HubSpot AI Data Sources: Buyer Personas vs. ICPs, What's the Difference?

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. Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolished 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, move 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.

Well, welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes. Max, what's on your mind, buddy?

Was it just me, or was the base, like, blown out of that intro?

For anybody else, that puppy was loud as the dickens.

Yeah. The good thing is the.

I'm sorry. The dickens. Hold on, hold on. It was as loud as.

It was as loud as what, Davenport?

Louder than you can shake a stick at.

Can you shake a stick at noise? Wait, no.

The noise can shake a stick.

I'm just going to slide a Werther's original slowly across the table to both of you.

If I pulled one out of my pocket, would you just, like, be dead? I wish I had.

I would be dead. But also, can we talk about the slander against Werther's Originals? They're actually delicious.

I love Werther's, but I am the old guy of the podcast.

So, anyway, well, happy post Thanksgiving, everybody. How y' all doing? How you feeling? What's the haps?

Full of turkey still?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm still pretty much 76% gravy at this point.

It fills in all the crevices, doesn't it?

It really does.

Yeah.

So it really ties together.

It's just like. It's like. What's it called?

Spackle.

No. What's the stuff that Phil Swift sells?

No. You know what I mean.

Flex seal. It's like flex seal.

I was throwing all of the things that I could think of at. At that.

Duct tape. Duct tape, yeah.

Gorilla glue, Dry walnuts.

Oh, geez.

Out. So here's the funny thing. This is the first year in a lot of years that we didn't do Thanksgiving dinner. Literally the day before Thanksgiving, I ran out to Firehouse subs. Not sponsored, but call us if. If you want to be. I don't know why you would, but we actually got their, like, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, like, sub and stored them in the refrigerator for the next day. Because it was just Noah and I here chilling because everybody else was gone for the holidays. They went to Ohio for a dog show. So it was super quiet and happy.

Happy Bachelor's giving.

Oh, my gosh. Just listen. I am officially done with Fear of the Walking Dead and Daryl Dixon and even watch Gladiator 2 in the theater with Noah. Okay. Not why we're here.

It was. No. I gotta share mine, though. So I ended up not having turkey this year, but not intentionally. We're not going to name names. We're not going to say anything out loud. What I will say is that when I showed up to prep the turkey, I kept asking, is the turkey ready? Is the turkey ready? Like, has it been defrosted? And then I said, okay, so, and so now it's time for me to get that turkey basted all ready to go in the oven. She's like, great. Goes to the freezer, pull out the turkey.

Oh, yeah, we got a turkey.

We got a turkey.

And she.

And she just looked at me and I went, is this. Is this a joke? Is. Are we? Haha. Right. So we had Thanksgiving chick. We had Thanksgiving chicken thighs. The most aggressive, aggressively seasoned, basted chicken thighs you could possibly imagine in your entire life. And then after that, I mean, as we can all clearly tell, I'm ready to sing. I look and feel like trash. But I capitalized on that. I capitalized on that opportunity to finally start, many years later, Game of Thrones. It's finally happened. I've been sucked in.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Next is Yellowstone. Then after Game of Thrones, you can go to Yellowstone.

Well, if we're basing my pace on when I actually pick up shows that are popular, talk to me in about five years and I'll be ready for you. So.

Oh my God, it's so good.

But speaking of Yellowstone.

Yeah, that was a heck of a segue.

Yes.

Who's their Persona and their ideal client profile? I don't know.

Who could it be? Is it Kevin Costner? We don't know.

No.

No, apparently not anymore.

Anymore.

So this bag of band of gravied people, we have come together today to do another installment in our series on HubSpot AI data sources. Last week we went wading into the deep end of my pool brand, voice and tone. Without our water wings, we survived. We lived to tell the tale. But this week we're talking about the part of HubSpot's AI data sources that quite frankly, it's still somehow content related. But I'm going to be. I'm looking forward mostly to hearing you guys nerd out today. But the reason why I say this is content related is that the part we're talking about actually digs into the first question I will ask any subject matter expert in any company, no matter what they do or what they are talking about when they sit down for a content interview with me. And that's not what are we talking about today? It's not why does this topic matter? It's who are we targeting? Who are we talking to? But here is where this conversation gets interesting. For as long as there has been an inbound, there have been buyer Personas, right? We have been beaten over the head with buyer Personas. We have episodes upon episodes about buyer Personas, both positive and negative. Whenever we've talked about who we're talking to or who we're targeting, in the context of HubSpot or inbound, it has been about Personas. Except when you fire up the HubSpot AI data sources settings, there is nary a Persona label to be found. Instead, you are going to find something called an icp, your ideal customer or client profile. And George, I see you already pacing and chomping at the bit. Tell me why you're excited about this conversation today.

Well, I'm excited about this conversation because to me, listen, one of the things that's frustrated me for a long time is this idea of B2B versus B2C versus like human to human. And last time I checked, probably every human works in some type of organization. And so there's there even for like listen, listen. When we think about this, it all comes down to the word of context. And when you think about what HubSpot's building, the prospecting agent, one of the biggest context that they need is ideal client profiles. Ideal client profiles being kind of coming front and center we'll call it. It's sort of new, but not new. Meaning if you turned on hubspots like target accounts, you would start to see things around buying role and ideal client profile. And there's stuff in HubSpot Academy that talks about this. But for today's conversation, when we're saying data sources and ideal client profiles, and we'll probably talk about like the difference in best practices and things like that maybe as we go, what I want people to understand from a level of context, Ideal client profiles are the what and where. Buyer Personas are the who and how. That's a.

My God, you are jumping ahead in our conversation. But I love this.

I'm just, I'm saying this is. You asked me why I'm excited. So I'm excited because, listen, whether it's content, whether it's social, whether it's prospecting, whether whatever interaction, whatever activity you want to call it, the what, where, who and how, they're important, well, that is.

Really setting the context nicely for our conversation today because we want to talk about whether or not there is a difference between buyer Personas and ICPs, because I don't think a lot of people see that clearly delineated. And quite frankly, HubSpot, when it's rolled out a lot of changes, which has been doing a ton of over the past year, some of this messaging is getting lost. Some of these critical strategic conversations aren't happening. And that deeply influences how well we do or do not use these tools. So that's exactly what we're talking about today. George, and I want you to stay on that mic because your train of thought is exactly what I want us to pick up with because we're talking about why this shift in language matters. We talking about, we talk about how do we use these mindsets to customize the ICP settings appropriately in your HubSpot AI data sources to get the most of your out of your new AI superpower. So, George, again, I want to come back to you. We're seeing this shift in language with HubSpot, and it's very purposeful. And quite frankly, it's not the only place we're seeing them shift their language. Right. It's a customer platform. We've heard all bound get dripped out. You've already started tapping into the real difference between buyer Personas and ICPs. But could you simplify the complex when you say the what and how versus the who and the what? Like, talk to me about that. What does that mean? And why are we seeing the shift in the tool?

Well, see, and if I, if I pull out my crystal ball, which I actually don't have, like, part of me has really been entertaining this idea of like, is HubSpot not even really going to be a CRM? Like again, you alluded to customer platform. I, I said a couple weeks ago or maybe last week, our. Is HubSpot building the, the world's largest assistant business assistant because of the AI. And again, we're having this conversation because it is data sources. It is data sources in the AI Settings tab. And so when I think about this, Liz, again, it goes down to, you know, listen for, for ideal client profiles. And again, if, if you go into HubSpot and if you go into settings and you go into AI and you go into data sources and you click into the ideal customer profile and you start to build one, you're gonna see that it's gonna be things like revenue potential, firmographics, demographics, location, company size, age range, which by the way, age range is interesting to me because it's literally like the age range not necessarily of the company, but the humans, which. Hang on a second. If it's ideal client profile and it's.

What was that word you said? What was that word you said?

Oh, I said, I said humans.

Thank you.

So why is the human 8 so like already if you start to think about like those things, like are they starting to tie in the who with the like where. Right. The, the ICP is already starting to get a little piece of maybe the potential buyer Persona inside of it. And, and so what's, what's interesting to me here is you should be able to say these are the types of places that the humans that I want to serve. Which also if I go Back to my B2B versus B2C thing, does this tool become something different? Is, and I don't like to create new terms, but is there a new term where this data source and its ideal customer profile or ideal client profile? It's a, it's a merging or mixing of Persona roles, goals, challenges, demographics, psychographics, and also a company style, if needed, job titles, industry locations, things like that. Because here's the thing, there are B2B companies using HubSpot, there are B2C companies using HubSpot and the context that each of them are going to need based on what's in these data sources for anything they're going to do is going to need a merge of both. Anyway, I'm not exactly sure if I answered your question, but that's where my brain goes based on the question you asked me.

Thanks for taking all the topics, George.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry.

No, Chad, what are your thoughts on this?

I mean, yeah, so to me, I just look at ICP and it's, to me it just seems like it's all company except for age range, you know, about interests. Yeah, interests is right. That is, that is very human. Yeah. So I mean those two, the last few are like, they seem like an afterthought. So like my, my thought is like this is all stuff that breeze AI can go find or, you know, whatever.

Right.

And enrich your data with with all that clear bit goodness that's out there and that's how it's going to try and find things. But Clearbit was originally like pretty company centric if I'm not mistaken. Correct.

Yep.

And you know, this like buyer Personas very much are about like the humans and like their temperaments and all that kind of stuff. It's like, I'm almost wondering if this evolves someday to have a drop down at the top that's like or, or is configured differently based on your business. Right. Where your business is like, hey, I work primarily B2C with some B2B. I work primarily B2B with no B2C. Right. Stuff like that. Where then a little bit of the weight of what it's really trying to, you know, use to either find or configure its, you know, content or however the AI works, I think would be different based on those, you know, based on those different type of people that you're looking to find and looking to communicate with.

Max, you've been suspiciously quiet. Hold on, George. Because Max is like riding up on that mic and I need to understand what's going on in that big noggin of yours. Is it just gravy or do we have something else going on?

Can I make sure I understand this thing first before I say anything at all? Absolutely. So, you know, I, I honestly didn't even know that this was in the tool.

Right.

And so I'm diving into it and kind of discovering it as we go. Am I to understand that this is mostly to be used in the blog tool or you can select an ICP when you're generating a blog post.

So. Yes.

Or what else is it used for?

The prospecting agent, I would say any agent. Moving forward, I can see where the social agent would look at this context. If you were doing like B2B social.

Posting, definitely the prospecting agent, which is, you know, you know, ideally having conversations with people over email. Right. About stuff that's relevant to them.

But then also the content piece. Yes.

Cool. I'm going to say something controversial. I hate this it's so like, ICP and Persona is the same thing. At the end of the day, it's who you're trying to sell to if, like, we're being totally honest, right? And the. The stuff that really, like, pissed me off about, you know, Personas back in the day is that, you know, everyone was just like, oh, yeah, you know, what's their level of education? Or what's their, you know, income level, what's their typical job title, what's their this, what's their that? And, you know, to be honest, none of that stuff in any sort of material way really helps you write content if you're not thinking critically about what have I said a lot in the past? Goals and challenges, right? If you look at the old buyer Persona tool, right, that one that is just for whatever reason, for the past 10 years has been hidden away in the properties of that one. It's that one little special property that for some reason has this little, like, app built into it, right? Even that lets you write down what someone's goals and challenges are. And when I coached, you know, people through this back when I was doing marketing hub implementation, I said, listen, ignore literally everything in the demographics section, right? And just focus on what the goals and challenges are. Because ultimately, when someone searches for something online, they're searching for ways to either get closer to achieving a goal or overcoming a challenge. That's in the way. If you think about any good piece of content, that's the one true thing about all of them, is that it helps you do one or two or both of those things, right? And for HubSpot to build a tool in 2024, that is one of the major things is either to guide the conversations an AI bot is having with someone where they're trying to convince somebody that they should, you know, talk to us, right? Or some sort of tool that helps you, right? Content that people should be, you know, looking for, right? And it should provide them value when they consume it. This ideal customer profile thing literally asks just demographic information and then says interests and other.

Yeah.

As the options. There is nothing about goals and challenges. This, to me, is a massive step backwards. And it almost kind of tells me that, like, the people building this just don't understand the physics of why buyer Personas worked well. Right?

So. So hang on a second.

Hold on. I really want to jump in here.

Now I gotta jump. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Last week we talked about the wanting them to not only have ideal client profiles, but also to leverage the property that you just talked about and the juiciness of the roles, goals, and challenges. And we even talked about how I've been training Personas way different than you'll ever find on HubSpot Academy based on what you just said. Roles, goals, and challenges. However, I have to rewind to this place where you're like, they're one and the same. No, they're. They're not. They're not one.

Okay, let's have this argument.

Because they're the same. Anyway.

Like, sorry. All right, tell me how they're. Tell me how they're dramatically different. Then I'll tell you how they end up being the same exact thing. Go ahead.

Yeah.

So please remember that I have a content grievance that we need to come Back to.

Yeah. ICP's define the company. Buyer Personas define the individual. Like, they're two totally different things. And again, there's different. Again, you got to realize, Max, this is an AI tab. This is in an AI tab for AI tools that are the worst they'll ever be, and then they're going to get better over time. And I hope these conversations help the amount of context when it's the companies to the context when it's the humans, and when you can take the context of the company and also the context of the human. This is why we literally begged the powers at HubSpot to be in our last episode to, like, please put Personas in this freaking section two or a section next to Ideal customer problems by Personas. Because now you have double the context on the conversations and the information and the education that you want to provide. There's different inputs, so there's going to be different outputs based on both of these. And. And it should be built in a way that they work together. But if we say, oh, they're one and the same, then we'll never get to the point where we actually have a system where they're working together for the different inputs and outputs in the different context that creates the holistic conversation that we're trying to have.

But at the end of the day, this is information about people you're selling to. You don't sell the companies. You sell the people at companies. Right. And also, companies don't have interests.

Yes.

You know what I mean. Companies don't have job titles. I know what I'm saying. I agree with you.

I agree with you. If I sell Event happily, I'm going to sell Event happily different to a health care solution than I am to a marketing agency than I am to a frickin Restaurant. I don't even know why restaurants would have events, but they might have events. There's context to the sales conversations based on the human working in different types of industries. I'm going to talk to somebody who's 65 different than 25. I'm going to talk to somebody who makes a million dollars that different than makes 50 million, because I know I can sell more benefits and features and add it. Like, both of these are huge for what we're going to do with an AI system moving forward.

I agree, but what about people who don't sell the companies? Are they just never going to use the ic?

No, no. That's why we're begging for the buyer Persona to be in there. All right. Yeah, Right.

But the other thing, though, like, Joy, take a look at the. Hold on. If we take a look at the ICPs that we've built, they're humans. It's a HubSpot operations leader. It's a CMO. Like, we're talking about individual people. And this is where, like, I have to. I. I feel like there are parts of me that agree with you, George, but then there are parts of me that seriously agree with Max. And we've seen this time and again in terms of anything they have tried to build to help either smooth out the issues with content creation or make it more human or do all these things. Like the. After I ask who is asking a question about a piece of content, I say, why are they asking this question in this moment? How do they feel about it? And there's. There is. I don't know if there's like, a missing piece of this tool that could end up on a wish list that allows us to really emotionally dial these things in. But that, to me, is where I'm like, I. This is where. Is it a communication issue where we have another situation where HubSpot did not message this change properly? So we're sitting here arguing about why is this here, but buyer Personas isn't here. Like, it is a wild thing to me that ICPs are suddenly showing up here. Buyer Personas have been positioned as the anchor, the inbo physics nexus point around which everything generates. And now we have this. And is it a human? Is it an organization? It could go either way. Like, that's where it gets a little bit confusing for me of how I'm supposed to be using these or how I'm supposed to be contextualizing them.

There's a piece of me that feels like they're trying to get away from the stigma of like, classic inbound, right? In that, like, they're trying to not use the word buyer Persona very, very hard because for whatever reason there is this just. I don't know, I see a lot of people talking about how, like, oh, buyer Personas are a thing of the past that is all about your, you know, whatever, and then they show you something that's like literally just a buyer Persona. Right. You know, like, I, I like, what I really, really wished is that they took buyer Personas and they turned it into like a real app that did everything that it actually, like, needed to. Right. And put a heavy emphasis on goals and challenges. Sure. You can put some information about, like, you know, the company stuff, and maybe that would talk to like, the company fit tool or something like that with like, the new lead scoring stuff. But to me, this just like this ideal customer profile thing, like, it just breeds a lot of confusion on, like, what is this versus what is the Persona tool and how do they play together and like, all that stuff? I don't know, it just seems like they're. They're trying to use more industry slang and industry, you know, jargon and get away from, like, what made inbound found in, you know, the HubSpot of old special. Right. And to me, buyer Personas, again, it's just like, is one of those things that, like, no matter who you are, you have one. Right. But it almost feels like through what we're building in the tool, we're kind of like not emphasizing the importance of that anymore. And I think it's like, kind of goofy. I don't know.

I think you're both right in a way or like, everybody here has a part of the what they're saying that's right. Like, when it really comes down to it, if you're B2B, you're selling to a human working at a company, right? And each different person in each different roles has different goals and challenges. Right. And so if you can build out both the company object target, which I think you're very much right, max in, they're trying to get away a little bit from some of the jargon surrounding inbound because they want Breeze intelligence to be able to go find you some businesses.

Right?

And, you know, like, without, like, while still trying to make it as helpful and inboundy and content creationy as possible and, like, have the parts of HubSpot that were good. I hope they don't forsake what made HubSpot unique and what brought HubSpot to where it is. Right. And I Don't know if they will but like at the end of the day, like, well now I can give this AI brain, you know, brain wallet here inside of my HubSpot the types of businesses that I really find that I sell well. And then I can also give it the types of people that work at those businesses that are most likely to be an advocate and sell well. And if we can merge those tools together for B2B I think that that's a big benefit at the end of the day. Right.

And like George, to go back to like what you were saying is like, oh, I'm going to sell something differently to a $50 million company than I would to like a, I don't know, like a million doll company. I, I agree with that. But to me that's not buyer Personas paired with ICPs, that's just different buyer Personas. Because the goals and challenges of someone with a marketing manager job at a 50 million dollar company is going to be vastly different than the goals and challenges of someone at a million dollar company.

I love that, that differentiation.

They might rhyme, they might rhyme, but the goals and challenges are going to be much more unique. Like they're managing bigger teams, they're doing other stuff.

But you wouldn't base a buyer Persona on the amount that the organization.

No, I know Marketing Mary, using your.

Example, where Marketing Mary's at. I don't think that's true.

I don't know that's true at all. Like an SMB Marketing Mary, Marketing Manager Mary is wildly different than an enterprise marketing manager Mary because they're usually in a much more complex organization with a lot more bureaucracy and red tape and a lot less autonomy and they're wearing fewer hats. They're usually reporting to a director who's reporting to a VP who's reporting to an SVP who's reporting to a C suite. Like that is, that is an insane organization with a wildly different decision making thing. And they're also probably a marketing Manager Mary inside that enterprise is probably with nested within a specific product group. But here's also where it gets interesting as well is that and this is where like even for me, goals and challenges and this is me being the needy content nerd. I could have two VP of sales at the two same size companies. If one is doing well, they're going to have a different emotional response to a topic or a piece of content that I'm going to create versus one who is scrambling at the end of the year or the end of the quarter and is worried Heads are going to roll. And so this is where I, this is where I don't know if the HubSpot gods are listening. I would love the ability, whether it's just at a piece of content level, to say this is how they feel about this specific topic. Because sometimes, George, to your point, the Persona, the icp, doesn't change. But what I am hearing overall is we have another case of bad change management when it comes to rolling out big stuff in the platform. To be fair, we are niching down into a setting inside of a setting, inside of a subheading setting. So, like, I get it, this is not to knock them, but if we're going to have language changes, we have no idea, we're guessing as to why they put ICP versus buyer Persona. We are guessing. And I don't love being in that position about something that has been such a tent pole of the inbound methodology.

Yeah, well, I mean, I know, I get it's a setting. Well, I was gonna say I get that it's a setting within a setting. But like, if you really think about, you know, what this is meant to do, right? Like it's, it's, it's really meant to, like, I mean, or I guess what the potential here is, right? I think this has the potential to really help people with like the hard stuff outside of just crafting a blog post, right? Just think about it for a second. If you had like a fully flex, fleshed out, you know, buyer Persona in here, where it's like, here's, you know, yeah, sure, this is this person's job role, here's the industry they work in. Because all that stuff does have an effect on what that person's goals and challenges are, just like company size does and things like that, right? Like, think about how this could help you, like, put together those more complex things that has to do with like SEO and content creation inside of HubSpot, such as topic clusters and the SEO tool. And like, you know, imagine if I could like, say, here's clearly all the different goals and challenges they have. Here's the extra context you need about like the type of industry or the type of company they work in, the roles that they generally have. And then imagine if it could just like automatically generate one of those, you know, those, those content spiderwebs, the topic clusters for you, right? And go, cool, here's your roadmap of content you need to go create now. Let's go create those individual pieces. And since we have the broader context now of what that whole sort of like pillar strategy or content strategy is going to be because we have that context from the buyer Persona. All of that can then be informed to the individ posts that it's helping you write and structure and things like that. Right. That would be sick. And it has the potential to do this right. And maybe this is the first baby step. That's great. But like the first baby step could have at least included goals and challenges, even if it's just a text field. Right. Like, it feels a big step back from Personas, which had that. Right. But then Personas had no connectivity into any of these like content creation tools.

That it's asking to create content with less context, which I find weird with a new label with that wasn't given as context. But George, I want to come back to you here for a moment because we can sit here and debate all day long about what was the intention behind this? Why are we seeing this versus that? All of the feelings we clearly have about this topic. But George, when you think about the. The users who are listening to this podcast.

Wait, the users? The users or the who?

George.

Hit us.

George.

Is it the users?

I'm sorry, I didn't hear the rest of the question.

Is it the users or is it the. Oh, there it is. Sorry, go ahead.

There wasn't the rest of the question because we were waiting for you to do that.

Gotcha. Slow.

Sorry. Thought that was a dunk layup I gave you.

When we think about the humans who are supposed to be using this, how can they think about the purpose of this tool now? How can they think about what it is that they are building? Take us through that purpose and those mindsets that you want people to see here. Because we're not going to be able to answer all these questions about intentions. We have a tool in front of us that we need to start using now.

Yeah, and I'll go into what Max was saying. Like the amount of humans that don't even know this exists. Like, Max was like, I didn't even know this existed. Hence why we're talking about it on the podcast and that we need people to go in and at least start putting information in there and paying attention to it. Because as it grows over time, my hopes is that it does all the things that we're talking about and adds all the things that we need. Because at the end of the day, we have to remember that this is as much automatic understanding, automated context as humanly possible is what we want to give the machine. Because that's what HubSpot is building. They are building an AI machine right underneath everything that we knew and loved. And the fact that Max is even going to like, hey, wouldn't it be great if there was a day where I could put this, this and this and select this and this and it would know and then all of a sudden my topic spider would come out and then I could be like, write all these blog articles and then I could hit remix and we could remix all of these articles and like, it's a little like HubSpot 7 steps process to decimate your content creation process. But it would be because somebody listened to this podcast, realized there was ideal customer profile and all of the other things that we talked about in previous episodes and we'll talk about future episodes to fill in the gaps to give. Because by the way, you can also give it additional context in the way that you're like crafting the individual prompts based on a section or a paragraph using Breeze co pilot. So like, this is the. How do we get the best foundational contextual information so that we can get 70 to 80% there and humanize it and hone it on the other side before hitting the publish button? Like, yeah, so just know it's there and start filling it out and actually think about this stuff.

Yeah. And I'd say like, yeah, I mean, there's probably people just finding out about this now, like, me, but like, George, how many people, like, still don't, like, when you start working with them? Don't even know, like, Personas exists? Like, most of them.

Like, here's the thing, literally, I, I, and again, I'm not shilling, but the amount of super admins that take the super admin training that when I talk about Personas and show them the Persona Workshop video that we have are like, oh my God.

Yeah.

And these are super admins.

Yeah. Like, and it's, it's crazy because it's like, it's, it's by far one of the easiest and simplest ways to say, hey, is my content resonating with a certain audience or not? Right. Because, like, you can literally have these people, like, self identify. Right. But you know, and let's go back to your question on, like, how could people use this today? I mean, if this is informing how your blog content is getting written, I mean, I can only hope and pray that it's taking that interests and other field, like, into consideration. And so I'd say if you want to try to use this today and experiment with it, you know, go write up a whole bunch of goals and challenges in two different sections and drop it into that other field and just like, you know, hope and pray that it's actually going to use that and take that into consideration. Right.

I mean, to be fair though, remember this is part of the puzzle because last week we talked about brand voice and how much that has changed and how there's all sorts of context as far as some of those pieces as well. So like, and, and Liz, I'll let you go. The one thing I did want to say, and I'm curious, and if you work at HubSpot, you can email me or call me. I swear I won't release it on the Internet. But if, if this confusion of this conversation we're having today is because you decided to call it ideal, by the way, it used to be if you go look on the Internet to, it used its ideal client profiles and buyer Personas. So HubSpot, if you're the human that called it ideal customer profile because you thought it would align with the customer platform, that's what my curiosity is getting the best of me. Like, is that why we named it that? And, and it should have had been two things instead of one thing. Anyway, I'll shut up, Liz.

No, I think the big thing for me and because ahead of this episode, and quite frankly the last one, I talked to some friends of mine who have been in my niche specialty role in different organizations and also at agencies, and I asked a simple question. Will you ever generate a blog post from scratch within the HubSpot tool? And they said, I don't even know how that would work because none of us have processes where content creation begins inside the tool. It begins with conversations, it begins with an interview. It begins with, with something else. So this is where it gets really fascinating, where I sometimes see a friction between what the platform is enabling people to do versus what is actually the best practice when it comes to whether it's content creation or any strategic, any sort of strategy, asset building. You know, it is this very like the idea that somebody can in a vacuum by themselves go into HubSpot and generate a blog post where they pull in brand voice and they pull in this person and they have a topic. The SME is never going to be the person doing that. They're too busy. It's going to be a content person. Hopefully they have some background on what great storytelling looks like. Hopefully they know how to weave it in. So it's actually human and empowering and educational and all of these things that we want them to be Particularly at a time where we've talked about this, we're entering an uncanny valley of content where buyers are going to feel something is wrong with your content and they're not only going to dislike it, they're going to not trust it, they're going to get the ick. That is what is happening. And so that this is not a way for me to open up another content debate. But it is this weird thing where I'm seeing things enabled where it's like, is this actually the process or best practice we want to be supporting?

And what I want to be careful of is for it not to always turn into a content. Because by the way, everybody knows I love me some content, but it can't always turn into a content conversation like this for sure needs to. This one in particular for sure needs to lean into the fact of like. And some of you have access to it, some of you don't. It's beta. But when, when the prospecting agent is rolled out at a larger scale, this is really, really important. And you so pull us out of that. George.

Different. Yeah, yeah, because so I think this is a really good don't. I think it is really easy for us to get obsessed about the content piece of it. And a big don't is not to put blinders on and think that's its only purpose. So can you talk to us a little bit about that idea of like, let's take it, let's take a step back out. Right. Of course I'm always going to be in the content end of the pool. George, look at me. We know how broken I am.

Listen, I. No, anyway, I listen, I turn on target accounts. I as a human then either have to manually put in the target accounts that I already know that I'm supposed to be going after. But it maybe I'm trying to find other target accounts. And so like, like that's human time spent searching for these. If I have ideal client profiles or ideal customer profiles and now AI is trained to go through all the companies and find ones that would align with these and then allow me to put a button, push a button on an AI generated list of like target accounts that I want to target. It just saved me a metric but ton of time. If now when I go to enroll a sequence and it's using templates and it's actually creating the templates based on the ideal customer or ideal client profile, now it knows that it's talking to an owner, a CEO, a coo, like C Suite versus a mid level manager or an employee. Because again you can even age like depending on how you build these ideal customer profiles and how many of them you build and how much more of Personas, rose goals challenges could be applied to this. By the way, if you work on this tool make Max happy after other or before other just put rose goals and challenges. He'd probably be quiet about the whole thing and he'd be like this is the best tool ever.

But that would be based. Yeah, but here's the thing thing.

Here's the thing like now so think of like that where is it taking away manual tasks. Where is it then able to create micro content emails, things like that to where where and especially when you go to this like semi autonomous or completely autonomous. The context to be able to like this is why we're not talking about it this week. This is why icps attached with with the actual products in the data sources is so freaking important. Because when you start to prospect if you know the who ideal customer profile and the what the products and you have the context to actually get the job done or at least augment the job that a human is trying to.

Do, what just sends them into a meeting with a lot of really important information without them having to go dig through notes and have the right properties on the left hand sidebar but also on the company. And I know like things are better now with like cross object association tables for admins to configure stuff like that. But it's still not like that amazing to read a bunch of properties in the middle tab on a company or on a contact. You know like it's it when also activities are really important and going through that activity timeline of what most recently occurred in that company or with that human. So yeah, I mean like being able to really have that context. I think this goes into the meeting prep tool as well. This all I think will feed into the meeting prep AI. You'll be able to have some really I think great frequently used prompts that you'll be able to save. Another thing that would be amazing that I'd love to see someday is the ability to utilize snippets inside of copilot it right? So be able to pump, pump, pump a snippet in of a good prompt that you know you don't ne right. And so you could just build things in with snippets and you know, make it really easy for your team. I think that's just like a no brainer right there.

Yo yo, I'm just gonna throw this out snippets as a prompt holder.

Yeah.

Would be exactly. Super dope functionality. But, but, but the point I'm trying to paint, because by the way you're, you're almost alluding to the end of the story, Chad, is like imagine a world where I set these things up in data sources, in AI data sources. Because I know that HubSpot's now building the world's largest business agent that happens to just hold information in his brain called a CRM. But I, and I now know that it can take me through a thing of where it helps me select all my target accounts, it helps me prospect all the target accounts. I'm getting ready to write an email or go into a meeting and I go to the contact or I go to the company and I say with, with copilot. Summarize this human. Summarize this human, Summarize this company. What? So now all of a sudden, in an instant, it's helped me save time along the way and it helps me save time before I get on that call or write that email because it's, I can extract the context that I need need based on the context that I gave it for the foundational pieces.

Yeah. But you know what? It kind of does, at least so far still is just isn't really very useful for B2C. Like it just isn't as helpful for like at least the industry that I'm building hubspots for like homeowners who own a house that has a damaged roof. Right. Or you know, is looking for a replacement or whatever. Right. So just like home services, like that's a huge, huge, huge segment of the market with just Homegrown I couldn't find anything so I hired some developers and built a custom thing that worked for me and now I'm trying to make it work for other people. Garbage CRMs, you know, that are, that are not enterprise, that will never take these businesses beyond the size of, you know, a few million without a lot of pain and manual effort to integrate it into their other systems. Right. So it's like I would love to see a little bit more love for the B2C because man, the home services market wants stuff built on top of stuff like HubSpot that's like to the nth degree configurable. Right.

Wait, so you're saying ICP is not relevant to that?

I mean ICP is, but it's like I just feel like that there's so many company properties and Clearbit enriches all this company level stuff that it's like if I was a, you know, one of those people, I'd be like, yeah, like most all this except for like age and interests is not relevant to the people that I'm looking for because I'm not looking for businesses.

So basically what I hear you saying is we need a clear bit but for human data.

Yeah.

Which gets freaky real quick.

Yeah, exactly.

Although you're almost Creating your like first party data with HubSpot and some type of process that, where you can get that information but, but like enriching it automagically gets. Well that just to me it gets scary dangerous.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah it does. I mean like there's a lot of privacy stuff there but I think if HubSpot has the tools to allow you to build things to survey people, right? And like hey, are you in the market for whatever? And like people freely give up their information all the time. Unfortunately like people aren't that privacy minded and so they're like put stuff into Facebook all the time. I mean you ever seen those posts? It's like asking about oh, your first car and like all this stuff, you know, and people just answer all these questions which are basically just like two FA security questions to get into bank accounts. You know, people are crazy.

But anyway, humans will.

George. Humans will. Human. So George, are there any other common mistakes you could foresee folks making that are critical to avoid when we're looking at this part of the AI data sources settings?

I mean there's two big ones. One, the biggest one is not knowing it's there and not using it. Like again there's no harm, no foul to put the information in there. But that leads me to. My second thing is don't just put random ish in there because with any AI system like, like if we, if we're using Claude, if we're using GPT, we're painstakingly paying attention to the input that we're giving it because we know it will dramatically affect the output that we get. Make sure that you're actually doing some research, some understanding, some reading. This is not a copy and paste, you know, simple prom copy paste, you're done. Like now can you use AI to help you with this? If you have data and information to anyway, different conversation, different training, whatever, but like pay attention to what you're putting in there as far as the ideal customer profiles. And until HubSpot does merge, fix, add, whatever they're going to do with buyer Personas, make sure you find a place in your system that you're bringing that information in along for the ride as you're creating the content. That's. That's all I'll say. Or creating the processes, or educating your internal team on how you're going to use the platform based on this input.

Chad, you dropped a question in, in our chat and I'm kind of like, But Chad, my guy, you should say the quiet part out loud. You should ask that whole ass question.

Yeah, yeah, I was, I was thinking, George, like as you're talking, could it cause more harm than help in the future anyway if you put the wrong stuff in there? Like if you're just gonna, you know, put some ish in there, did you just ignore it? If you don't have at least 10 minutes to put something coherent in there.

You know, that's a, that's actually a great question. I would rather have nothing in there than ish in there. And that pains me to say that because it's the root of a bigger problem. If you're in business for any length of time and you haven't figured out out who you're selling to, who you're creating content for, there's a larger strategy problem that you call some. I don't even care if it's me. Call somebody because dang gone.

So I know this could open up a whole other can of worms, but I'm very curious, George, when you built yours, did you build your ICPs as being like a mirror of your buyer Personas? Like, did you start by saying, how do I translate my buyer Personas into ICPs, or did you start from scratch? What was that process? Because I could imagine if I'm sitting here listening to this, we've had a debate about the fact that they're different, but related and codependent. But am I just supposed to sit down and like, make up whole new ones that look different from my buyer Personas, or should there be some reflection there?

I think there's definitely reflection. And it's, it's like understanding as an organization, what are the problems you solve? Here are the problems I solve.

I was saying it's more than. And then what you solve for. It's the other things that people are looking for that you do solve something for. Right? So it's, I think that, I mean, and you could agree with this, right? Back when people were really just getting familiar with the idea of inbound, all they wanted to do was write about the problem that their product solved, right? But the people who really got it said, well, sure, our product solves for a specific thing, right? But what we're trying to do with Inbound is attract people who will have that problem. And we have to know that there is more than just that one problem that they're searching for. So one way to get in front of those people is to write content about stuff that we know that they're interested in looking up and goals that they're trying to solve for, even if our product doesn't directly solve for that themselves to get the right kind of eyeballs on our site when those people are looking for stuff that isn't necessarily just the thing we solve for. Right. The classic example that I love to use is like, when you look at, at HubSpot, back before it had any sort of integration with Instagram, we still created content for marketers because we were trying to sell to marketers. We would create content about how to market yourself on Instagram, even though our tool did nothing. Right.

To. To.

To help you do anything on Instagram. Right. So you know there's more than just talking about what your product solves for. Right. It's talking about other stuff that your buyer Persona is interested in, even if. If your product doesn't have a hand in directly solving it. Right. I think you would agree with that.

Yes. And I'm not talking about creating content right now. I'm talking about how do I create my ideal customer profiles inside the data sources. So if I was to go in the line of your thinking, yeah, Max, I would teach them about, they ask, you answer. And if I wanted to go the next level, I'd teach them about drafting off of other content.

10.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about I need to take zero to something with ideal customer profiles. I'm going to start with what are the problems I help solve? What are the products that I actually have to solve those problems, and what are the types of organizations that have those problems? And then I can say, okay, let's look at the data that I have, or let's look at, grab some data from somewhere and help me understand the organizations that have these problems that are in need of these products. What do they look like? Who's the buyer? And by the way, AI is great at giving you a lot of this information that. Which then you can hone and I'll give you a little secret sauce. One of the things, Liz, when I started to focus on the problems and the products and like the organizations and what they might look like is I literally started to see these patterns. I said, this is fricking Dope. And I took a Screenshot of the HubSpot ideal customer profile. And I said, based on our research so far, give me the relevant information to fill in these fields for these seven types of people or five types of people that or organizations. Before Max loses his frickin mind and it blows out like both sides of his ears. Organizations and humans so that I can fill in this information. And again, it was based on the input that I gave it. It was based on the questions that I gave it. It was based on knowing the platform that I was putting it in for and why I was putting it in for it. And so I worked hand in hand with another assistant to create a firm foundation for this HubSpot assistance content creation, prospecting agent. Because I know how important context is to all the future conversations we're going to have on all the tools that we're using. It's the biggest place that I think people are going to just flub it up is not under. Not being curious enough to be creative enough to give the context to take them to the future.

And George, if folks only remember one thing from this episode. What should it be and why?

Goals and challenges are really important.

That's not it. That's not it. Whatever that was.

Wow.

I gotta boil this down to one thing.

One thing.

If you. I'll say. I'll say this. If you're sitting here listening to this and you go into that ideal customer profile section and it's empty and you. Because I think you landed into something very interesting, Chad is like, like, I don't, I don't have that and I don't know how to get there. Then that's your next step. The one thing I would say is figure out how to understand the organizations, the humans, the hurdles, the problems, the. The products enough in a way that you can at least start to build a foundation of these. Because again, we're going to move on to another thing where we're talking about products and how do you put that in there and why. And so just focus on getting the strategy down and getting this filled out, these filled out.

I love it. Wow, guys, we didn't have any opinions about this topic whatsoever. Can you guys try harder next time?

Can we go to the therapy session, please?

Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or. 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 hubieroes. Podcast 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.