HubSpot Helpline 12/5/2025

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It's Rob, it's George, it's Casey and Kyle. Come with a problem and leave with a smile. Every Friday at 3. Come and join us as we help you with HubSpot. Open up your LinkedIn. Just make sure you call in and leave a voicemail about HubSpot. Make your Friday divine with the HubSpot helpline.

It is Friday at 3. You better tune in now. The bus is leaving. We're all on it. We've got Kyle, he's back. We've got George, we've got Casey. And somewhere lurking in the shadows is Mr. Chris Mus. Carolyn Moss is his middle name because to me.

The bus driver, I guess. There he is.

He is the bus driver.

I summoned all the rest of us just have benches.

Yeah. We were discussing buses pre show and I think Casey was left or had a bad experience with one earlier. But it is Friday in a wild week of Q4, December holiday planning, HubSpot updates, all kinds of stuff. How are we feeling today? I'll go to. Since nobody ever knows who I'm talking to, I'll go to Casey first.

I'm doing fine. After a trials and tribulations, both kids went to school on a school bus today. And hopefully we'll be coming home on a school bus today. But that still remains to be seen.

The coming back is the most important part. I would assume so, yes. Let's hope that they.

I don't know, they get, you know.

George B. Thomas. How are you?

I'm doing good, brother. It's. It's Friday. We made it through the week. We're only 20 days away from Christmas, which is going to be fun and exciting and I'm ready to help some people with HubSpot or at least have some fun and crazy conversations. So how about you, my friend?

I'm. I'm good. I. I was wondering how Kyle B. Jepsen is today. How are you, sir?

Great, I am. I. I'm crunching all the numbers on. On what the evangelist program at HubSpot accomplished in 2025. And it's. The numbers look good, but what's really exciting is I now have access thanks to HubSpot to paid version of chat GBT 5.1. And so I've been dropping literally of literally hundreds of spreadsheets into it, every like webinar I've ever run, all the, all the, everything from it, and it just like merges them up and gives me Numbers and it, it, what took me weeks last year has taken me like a couple of days. And the analysis is much better. So that's really exciting to me.

What are you analyzing exactly? We want to sit there for a minute. Like, how would the HubSpot evangelist program define success? What are you guys looking for? How would you determine it? Whether it was as successful as you wanted? Like, areas you can improve if you just dump spreadsheets? And what, what is the output or what you're looking for?

Well, it's a great question. I'm the first and currently only evangelist at, at HubSpot and I'm trying to not only justify my own existence, but try to get others brought on board with me. And so kind of the two main things I do are HubSpot tips and tricks on social and then the HubSpot admin hug weekly webinar. And so I ran like, I don't know, there were like 43 webinars for the admin hug. So I download registrations and check ins and the chat and the Q and A for each of those and merged them all together to try to show like, engagement over time. And then I got a nice tidy spreadsheet of like the most engaged members. And then I connected that to HubSpot customer data to say, like, are these enterprise customers? Are they free customers? How much MRR is represented here? And then for HubSpot tips and tricks, it was, it was more just like trying to analyze like LinkedIn data is lousy. So I do Monday morning briefing a LinkedIn Live. Really hard to get any data on how well that's going. I do a weekly newsletter also very hard. But I was able to just like screenshot each individual video stats and feed all those screenshots into ChatGPT and say, is this going up? Is it going down? Like, what's happening? And it gave me a bunch of spreadsheets I turned into pretty charts. And it's all in PowerPoint now. And I'm really happy with it.

I love this so much.

Yeah, I love it.

I like the idea that Kyle, you're like sending screenshots to ChatGPT and being like, am I doing a good job? I'm doing good.

I feel good about what I'm doing, but I need numbers to report to management. Yeah. So that's, that's what it looks like. Just today I learned Dharmesh created this thing called ImageGen AI. It's image generation specifically for like infographics and slides. And so I've told for each of These things I've told ChatGPT, you know, take all the numbers we've crunched and give me like five bullet points summarizing the most important things. Then I copy that, drop it into ImageGen AI and I'm like, hey, turn this into a slide for me. Here's HubSpot's brand colors and it gives me a slide. And then the coolest thing is you can revise it. I can be like, oh, change the header to this, or like, oh, change this caption to that. And it keeps all of it the same except the little part you're revising. And then you get branded infographics and stuff. It's. It's pretty cool.

George, I feel. I don't know if you're about to drop a bomb or if I just am misinterpreting you through the stream yard lens, but I felt like you had something to say that you, you said it was a cool idea in use case and the story was good.

But so, yeah, so there's, there's a couple things that I absolutely love. One, thanks to HubSpot, I have ChatGPT 5.1. Thank you, HubSpot. Kyle Jepsen should have the latest and greatest tools to be able to measure and create the things that he needs to create. The fact that Kyle Jepson has the unlock of using AI as an assistant is good. And just to hear that my friend, my pal, my buddy, is on this road of augmenting himself and saving time that he can spend with the family that he loves and not spend weeks, weeks doing numbers, but maybe hours or minutes doing numbers, like, it just brings great joy to my heart to hear that.

Well, and it's great too. And, and George, this is a very. I've actually been thinking about you as I've been, as I've been doing this because, because like all the AI stuff that's happening, right, we, we even have this term AI slop, right? Like, we are content creators and people ask me like, oh, is AI going to script stuff? Oh, is AI going to make your videos? And no, the answer is, I don't script anything. It's all unscripted. And I like being on camera. I'm not gonna. And so, like, the question of how can AI make me better at my job as a content creator has been a little tricky for me. But now just suddenly I'm realizing, oh, all the other stuff, all the stuff that's not content creation, but that I have to do to justify my ability to be a content creator. That's what I can have AI do. And it does it way better and way faster than I can. And then I can take that and like here at the end of the year, last year, it was all just like spreadsheet purgatory. Just like, why is my vlookup not working right? And then I had to throw the slides together really quick. Now it's. I've got the data and I am making just really incredible slides that are just beautiful and have fun animations and like, I'm enjoying this. Right? I'm getting to do what I'm good at, the stuff I love. And AI does all the grunt work and that now. Now I get it. Now I understand how I can still be human and AI.

Yes. Can we just take a moment? Just one moment. Oh, I love it. I love it.

That's where I was going to go. Which was. So you're saying you can now show up here and on other morning shit like that. It doesn't. What is the catchphrase? It's not going to replace. It'll augment. But it almost lets you have a preference on which parts of the job you prefer to do the most and then focus on those and eliminate the stuff that, you know. Last year, to your point, four weeks on spreadsheets is the entire month, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, and I mean, I'm just. Maybe I'm just slow. But like, I have this doc that I've been maintaining for the last three or four years. It's just called if I had an intern. Right? And anytime I find myself doing something I don't like, I put it in there. And I created this document years ago with the intention of if I ever have hiring power, this is what I will propose. Right? And I just realized like six weeks ago. Wait a minute. That's what AI is for, right? Like, I may never be able to justify the budget for an intern just for me. Like, Kyle's personal assistant is not a thing HubSpot's going to invest in. But chat GPT 5.1 sure is something they're going to invest in. And so hooray.

Yeah. I have not why we're here, but I can't wait till you unlock the fact that you have multiple assistants. Yeah, like, because not like, I literally showed a buddy of mine, he's a like a creative director designer guy, and we spent like an hour on a call and I was like, so this is my creative designer project. This is my writer project. This is my. And I showed him like seven projects that have Specific tasks. And I showed him too, like, this is how I do this. And then I hand that to this and do this to which then I hand it to this project and do this. He's like, it's like an agency. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. Of assistance. Anyway, it's so good.

And Chris, Carolyn is whispering in my ear here, hiring power, more evangelists. Right? So yeah, instead of me now campaigning, hey, can I have some sort of administrative assistant to do all this work that no human would ever enjoy doing? Right. I can now say, hey, look at all that evangelism is accomplishing with one evangelist. Instead of buying, hiring an assistant or an intern or something, can we, can we give someone else the opportunity to create content and build community the way I am? Right. And accelerate the thing that actually benefits people and lets people connect to people. Like, and it's really exciting.

I see. And I love hearing that as, as somebody who was crowned by Remington Beg back when I worked at Impulse Creative as the inbound evangelist, the fact Kyle Jepsen could hire more evangelists in the future is such the right path in an AI powered, but should be human powered world that we're headed into more humans doing more good things on. I will always sign up for that.

Yeah. And I mean also just like I, I hear there's sort of a, a phrase I hear around sometimes that, that companies and individuals tend to be data rich but insight poor. Right. Like I as one evangelist produce a mess of spreadsheets and screenshots across the different platforms I'm working with. Right? You have two evangelists now. You have two messes of spreadsheets and screenshots and, and nobody knows if anything's working. Right. But to have AI just connect all that together and say, hey, here's what's working. Hey, here's what needs to be improved. Hey, next time you hire an evangelist, maybe have them focus on these things or set these expectations. That's incredible.

Well, that's where I was going to go next. So, Chris, you can thwart me back into the Reddit question, which is a good one by the way. I can read that. But I had two things. George, Casey, Kyle, you specifically can answer this one first. First angle, I have a seven year old, he likes math a lot. Subtraction is not his favorite. So I don't know if you know this or not, but if you subtract, let's say you know, 65 minus 37 and you get whatever that is, 28. I'm not very good at math either. So he, you know, he gets it on.

Why did you pick a heart?

Well, look, I mean the point, what I'm getting at is like to be able to check your work, you just add whatever that is to the number, right? You can go back and check. I would be, maybe I'm in the minority here, but I would be concerned or at least curious how AI checked its work. I mean with all of the documents and all the spreadsheets and all of that that you're adding in, is there any mechanism to ensure that it is doing what it's supposed to do and deriving the correct insights from the uploaded data?

I think that's a really good question. That is something I want to explore. But the thing I've been realizing also is like what I did last year when I was doing all this manually, certainly there were a host of human errors, just like copy pasta and typos as I'm trying to make all this stuff work and it's just too massive. There was no way for me to check it. I had no time. Right now that it goes much faster there, there are opportunities, right? Like Maybe I feed ChatGPT's findings into some other AI, or maybe I ask it, how did you arrive at this? Or hey, I say show your work. You know, this is, that, that is maybe 20 year iteration on all this.

Can I dive in here for a second on this?

Yeah.

Because Rob, here's where my brain went when you asked that question is like, why are we asking that question? Like, there's a thousand Neil Patels in the box that you're talking to. There's a 10,000 Gary Vees, there's, there's 20,000 Albert Einsteins in the box that you're talking to. And so like when I think about what Kyle's doing, it's like, let me summon the things that I need. So for instance, earlier this morning, before I even started on psychic strategies work, I was working on a passion project not to be named right now that will be named maybe in about two weeks. And I literally was, I was literally like, I need you to be a content strategist, a web developer and a copywriter who happens to be very passionate about faith based leaders. Okay? Now what I'm going to do is give you all of these pages of the website. I want you to bring in the information, I want you to start to think about how these all align. Now I want to show you these things too. And now what I want you to do is give me a SWOT analysis of everything that we've covered and why you're actually telling me these things now. I summoned who I needed and I said what I wanted, and now you can read through that stuff and I'm telling you, like, oh, my God. Anyway, it's gold. It's gold. Like, have we all have Gemini in our Chrome browsers? I want to know if anybody has been like me where you go to a website and you ask Gemini, how could we make this website page better? Because I've done it. And it'll tell you based on Google Eat. You could ba ba, ba ba. And the user experience could be like, you could literally be using Gemini to do a website audit for somebody who wants you to do a website audit and just extrapolate that into a document and use your human brain to add to it. Like, that's what I. I hope people understand. Like, we're fundamentally in a different place of how we should be asking and doing. By the way, don't make me bring Breeze assistance into this conversation, because you could do this junk in HubSpot too. So anyway, yeah, I mean, go ahead, Casey.

I spoke today to my friend Trish. We did a live where I was showing her how I use call transcripts to update HubSpot CRM and create proposals, like, within. I mean, it took me less than 15 minutes to do both of those things by just pasting a call transcript in. But I was quoting you, George, because you have said it's the AI assistant and you should be treating it the way you would treat an assistant, an intern. Like, you can change. You can and should check their work. Still, like, when I'm writing the proposals, sometimes, sometimes it hallucinates things, sometimes it makes pricing. That is not what I've agreed to. And Chris has to look at my proposals and say, why did you tell people we would do that? You know, but just like, just like anyone, it still needs checking. I mean, Kyle's talking about hundreds of spreadsheets and a lot of data, but I still think, like, when I've done, I haven't done it quite to the scale it sounds like Kyle's doing. But when I haven't analyzed data, I do spot check the numbers. And there's been times where I had it reviewing, like an AB test and email, and it just got a version A and version B, like, mixed up halfway through the analysis. And then everything kind of got really lost. Um, so I all that just to say it's your AI assistant, and like any of your colleagues, they. It requires some checking of the work and I. But I just think that's part of the workflow.

Well, I think that's part of what George has. I mean, and this may accidentally summon Chris, but I think that's part of what he's talking about with having different functions, different, different versions to have certain, certain roles within that, much like an assembly line. Right. Like, there's a lot of power in being able to save time and be efficient and then come back as an editor or QA person to just ensure that what you're asking it to do and the task carried out is there. Right? For whether it's an AB test that's flipped, like, that's pretty easy. But if something in the assembly line completely breaks or is errant, like, that requires maintenance, it requires retraining and going in and fixing that so that future outputs are what you want from those. And that was more of the question. The other part of this, and we can hop into the Reddit bag is. And you can share these or not, but what type of insights, like, I'd be interested to hear after all of that and plugging in four weeks worth of spreadsheets, like, what do you mind sharing what it told you to do next year? Or like, what was working, what's not working? What kind of suggestions for improvement did it have for you?

Well, most of the insights I'm having so far are just my, my intuitions about who my audience is, are. Is wrong.

Right?

Like, I, I have always assumed the folks coming to the admin hug, for instance, are primarily pro users. That is based mostly on the fact that anytime we show an Enterprise only feature, somebody in the chat is like, ma, I'm a pro user. Why are we talking about enterprise? Right. According to the data we have, it's like 75% enterprise showing up on, on a regular basis. Right? And like, that was shocking to me. And I was like, this is, this is a point where I've got to check it, right? It's got to be wrong. And so this last Tuesday, I go to the admin hug, I'm like, hey, before we get started, just real quick, how many of you are Enterprise? And like, not everyone there hopped into the chat and told me, but most folks who did were Enterprise. There were like two or three people who were pro, but it was just like, enterprise, Enterprise. I'm on Enterprise. Me. Hi, I'm on Enterprise. It's just like, all right, my assumptions were wrong. I've been operating on assumptions here. They were not true. You know, and so those kinds of.

Things are just helpful yeah, that's really interesting. I mean like the squeaky wheel kind of thing and like. Yeah, it you hear from one person and you just assume like that's true more broadly than it is.

Yeah, very cool.

Figured I'd change my glasses.

I'm holding my tongue because I so want to make a comment about assumptions, but. Rob, Go ahead, go ahead, you can make the comment.

I can't see right now. These glasses, by the way, are awesome, but the pupil spacing is like a little bit too wide. So this always makes me kind of have a little bit of cross eyedness for a minute. Yeah, I mean, real quick thing, I don't know if this is what you're gonna say, George. I think the, I think that would be the primary signal to go and do QA or check. Like if your assumptions are challenged, that's, that's probably the best way to go back and immediately do a little bit of checking your work to see if, you know, if that lines up. Here we go. Got one for you. I'll, I'll read this and then kick it to the, to the squad. Joined a small company and HubSpot is a mess. I can hear George right now. Hello, everyone. I recently joined a small nursery group as an operations manager and I'm working with the CEO and COO to prepare the business for expansion. However, here's where it gets weird. Our HubSpot is an absolute mess and I'm not sure where to start with cleaning it up. We have almost thousand contact properties and 75% of them have no data, aren't used, or are duplicates. Our website is really old. We have six subdomains and only use one of them and have well over 1500 URL redirects with only 100 having been used this year. This is a huge project and I have very limited experience with HubSpot, so I'm wondering, would it be better to start fresh or is there anywhere that I can find good frameworks for organizing and sorting everything? I'm a little overwhelmed and would love any tips, at least for how I should start attacking this. Thanks.

First, you should start with the humans.

We learned that.

Good job, Casey.

All right. She learned.

We all learned.

Chris sent me that clip. I wasn't here, but I, I, I saw the video.

That is what we'll do first.

Yeah, my dang mind that day. Kyle.

Yeah, you missed out on probably the funniest, you know, two or three minutes of, of the show ever because George lost it. But yeah, start with humans. Casey, what's next? They only ask about starting. So technically you got the question.

I, I can go next. So she said humans.

Yes.

So here's, here's a fundamental principle of Life or HubSpot. Garbage in, garbage out. So you got to look at those properties and you got to figure out when the cat. When the data that you need to capture is getting captured, is it getting captured in the right place so that people can start to do things downstream stream? So clean up the properties. What don't you need? What do you need? By the way, you said thousands of properties didn't even freak me out because HubSpot ships with a butt ton of properties. So I would ask you, how many are HubSpot properties? How many are custom properties? How many are custom properties that are created by deactivated users? Like these are some, these are some levers you should start to kind of think about. Yeah, that's step two and who wants to do step three?

I was going to hop in and say this person has definitely done some research, right? They're throwing around percentages like 75% of properties are not used or duplicates or have. And, and like there are 1500 redirects. Like they, they have, they have scoped out the problem pretty well. But what I, what I didn't hear in the post was their goals. Like, what is this company trying to do? What are they using HubSpot for? What is the most important thing? Right. Like I could imagine if, if they were brought on and if this company, like their website is not performing well and they really want to optimize it. Well, then yeah, let's, let's look at those subdomains, let's look at those redirects, let's start there. But if the website, no, it's actually functioning fine, it's a mess on the back end, but it's giving us what we need. What we really want is to be able to clean up our contact database so we can do some targeted email sends. Well now, yeah, let's, let's look at properties, let's start segmenting. Let's. But like until you know the, the specific thing you're trying to accomplish and, and it, I mean, certainly you're trying to accomplish lots of things, but like the thing you want to accomplish by the end of the year, right? What, what, what would be hooray, we did it in 2025. Right? Like, okay, now let's work backwards from that. What are the steps? What data do we need? What's holding us back? And just focus on the stuff that Will help you get there.

Yeah, I. A couple months ago, I got like, my husband was making fun of me because I kept using the term, you can't boil the ocean. Like, every day I'd refer to something and say that, but I feel like. I feel like that's really true here. You can't boil the ocean. And that's what I think when I say start with the humans is figuring that out, Kyle. Like, what is. Yeah, what is the thing we care about today? I, along with George. None of these numbers scare me. But this is someone who has said they're new to. Newer to HubSpot. They don't have a ton of experience. So I'm sure those numbers feel really big and those are large numbers that would be really difficult subtraction if you were subtracting there. So I think you're spot on, Kyle. Like, you just need to figure out one of the problems that is causing the most heartache for whatever you're trying to accomplish in HubSpot and start just chipping away at that. I go into a lot of portals and I see a lot of duplicate properties. You know, job title, use this one. Job title, clean job title, don't use this one. Stuff like that comes up in portals all the time. But I think it's really just important that you figure out what are those. Are those actually causing problems or are you not really dealing with job titles at all because you're B2C and you don't really care what the person's job title is?

Speaking of my alarm just going off the only thing, Kyle, to your point, as far as goals that were mentioned, join a small nursery group as an operation, work to prepare the business for expansion. So as far as goals that was kind of mentioned, the only other part that wasn't really included in scope was a time component like a Runway or when. You know, when is this expect. When does this need to happen? And I think putting that in would evaluate if you. What about budget? Do you have it? Do you need to have something? I think somebody mentioned by the end of the year, which I think is not realistic, but having some sort of time frame would allow. Yeah, how do you eat an elephant? There you go.

Oh, do you see who that is? Anyway, okay, so, so question, question, question, question. I need to summon somebody. So first of all, let me be that guy, this human from the Reddit bag. If you also haven't gone into your portal, gone into the right hand side navigation, gone down to HubSpot Academy and typed in data cleanliness to see, you know, videos like keeping your HubSpot data clean or managing your business data in HubSpot or deduplicating your data in HubSpot. Oh, that's Kyle Jepson on that thumbnail. If you haven't done any of those things like there's this level of educating to be a master, but you have to be a sensei first to get to the things that, that you're trying to do. Now I summoned Chris because Chris, I'm curious if there's anything around this educationally wise or tool wise on value first to help this human actually with data model and stuff like that.

Thank you for, for summoning me. I'm having trouble with all of these answers that everybody on this show is giving right now.

Can't win.

And maybe this is a phrase that can work. I might not say it right, but you might not be able to boil the ocean, but as long as you're playing in the bay, you're not going to impact the ocean at all. Right. And so I'm trying to and having some success with can we create an outcome that can be a quick win and not like sacrifice the long term? And it's also somewhat measurable and somewhat agreeable because I got to do emails over here is often counter to I need to help our customers over here. Right. And you might think that you can prioritize one over the other, but at the end of the day it's going to be very challenging to do that and it just doesn't happen in practice. So we see these things over and over. I picked this one even though we did it two weeks ago or three weeks ago because you know, as long as this keeps happening every day, we need to keep talking about it like every day or else it's not going to go away. Something interesting is HubSpot markets. One of the main value props is unified customer view. Right. It does not get sold or implemented from that perspective. It's always find the one thing. Let's start chipping away. Let's start like quick wins, blah blah, blah. Right. And then we never. And HubSpot is always the quick wins platform at that point and it's never big picture. And what I'm having success with, especially with leaders who are likely to delegate HubSpot to somebody else and like that starts the, that starts the problem in my opinion. But if you're working with the CEO and a coo, you prepare the business for expansion. So that's the goal. Without any additional information, can we agree that Unified customer view is a good example, is a good thing for the business. Right. Pretty easy to get everybody to say yes, that. Do we agree that we have 100% control over whether that exists or not for us? I think that's that needs to be a yes. And if it's not an immediate yes, that's where some education comes in. Is it in? Is it a yes or no? I think it is. Like, does it exist? Like, can somebody look at this view and say everything I expect to be there is there. I trust it. So we have a unified view. If the answer is if the answer is no. And I heard about like I saw this customer over on LinkedIn say this about our product the other day and I would like it to be in this view. Okay, then we don't have it. And now you have a conversation that's focused on a very objective like outcome that changes the dynamic of should we do this in HubSpot or not, who's going to fix it, who's going to be responsible for it and moves towards okay, we've all agreed that this outcome is what we need and we might not be able to get there right away, but we can have much more productive conversations. That's not just activities getting out the door while making progress towards this North Star of unified customer view. So that would be. That's an approach that I'm like having success at the level of being able to reel leaders back in who are about to opt out of the entire process because that kind of outcome and goal needs to come from the leader. Right. Because it's a lot of change management to do after that.

So that's all I'd say going for the analogies in the chat, I just want to like and I know Chris, you don't like the term quick win, period. But I think when I read this specific Reddit comment where I a piece where I think a quick win could be really helpful is this person has said they don't have a lot of HubSpot experience. They're fairly new and I think that there's value for that person in building competence in HubSpot.

I enjoy being the the guy to ask these types of questions. So here you go. What I got from that almost sounded like start with the customer. Like maybe customer interviews. Like what do you hate most about the experience with our bit? The CRM is a customer relationship management tool anyway and there's a way to almost reverse engineers cliche but say like, hey Chris, you're a customer. You have been for whatever we're about to prepare for expansion. What do you hate most about your interaction with us? Oh well, billing sucks, whatever that is. And then take that feedback and use that to your point. A unified customer view to, to make the experience with your, the team interacting with customers smoother, you know, more frictionless, whatever that is. Is that kind of what you're saying? And am I close to the, where you're, where you're saying to also start, start with humans? Yes, but some of those humans can be the customers using, you know, or that are involved with your business. Is that part of what you're saying or no?

I think we usually have data already from those customers that exist in our systems. And that's where before I would go there and this is the part of where is it under our control or not? Like getting customers on the phone and getting their feedback. Like that's where you start to create giant projects where people are like, no, no, that's going to take forever. But can we get our sales team together? Can we get our service team together? Like that is a leader. Leaders should have control over whether that happens or not. And can we all look at this contact record for an hour and talk about which data matters to us? Like what does unified customer view even mean? Because to get to the quick win of de duping or deleting stuff or 3/4 of the properties have no data, it's like, okay, we're going to delete some, but then who's in charge of deleting and who's going to get upset if we delete the thing that they plan to use? And to avoid those kind of train wreck scenarios, if you can align unified customer view first, it becomes a much more productive activity to find those kinds of quick wins. Right. That still lead towards the, the ultimate goal.

And they, they can't be quick wins. You know, like if you're making, if you're doing some record customization or if you're making some save views or you're doing some of these core things, you can build those and then you can iterate on them. You can show them to the teams who are going to use them or the leaders they roll up to. My kids are home now. And, and you can say what's missing? Right? Like hey, what were you hoping would be here? Or I tried to put this thing here and it's not there. Where would we get that from? Right. And I think for a person like this particular, it sounds like maybe they're new to the company as well as being new To HubSpot, they have immense power in playing the new guy card, right? Like, hey, I don't, I'm not here to tell you how to do your job. It just seems to me like you might want to be able to see this person's telephone number and we don't have it. Where would that come from? How would we even get it right? And that is, that is that small iterative process can get you to the big, happy, ideal unified platform if you start at a point like that.

I mean, I like the idea of sitting down in front of a contact record for an hour and asking those types of questions. I mean, George Casey can speak on that. But like quick wins for who? The customers or the team? And I think there's a way to achieve both, right? If the experience or the relationship that doesn't facilitate something that's easy, something that you desire to, to recur. Right? Like the customer owns revenue and, and teams own the recurring part. Right? So again, asking, as somebody that is trying to make sense of that, when you say quick wins, are you only talking about the teams using the CRM? Are you talking about, this would be such a much better experience for our clientele, our customers. We should do this. If everything was, if you called right or interacted with me and I had your name wrong, didn't know your number, contact anything about like any of that, any of the history, that would not be a good experience. And so there's a way to almost have the quick win, so serve both the customer and the teams that are using the tool. I think that's what I got from sitting down and looking at the contact record for an hour and figuring out what all is needed for a unified customer view.

I, I think you're right. I mean, I think that I had a client recently in a similar situation, actually a new hire in charge of HubSpot. She called me and she was like, hey, I don't even know which of these properties make sense. I think there's duplicate, blah, blah, blah, all the whole thing. And actually the first thing we did was we customized the records to show the data that was like that. We talked to the sale, we had a call with the CEO, we had a call with the sales rep. Not like even a ton of calls. This wasn't a huge undertaking of the whole organization, but we called a couple of key people that use HubSpot and figured out what properties they were looking for. And then we just customized the record so that those properties were visible. And that was kind of our first step. Of like, figuring out which properties matter. Because after that, then we're like, okay, these are the properties people are looking at. These are the properties we need to keep. Do we have any duplicates of those? And things like that. So I think like, when we talk, when talking about like the road to the unified customer view, I think that makes it. That's like a step you can take. And you can make that step in one day even, like you can call those people in one day and customize a record. And then you just feel a little bit more confident in what you, what you have and what you know.

We got pretty deep. That's what happens when Chris comes in after he's been summoned.

Something. Honestly, the most interesting word in the, in the Reddit post, which is a word we have not talked about yet, but the one I find most interesting is nursery, right? Like, here is a world I know almost nothing about. I, There are nurseries not far from me, right? That big greenhouses, lots of trees and stuff. And I sort of imagine if I want, if I decide I want to plant a blueberry bush in my front yard, I could drive over there in my minivan, pick out a bush, put it, bring it home. But I can imagine there's probably like a B2B aspect to it also, right? Like landscaping companies and contractors and things might be buying stuff on a regular basis. But if this is all, if their business is primarily, people come in, we sell them things, we shake hands, we say goodbye. How customer information gets into the CRM in the first place? Very interesting question to me. Now maybe maybe they mentioned they have a website, maybe they're selling stuff online and maybe that trickles through, right? Or if there is this B2B aspect, maybe, maybe that is how it ends up in their CRM. But if it's just like purely retail B2C in person sales process, like, I would be fascinated to know how the data gets into CRM, what they use the CRM for and what it needs to record. Wait, because that is not interesting.

Am I the only one that hears your kids in the background and thought nursery was for babies?

I thought we were talking about babies here. I didn't know we were talking about trees. Like, I thought this was like, you know, five fingers, ten toed properties. Like.

Yeah, no. Okay, well it, it same, same thing. Okay, let's imagine it's a daycare sort of situation. I have no idea what a HubSpot for daycare looks like, right? Like, do you have a toddler object and a marriage and associations and like how are you? Like are there HIPAA requirements? You're not doing healthcare stuff. But still, like, I'm sure there's privacy stuff. Like there are just a host of questions that like if we came up with a perfect solution for the place down the street, for me that sells blueberry bushes, it would probably not apply at all to the daycare center down the street. Right. And like we, we really need to deeply understand not just the, the business and their customers, to Rob's point, but like the industry and what they're even, what a CRM even means in that context. Because like for me as a guy who works at a software company, yeah, you know, website traffic, forms, leads, social media, email calls, all that stuff. Like you can have a highly connected in real time and the customers are providing it maybe without even having to think about it. But if I think about the first job I had as a, as a janitor at a mom and pop run retail office supply store that didn't even have a website, like I don't know what CRM means in that context. Right. And so it's different.

George D. Thomas has been rubbing off on me and, and Chris as well. I just asked basically that like a list of questions that would directly impact the overall customer experience. The very first. So number two is exactly what Chris said. Like what would you ask if you were starting this kind of just prompted our buddy Claude. Number two was conversation context across channels when a customer emailed. Like can your team see everything and make every interaction in one spot? So unified customer view, number one was reducing response friction. What are you doing to eliminate the time between a customer reaching out and a human seeing it. So like that type of stuff, that's less proper maybe. I mean it obviously involves properties and how the system is configured, but that should be the goal in mind. It's like the foundation. How can we serve customers more quickly? There's probably a bunch of ways. All right, let's start there with that question in mind. Right. I'm, I'm trying to get some Chris Carolyn validation for once. And I was pretty close.

I mean those two are so tightly knit because it doesn't matter if you can see the thing if you don't know how to act on it.

Correct.

Right. And that's for the unified view. And the beauty of this is that what Kyle just described, if you can get agreement on the. Every single business benefits from a unified customer view. Like no matter what business you're in. Right. And we, so most of the people I've Seen talk about things like this, about the complexity of the buyer journey and like, as soon as you get into like, I think hiding behind every business is different. Like that's why we haven't been able to find our way out of, out of these messes. Right. Because at the end of the day, the humans that businesses are selling to you are not different. They want to be heard, they want to be seen, they want to be understood and they want their expectations met. Like, no matter the business context, you can as soon as you flip the CRM to support that and not just the names of your internal processes, all of a sudden we get to standardize these conversations in a way where it doesn't turn into he said, she said immediately. Because even the same business in the same vertical, you see leaders. Well, that's not going to work for us. We do it this other way. Right. And that's where if you can get this first. Yes. Of okay, yeah. Unified customer view. Like that would be good. It becomes much easier to hold people accountable, to be like, well, why are we doing that? That doesn't, doesn't lead to this. Right. So I love those first few options that you share.

What he means if Rob, you're doing a good job.

Yeah.

Cue the hallelujah Hallelujah music. Perfect. And then he's off again. I had to take off the orange glasses because I didn't feel like I deserved them after he came in here and, and gave feedback to all of us.

Put the smack down.

Put the smack down on us.

He gave the elbow off the third, third row. Bam.

There is another one. Chris did not send this, but it's in the same vein and I think a lot of the. The response would be the same. By the way, if you're watching this now, the number is flashing across the screen. We would love to answer voicemail questions, particularly with tons of context. So the more context you can leave in the voicemail and the more specific, the better.

That's what we've learned this year is context.

Context. Context matters. Yeah, I could summarize this one, but this is another one from Reddit on small business. Not sure if HubSpot was the right move. Small business 60 employees. B2B service based sales team consists of myself and one dedicated guy. In addition to sales. I directly manage another division. After six months, bought one sales hub Proceed for myself. For the most part I haven't made the time to figure it out. I think that's going to be important later. So I don't fault HubSpot for me not using it. I've hardly used the platform, but have since hired a guy to solely focus on sales. My initial hopes for the platform were to use it to track leads, follow up, maybe an occasional marketing campaign. It goes into the sales model. Our product is pretty easy sell once we get in contact with the right person. So the cycle ideally runs pretty quick. The hardest thing is getting in front of the right people. Once a customer is acquired, we rarely lose them. We don't need something sophisticated continually tracking deals and quotes. My gut says that HubSpot is too much of a tool for a simple sales process. We really just need lead and follow up tracking for three people.

Thoughts?

HubSpot is what you make it. So if you need a simple process, then build a simple process. I'm stuck back in part of what you read as the marketer in the room or a marketer in the room. The occasional marketing campaign. I was like ah, what like what is happening? What do you mean occasional marketing campaign? No, this is. And we kind of talked about this and I just kept my mouth shut earlier. Like this is where I, I'm passionate about like wrapping HubSpot around your business and literally like it is about customization, it is about what, what process for the people that you build on the platform. And so what what I hear and have heard historically, that sounds like this is. It sounds like overwhelm to which I go, well, how much time have you spent in academy? How much time have you spent playing? By the way? They literally wrote I haven't spent the time needed. So like it's overwhelmed based on unknowing of the way to make it simple for the people to actually be able to rock it out and track the things that you're trying to track. Just my take, just, just my take.

Sorry, there's lots of kid noise over on my end. Did they say what, what tier of HubSpot they're on or they just say.

HubSpot after 6 months bought one sales hub proceed from us, bro.

Okay. Yeah, I mean it's like HubSpot doesn't start at pro, you know, like starter is all right, freeze pretty good. Like if you are legitimately just three people and it sounds like maybe haven't had any sort of CRM solution. Maybe like I can totally understand that going from we don't have a CRM and we certainly don't have a recurring cost for a CRM2 we have the monthly price of whatever sales proceed is these days and we're not getting any value out of it. And we're a small business. How can we afford that? That. That may. You may have jumped into too much too fast. Right? Like, you could. You could reel that back. You could be on Starter. You could be on. You could be on. On free. Or like, there's this new smart CRM sku. Maybe you don't need Sales Pro. Maybe you need like CRM Pro and like it. I don't know. There. There could be just a package misalignment. Right. And especially if you just want to get your feet wet with like, what's it like to have deals? What's it like to be able to report on this stuff? You can do that in the free version of HubSpot and figure out if you have the process needed to implement it. Or do you need to figure out what your process is or. Or whatever.

It did sound more like overwhelmed than. I didn't see the word budget in here. Like, you could probably deduce that from the context, but it didn't really flat out say, like, I'm paying too much and maybe. Is there a cheaper. It didn't say anything like that. I think you're. I think you're pretty spot on. Oh, go ahead.

I went through the comments and in fact, he. The original poster says, at some point, like, budget is not like my main concern. I'm just worried about having the right tools. So then that just goes back. You know, it's as complicated as you want to make it.

Chalk another one up for I'm on a roll today with my deductions. Yeah. I mean, if it's. If it's a simple sales process. Right. Shouldn't you just use the tool in a simple, like a simple way? To George's point, you can wrap it around the business, but if the business is simple, it doesn't require you to build an insane amount of stuff to support something that is currently simple. Right. But it does go ahead.

Sorry. Like, listen, I'll be very vulnerable here for a moment. I pay for a lot of HubSpot. I pay for a lot of HubSpot because I want to be able to go and look at a lot of it before I go into a client's portal. I personally use as little as possible for the processes to work. Can I have a meeting scheduled? Can I build a quote? Can I send an invoice and get paid? And can I have the humans in my organization find their information that they need in it?

Cool.

Cool.

We're good.

We're Gucci. Like, that's the thing. Like, HubSpot would want you to have great uses usage metrics because you're sticky. Yo, I'm sticky as all get out because you're my invoice machine, you're my meeting scheduler machine. I don't need you to necessarily be my, I'm not going to name any tools because I don't want to get hate mail, but I don't, I don't need you to do like this and that in the, in the portal. I just need you to do these things right. So again, some people might go, yeah, George, you're stupid. Why are you paying for all that? Well, because I need it for other reasons, educationally and testing wise, but not necessarily for our internal processes.

You don't have to drive a Ferrari like a Ferrari. Is that, is that Devin by the way?

I think it is, yeah.

It's my dog Devin. I don't lose any sleep, by the way. I lose no sleep knowing that I use the 20% or 30% that I need to use. None.

Well, and I think, I mean the, the thing that's interesting about you saying that George, is, is, you know, HubSpot. Far better than the average HubSpot. Far better than the average HubSpot. Right. You know really well what is in there, what it can do and what you don't need, right? Whereas if you're brand new to HubSpot and you're hopping in, you have a pro seat, you're like, oh, workflow. Sound fun? That sounds fun. Oh, playbook. Should I create a playbook? Oh, do I need to build this custom report? Oh, do I need to do this bit of automation? Oh wow, I can. And, and it just like an occasional marketing campaign. Well let's, let's get started with these sticky notes in Marketing Studio, right? And it's just like blah, blah, blah. How about that? Back up, right? Like yeah, what are you actually trying to do? You're just trying to send some emails, make some phone calls, generate a deal, track your revenue, your close rate. Like, okay, let's focus on just those core parts of the platform. Don't let any of the shiny things appeal to you. But now if you find like, oh, we are doing this in this way, it would be really helpful if we could automate this other thing on top of it. Ah, now we have a need. Now we can go explore workflows, right? But I think getting down to those most basic core components, especially as a beginner because they're going to be the foundation of everything else.

I really think this person just needs like 30 minutes, 15 minutes even maybe with someone that like can hear what they're doing and show them in HubSpot where those things are. Because I think it can be really simple. I think they're just getting overwhelmed with like the, the whole, the whole thing when really if they don't need the whole thing then that's fine. That doesn't mean has to. It doesn't mean it has to be everything. If you don't need that right now.

Well right now is, I mean they said once we get a customer we rarely ever lose them. So even if growth goals, you can do that by in our like net revenue retention of not having churn and not losing people. So maybe growth is the goal but maybe they do it in a different way. George B. Thomas taught me you need to learn how to learn. So some of this sounds like people like if, if this person isn't interested in, in at least having some initial view of, of how to, how to. How to do what Kyle did and be able to do more of what they enjoy and are better at with some automations or with some structure, then you know, it'll be a more difficult conversation because being open minded to, to any sort of growth begets complexity. And I think this to me sounds like I am dreading stuff that isn't even on the horizon yet. Whereas you know, to Casey's point, 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes of hey, you know, you could just do these two or three things and make your life a whole hell of a lot easier. Are you interested in that again specifically because of the budget thing? Good stuff. Chris, how are we doing on time?

I think it's time to wrap.

I just, I just kind of wanted you to come back to see how enthused you are when you come back on, on screen earlier it was understood because you were mad at me or somebody but. But now you're not you.

Rob, you were doing a great job. Rob. It was the rest of us.

I did a great job after like retroactively did a good job.

We're all doing great jobs. We're showing up trying to help you with HubSpot and hopefully somehow this gets out into the ether that it is just a few minutes of your time with somebody who knows what's up to really focus you past all of the bells and whistles and properties and pipelines and all that stuff. Like it's okay for a unified view to be like 10 properties and nothing else. Right? It's again like you guys have been saying, get in there. Here's a contact record. What do you need to do to sell stuff?

Yeah, I want to give both Reddit bags from today a link to my 30 minute free coaching for December.

There you go.

Go do it. Go hop on Reddit.

That'll get it done.

Isn't that not. Isn't that frowned upon on Reddit? I thought like self promotion was. I'm not a Redditor.

I'll hop on and share your link.

If the value comes first, you can get. You can do stuff like that.

Yeah, I would say that's less self promotion and more. Didn't you ask for help? I mean, what. Here it is. This is not a checkout link, it's a meeting link. Anyway, we want to thank everybody for joining us on this Friday on the HubSpot helpline. Shout out to Devin. What's his name on here? Diesel. Big Diesel. It's good to see you, buddy. That's what we're trying to do.

Seven Bellamy, the one and only Devin Bellamy.

Yeah.

Good to see you, my dude.

Hey, Devin.

Hey, man. Well, we say hey to Devin and everybody else we say goodbye to. We wish you a great weekend, Happy Friday and go be human. See you next week.

Yes, sir. Hello, you reached the HubSpot Helpline.

Help behind Helpline Helpline.

It's Rob, it's George, it's Casey and Kyle. Come with a problem and leave with a smile every Friday at 3. Come and join us as we help you with HubSpot. Open up your LinkedIn. Just make sure you call in and leave a voicemail about HubSpot. Make your Friday divine with the HubSpot. That helpline.