phase, I was like, no, no, not the right questions, not the I can't upload. No. Oh, I like, how are you guessing my voice and tone? Because you're really not letting me educate you on it much. And they're just. It just wasn't. It wasn't. But it was because at least it was there. But I was like, not going to use it. And then we get to where we're at now where I reengaged with it and was, wow, okay, now we're about it. Well, first of all, as soon as I could upload my own document with my own voice and tone like that, I wanted to give it. That was a sure sign of, like, things were changing in a winner for me because, I mean, we've. We've helped multiple clients with their kind of voice tone, GPT, custom like how, you know, sound like you stuff. And so we finally were able to kind of get that in our HubSpot system and it really made setup a little bit easier. But, man, there's just. There's so much. I, I can't wait to go through all the pieces that we now have. But for those of you that might be listening to this and you're like, what do you mean voice and tone? Well, what we're talking about is the brand voice and, and here's what's funny, Liz. As we're having this, it's literally still has a beta tag next to it, which again. Which again I go, hey, when it first came out, it was like. And now it's like wee. And it's. And we in beta, all in beta. Like, this is even like fully. Hey. Yes, we are saying that it is all there at this point. And so to. To say something that I say quite often is that even though it was worse, this is the worst that'll ever be because they'll continue to make it better. But there's just so much. There's just so much good here. And again, if you think about last week and how we talked about data sources and the rich amount of context that we're starting to align things and connect things. Yeah, it's just. It's. It's really good.

Yeah, I. When I looked at that tool initially, I. I had a very similar reaction that you had, which is like, why are we even bothering doing this?

Yeah.

Like, if. If it's not ready, you're telling me that your. Your first foray into the authenticity and soul of what a brand sounds like is a. Here's the little text box where you could fit a sentence in. Best of luck at Godspeed. Like, it just. I was like, what are we doing here? And also, voice and tone are not the same thing. Like, there. There's a. We're going to get into this conversation more deeply because I think this is a really exciting thing that HubSpot is doing. I think it's going to create, I'll put a nice word on it. Complexity. It's going to create more questions, I think, than answers for some, if they even realize they're there. So I think we're entering a very interesting period here. But quite frankly, it's just nice to see HubSpot rolling out new actual content tools.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

That's what excites me about it. Chad, Max, how do you feel about this? Have you had a chance to poke around? Do you have thoughts, grievances, opinions?

I mean, I haven't played with the new one or whatever the newest version of it is since it launched because it came out at the beginning and I was kind of like, oh, okay. Uh, you know, and. And the way that I looked at it is like, baby step, right?

Baby step one.

You know, just like anything else. Right. You know, everything starts with a. Just a tiny little pitter patter of a baby step in HubSpot, which is how it should. How it should be. You know, I think it's probably really important that they start heavily investing in terms of, you know, what else this brand voice touches throughout all of HubSpot, because again, at Inbound, they united all of those, you know, AI tools under one, you know, one brand voice, if you will, which is now Breeze. Right. And so I think, like, you know, as that starts to become a more, like, cohesive sort of singular product within HubSpot. Right. And, you know, obviously it's touching so many different things. All those different things that Breeze does can be, you know, affected in one way or another by your brand voice. From the emails that your sales reps are writing through Copilot, to the way that your agents interact with and talk to people and the demeanor that they have and the, I don't know, the. The the values they have in terms of how they operate. Right. You know, there's so many different things that, you know, are used by Breeze to basically represent your company through, you know, an AI essentially, like, you know, putting it out there in terms of the way it writes with stuff, the way it interacts with people, all these different things, you know, that you want to make sure that that experience and that sort of brand voice, if you will, is consistent across all of those different things. Right. So, you know, if there's any time for, you know, HubSpot to really, really push the pedal down on the Brand Voice tools in HubSpot, I think it's now, right, because you don't want that brand voice to just be present in your blog articles. You don't want it to just be present in some other content it's creating for you. You want it to be present in things like the AI chatbot and the way your, your reps are communicating with people and how it's assisting them do that and things like that. So, you know, I'd like to see them really kind of push the pedal down on it. And I welcome any and all updates to it.

But let, let me dive in there for one quick second, Chad, before you go, because one of the things that I want everybody to realize that's listening to this, when you turn Brand Voice on, it is already. And you'll, you'll. When I say this, you'll, you'll, you'll say, oh, there's some things missing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we know, we know.

Yeah, yeah.

Hopefully they'll get here soon. But when you turn Brand Voice on it, it instantly will apply to your social posts, it'll apply to your emails, it'll apply to your blog posts, your website, your landing pages, and SMS messages. The really other cool thing, by the way, if there's more than HubSpot, go update your knowledge article because that's literally what I'm looking at is the Brand Voice knowledge. Like, because immediately I'm like, like success. Oh. Or like maybe reference the agents, because the agents are coming out. They should probably be here. But here's what's also cool. If you're listening this and. And you happen to be somewhere other than America. Brand Voice is also available in Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Japanese for the social email, blog pages and SMS content as well. So I love the fact that it's going outside of just blog articles, Max. But across all of the things, eventually. Yeah. Chad, what are your thoughts?

Yeah, I think it's interesting that Brand voice and it makes sense. But brand voice is found as part of brand kit. So I'm very interested to see as well that get tied into things like business units for when in one HubSpot portal you have multiple segments that possibly solve different problems for different industries that are cross segmented or related for that brand voice to when somebody logged into one business unit is using it versus another. Be different in your generate like what you're generating with your emails or your reps or different things. Another place that it would be really cool I think to see it is to really dive down into your interactions with Copilot because that has been getting so powerful. Like I was on a support ticket the other day and just asked Copilot like Hey, did Mr. Wizard who I was talking to open up the last email I sent him on this ticket? And it just like checked the activity and told me if he opened it or not or whatever because I was in help desk and it didn't and I didn't want to go click in. I'm like, let me ask Copilot just to check and see. And it's like it's getting so good that I'd love for it to be able to like even coach new reps through how do we do business as well? Like, because that's the next evolution of this kind of a thing. But you know, it being tied in tighter and tighter. I think having it segmented kind of per business unit for more larger enterprise type portals, it just makes a lot of sense. Right. And I think maybe it might not ultimately be part of your brand kit at some point, but it'll be your AI voice along with like your content voice, you know, if that makes sense or shapes your AI train, your AI model type of a thing. Right.

Yeah, I, I love the idea of it for business units because as someone who you know, we, we struggle. The good thing is we sound a lot alike in the different places that we are.

Right.

Like imagine the tweaks that we could make for psychic strategies versus beyond your default versus like superhuman framework. And right. Right now it's kind of like the way our portal set up. We've got one. And also. But if it was for business units and you could have multiple voices, I think that would be super sweet in the Future. So hey HubSpot, if you're, if you're listening and that's something that's coming, then let us know because inquiring minds, we're curious.

I think that's the intent based on how it's Laid out in the URL. Right. It's under brand kit. And then you're setting up for your portal or for this. Sorry. For this specific brand kit, you're setting up the brand voice. And if you can have multiple brand kits, I think you can already possibly set up more than one brand voice.

That would be. I need to do some digging on that because that's definitely a thing to shout about.

You know what I just noticed looking through the knowledge base article of brand kit, is that you can do replacement rules where it will replace certain words with other words.

We're getting there. We're getting there.

Yo, talk about the greatest prank potential of all time. Every time someone writes AI, just replace it with the word hot dog.

You know, the amount of hours it would take somebody to figure out why that was happening. Why is this happening.

They'd submit a support ticket spot. No time, dude, for support.

Right? We have some fun here.

This is how we get to the real tips and tricks, the things that are really going to move people's businesses forward. Like that's what do hot dogs is.

That high IQ insight people listen to the podcast for, you know.

Right, right. For sure.

The biggest.

Quick question for you guys, do you think that this tool is actually going to have an impact on the content we're seeing companies put out now?

Without a doubt already is. So let me give you. So first of all, before I answer that, the fact now, Liz, that you can do things like personality and Max kind of let the cat out the bag, but you can do personality and you can do up to four different characteristics. You can do default tone, and so again, you can do four characteristics. But you can also add in your company mission up to like 50 words between those eight things. Four and four, you know, four plus four high IQ, eight things. And this company mission, it's. It's crazy how the context and specificity that you're giving this thing, but also you have a terms to avoid. And then like Max said, you have a replacement rule. So if there are things that you don't want to actually talk about or if you want to talk about things in a certain way. And what's really great about this is it is powered too by Copilot, where you can literally select the paragraph of text and sure, you can do things like expand or shorten or whatever, but you literally just say, use my brand voice. And then you get a chance to look at what it spits out versus what it has. And it's. I'll. I'll equate it to like, it's almost like the, the fine tooth finish or whatever you want to call the, the thing that you thought you had it the way you wanted it, but now you could apply this brand voice to it. And, and here's the real world example. I created a piece of content. I created it in GPT. Like I had been with a custom Sidekick Strategies GPT. I put it in HubSpot and I then applied to every single sentence and paragraph, brand voice. And then I sent it over to this person, you might have met him, my content strategist, Liz. And I said, what do you think of this one? And these are the words that I wanted to hear. She said, this is the best one you've sent me so far. So when Liz asked, dude, I wrote it myself.

Yeah.

When Liz goes, is this going to make an impact? Yes, if set up properly, NF used in the right way, and if there's a foundational piece that didn't suck to begin with, it's going to get you to the next level of like, oh, that's dope. That's my answer.

I think I'm pretty aligned with George on that. Right. I think just like any other tool in HubSpot, people, it'll have an impact if people use it correctly. Right. My fear is a lot of people are going to ignore it and I don't want that to happen. Not that I think, like, it's going to get ignored. I just think that, you know, sometimes the best parts of HubSpot go unnoticed by folks who aren't using it the right way. Right. It's the, it's the new version of people who just buy it to be an email tool. Right. You know, so I think what will happen is that this will at least be a factor in, you know, improving the quality of AI content. Right. You know, instead of just blasting stuff out because people want to save time. Right. So, you know, for the folks that do or are successful, you know, creating and refining their content via AI, I think this will be a, a common thing. You see folks who are doing it the right way use. And so hopefully we can see it be very well adopted among the folks that are leveraging AI in a good way is my take.

Wait, you're muted.

You're muted.

I made a joke. I made a few good men jokes. I said, is that the take? And nothing but the take. Can we even handle the take?

That's the take.

Oh, well, yeah, that's.

Well, we couldn't because we couldn't hear it.

It's a power up for you, Liz.

Thanks, bud. Thank you. I really appreciate that, guys.

Chad, do you have a take? I mean, where we are going, we don't need no takes. Go ahead.

Just need a 25k gooseneck and some marshmallows on the back.

How would you define your brand voice right now, bud?

Oh, I mean, exquisite.

Yeah.

Question. What is Gigachad's brand voice?

And tone is back home, actually, so I'm traveling right now. I ain't got no Gigachad.

We can't Gigachad today.

Wait, is that a green screen?

Yes.

It's a fake printer.

Yeah. Fake glowing printers. Yeah, it's because I'm using my graphics card to do background replacement instead of like the little, you know, cheeserton one that comes with the program. Oh, that's my.

Really feel. Yeah, like, I mean, what the does cheeserton mean?

You know, don't worry about it.

All right, sorry, Chad. Go ahead. Go ahead. God. Go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, like, this isn't. This isn't my area of specialty expertise, right? Like, content is not something that I've ever really produced. Like, I've done things like this where I share, you know, on. On an episode like in with Hub Heroes, but like, actively going out of my way to write content, that's not something that I have tons and tons of experience with. I can help set up the tools. I, again, like, I'm much more of like an API plumber type of a person. Like, I connect the old systems and make this stuff flow through, you know, make it do what you need it to do. Right. That's my jam. So, and. And actually having something to guide a simpleton like myself in the correct direction in this kind of a thing, I think is really cool. But I'm. I mean, I'm a little bit curious. Like, you know, is this something that can help a company? You know, like, maybe I'll ask a question out there. Like, is this something that can help a company, like, reproduce maybe the mission and vision of the CEO? Like, the CEO of a company says, hey, this is what we do and who we are and, you know, helps the new people really catch that vision or speak like that person that originally made the business successful in the first place? I mean, is that where this ultimately can go? Like, I see the connecting of the dots and the plumbing in the back end, but like, practically, I guess, you know, maybe that's a good question for Liz. Is this something you see that being able to do, or is this, you know, something helpful?

Right, in that way can we take our founders founder's brain and upload it into the matrix where he can live forever, literally.

I mean, just like, you know, he.

Passes on, his brand voice will live throughout the company, many generations after that.

Well, this is where we start getting into, I think one of the biggest potential challenges here, right, Is that your voice is not your message. Your. Your voice is not the what of what you're saying. Right. So your message is the what of what you're saying. Your voice and tone is your style.

Right.

How you say it. Right. So for example, George's what's. Or it's. It's all about the humans. It's about HubSpot. It's the actual tactical education that he does about HubSpot. But his voice and tone is the packaging, it is not the message.

Yeah. It's the wrapping.

This is where I think a lot of people get really tripped up with this, is that they are going to think that voice and tone is going to be a way to come up with more what's. And you still have to have a message. You still have to have your own set of core beliefs. You still have to have your own points of view, like saying you're warm and approachable and we say hot dog instead of artificial intelligence. Like, that is stuff that is stylistic, right? That is, that is just making you sound like a human. But what gets more interesting about this, what gets even more interesting about this is that when I think about companies that try to operate more like media companies, right? Or where you have multiple thought leaders underneath the same roof, they're not supposed to sound like each other, they're supposed to sound like themselves. So like when I used to be the editor in chief of Impact, you know, we had it. We had an impact brand voice. But all of our editorial, every single byline was an individual human being. And we worked with each of them to make sure that they sounded just like themselves. Now, there was some stylistic polish that went on top. You know, we had AP style, so we had certain rules for like commas and stuff like that. Right. But for the most part, you know, this is one of those tools where it's very exciting, but there isn't a ton of knowledge or education out there about what this stuff actually is, what it isn't, and how and when you use it. Like, think about the disparity that we're going to see in content where, you know, George, you and I get to work together. And that's really exciting. But not everybody has a Liz.

Yeah.

You know not everybody gets to, like, hang out and talk nerdy shop about brand voice and tone, which is a very niche specialty area. So hooray. I'm so glad we all get to upload documents, but there's really no guidance on what that is supposed to look like, especially since it's like. It's kind of like asking what somebody, somebody with a content strategy is. If you ask 10 different people, you're going to get 10 different answers on what that document looks like.

So it's, it's interesting. I want to. I want to. 1 I want you to talk about in a minute. The document that we created to actually upload and use to, to do the voice and tone, the probably superhuman framework is, is the greatest example that you've done lately. I want you to talk about that for a minute and what that kind of looks like. But. But what you just said, I think is really important. And again, I don't know how many people from HubSpot actually listen to this podcast or not, but when you started to talk about individual voices, I started to think back to our episode on data sources last week where one of the things was the user, right? You can go and put, like, I'm this role and like, imagine if there was like an overarching brand voice. That was the rules and things that you wanted to set. But imagine if there was another layer of this that it could be programmed per individual human. And so if you went to write the email or if you went to do the social post or you went to write a blog article, it actually knew, oh, I'm supposed to look at this brand voice, but I'm also supposed to use this human's, you know, brand voice or tone or whatever you want to call it. Now all of a sudden we're getting double context. We're getting more specific. This, these are the levers I think HubSpot could start to pull of, like, because again, I'm gonna sound different than Max. Max is going to sound different than Chad. Liz is going to sound better and probably smarter than all of us combined. But if we at least had this information at a user level to be combined with the brand voice that is also then connected or combined with the data sources. Now we're getting somewhere. But, but Liz, talk about this document so people can kind of understand what we're even talking about and why I got excited about the fact that, well, we can upload our own document now.

So it's interesting. The document that I'm going to walk through, we did this, obviously, for the Superhuman framework, which, George, we could get into at a later time, what that actually is. But it's an incredible passion project that we're working on together. But what's interesting about it is that I actually created a hybrid document that is both a messaging strategy and a voice and tone document. Because right now, there is no place to put a messaging strategy for your business or your company within HubSpot. So, and so whenever I think about, you know, what are the documents that people actually need in a business, you need a messaging strategy, and you need a voice and tone document. You need both. You need to know what you're saying, and you need to know how you're saying it. You can't just know how to say something without knowing your what. And you can't just know what you're saying saying without having some thought or intention behind what, how that's going to sound when it comes flying out of your digital face. Right. So what I did was I created a hybrid document where the first part is the messaging strategy. I documented what the Superhuman framework is. I documented key terms and our chosen definitions for them. This is what we say it is. This is what we say it isn't. These are the different components of it. This is how each of them are defined. And then I also included a section of this is how we are competitively different from other similar frameworks. So it understood how to position us and understood our place in the market. Because a great brand messaging strategy is going to have a number of components. It's going to have the what, it's going to have the where. So your marketplace, where do you fit? How, who are you? How are you different? And then I went into a big comprehensive audience overview, just so everything was in a single place. But unlike a lot of what the Persona tool does and does not allow you to do, I went a little bit more emotional. So I said, who is our audience? And I ran through a big list of who they are. Then I ran through what are their current challenges. Great. So disengagement, burnout, high turnover, culture, misalignment, performance pressures, communication breakdowns, and then we go deeper. So how do they feel about where they currently are? They're frustrated because of XYZ. They're isolated because of ABC. They're skeptical because of 1, 2, 3, and on and on. There are a few more like that. And these are very clearly defined. We don't just say they feel frustrated. We say they're frustrated because they feel like they're spinning their wheels, constantly putting out fires without seeing meaningful progress. They feel isolated because leadership is is lonely, especially when it seems like no one else understands or shares their burdens. So each one has a micro story in it. Then we talk about what their goals are. They want to build stronger teams, reduce burnout, improve retention. And then what do they want from us? Connection, clarity, competence, impact. And each of those has a bit of a story behind them. And then I ended that section with situational examples like. Karen is the VP of operations at a growing tech company. Her team has seen an uptick in burnout and disengagement after months of pushing hard to meet aggressive goals. She's frustrated by the high turnover and feels the pressure to balance productivity with creating a healthier, more sustainable team culture. She needs a framework to align their leadership with meaningful action, reduce burnout, and foster long term loyalty and engagement. But there are like six or seven of those. There are lots of them. And so that's just the messaging piece, right? Because in order to feed something voice and tone, it needs context. It needs to understand what the heck we're doing here. Now, if at some point later on there's a place to dump a messaging strategy in, this makes it a lot easier. Although HubSpot makes sure they talk to each other. Make sure. I don't know. You find someone who can educate about how these two things are codependent and work together. I don't know who that person might be. Some beautiful tall angel who falls down a lot and doesn't know how to ride a bike. Common. But after that we. Then we get into the brand voice and tone. Right? So this is where I have to do a little educating for our audience. Voice and tone are not the same thing. They are two codependent elements of your brand personality, your brand voice. That is what someone is supposed to think about you all the time without you having to tell them. You are warm, you are friendly, you are approachable. Right? You are traditional, modern, however you want to put. Tone is how you deliver on the pro, the promise of your voice. It is what you actually sound like. Oh, so you are a challenging, innovative, visionary brand voice. Right? So you speak clearly, you speak concisely, you include facts. You. You don't use passive language, you use active language whenever possible. It's how it manifests. How do you sound? How do you deliver on the promise of being warm and approachable and friendly, sounding conversational? By using plain language. So again, it's the delivery mechanism of that. So that's voice and tone. That's how they work Together. Tone is also a little bit more dynamic. Right. You may see your tone shift depending on the context. A blog article might be more personal, it might be more one to one, more human, more conversational. A case study is going to be more just the facts, man. It's going to be just facts and figures, a little less editorializing, a little less fluff. And then we get into do's and don'ts talk about this is how you do. Embrace this voice and embody this voice is how you don't do it. Then we get into tone. What I really like about what I did in this tone document and maybe I should share this as an example in the show notes just so people can look through it. Yeah, but I talk about the different contexts in educational content. This is the tone, this is how it sounds. This is what you avoid in empathetic situations, in urgent calls to action, in conversational interactions, each one has a set of rules. Then finally, this is my new favorite thing. And I'm so curious to see how this influences our outputs. AI and machine learning models are all about if then statements. Right? They use logic to make decisions, but if you don't program some of that logic for them, they can sometimes make what they think is the best decision possible. So, Chad, I'm actually going to share my screen just so the guys can see what I'm looking at, because I want to see if what Chad thinks of it. I'm so curious. So this is what I'm looking at here. So I created a bunch of if then statements. Who am I speaking to and what are they feeling right now? If they're overwhelmed, do this. If they're hopeful or curious, do that. Does this message address their pain points directly? If not do this. If yes, do that. So I created a bunch of different questions that help them hopefully make decisions. Because I thought about it this way. I'm either giving this to a machine or I'm giving this to a person. Because voice and tone documents, brand messaging documents, these are all incredibly subjective. They are meant to be manuals for your content creators or, or anybody who has to create assets that are a part of your brand. But they're always going to have moments where they have to make decisions.

Yeah.

So I wanted to create opportunities for them to still have creative freedom and flexibility, but understand where to move and pivot if there are changes. This is, this is what this beautiful child looks like. I love her.

I think that's fascinating.

Go ahead, Chad.

Okay. Yeah, so I think that's fascinating. I mean, the Part that I think is fascinating about that there's two places that my brain goes when I look at like all those if then statements at the end. And realistically, it's like it's going to process it sequentially most likely. Right? Meaning like if this do that. And so like at some point it's going to be like, oh, hey, is it this? And then it's going to rewrite it in some parts and not in others, depending on the action inputs first. So like this is an example and if that's by design in that order, then awesome, you know. Right. But if there are some parts of it where it's like, if it rewrote this and then didn't rewrite that, it could yield something interesting. Right? That, that's one place. And because like I always go back to like ever since I started getting more heavy into automation and data and really understanding how like the Internet works and like how tools are connected and integrations of work. My poor wife. I feel so bad for her because she's like, hey, could you go get me the black shirt from the closet? And I'm like, yeah. And I returned the first black shirt because she didn't give me any additional criteria, like, oh, I wanted the long sleeve one that has like the button on it or whatever. Right. And I'm like, I've gotten so, so much worse since I've gotten more like programmatic because I think start to think more literally about the stuff. And like, yeah, LLM sounds so human and conversational, but it is going to take the easiest path to the answer you requested. And that's, I think, something that people forget because it's like, it is a lot of times like, oh, you just ask it a question, it'll do thing. And like you talk to it like in, you know, with your voice and whatever. Right. Depending on what models you're using. But yeah, so like, I think the, the, the order if it's how you want it and like if you think through that, then that's phenomenal.

It's interesting. I actually want to point one thing out here really quick just to answer Chad's question about this. So if anybody went to George's AI talk at Inbound this year, he gave away an editorial checklist that goes in a very specific order of how you analyze a piece of content. And it's always granular structure a little bit higher level, substance a little bit whatever. And then toward the end it just starts getting more into style. So there is a definite and definitive order in which it moves in. And that's why I'm curious to play with this. It's just again, it creates this sadness for me where it's like there isn't enough education out there about brand voice and tone. So we're having conversations that many organizations may not even be having. They may just be excited to call it warm, friendly and approachable. Max, I'm sorry I cut you off. Go ahead.

This is to me, I know we were listing off where brand voice gets applied. Do we know if it, if it hits customer agent yet?

Not that we know of yet because it doesn't say it in the Knowledge article. Which is why I kind of alluded to if anybody from HubSpot's listening. The, that agent, the prospecting agent, the like all of the agents.

Yeah.

Really need to be tied in and pay attention to this.

Well, yeah, I'd say, I'd say even so, customer service is so different at every single company because everyone sells different stuff, everyone has different types of customers, everyone has different types of processes in the background. Everybody has nuances around the way, you know, they serve their customers and what to do in different situations. Right. And I think it's really hard to build, build an interface around that to create a lot of that logic. Sure. You build an interface to control what happens inside of HubSpot and like your process there. Yeah, totally. Can you build workflows to do different things with tickets? Sure.

Right.

But that customer agent, the, the AI stuff behind it, what I, what I really think it's geared towards right now is understand what they're saying and go find knowledge based articles and if they don't work, go give a way to get back and go create a way to get a ticket. But this document that you're showing me, Liz, where you were writing through all those if then statements, just imagine if you could take your customer agent and literally just upload. This is our customer service playbook. If you encounter someone with this situation, here's what to ask, this is what to do. Right? And an AI can get smart enough to like, or the AI already is smart enough, just like it's smart enough to understand your brand tone here just by reading this. Right. That would be such an amazing thing to be able to say, like, hey, here's how we handle all these different nuanced situations. What to say, what to ask for. Right? Like, this would be an unbelievable way to train those customer agents in a much more meaningful way of like, here's the URL and here's the content. Go find it, if it matches what they're looking for, give them the article. Right, right.

Has words.

This is where we start getting into a weird space, though. George, what are you going to say, bud?

Yeah, so here's, here's. I want to just lean in and then I know you want to get into like the weird space thing, but I, I wanted to circle back around on something that A, aligned with something you said when you were talking about this document and B, aligns with max. What you're kind of saying, I want everybody to know. Inside of Brand Voice, there is channel specific settings which you can flip switches on that say, use the default tone or use the different tone for. And right now there's blogs, case studies, email pages, podcast, and social. So there literally is a place that I can be like, okay, I want to tweak the tone to this. Now imagine if it was. I want to tweak the tone and tweak this and tweak this for this. Now all of a sudden we get a real interesting place. But this is also the screen where I would love to see, well, social probably stands for the social agent, but like prospecting agent or a success agent. Like, I would want to see those agents in this channel specific settings to be able to do the things that we're talking about in today's podcast at a very granular level. Because again, I think the big problem with this is one, people might not just be doing it like Liz says, or might not understand it. And when they do do it, it's such a broad brushstroke. And this is literally where I would say in HubSpot and in your business, this is one of those scalpel strategies, not sledgehammer strategies. Like, specificity is going to win the day per channel, per tone, per, like.

Yeah.

All right, go ahead, Liz.

Yeah, so the weird space that we're entering into is where guys voice and tone is so much simpler than we think it is in some ways. Right. Like, I had to do a lot of writing out here and what the, what the guys are looking at right now is the section where I talked about how do they feel about their current state, what are the goals they want to achieve and why and what do they want from us? And then the situational examples and scenarios. What this comes down to is literally just being a human flipping being. Like, if somebody shows up and they are frustrated and feeling isolated and feeling skeptical, but they are hopeful and determined, that means you need to show up and acknowledge their frustration and validate where they are right now. And why? And this often gets packaged under a word that I am growing to loathe with every fiber of my being, and that is empathy. Empathy is not a band aid. Empathy is a Trojan horse word that allows people to say, well, I'm showing up with empathy. I said, hi, I see you're frustrated. That's a freaking bummer. No, that is not actually showing empathy. Real empathy is showing up and saying, man, you're frustrated, aren't you? I get it. You have so much downward pressure coming from above, upward pressure from the people you're leading from below. You're being told two things that seem to be mutually exclusive. Your people must hit these goals, create a safe work environment where people can balance work and life. And you're just sitting there in the middle going, sure, Jan, happy to. Absolutely. That is showing up. That is meeting an emotional need. Jan. Jan sucks.

Let's go to Sandals, Jamaica.

Serenity by Jan. Candles are terrible anyway. And that's where I think we get into very interesting conversations around brand, voice, and tone. You do need all these rules. You need to understand what are the things that you need to document. But literally, you are just sitting down and saying, well, who is the human being in front of me? And why are they showing up this way in this moment? Not just what are they asking and what do they want from me?

Yeah, I'm curious. Do you think that, like, understanding just your own ish, as George would say, of being a human and, like, how you feel and, like. Because sometimes, like, you know, I don't know, maybe I got a little touch of something in my life, but I don't know always how to explain exactly how I feel about stuff, you know, like. Right. And, like, it just is or whatever and, like, articulating those things. But, like, for me to try and, like, put how I'd like to communicate to people in a business document would be very difficult? Because it's not.

It is incredibly difficult. And so I have a story about that, actually. I have a. I have someone I work with, I've worked with for years. And George, you will probably relate to the story, not because it's you. I'm not being sassy. So I do with. With our class. No, I'm very serious. I do this workshop for our clients at Psychic Strategies, but something that I've been doing for a very long time. It is a voice and tone workshop, and I actually take people through. So what do you want to sound like and what do you not want to sound like? Who are you and who aren't you and this guy, he is absolutely incredible. He's one of my favorite human beings on the planet. He is this big, gregarious, larger than life kind of guy. He is. He is a magnet of a human being. And that idiot sandwich. I love you so much, Rob Beeler. I know you are listening. You know, I'm allowed to tell this story, but good God, he literally put, well, I don't want to show up as opinionated or funny. And I'm like, wait a minute. So are you just gonna wake up tomorrow morning and be a. Be a fundamentally different human being? Right, so you're absolutely right, Chad. There is, there is a reason why people who are third party facilitators come in and do this work. Because when we look in the mirror, we only see the best parts that we want to emphasize and the parts that we think will not be palatable to other people. We have. George and I have had extensive conversations about this. You know, you have done a tremendous amount of growth in terms of how you show up as a whole, whole ass human. But that required both of us to go through scenarios where it's like, my guy, why are you hiding parts of yourself?

Yeah, so. So, Chad, by the way, it is difficult.

Yeah.

Even for me, it was difficult. Which is why, ladies and gentlemen, you hire an expert to help you make that journey. And this is not a sales pitch, but this is something that we help humans do at Sidekick Strategies is like. And by the way, I. I will forewarn anybody and everybody before they want to just reach out and think it's going to be like frolicking through the tulips. It's more like laying on a psychological therapy couch over and over again until you're like, God, why did I sign up for this? Until this beautiful document of understanding comes out the other side. And then you throw that into your GPT or you throw it into your HubSpot. And then all of a sudden you see the massive difference that it not only made in you, the human going through the process, but also now your AI assistant that can. Because it know you know you, so it knows you. Like, it's a. It's a game changer.

It's a beautiful thing. So I know I could spend a bajillion hours talking about this, but we do not have a bajillion hours. So I would actually be curious to hear from you guys, considering that we've done a little bit more of a deep dive into my end of the pool, where I do. Because you guys talk about like web hooks and you lose your flipping minds. This is the ish that gets me so excited because we're just at a very exciting inflection point where if organizations have the chance to get it and they really want to learn this stuff, they're going to, they're going to plow through anybody else who just, just doesn't do the work. But I'd be curious, what warnings or fears or concerns do we now have about this brand voice and tone tool? Where. Where are you? Where's your gut on it? Because there's a lot of opportunity here, which we've already discussed.

Misunderstanding. It's the first place, I think. Right. Like, I mean, I think I look at the tool. The, one of the reasons there's a beta tag on it is because people just, they have a knowledge base article to help explain what it plugs into and that's it. Like, I mean, again, we need the content therapy couch, it sounds like, to like really make proper use of the thing. And it's like there's gonna need to be some sort of multiple mediums of video and other learning to help people understand how to configure it. I guess, you know, that's what I'm afraid is people won't really know what to do with it.

I don't know. I don't know if this is a fear or just me being still curmudgeony about AI for whatever reason. What I fear about, you know, making more stuff easier with AI is that we start to like, take just a couple more inches of detaching ourselves from thinking critically about our own content creation and offload even more of that to computers and take a little bit more of the human out of it, you know. But that amount also might just be me being like, back in my day, we had to write our own blog posts to know what we were talking about. Now you just got all these AIs and Skibidi toilets creating it for you. You know what I mean? Like, I, it's. I think it's cool. Don't get me wrong. I think it's. I think it's probably going to be really impactful in terms of like the quality of everything. But, you know, there is still always going to be that part of me that was like, man, we didn't really want to create content back then because it was super hard, and now we're just kind of removing as much of the challenge as possible. Yeah, which, which again, maybe that's a good thing because it'll make it a little like that, that's the, that's the other side of the argument that makes it really difficult for me to kind of wrestle with it.

Right.

Because there is so many positives of it. Right. Like I talked a while ago about, you know, why I'm so stoked about Content Remix is that now I can create content in the format that I'm comfortable in. So it would encourage me to create more content. And then all the ways that all the, the, the formats and modalities that I can disperse that content, I can now create. Like, you know, I don't like writing, but I can take, you know, a short 30 second TikTok video I do and turn it into a blog post, turn it into a social post, turn it, you know, turn it into all these other things that I'm really, really bad at writing, you know, so it'. Right. You know, and I think maybe like you're going to see that a little bit less with the brand tool, because at least if you're putting the time and effort into like, you know, doing things like the document Liz created and really thinking strategically about your brand voice, I would say that's a pretty good indicator that you're using AI in the right way. Right.

This is also a baby version of this document.

This is like small one.

I need a nap. Tell them how big these are.

Hey, I'm sorry, do you see how small?

Small.

The scroll bar is on the right hand side and you're telling me this is a short one?

I can't see it.

Yeah, you barely see it. Yeah, but I do have one question though, Liz. This question's for you. If you went into, if you went into George's advanced settings for his brand voice and you went down to the replacement rules and you replaced the word humans, what would you replace it with?

Oh, wow.

Almighty Skynet overlords.

Oh, geez. I was gonna say. I was gonna say stinky little birds.

Oh, wow. See, how did we get.

Just imagine that. Remember everybody, it's all about.

Just make it super simple.

It's all about the stinky little birds.

We were doing so good.

We were doing good to get off my lawn. So George, what about you? What are your fears and concerns now.

That, that I have you guys on this podcast right now? No, I'm just kidding.

Let's go.

No, my biggest fear is that it becomes the HubSpot projects tool.

Oh, a great idea.

A great idea that gets abandoned, right? It's a great idea that gets abandoned because right now it's, it's to the point where it's exciting, but it could get to the point where it's awesome. And. And here's where I'm gonna go with this, is that this could be a fundamental piece to where HubSpot is going in the future, or where I feel like HubSpot could go in the future. I don't know if they're going there or not, but I. I bumped up into something earlier, maybe a week or two ago in my brain. I don't think HubSpot is actually building a CRM anymore. I think HubSpot is building one of the world's largest and best business agents that you will ever be able to find. And because here's the thing. The minute that we have all of the activities and all of the data and all of the voice and all of the tone and all of the agents working it, it is now a business agent filled with other agent employees that the humans are powering the strategies and the. I just think this goes to a place that we might not even be able to imagine at this point, to be honest with you. And this piece right here, the connective tissue of data sources and Personas and ICPs and brand voice, is so vitally important to get right that I. I hope they put the money and time into birthing it into what it needs to be. By the way, Liz is showing everybody, if you're watching this on YouTube or wherever you watch it, the original document is a PowerPoint presentation that is, I don't know, many, many, many slides of information. You're muted. So you're just killing it with that mute button.

Of course I am. I'm killing it with that mute button. No, it goes into problems, value propositions, how we talk about ourselves, how we talk about every single different type of competitor that we have, everything. So there's a lot that goes into it, but I haven't. I didn't want to upload something so large. Yeah, but, George, what do you want are. We've gone through a ton of stuff today. I've dragged you all kicking and screaming into the deep end of my baby pool. But what do you want people to walk away from this day? Because we've talked about tool and we've talked about strategy.

Yeah, I. Well, just based on what you said, I want people to quit thinking of it as two different things. I want. I want you to think about it as, like, this cohesive. Like, this is where my strategy lives. This is where my tech lives. This is where like. But. But my takeaway for today is and not to sound like a broken record, but quit using HubSpot like it's HubSpot. Always come back to these places and pieces that they launch. Always retest it, always modify it. Iterate, iterate, Iterate. Like this. This probably is the third, if not fourth time I've come back to it and tried to try it out to see if I liked it. I finally do enough to talk about it on the podcast. But I'm not just going to let it sit here. I'm going to keep digging. I'm going to be looking for new features. My biggest takeaway would also be for anybody and everybody listening to this podcast is to be noisy towards HubSpot that we need more education on this. Look, if I go into the HubSpot Academy and I type in brand voice, there's two videos that show up. One Jory does for about three minutes and one Crystal does for two minutes. Come on. Five minutes for brand Voice. Like, I'm not even saying, like, everything that Liz was just talking about. I'm just saying five minutes for Brand Voice. Like the feature. Like, there, there has to be some granularity of educational context to the way that people should be thinking about the strategy and using the tool. And if, if HubSpot Academy isn't leading the way, well, dang on it, then we will.

We're already publishing a new piece of content today about this. You know, I'm uppity about it.

I'm just saying, like, so get noisy about what Uppity about it.

Anyway.

Get noisy about wanting more education around this because I, I personally feel it's that important to you, to your business, and to the level of what we should be taking this. I envision a world where there's independent user brand voices, a major brand voice tied to your Persona property being used. Right. Your icps putting, being put in there. And now let's. They're so. It could be so good.

I already manufacture that outside of HubSpot. I use. So it's not GBT. You know this. I have a George bot, I have a Paul bot, I have a Rob bot, I have a Sean. But I build my own voice gbts based on my clients, based on hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of transcripts, documentation, programming, like. But that's because I know how to do it. And I wish there were more opportunities for people to learn this.

Oh yeah, HubSpot.

Call me.

Yeah, anyway, super curious if, if, if you're listening to this and you're like, wow, I'd love to do like a one day low cost group brand voice tone workshop. Hit us up George B. Thomas.com just hit us up. I'm curious if that's like something that the humans actually Stinky little birds. Oh stinky little birds. Let's not do that. 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 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 hubcast 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.