HubSpot AI Data Sources: Unpacking the Simplicity of the Marketing Strategy Setting

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.

Are we united and activated, gentlemen, I'm activated.

I'm united.

George, you're in a very efficient mood this morning. I gotta call that out here for a moment. I don't know if you guys have noticed that. All right, let's go.

Yeah. Get stuff done.

George. Standard time gst.

Yeah, there we go.

Love that for us. George, how are you feeling going into today's conversation? I got him now.

I'm feeling great, but I don't. I don't think I need my own time zone, but I'm. But I'm feeling great. I'm excited to have this conversation, and we'll see where it goes.

I love that. Max, how you doing, bud? That is a look of concern or you're locked in.

I'm locked in.

Locked in. Chad, how is our printer overlord glowing red? Oh, God.

Yeah, well, you know, it does what it wants. I gotta. I think. I think I want to hook it up, you know, like, make scenes, get another camera, you know, change angles, turns red, Type thing.

Wow. I don't know. Or, like, press a button and just. It's like. Like really fast, rapid. We'll see.

There's some fun stuff we could do.

For the folks listening at home. Check the show notes. This week, I've been taking a couple of strategic screenshots of Chad. And action. I don't know if printer overlord likes that. It glowed red when I said that. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. All right, you know what? Let's dig in, guys. We are back for another installment in our series about Hu AI data sources. And last week, we had an incredible discussion. Sometimes debate, sometimes a little bit feisty chat about buyer Personas versus ideal customer profiles. And I have to recommend that you go back and listen to it because Max said after we stopped recording that it was probably one of his favorite discussions we've ever had on the podcast. And I got to admit, I listened to it. Again. And I thought it was pretty fantastic. So if you missed out on that conversation, go back and listen to it. But George, let's say for a moment, maybe some of our listeners are joining this series right in the middle. Can you give us a quick explain it like I'm five refresher of what HubSpot AI data sources are.

AI data sources is a place where you can go in and really just start to add context around your business, your strategy, your products, your ideal customer profiles as, as HubSpot is calling them. Just like the. There's a plethora of things that you could be adding to help the system, the machine, the CRM to future be probably the world's largest business agent understand maybe what you're trying to do, how you're trying to do it. So that is. And again, I think it'll grow over time. But that is what AI data sources is. It's a setting and it's gotten multiple shows being a setting. So that might tell you something.

Yep. So for our listeners, if you are midway through this series and you're joining us, we have an episode back in the feed, a few episodes where we talk about what these are as a whole. We talked about brand, voice and tone. A few episodes. That was a really fun and exciting episode. Like I said, we already did buyer Personas versus ICPs and today we are moving into the next section of HubSpot AI data sources called marketing strategy.

Yeah, I'm gonna be honest.

Yeah, I'm gonna be honest. I'm very, let's just say curious is the label I'm gonna use for where today's conversation is going to go. Because it is very lightly designed and it's either, it's either.

We call it lean. It's lean.

It's very lean. It's very lean.

Efficient. Yeah, it doesn't take a whole lot of time out of your day.

It's very clean. It has like a four minute mile if it were a runner, like in like 0% body fat, which is either exactly what it needs to be or.

Or it's not anything or it's.

Well, we're gonna find out together like a family.

Listen, I mean, let's be honest. There is a saying of like, you know, great things come in small packages or something along those lines. Like I have, I have thoughts and I have grievances and I have things that I wish. But that's not what the whole podcast will be about. But it, it's interesting that it's here and it's interesting what you can select, but let's just move on with that.

Nice try, buddy. Nice try.

That it's here. Studying. Review. Oh, it's interesting that it's here.

I think you guys, words on a page. And it exists.

Oh, it's.

You can probably tell. I tried to, like, pull this together and the introduction. So I do prepared outline for each one of our shows, and there are lots of screenshots. And then we get to the questions, and it's just like, what. What do we think is happening?

Yeah.

So don't get me wrong. It's interesting that it's here. Sorry.

Pull back the curtain a little bit here. And I want you to take us back to that moment when you first clicked on this setting.

I want you to tell us before I clicked on it. Let me take you back. Before I clicked on the settings, before I clicked on the settings, I was like, oh, this could get interesting. All right, now ask your question.

First, describe exactly what you saw without editorializing. And then what was your reaction to what you saw?

Yeah, so was it the five stages.

Of grief or something else?

No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I saw the thing. Marketing strategy, and I said, ooh, marketing strategy in AI data sources. This could get interesting. And I clicked into it and I saw this drop down, and I thought to myself, okay, lead generation makes sense. A lot of. A lot of companies, you know, focused on that engagement. Okay. Yep, yep, yep. Brand awareness. Oh, yeah, I. I definitely have helped clients with that trust. Well, we all probably, hopefully should be trying to, like, build trust in our marketing because, well, you think that's what we should do. And then education. I'm like, big on education. So I'm. I'm immediately like, oh, yeah, okay, so all of these make sense, But. But then I immediately, too, go to, like, I know how many. I know how many humans I've actually helped. And then when you ask them about the strategy, their strategy is lack of strategy or no strategy. So at least this is also a place where we can pinpoint, like, what are, you know, a couple of the strategies that you should be focusing on. And because that's what you're focusing on, at least let's let the machine know that that's what you're focusing on. Now. Then I got to the point where I was like, well, me personally, I'm. I'm kind of focused on all of the above. To which I was like, and I can only select two. Oh, my God. And I was like, wait, why? Why can I only select two of these? And then I Was like, well, now you've created a dilemma in my brain. Like, are two of these more important than the others? Anyway, I'll stop there because I have some thoughts to how this might actually need to. Those were my initial thoughts. I was excited. I. I kind of understood, okay, match the human to the machine. And then was sad because I was like, two. Okay, why? Why?

To why?

Yeah, I had a very similar reaction. I opened it up and I saw it and I have a very, very big monitor now. It's like a big widescreen monitor. And I had the whole browser window taken up.

Oh, I can rock like that. I can't. I can't do that.

It was by accident. I hadn't minimized it, but it just kind of for dramatic effect. You just see this one single field.

Just way over there.

And then I click and it's like, marketing strategy. Would you like lead generation engagement, brand awareness, trust, or education? You could only pick two. And, and, and then I looked for a knowledge base article like, oh, there's gotta be something I'm missing. And then, and then when I looked, I just found a list of here's how to manage your AI data sources. And it says marketing strategy. Select from marketing goals such as brand awareness, engagement, or more. And you could select up to two marketing goals. And I just kind of felt a little stumped. First of all, you're telling me, like, let's just start with trust. Let's put trust there. Let's just throw. So are there going to be times where trust is not a goal? So there's that. There are times where I feel like we're missing just a lot of stuff. I don't. I'm very glad that we're all a little bit confused because I don't know what I'm supposed to do with this.

Well, so you're. It's. It's easy. You're supposed to pick two. That's what you're supposed to do with it. You're supposed to. You're supposed to. End of episode, End of episode and like it. See you later. The big question is, what in the. I don't want to swear. What. What does it do? Like, you have. You have a whole big white box of a page under it. Could you please tell me, by selecting lead generation xyz, ABC will happen in these tools. By selecting a combination of trust and education, ABC and XYZ will happen in the. Like, you give me a video or something on this page that helps me not have the unknown chasm of like, great I picked two. That was very anticlimactic. I have no understanding of what I just did to my machine. I don't know how it's going to do it in the blog tool. I don't know how it's going to do it in the social tool. I don't. I don't know what changes I just made. And I don't know if I come in here next week and change it. Like, can I change it and go write a blog article and then come back and change it and go write another blog article? And will the two blog articles be different from a marketing strategy standpoint? Because I selected two things in the little box. Okay, I gotta take a break.

I gotta breathe.

That example is giving me a panic attack. Because the idea that that's where you set the strategy of a blog article.

Oh, my God. I don't think it is. I don't think it is.

But still, Matt, be a voice of reason. Be a voice of hope.

Yeah, I mean, voice of reason. It's like this should. This should be like a content level piece setting that you turn on, right? So, like, if I'm writing a piece of content, there's always some kind of intention of that piece of content. Right. Also, let's just go ahead and say build trust. Shouldn't be opt.

I don't want to be trustworthy. We're gonna turn this one off.

Yeah.

When should. I'm sorry.

Let's build brand awareness.

I'm sorry. How's that not a freaking default setting, dude? Like, it's. It's weird to be like, are you sure you want to build trust when you write this? It's like, what are you talking about? Of course I do.

Hey, let me tell you what all the cool kids are doing. They're not building.

I mean, I get what they're doing. Like, I get what they're doing, right?

And.

And, you know, I think this just like anything else, it's the first baby step, right?

Like, they.

They probably like, here, here's the other thing, right? It's probably pretty difficult for them to tell if it's working if they can't test it at a mass scale. And the only way they can really test it out of mass scale is like, hey, let's turn this on so it's happening for all of the content. And then we can see how, you know, how good it's actually working and what people are interested in selecting. And then make it more pointed and specific and. And have it at the content level. Right? Like, you know, that's really kind of what I can imagine because I mean, ultimately you're going to get a lot more testing on this stuff when it's used on a broader scale and just saying, hey, we're going to do it for everything versus, you know, just hoping people like pop it into like individual content pieces.

Well, let me ask you a question.

That's the only thing I can think of.

Let me ask you a question on that.

Actually, no, I don't consent to the question.

Well, I'm going to ask the question anyway because. Because how many people do you think journey over to AI data sources versus journey over to the blog tool? If I wanted massive adoption on something, I'd put it smack dab at the creative blog because more humans are going to create a blog than they are to AI data sources.

So like, but you also got to remember too, like they just released the whole, you know, breeze thing and now everyone's going and checking out Breeze. So maybe they are looking at it there, right? Remember, it is still hard to get people to write effing blog posts that aren't doing it right. But it's really easy to go check out this shiny new AI thing where you can turn on the settings and it'll do it all for you, right? So maybe that's their evidence. But I agree, like it would make sense like that. You know, if, if you're writing a blog post and you haven't set this yet and you're using the AI tools, it should be like, hey, maybe go check one of these two boxes for whatever reason before, like you, you know, have the AI write your blog post or whatever, you know what I mean? But I agree with you.

It should be enough that I am setting a blog strategy instead. Side HubSpot is insane to me. It is antithetical to so many of the things that we have talked about with HubSpot before, which is HubSpot is where you execute, you come with it, with your strategy.

But remember, but remember, we're not talking about humans right now. We are talking about bots right now. We are talking about assistance right now. We're talking about connecting the human strategy that we're executing to somebody of the assistant.

Hold on a second, Chad. You have just been sitting, sitting there just minding your business with a very pleased look on your face watching George Max and I have totally reasonable non emotional reactions to the marketing strategy tool. What is going on in that brain of yours over there?

I'm trying to figure out what game Max is playing.

Farming simulator Is it?

Yeah, I can see it on your TV back there in the reflection.

Dislike the way you do deal with emotional support with HubSpot. Puts a in front of you you don't know how to cope with.

Yeah, he's like, I gotta go.

I'm out of my strattera, so I have to, like, distract myself. Live conversation so I can actually have them anyway.

Well, thanks for.

I'm just dropping off some grocery guys. It's all good. Yeah, I'm here.

So, Chad, nice try trying to get out of this.

Okay.

Got it to us.

Yeah, well, I mean, you know, standing up for my computer brethren, all my, you know, bots out there, as we were just talking about, you know, I think. Okay, just ask for two. What's like. I mean, if you throw everything in the kitchen sink at it, then it's not going to prioritize anything.

Yeah.

Maybe the word should be prioritized, too. But it's probably understanding that it obviously needs to have trust. It's like, do you want to emphasize trust, or do you want to just have the normal amount of trust, I assume. Yeah. Standard trust or extra trust, you know, like, I mean, do you want to emphasize that?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I'm thinking our trust.

Yeah, exactly.

You're saying. I almost wish you could, like, put them in numeric order. Yeah, wanted to. Like, here. Here is the rubrics in which I would like my assistant to pay attention to this. It. Don't. Don't bring up trust. Just trust should just be there. But the other ones, other than trust, like, this is the rubrics of importance to me at an organization of how I would want you to think about us. Right. As far as that goes.

This is also like another. Speaking of rubrics, this is another really great place for that document that Liz wrote that explains everything you can write. I think that's probably the next level is like, what's the nuanced content playbook that you can upload for me? So I follow it just like I do for your, you know, what was it the brand or whatever last time, Liz, what was it controlling when you did the document again? Voicing it was a brand voice. Oh, yeah, voice.

Voice and tone.

Yep.

Yeah. But if you could add additional context to, like, lead generation or to engagement or like, that would be dope. But here, here's the thing. I. I even want to take a step back. I. I wish that this tab wasn't marketing strategy. I. I wish that this tab was strategy and that I could go in here and I would see marketing, sales service, social. Right. Because now if, if HubSpot releases a new agent, prospecting agent, service agent, content agent, social agent. Now there's a, there's a strategy area that I can go to to give more in depth, pick two things hopefully in the future, upload documents that that agent or the system in a whole can look at the different strategies for the different divisions or hubs or departments. That's where, where I would love to see this. I have some other ideas but I'll show up there and, and see what you guys think about that.

Absence of sales is upsetting of any kind. Yeah, Sales enablement is a marketing strategy.

Especially with a prospecting agent right around the corner.

Yeah, that'll be really, that will be really interesting when they. Well, I mean. How much fight? Well, I guess this is getting to another subject but like how much fine tuning do they actually give around the prospecting agent in terms of stuff like this? That's more. Because what it's like the way I understand it's like two options. It's either like keying up the stuff for you to send or it's just sending it and straight up talking.

Well, you have to train it, right?

Yeah, you have to train it. What do you train it on?

There's, there's like a. Settings there. We should probably do a whole episode on.

Yeah, we probably should.

That's a different settings area of the prospecting agent. But there's. But the two things you're talking about is autonomous and semi autonomous of like just let it do it for you or like, like hold its hand as it, as it does the thing. But yeah, just back to send it button. Yeah, just, just send it. We don't care that much about them humans. We just want to try to sell them stuff and we don't care about trust in humans. We just want to sell stuff and get revenue roi.

Yeah, no, I would. I think like ultimately the, the when it, you know, gets better and they learn what they need to learn. I think the ultimate deployment of this is when you're creating a piece of content and you're building the AI trust. One isn't an option because that should just be implied. Right. And two, it should more so say what's the goal of this piece of content? Oh, have like a number of different outcomes. Right. And to me that's the, that would be the ideal.

But will that be on a. Per. Per article or per content?

What I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about.

Per content but let's pull up from that. Let's pull up from that because again, you guys love to talk about content. Dang, gone. Not everything is about content. List, plug your ears.

You were the one.

I know, but, but here's the thing. Let's back up a second because again, and we talked about this with the ideal customer profiles and buyer Personas and just wish like HubSpot would use some of the stuff that they already use like Personas and ideal customer profiles together. Like it just let us hook into the stuff we're doing. Look, marketing strategies, they depend on business goals. Marketing strategies, they depend on the target audience that you're trying to go after. Marketing strategies, they depend on where the customer is on their buyer's journey, awareness, consideration, decision. So now where this gets dope is if HubSpot users were actually using the goals feature in HubSpot and HubSpot AI data sources could go and look at what the goals were set to. Pay attention to that. If that we could literally have target audiences. Oh, I don't know because there's a ABM and Target like anyway, target accounts. Like if you had that set up. Well, what if AI data sources could look at target accounts and, and by the way, if you had a way to actually track buyers journey. I don't know, life cycle stages for most companies who haven't customized. Anyway, if there was a way that you could then say, hey, here's our business goals, here's the target audience, ideal customer profiles, buyer Personas, target accounts, all the three things that are already in HubSpot and in here's where they are on their journey. Now fluctuate. Imagine going into marketing strategy and it being what's your strategy? And awareness. What's your two strategies for.

Hell yeah.

What's your two strategies for decision? Now all of a sudden being able to pick two makes a little more sense because you're picking the two for the area of the journey. Like anyway.

I mean, honestly, dude, imagine like where, I'm sorry, where's the tool that's just like leading into Inbound, which is what make made HubSpot so great. Where it's like you can tell it your company, you can tell it your goals, you can tell it like a little bit about your customers and then it literally just crafts an inbo marketing strategy for those things. Like think about can it should be able to learn all that stuff from HubSpot Academy, which has 10, 15 years of freaking content around how to do inbound marketing. All that shit still holds up right Besides maybe like a little bit of a less emphasis on, you know, landing pages and capturing leads and stuff like that. Right. It's like, you know that it's wild to me that they haven't been like, cool, let's do like the hardest thing, which is like taking all this information that we know about inbound and putting together a. A cogent strategy.

Right.

But doing that through the context of like your business and your goals. Like, why couldn't it put together something like that?

You know, they could, they could, but.

It'S like, but you know, what we're doing is we're, we're doing this like, ICP stuff and getting away from the word Persona because like, they're placating to all the folks that say inbound, dead. When really, when really. I know, but when really, like, inbound is the same thing. People just call it, like, different stuff. And it's like, like all about. I don't know.

Yeah, okay, I want to pull this out.

Is if you read it, it's inbound. It's all inbound. It's still all just inbound. You know what I mean? But people just like to call it something different so they can sell something else and, you know, stand out and say, oh, inbound's dead. And we defeated it with this brand new strategy. And then you look at the strategy and it's like, that looks like a lot of the same. Right. I muted myself instead of beeped it.

But you, you like how I know how to just like throw a word out there, Even like scrambled eggs. I just throw that out there. And then. Max, just don't you dare.

I know. And then, George, what you do is five minutes later, like, guys, I don't want to have a debate about this. Mice. What?

What?

Stop it.

How could we have possibly gotten down this rabbit hole? I mean, goodness, why are you guys.

Keep talking about this content even though it was the very first example I'd let within this conversation. How dare you.

You guys sure do love.

George, I just want to stick with you for a second because I would actually like us to get back to the thing that you were pointing out, which is we need to remember what the purpose of this tool is, because it's easy to sit here and say marketing strategy for all of these different things, but it's. This is a very specific context in which this is being used. So can you remind us of the purpose of what this is supposed to be governing within HubSpot?

Yeah. This entire settings is the bridge from the human brain to the AI like Breeze co pilot Agent. Like the. It's. It's the context. It's the, the thing that it's gonna make decisions off of how it's gonna create or act and do. Like that's all of these settings that we're talking about. And again, they need to get more robust over time. At least that's how the agents and co pilot and Breeze will get better over time. Because it all comes down to like the amount of context you can give a. You know, I'll just keep calling it an agent or. I mean it is a large language model. Like let's just not, let's not be stupid or what's powering these. That's where you get to the magic pieces. The places is. It's understanding.

This is just like GPT memory. Basically it's GPT memory for your portal that they set up on a per tenant level. Like each HubSpot portal is its own tenant. You give your tenant some strategies. Yeah. Some custom instructions.

It's a mix of memory and custom instructions in HubSpot for your business. Like anyway.

But I got a question. Did we ever like confirm that this marketing goals one, you know, like there's no documentation out there necessarily saying exactly what in the world that these two goals do. I mean in the subheading under select marketing goals it says add up to two goals for your AI generated content. So it sounds, you know, I mean I sure do love content over here, but it sounds like it's pretty content specific at the moment.

Well, but you gotta be careful. You got to be careful. Email is content, Case studies is content.

Yeah, exactly. I'm not saying it's. All right.

Right. So like when, when we say content me be careful. Because in HubSpot almost anything that's written word could be considered content. Right. And so it could. But no, here's. By the way, this, this whole series might be our subtle way of begging whoever is in charge of AI data sources and, and what they're building to just get on a show with us. Just like come and let, let us ask you, you know, 6 or 60000 questions about what's. Maybe 6, maybe 10, not 60 000, but just let us ask some questions about what's really happening under the hood. Because I think if the HubSpot users, the Hub heroes, if you will, the humans, knew what's happening under the hood, it would help them fill out the details better, know what to select better.

That's the thing that kills me about this whole rollout. And again, I understand we are in settings within settings within settings for a specific part of the platform, but AI was such a huge tadpole of everything they rolled out this year. And I'm finding us having these discussions where a little clarity, a little messaging, a little bit more direction, an extra knowledge base article or two would have made a huge difference if we spent a whole episode debating buyer Personas versus ICPs, because the intent of HubSpot introducing a new term was unclear and undefined. We have this tool here, which is either the canoe that we need when we, when we think we need a yacht, or it is something that is the beginning of something that could be great, but it's. It's not giving us enough direction to use it properly. And that's where I find myself a little stuck with some of this. Some of it feels very well developed. We were able to have much more substantive discussions about the brand, voice and tone, and we've already seen leaps and bounds with that moving forward. But there is just sometimes a vacuum of messaging, a vacuum of direction that I am struggling with with some of these new tools that are rolling out.

There is. And I'm wondering how much of it is, because, like, a lot of this, like, new AI stuff in HubSpot is. I'm not saying AI is uncharted. Well, much of AI is definitely uncharted still, I think, just fundamentally. But I think they're still like, very much in like a phase of experimentation because there's so many different ways they can go with it. Right. And I think this is kind of just like a product of let's build some stuff and see what happens, see how it gets received, even though we don't necessarily have all the right answers of how to use it right now. I don't know.

Well, and I'll throw in here. Go ahead, Chad.

I was just going to say that's a big part of their philosophy anyway at HubSpot is start small, iterate, grow, take. Because, like, I mean, it's the worst as a software developer to build something that you think people want all the way, and then they're like, this is not what I wanted at all. Like, that's so ridiculously expensive. Ridiculously. I know you deal with a little bit of like, user fatigue, user frustration when it doesn't do everything you want it to, but it's a whole lot easier to just continue to build on it. And these are really the building blocks between some of the things. Like when, you know, you and George earlier were just getting inspired about like, man, what if it could help you do the really hard thing of, like, building your whole strategy?

They're never going to start at the beginning, right?

Yeah, they're not. How could they possibly be? Right. Because they don't know for sure. Right. And they don't know how people are going to use these things, what they want, what they don't want, what they like, what they don't like. I mean, that's part of why we even talk about this in, in, you know, these episodes. Right. Is we want to make sure that at least. I mean, if somebody's got their ear to the ground and wants to hang out with the Hub heroes, you know, they can.

Yeah, we'll even make you a little cartoon superhero. So.

There'S that. And I would say this too is like, amount that it changes right underneath their feet.

Yeah.

And what I mean by that is AI is like fastly, fastly moving. The amount of times that I have gone back, and I'm gonna dumb this down. Seriously dumb this down. But the, the times that I've gone back and recreated a prompt that I've built that was tried and true to make it better or do a next thing or I could cut a piece because now it just fundamentally like a new feature was released or whatever. Just, just in, in that the amount of iterations. Imagine like trying to build a platform with this AI and all AI changing, all the data changing, all the other pieces of the tool changing around it. Like there's so much change to try to keep up with. And here we come running in of like, it'd be great if we could do. But it would be great if we could do these things. Like, we understand, we understand we're saying the same.

We see the vision.

Like, yeah, we see the vision, but Right. Yeah.

See where you're headed. And I think we want to advocate for our use case. Right.

Well, here's what I will say about that. I agree. One of the things I always come back to, and we've said this multiple times throughout the series, that this is the worst these tools will ever be. And where they are right now at the quote, unquote, worst level is pretty freaking phenomenal. Because HubSpot could be a platform that takes 8,000 years to implement any changes, and they're going to market with some sort of full fledged Cadillac worth of tools before they've even asked the community what it really needs. I think the only challenge I'm still having is that with some of these, that is very clear. Right. Like, when we look at the brand voice and tone stuff, you could see exactly what the purpose is. You know, exactly what we're trying to dial into. You could understand like, hey, this is where we're started versus this is where we're going. And it's even leaps and bounds from where it started as like a one line thing that you could enter. The one thing about this and this is where it's just like, it's that knowledge management documentation specialist from many moons ago who's just kind of dry heaving a little bit, is that when I open this up, I don't even know how to experiment with it. Because George, you said something fascinating at the start of this episode. What is the difference between a piece of AI content, whether that's email, chat, whatever generated, when it's brand awareness versus lead generation. Why is trust ever negotiable? Like there are just a few things where it's like, I would just love a little bit more direction of hey, try experimenting with this. Or this is what it might look like to give me a little meat on the bones to get it started. But what I would like to hear.

From you because it's funny how you guys won't let go of trust, but we haven't been on a rampage that education should just be a thing. Considering inbound is literally create valuable informational content as a magnet to bring PE and like I hate the word magnet.

Oh my God.

No, I'm just saying it literally was a picture of a magnet.

George, take us there. How do you feel about education being negotiable?

No, I'm just saying I can't believe you guys haven't been like, just trust, trust, trust, trust. Listen, trust and education are like table stakes to me. But then that, but that, that Lynn, leads that you only have like three options to and you can only pick.

Two, which are brand awareness and lead generation. And brand awareness is always such a fun engagement for me as a goal. What? Brand awareness is always a funny thing. So you do we want them to be aware of us so they'll go to brunch with us? Like no, we want them to become leads. We want them to become part of our community. Like there's brunch will be nice. I love brunch. Girl loves a good brunch. George, as someone who has spent a lot of time experimenting over many, many years with new HubSpot tools as they come out, what are some of your do's and don'ts for people who are looking at this particular setting or any of the other settings? As this tool continues to evolve.

Yeah, but here's the fun thing. Like my brain is in a different place after this podcast than it was before this podcast. Because here's the thing. So if I go into my portal right now, I have lead generation and I have engagement selected, which I'm like, yeah, that's what I want to do. I want to get engagement and I want lead generation. However, based on this conversation, what I would say is if they're non negotiables, then why didn't I pick trust in education? Because I can focus as a human on making sure that it's, you know, lead generation or that I'm saying it in a way that might be conversational or getting engagement. But I without a doubt want to build trust and I want to build education. And I, I feel like that's going to also really impact the length of content and the voice and tone of content if I select in my, in understanding what I know about other models and AI, like Claude and GPT, like as soon as you start to say like education, meaning like PDF, like blog article, like you, you start to get longer answers or outputs than you typically do. If you're just like, give me this thing. So, you know, maybe like, if you're just not sure, maybe you just pick trust in education because those are non negotiables. But yeah, at least use it. And then again, like me, I can change it over time, I guess, because right now it's lead generation engagement. But after this podcast I might just go put trust in education because that's who we are and what we do.

Yeah, I think, you know, again, this, this to me, at least at the moment, I would imagine based on like just software development and architecture, that these are like prioritize these things. Right. That's how I would imagine that this is being fed into the engine. Right. Is like make sure that these are the most important things while all of them will probably still all occur in some fashion.

Right.

All the time. You know, so I think, whereas last week we were like, hey, if you don't have any clue what you should put there, maybe don't put anything at all. Whereas this one is like, I think trust and education is a good default if you don't have a better option. Right.

I would 100% agree with that because you, you, to George's point, those are kind of table stakes. You know, we, we've talked repeatedly throughout this entire podcast since it began about how education and trust are kind of like that. That's what we're That's. We're in the business of. Right. I would be curious to see if anybody would do some testing with some of their AI tools of what happens and what. How the outputs change depending on what you select. I'd be so curious about that.

Here's the. Here's the fun thing. And not to be that guy, but I'm going to be that guy. I literally just tried to change it in my portal. If I try to put education in the little box, I get an error screaming at me a red box saying, I can't add education. So there's a glitch in the matrix. But that's. What.

What were you trying to change it out from?

I. Well, I removed my marketing goals completely. And then I tried. I tried to put trust in education in there and I got an error. So I removed education and it saved and I added anything but education and saved. But as soon as I try to add education, I get an error. So. HubSpot. You're probably not listening to this or watching this, but there's a glitch in the matrix when it comes to like selecting education in the marketing strategy goal. But this does go back to. This is the worst it'll ever be. They're building it so that we can move forward and somebody just needs to do a support ticket on can we make education work? Because trust and education are like no brainers.

I was gonna say, the thing that I find fascinating about this is that of course we have to have a setting like this because if we think about any of the AI tools that we use for anything, you have to give it a goal. You have to give it something of like, oh, this is what we are trying to accomplish with this. These people. So there's the other side of this, because I was talking with a couple friends about this this weekend who use HubSpot. We were. I was just curious, what do you think when you see this tool? And a couple of people said, well, if it's just so simplistic, why even bother having it? And it's like, because you have to give it a goal.

Wow. Anyway, never mind.

George just glitched out. Talk me through what just happened on your face.

His education button got switched off.

Well, no.

Yeah, yeah.

My Georgia education goal.

What do we do?

Well, I don't know what friends you are talking to. And so I don't want to be rude because they might listen to this or watch this.

They do not listen to this show. You're fine.

But. But I'm like, but I'M like, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's not powerful. Like, think about AI and prompting. Like I can say, I can say as a professional writer or as a social media strategist or as a. Right, like those two words or that, that word or whatever, it simple massive effect on the output. Massive effect. And so that's why I'm saying, like, even though we can only select two of these, we have no clue the potential massive impact that this makes to all of what is coming out the other side of what we're creating. And so imagine this. I want you to go sell your business and products and services to anybody on the planet. But first, but first I'm just gonna wipe it from your memory so you don't know Jack Squad about it and then go do that. You, you, you need the understanding, you need the context. As a human, it needs the understanding. It needs the contact con context as a system anyway, to me is that.

There was such a high degree of overlap and similarity between the goals that were given and they had a similar reaction of like, when am I never going to have trust there? You know, there were a couple of things where it was like, they were like, this is so simplistic and without direction. I'm not even sure how to use it. But I think too, what we've been trying to say here is that like, we have to give it a goal of subtype guys. We have to give it a goal. And let's be honest, while some of us are sitting here going trusted education or where it's at, go to subsea suite leaders. They probably might not have the same answer. You're like, yeah, trust is important, but I would like to generate leads. Please, please and thank you. Something measurable, something less warm and fuzzy is.

I, I can't remember because I haven't been on. I, I looked at the page recently, but like, does it, does it give zero context to what it actually does?

Does, does that say anything? And there's no link to every article.

It doesn't say. The AI will keep this in mind as it's creating content across everything for.

You in goals for your AI generator.

Yeah. In a knowledge article it says like one line. Do you have that, Liz? Like, maybe it's a line and a half.

Yeah, I could read it. It's. I could read it. It's select marketing goals such as brand awareness, engagement or more. You could select up to two marketing goals. That's what it says. But the thing is we have to explain anything but we have to take this literally. It is a marketing strategy. It is not a sales strategy. So it is meant for explicitly marketing activities. So if we look at through it at that very, very binary lens, if I get really black and white about this, it is how you define your marketing, what is it you're trying to accomplish? Depending on where an organization is in their journey, they may be more emphasizing on the brand awareness piece. But the challenge I have, and this is what I think we started to talk about at the beginning is that that shifts depending on the context. You know, I'm not always talking to all of my audience at the same time with the same tone of voice and the same goal, particularly since they're all ping ponging through their own buying journey. But we have covered a lot of ground today. I think. I know we're all. Do we feel more confused? Less confused? How are we feeling, guys?

Feeling optimistic about the future?

Max?

Him.

Yeah, you are.

Tell us why.

Yeah, it's the worst it's ever going to be. It's the worst it's ever going to be. They put it out in this sort of like clearly this like testing state to spur conversations like this, right Amongst users and people going through the beta or whatever it may be, right. And they'll fine tune it over time.

You know, one thing I'm surprised understand.

Max, you literally said I of optimistic. So you'll have to forgive me for.

Initially being like, wow, I am, I'm optimistic.

I always, I always, I always bet on HubSpot. Baby, you're never gonna hear me. Not, not bet on HubSpot.

We always bet on big sprocket over here. But Chad, what were you gonna say?

I was gonna say, you know, one of the things I know noticed that I didn't notice is like, you know, whenever anything new comes out in HubSpot, you get like 800csat happy medium sad faces and give us feedback about this thing. Right. I haven't seen that anywhere in the data sources tab, which I'm a little surprised about. You know how like oh, the new advanced filters view. How did you feel about the advanced filters? I mean, I guess maybe I'm in a lot of portals so I see it more often than you know, people who are just in less portals, right. Who are just super admin in their own. But still like I never saw, I never saw any CSAT or any feedback survey function here, which I'm again a little surprised about. I've even gotten, you know, product managers who've just like emailed me from one of those before and asked for more context. Right. Which is. I love that about HubSpot. And I know they bet on their users, and so I'm just a little surprised I haven't seen that.

Yeah, no pop up here. Which, by the way, totally not about this episode, but I wish there was a don't show me that ever again in all the portals that I'm in button.

Oh, my God. Yes.

But I don't. That's startup guides. I don't need to give you my feedback on the. If you want my feedback, you got my email. We can talk like, oh, anyway. But that's just me.

They need a. They need a button. They need a button in that onboarding flow where it says, what type of HubSpot user are you? And it's like sales person. And there's just one thing. That's the bottom that says, I'm George B. Thomas.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

GST time.

It's like.

It's like, oh, yeah, we're in gst.

No, you can't get that specific. The bottom. But the bottom button could be for many people out in the ecosystem. And it just says, I'm a sure you have. God, yeah.

One for them. And then you. And then you have a George P. Thomas button.

No HubSpot. I mean, that's. It's above HubSpot. God, actually.

Yeah. No, no, no, it's not.

Chad, to your point, a guy I'll be on. Okay, first of all, we're gonna talk about that later. George, you know that. Chad, to your point, I will say this. If I cook a big Thanksgiving meal for something and there's a side dish where it's the first time I've test driving that recipe and I'm feeling a little iffy about it. Guess who's not proactively asking anybody what they thought about that corn casserole? This girl. We're gonna focus on the turkey. We're gonna focus on the mashed potatoes. We're gonna focus on.

So you're just gonna.

Yeah.

You're gonna look at the sentiment as people are jamming that corn casserole in their mouth and then.

See, that's right. That's right. But unless you're coming up here to tell me I'm so pretty, like, let's just. Let's not have the conversation none of us want to have, which is. Everybody's uncomfortable.

I've never really seen Hustle be afraid of feedback, though.

I know the sentence.

Jamming that corn casserole. In your mouth just really made me uncomfortable.

I'm here for you, Max.

George, please, for the love of all that. Yeah, no, no, he's zooming in. George, take us home. What do you want our listeners to go home with from today's scintillating conversation?

Yeah, first of all, from the human side of marketing strategy, trust and education are table stakes. Make sure you're doing that. But when it comes to bridging that gap with HubSpot, make sure you go into AI, go into data sources, make sure you listen to the historical episodes that we've done on brand voice and tone and customer profiles and all of that good stuff. But definitely go in and at least it'll take you a second. Select two marketing goals that you want to give some context to the system around when it comes to the content and other elements that you'll be generating or using inside of HubSpot. That's my two cents. 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 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 hubheroes 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 someone's hero.