HubSpot Helpline LIVE #hubspot
George B. Thomas, Rob, Casey, and Chris answer live HubSpot questions on customizing deal terminology, developer advice, pricing, and CRM portal audits. An informal conversation focused on practical usage and community problems.
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Helpline, helpline, 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 Helpline.
Welcome back to the HubSpot Helpline. Must be Friday at 3 and you're joining us as we help you with HubSpot. Thought I could sing that part. I did not warm up enough for that. Chris. George Casey, as I'm always joined with. We have joined by, sorry, Chris, Mr. Profoundly Pro 4000. We also have Ms. Casey, greyhound of the helpline, Hawkins. And we have George needs, no introduction whatsoever. B. Thomas. The B stands for best in the game. Been doing it since back in the day. That's. There's a lot of B words that could go there with George B. Freaking Thomas. How are we feeling on this Friday, guys? There's less than three weeks until we arrive in San Francisco for inbound 2025.
I'm excited. I'm excited.
I am feeling good. I have some stuff on my schedule now as of this week. Got to do some reservations. Got in to one of George's sessions. Excited to hear what George is bringing to the table to the stage.
I thought you were gonna go over a run through of what you were presenting today. That's not the case.
Oh, is that the case? Yeah. Here's. Can I give everybody the God's honest truth?
Give the people what they want, which is the truth, George.
Yeah, I usually don't know what I'm gonna say until after I get off the stage. Like, don't get me wrong, I built an entire presentation. I have, like, the words that I want to say. I have the concept of where we're going. I know my takeoff, my landings. But then I get off stage and I go, well, where did that come from? Because stuff just starts coming out, like, in between the parts that I planned. And usually, by the way, those are the magical parts that people, like, tweet out or put on. LinkedIn is like, I didn't even know I was gonna say that until five minutes ago. So we'll see.
Is that because of anything, like, the audience energy? I mean, I don't want to get, like, weird, but is it because of you're leaving space for that intentionally so that you'll just know what to say at the time. Is it because of people reacting live to it? Is it. I mean, why do you think that is?
I think there's a couple things. I think, one, I think it's because everything changes so quickly, and, like, I might hear something at inbound the day before the session before, and all of a sudden, like, that tweaks my brain in a way. And so when I hit a certain point, I remember that and I connect it and I roll with it. I think, too, there's sometimes there's audience energy. Because if all of a sudden, like, I've kind of got a point where it can be the comedian George on stage, I might control, like, riff with that a little bit longer and then kick back into something else. But also, if I'm being completely honest and transparent, authentic human, before I step on any stage I go on, I always say these words, your words, not mine. And what I mean by that is, I feel like there's a little bit of the universe, a little bit of God, a little bit of being led by the spirit in the moment of, like, somebody in the room needs to hear this thing, and the words that are coming out of the mouth are your mouth. So I'm gonna make sure it happens.
Yeah. To your point, there's a lot of stuff that could change. Even, you know, the day before, you've. You meant. I asked that because you said you normally don't know what you're talking about, but this year, I think you've been like, you had an idea, like, you've been building something, and that seems to be the thing that they accepted, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's. That's what they accepted. I mean, like, here, I'll give you an example of last year, and then we'll move on to, like, actually helping humans talk about HubSpot and stuff like that. Like, last year, one of the things that people had the holy aha moment was when I talked to them about how. When at the day before, Andy Petrie talked about the release of the stuff, and I was recording it in chat GPT and, like, able to turn around a piece of content to then be published on the website, to then be in my presentation deck the next day as an example of how you create content with AI as an assistant. Like, before I got to inbound, that wasn't even in the deck.
Yeah.
But because of something I did, and then all of a sudden I'm like, this is kind of cool. Is there a way we can get it published? And people lost their mind over that type of speed and ability with AI as their assistant. So who knows what'll happen this year? Who knows?
Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. I thought it was more of the. The Michael Scott. Sometimes I just start a sentence and I have no idea where it's going. I just hope I find it along the way. That type, that's more of what I do. So, you know, you getting the words and adding them in is. Is much better. It kind of happened to us. You know, we did a theme last year that was it's not magic, it's red partners. And the amount of times magic was mentioned by, I think Dharmesh, Andy said it, Ryan Reynolds even said, like the magic component. So sometimes it's kind of a perfect storm. Anyway, we are here to help people with HubSpot and we're here to not have to summon Chris anymore with the Imperial March music because he is center stage while Mr. Jepson is away. Chris, what are we leading off with today or are you had a comment?
I do think we've got him coming back next week from paternity leave. He's back for a few weeks thanks to Inbound, so hope to see him back next week. Super interesting Reddit. Reddit post here. We're gonna. We're gonna start with. Yeah, let's go from boots with suits.
Wow.
Titled Changing the term deal.
Do you want me to read it?
Suits, Chris, are you boots and suits?
I am not boots.
Oh my God.
Cat in the hat, man. You gotta know.
Mr. Profoundly Pro 4000. Thank you.
That is correct.
Good morning. I am helping a treatment center for substance abuse disorder with their HubSpot needs. The functionality of deals and the deal pipelines is good. Although I think HubSpot is not particularly well suited when the contact and the deal are the same thing. A potential patient becomes a deal upon submitting an application and throughout various stages of admission and treatment. My issue, words matter, and calling someone seeking treatment a deal is awkward and cold. Can I change the term deal? If not, how difficult would it be to create a custom object? And is that even a workable solution? Thank you for your help.
We just dove right off into the deep end, didn't we?
Well, I mean, first of all, now, yes, you can change it from deal to something else. However, I feel like if there is money involved in the support that you're supplying, there is still a reason for a deal and the money moment and the sales process to happen. Where my brain goes to is any of the stages that they're feeling not Human about having somebody who is going through this process that becomes like a ticket pipeline of stages that they need to go through, not a deal pipeline. So there literally should be like the human pays for the thing that then becomes a pipeline for support. Because it can be a support pipeline for support. I'll shut up.
Well, you can change the nomenclature. So what, what a deal is called in the object library. Correct.
Can I demo how to do that? Because to be honest, I didn't know until right now.
Even the people on this show with Help Spot with help Spot. Hey, might as well be called helping the people on the show with HubSpot. My son, by the way, who was when he was five, calls it Hope Spot. And I've called it that a lot since then. Anyway, Casey, show us what's going on.
In order to edit the object. Hi, Reddit user whose name I've lost. How did you forget roots and boots?
Come on.
You can change the name of deals. You'd want to go into your settings here, go over search before scroll, go to your object library.
Yeah, I don't know if that work the way you want it.
It doesn't. It's not going to work the way I wanted it to. Just scroll actually and go under data management and go to object library. And now you can go over this. This is the deals object in this portal. It's already renamed, but I was able to go to Details and then edit. And then I'm able to edit the. The name of this from deals in this case. Now it's opportunity guessing. In your instance, opportunity might be worse than deals in nomenclature, but you can also rename it in like the properties that reference the deals too. So yes, you can change this.
Yeah. And this was, I think this part, the changing of the properties just got made easier as they brought it out of beta. And Maggie from that team, it's a great loom on how to do that. But before we start renaming. Yeah, objects, I want to bring us back to George's point. Each object serves a specific purpose, especially the core 4 of contacts, companies, deals and tickets. And the way I try to explain this to people, because it's very easy to think revenue and think deal, because that has been the place traditionally where you manage revenue in HubSpot. Now we've got invoices, subscriptions, orders, lots of ways to track revenue. So how do we differentiate from the deal? Well, the deal is built for sales management, management of a sales process. And if there is no sales process to manage, please stop using deals. Yeah, right. So if somebody walks in, let's say to the, to the treatment center, like, maybe it's an invoice. That is the first thing. Maybe it's an order. And then, you know, we could even have fun and call contacts humans in our CRM lots of ways. I think the key here is understand what the objects do and how they relate to each other. Because you don't want to create another object that acts just like the contact object if you can help it.
But.
Change the ticket to be treatment or something like that. But I'm, I, I love where they are coming from in terms of words matter. And if you're trying to help people at a treatment center, even just behind closed doors and the team meetings them, in the team meetings, you don't want to refer to people as deals.
Like, yep, so correct. I mean, I've, I've worked at an inpatient facility before and that was, I mean, so this one hits pretty close. But having the understanding of that, like there is insurance involved and there is like George, I think said, like deal is money changing hands or like money. Right. So would part of that be like. In my head, I immediately thought change deal to case. That's typically like more so what they're called because you can have a case that's reopened. You could like, you can do all of that. But Chris and George both mentioned, do you know how many places and how many other you would have to replace the word deal in every possible other instance throughout the entire portal? No. Like a massive control F macro switch out so that whatever word you were putting in there would change to correspond with the new nomenclature. Am I thinking of that correctly?
They're making it easier. I did not watch her video, but at first we all relied on HubSpot to make those changes, and now they've made it easier for us to make those changes to the properties.
And I will say it changes it because I, I did watch the video and you know what she says in the video there is that they try to change it everywhere humanly possible, but if you've typed it into naming convention, they can't change it there, but anywhere where it's used inside of the software itself, it will try to change it. Now, one thing I did figure out is that if you change it in your CRM, it doesn't change it in the mobile app, just at least right now. Because if I go to my mobile app, it's still contacts, but in my CRM, in my desktop version, it's humans or dare I say it's Humans.
Yeah, I was waiting on you to bust that out for the first time today.
We made it 15 minutes.
Yeah.
Yeah, we made it a pretty, pretty significant amount of time. Yeah, that's I think having an. And that's a coaching moment from you, Chris, like shout out to you for putting that in place first before you just go diving in and start changing a bunch of things and recognizing that the sentiment there is a valid one.
Right.
Like labeling people. Is that. I agree with all that. Do we have another. Anything else on this one or we want to dive into a nut? There's a one on here that I really like and I really like it because I don't particularly think any of the people on this call would identify as developers. Are you looking at that question, Chris?
Not yet. I just want to say one more thing. The place I'm seeing the most friction when I rename things so I've renamed services to deliverables and in any of the like the pre designed workspaces. So in this case the customer success workspace, it's. It still says services and then there's deliverables right next to it. So there's still some stuff there just to be mindful of. That's why it's. You try to avoid doing it if you don't really have to, but if you do just know all the places that it. It might take a minute for the team to. To make that happen.
Yep. Word. Thank you for that clarification.
Which one were you looking at?
Economy turn 14. It's down the list a little bit.
Is that their name?
Yeah, it's notes. It's no suits with boots or boots.
And suits with suits.
Boots with suits.
All right, developer diving into the HubSpot ecosystem for the first time.
Nice.
What's the one thing you wish you knew when you started?
Oh. Oh, okay. Well, what is it? The cli. Setting up the cli. Like being able to like actually. So, so here's the thing. And I don't know how many people still do this now, but back in the day you used to have to kind of log into HubSpot and do all your Devbing in HubSpot versus like creating your own environment on your computer, whatever you use, a PC, Mac, whatever. I wish I would have known that sooner and been able to set up my own environment with the tools that I'm used to using. So that's one thing. Also I would have wished maybe that somebody talk. So I'm gonna say it. If you haven't checked out the 2:2. I think it's two developer certifications inside the academy. If you're just getting started, that's a great place to get started versus just immediately diving into like developer docs. So yeah, HubSpot Academy certifications and the fact that I can build my own environment are the two first things that come to mind. Oh, and the third thing is use content staging. Okay, that's, that's, that's, that's the third thing. Yeah.
All right.
I agree. There's, there's a pretty big developer like community, so I think anyone, I mean this is true of anyone getting into HubSpot for the first time. There are, I mean there's a developer community specifically, but there's also just like HubSpot user communities, but so developers, you even have your own set of community to reference and people in the HubSpot ecosystem are really, really helpful and willing to jump in. That's why we do this every Friday. So that's definitely something to reference.
I guess I should read the whole thing. Rob One of the challenges of the HubSpot ecosystem is that words can mean lots of different things, different people. George was thinking about it, I think from a little bit more of a web developer perspective. The question continues. I am a developer who has spent most of my time in other ecosystems, but now I'm taking a deep dive into HubSpot and I'm genuinely excited by the platform's potential, especially the APIs. I'm going through the HubSpot Academy courses and the developer docs, but I know there's a huge difference between reading documentation and real world experience. For the veterans here, what's one piece of advice? A gotcha or something you wish you'd known when you first started working with HubSpot could be about the CRM workflows for API limitations. Appreciate any wisdom you can share. I'll just say that I don't have any developer experience, so I'd love to draw on what I think are some pretty good answers in this in this thread, when building custom integrations or custom data migrations, always set the external ID as a unique property so you can use the unique identifier endpoint to read query records instead of using the search endpoint, which has five calls per second limit that limit. That rate limit is mentioned multiple times in this thread. I think that's something that needs to be aware of. Use batch endpoints as much as possible and use Upsert endpoint instead of Create Update Endpoint if your business case supports upserts.
Casey hi.
I also don't have any developer experience so feeling like the team's putting us on the spot today which love love to see.
Thank you thank you Mayor.
I I mean I Do you think I have developer? I asked Claude and Claude says a lot of the the responses that are already in the thread which is helpful they they laid out I think he said any gotchas hold on, let me read this quote because it's exactly CRM workflows or API limitations. Claude's answer API first architecture talks about 100 requests or 10 second for endpoints as like a limitation CMS Hub for custom development approach you have two main paths HubSpot CMS Hub for website or build external apps and then the ecosystem and workflows and talks about the power there. I would almost position this in the since we aren't developers I mean George is everything Go ahead George, finish your.
Sentence here in a minute. Chris, copy and paste that question into our studio chat while Rob continues on. I'm curious. I want to try something real quick.
Yeah, there's some other people referencing how helpful the LLM is in this situation as well and one of them one of my favorite pieces of advice so.
Far that only gave me something HubSpot.
Changes a lot very often very fast. So many articles and tutorials are from two years ago will at best be missing some critical new functions and at worst lead you down an old pathway that is no longer relevant. Consequentially, LLMs are of not much help. Documentation is your friend and I'll just share that even though documentation is our friend, HubSpot moves so fast that a good buddy Nico tends to find gaps in the docs all the time and trying to develop stuff. So keep up. Like I mean just keep keep be aware of the fast pace and try not to get too set in your ways I'd say.
So what is Hub? Oh man, welcome to the HubSpot universe. First off, let me just say it's awesome that you're diving into the developer side of things. HubSpot's APIs are like a treasure chest of possibilities. But yeah, there are definitely some gotchas that can trip you up if you're not ready for them. Let me hit you with a few things I wish someone had told me by the way, this is GBT clone when I first started tinkering under the hood. I won't read all the all the stuff about it, but it gave API rate limits are real my friend. It then gave a paragraph from that it said custom objects are a game Changer but dot dot dot and gave some stuff about that CRM extensions and custom cards equal next level customization. Gave some stuff about that sandbox versus production. Don't overthink it. Some stuff around that data model overview tool is your best friend. Documentation is good but community is better. Hey. An error message or puzzles, not problems. And there's like it's literally a paragraph for each one of those things that brought so it ends up with this. So there you go. A little of advice to help you hit the ground running.
That last one, that last one is so good.
What the error messages are puzzles, not problems.
Yes.
Yeah. It says when you're working with APIs you're going to run into errors. It's just part of the game. The key is to approach them like puzzles. HubSpot's error messages are usually pretty descriptive so take the time to read them carefully and troubleshoot methodically. And remember every error you solve is a step closer to mastery.
There you go. When are we. I mean when is Clone George coming back on the show?
Well, let's see. Let us. Let us know George when he's got availability to join us calendar.
I also feel like it's worth noting that I have found as a marketer. We talked about this last week actually as a marketer there are some website platforms that are really difficult for us common folk to use. So speaking from my perspective, I feel like developers developing in HubSpot have an opportunity to empower us common folk to make changes in the platform ourselves, assuming that things are built in a way that they don't necessarily need to be custom coded. So I would keep that in mind as someone, as a developer newly learning HubSpot that some of what you might be taking from platforms like WordPress if you can, if you can make them more adaptable in HubSpot, it might save you time in the long run.
I would say to economy turned 14. Let's say he's figured all this out. He or she, I don't know whoever it is and is able to now develop like what would you want them to be developing?
Ish real problems.
And the stair George is not frozen. He was just staring. Yeah. What's a real problem Chris, if this person was like got it. Thanks for the advice. I'm now ready to go. I am building X. I mean are.
They developer or are they like a.
Whatever wide open for you?
Whatever the HubSpot users on that team need.
On the team. Love it.
I think from my side web experiences that are more user friendly and web pages that load well and look well across mobile and desktop. And then on the back end of HubSpot making sure that my systems are all communicating with one another succinctly. Sorry George, got so close to the camera.
Anything that helps with user experience.
And we'll move on to the next question. Thank you George for ending that one rather succinctly. We have. I don't really want to go down the complaining route. I see this Material Donut submission here. Fix your pricing model. HubSpot seem to get a lot of engagement.
Wait, that's their name. Material Donut.
There are some great names on here. George. You should, you should, should check it out. I could read this one real quick and we can dive in or not dive in. I don't know if they're. I'll just read it. I believe HubSpot should do something about the huge pricing gap between starter and Pro. It's just stupid. We are a company on starter plan and we'll be happy to pay two to four times our current pricing for some workflow functionalities and add ons but the 10x pricing gap is just ridiculous. So stay on starter and use third party apps to cover the gaps. It's 2025. People want to pay for what they use and not have bloated packages. Is it just me or are they leaving so much money on the table with this pricing structure? Especially giving given their SME customer base.
So just a few assumptions being made.
Just a few, yes.
So here's the thing. Let's be honest. They're not lying. There is a massive Grand Canyon chasm that go from starter to pro in any of the hubs and I've talked about this with multiple people over the years of like why is it such a huge like gap? And I don't know especially when you look at like what you can do versus what you can't do. Like I feel like there should be a way to like shrink that a small amount. But with all that said, being able to run the amount of ish that you can for free and for almost free is like should be a thank you moment. And if you're itching that much to get pro, get in your wallet. Like, listen, I had to just come to the conclusion like it might be painful but I'm gonna pay for it. I want to be able to do XYZ ABC or I want to be able to create this experience or I want my team to not have to do this a thousand times manually. I guess it's worth the extra amount.
Chris, I wanted to have some dramatic silence there and, and the intent of this is obviously to be helpful. I think that was, is there they, they said in this Let me go back and don't want to misquote material donut and be in trouble on the, on the Reddit forums and use third party apps to cover the gaps. Is that the workaround? I mean is that if there, if the budget isn't there or if it's as you said truly again a Grand Canyon type of gap? Right. 2 to 4 is one thing, 10x is another one. What. Where do you like commonly see that? Is it a growth stage? Is it like, I mean why would there be such a gap? From the, from the business's standpoint, if they're using stuff and increasing revenue and scaling and their team of whatever amount of people are they just going to have to do that in perpetuity? Because HubSpot in my view is moving more up market. Not like they're getting away from SMEs which was who they still serve now. But how do you, how do you fix that with a workaround if the pricing structure gap doesn't narrow?
HubSpot has actually started solving for this. Like you can have Zapier, like it's so easy to set up and it's available to you at Starter. That's usually the first obvious thing because one of the reasons you do have to upgrade is to get access to workflows in HubSpot in most cases. But I, I think the usage based pricing models that a lot of companies are moving to and we're already seeing it related to AI. AI stuff in HubSpot likely helps with this at some point. I think it makes things very confusing right now to have Hub licenses and seats and HubSpot credits. So in my experience as a partner, it's pretty much case by case basis. But for me, for what it can do, like I don't think there's any in these situations. Like if, if they're just, they're not thinking about what it does for the business at all. It's just I pay this and 10x feels like a lot, right? When in reality if you're leveraging HubSpot to make even, even grow by hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, like what are we doing talking about the cost of HubSpot. That's where you can easily. This is why I don't like the ROI conversation. You have to think about it more than any other value prop because it usually looks amazing on paper when you think about all the time that you spend going across all these apps and doing all these workarounds. That's where now we thought it was good. Before inbound, you get all your data into HubSpot. AI is going to be doing unbelievable things to create value and like. So when I hear bloated packages, I hear a misunderstanding of what they would be getting for that 10x price bump. Right?
Yeah.
I feel like my passion is proving HubSpot's value to HubSpot users because I feel like a lot of times people do get into these pro and enterprise portals and they don't understand how much is at their fingertips and they still might be paying for third party tools in many cases that HubSpot would actually make redundant and could, you know, even save money in many cases. I feel like that's like my entire niche is like organizations that have HubSpot but don't understand like how powerful HubSpot is. And I had this thought the other day. I was booking like a spirit airline ticket and I was going through all the steps of the purchasing process where they make you first you buy your ticket, then you have to pay to have like a life vest and you have to pay to have like all of a seat belt. Like you have to pay for each of those little things. And I.
Only 1999 more and you get to breathe. What?
Yeah, like you know, you're going through all those steps. And I had this thought and I was like, this is so annoying. I wish I could just buy a ticket and I wish I could just have all the stuff in it. And then I remembered I can, I could just go to one of the non budget airlines and it would just all be in the ticket and I wouldn't have to worry about all this stupid stuff. And I feel like kind of that's the same thing with HubSpot. Sure you could piecemeal your way, but you're going to have an uncomfortable seat and your seatbelt might not actually latch and you're still going to be adding on to buy water on the plane.
I, I didn't mean to get as derailed, but I saw George laughing and just the concept of paying for a life vest is. That's the easiest no I've ever. Anyway, that hurt me by the way. Go ahead, please go ahead. I did some research.
I, I did some quick research while we're answering that question, I asked the clone what would a cool.
What would it cool.
I really thought Rob derailed us last week.
I think what would a cool Reddit name be. That would be fun and nerdy. Give me five somewhat strange options. I'm gonna go sign up for a Reddit account later today, either under hub sith lord 42 or maybe automagical nerdicorn or maybe inbound overlord 9000. I may even pick Pixel Pusher prime or Workflow Wizardry. I'm not sure, but I think one of those is my future Reddit name. I just, I can't. I can't even think about this anymore.
I think that's time to move on.
Yeah, time to time to move on.
I think the best question now I'm.
In here typing out give me Reddit handles.
I think the best question in this thread is from Ski Girl 180. What functionality do you need?
Oh yes. Yeah. And immediately it's automated workflows and guess how much time that saves you. And time is money.
Anyway, yeah, I just pulled a George because now we're on Claude and Reddit names and Spirit Airlines. But I put it into Claude and ask like how would you respond to this comment? Right, Chris, shout out for turning me on to Claude. There's some pretty smart stuff. You think, like AI is pretty useful. One of the. It has a whole thing. One of the interesting things is exactly what George says. So that's the segue is like why don't you just list out the features that you want and like what they're worth, like pros and cons. But the interesting thing is it says like the gap isn't accidental. It's designed to make professional feel worth it once you need any of the features. And if worked like the gap there, if that's needed, does not now feel like it's so much more expensive but so much of a time reduction or efficiency boost or something that whatever that is. So it's designed that way. The last point it made was kind of piggybacking off the other thing I asked about developers. This pricing structure actually creates massive opportunity for developers. The gap you're experiencing drives demand and for third party solutions and of course AI. So just to round that out. But yeah, what. Repeat that Chris, one more time. What functionality do. Do I actually need?
Yeah, and I bet this person would have a hard time answering that effectively. And the way I'm reading through the thread, this is another one of the situations where you can't. It's not obvious, but having seen this enough, they're probably just talking about Marketing Hub, right? And that's where like we've never crossed the bridge from point Solution to customer platform and you know, how. How many other systems or spreadsheets are they using to support their process and are they even using Starter effectively? So yeah, it starts with goals and then. Okay, you. The goals are grow by millions. Okay, maybe we can afford 10k per month if. If we can guarantee the millions.
Love it. Yeah. But a lot of these, A lot of these questions since we've started this are like lacking in specificity. And so instead of answering them, we do kind of hypotheticals. Depends on what you're talking about. Is it. Are you trying to run a whole team? Is it a. Is it whatever. And so more specificity would be needed there. But just in general, like what. What does functionality even mean? Like, how would you approach that? Chris, you like to get philosophical and I can see George leaning directly into the camera so we can see almost like fogging the camera up. Like whatever the you like, whatever makes the user experience and the teams operate better. That kind of answer I didn't even know yet. You were googling and redditing and clotting other Reddit names options.
Jeez. The challenge is the way that these things get framed. They drive towards. I just need this one thing and it's so expensive. It's like, no, you don't just need one thing. You need to plan. Like, this is not a tool that the functionality does not get you the results. Like using HubSpot to execute a strategy is what gets you results. Right. And it's a. From what I've seen, the ecosystem has not been good at this part because a lot of people are incentivized to sell the. Sell the solution. Like sell the hub if you can, sell lead generation if you can. Because this other one, very similar. But you can tell by the way it's worded that people. This is a long standing challenge. Right. So what tools would you Recommend to overcome HubSpot marketing limitations slash expensiveness. HubSpot is such a great tool, but just doesn't cater to small businesses with smaller databases. I've been recommended bridge the cost versus functionality gap, but apparently this does address the cost issue, but isn't great in terms of functionality. Is this a case of you get what you pay for? Any other small businesses out there who have found a workaround than investing in value? They didn't say that last time.
Yeah, I was gonna say, seems like.
You added that in there.
Man. Yeah, I mean, I'll say like HubSpot moving at speed, changing dramatically over the last few years has not made it any easier. But if we find ourselves in a budget debate we've already already lost. In my opinion, we've lost track of what's really important.
I concur. It feels weird when you get deep and we started off with like the empathetic nomenclature discussion. So this has been felt like it's been deep since the beginning. So let's keep it fun and fresh with a. With now for something completely different. We're gonna go through this. Get off of the Reddit because I have one. I think this is a good question and we'll see how many of these you agree with. The question is how I audit a messy HubSpot portal. As a former hubspotter, I guess it's not even a question, but it is the entry used to work at HubSpot Help team get their portal CRMs cleaned up, running the way they should. When I do a quick audit, this is how I usually go about it. So we can do this one of two ways very helpfully, which is I'll read them out and you say I agree. Hate it. I would have done something else first because these seem to be in order. Chris, any ideas for how we do this?
Actually did this with Lucy Abal already on our last super admin show.
Oh, we can skip right past it.
Then because I wholly disagree with the whole post.
Oh, oh. Then we start goal here.
Shots fired.
Yeah.
So go for it.
Wait, are you. Hold on a minute. Are you C astronomer 8992?
I. I am not. You know, I'm transparent, bro. I'm profoundly. Chris, when I show up on Reddit.
You'Re Mr. Profoundly Pro 4000. You just need to add the 4000. All right, I'll go ahead. We can have Casey and George weigh in if you haven't already, because they did not get to hear the snark and the rebuttal. And we're trying to. We're trying to drum up some interest. First I look at the contacts. I clean out anyone who hasn't engaged in a quote long time or clearly doesn't belong in the CRM. It can actually save money. If you're close to contact limits, they delete them. Clean out was the terminology.
Because Chris is like Chris is working because he's already been here. I have a lot of follow up questions to that one does. What does clean out mean? If that means delete. I wouldn't so quickly necessarily delete them. If it means set them as non marketing contacts. Yes, I agree. One of the first things I do in a new HubSpot Portal is set up a non marketing workflow to automatically set people to non marketing who are bad contacts, don't have a lot of engagement, things like that.
Okay, so I don't completely disagree with this human. However, I will say that the word strategy needs to be put in place here. One of the first things we do is we build what's called a five folder framework. Inside the five folder framework we have a bunch of lists. Those lists tell us things. So as far as deleting humans, are they a hard bounce? Did they unsubscribe? Did they mark me as spam? Are there indicators of like they should not be in our database because we cannot communicate with them? Sure. Then go ahead and remove. Is it a list that shows us like last activity was 90 days or 120 days ago? Sweet. Maybe there's a strategy if we send them like a physical piece of mail or something like that because Maybe we're an H Vac company and all of our people are like 55 and older and they don't even use the damn Internet because that's why there's low activity. So like strategy but like lists for data cleanup. So if I'm auditing is one of the things that I say, hey, here's some areas we could clean up as well as here's some people that you can't communicate with but seem like they're still valid by the way. One of the things with that is we get somebody to use like a never bounce system to make sure the emails are even good in. Because if they're not good, yes, delete them. So this and that kind of answer to that first one that you just gave for me at least.
Chris, I'm just. You're. I'm not even going to go to you until the end.
Yeah, just keep two.
Then I move on to lists and workflows. I check for anything outdated, unused or messy. If something hasn't been touched in ages, I archive it. I also tidy up naming to keep things clear. I have a lot of questions on just the terminology again used and like what is ages meant? What specifically would messy mean on you? Why would you have like yeah, a lot of stuff here. Any comments or should I just go through the next couple?
I would just say I don't like on the surface fully disagree with that one, especially the cleaning up of the nomenclature specifically, but agreed with your a few follow up questions.
Well and also historically lists have been like the cesspool of create it and forget it. So now I would say is you can Create custom properties for lists. Therefore you could, because you might not have this, by the way, this, this person that you're auditing the portal, they might not have this. You could create views for the lists to then get them into certain buckets that again you could look at. Because trust me, if they're the type of HubSpot user that lives in a wait, we can do active lists and they have 5,000 static lists, which by the way, they can't because it's over the number that you can have. But I'm just being for comedic effect. If they have too many static lists, there's going to need to be some cleanup there. But you've got again strategy and be able to view in buckets the stuff that needs to be renamed, the stuff that needs to be maybe rebuilt or reused, and the stuff that needs to get out of the portal.
My initial reaction to this one as somebody that has set in on the results of a lot of these is really more just a question of like how much of this, even from lists, workflows, contacts, would you be able to determine to eliminate, change or remove without discussing, hey, what's the context of this with the person who's. Who owned the instance, right? Like, is that something that they should be considering? I certainly think so. Because what if half of the list or workflows or half of the things in there were created by somebody who doesn't work at the company anymore, aren't part of their go to market strategy or aren't relevant? Like some of them may not have been used in a while, but they're set up correctly. They're just. I mean that would like, why are you. How much of that before we go to number three or we can ask this at the end involves a, like a conversation rather than just an audit and then actions to clean up, remove, alter, change. That.
That is the thing that's missing. That's the context that's missing.
I got it. Chris did not slack me on the side. No private chat.
But like, but you don't always have that. You don't always have that.
You don't do it. I don't know.
Like, well, here's where my brain goes to. Because A, I agree the conversation is important if the person's there that you can have a conversation with a great. But another place, especially with lists, where my brain goes is like the amount of humans that don't go into the used in areas like this list is used in 17 places. Don't touch it, don't touch it. Is not used anywhere. Great. If it's a piece of then delete it. But like I agree with conversations but also again, the used in area or workflows, lists, forms, all of that is super helpful. It's the connective tissue of understanding that you need as a HubSpot admin.
Okay, that actually cleared up a bunch of that is like there's next I review the properties and contact record view. I look at what's actually being filled out and whether the contact card is overwhelming or missing key info. If needed, I clean it up, reorganize things to make it more useful for the team. Shout out for the team.
I agree with cleaning up the CRM contact cards, but again a lot of this is context based and so it's hard to. I actually just did this exercise for a new client where I was cleaning up the CRM cards and it involved a lot of conversations specifically with the sales team who was actively using the CRM contact cards on what properties they're actually referencing. Because without that context I can can use the amount of context that have the property filled out to get me somewhere. But that's not the full picture because two things could happen if I just rely on property fill rate. One is I could have a workflow automatically filling properties and that workflow could have been built five years ago and no one's even referencing that property anymore. But everybody has that property filled out but it's actually not useful. And two, on the opposite end of the spectrum, there might be a new property that the team just started using that we do want to reference.
There we go. That's so again, love to be this guy. I'd make no, you know, make no buts about it. I'm not on any of your level, so I can ask layperson and dumb, maybe dumb questions like this would you. And this is kind of Chris, where you were going and where I was asking how much of any of these changes would. Even if it's messy and working to generate revenue for the sales team or for whoever. Right. How much of an impact would it make to people in their daily lives if somebody comes in and audits and changes a bunch of stuff, deletes, alters, quote, unquote, cleans it up and now they can, even though it was not ideal or less than now, they can't execute their role, their function, their daily activity log. Is that Chris, is that kind of where you're considering also like the. The conversation. And I know George said sometimes you don't have that you don't have the context. And you just have to, you know, either bet. Am I thinking about that correctly, that doing a bunch of stuff without. I don't want to say without permission, but without some sort of context could potentially not only change things, but actually be detrimental to like revenue generating activities?
Yes. Yeah. And I think I'm gonna assume positive intent and assume that that is behind this post, that that happens first. If she helps teams get their portals cleaned up. It's just presented in a way that we know that a lot of people do try to do this stuff with, which is that you don't need context. You can just go in and clean up stuff. And the one thing I dug into it, Lucy, is that when this is being asked for, because clean up my HubSpot portal, help me get more out of HubSpot. The person who set up HubSpot, left. Those are some of the most common, like calls for help. Right. But they're general. They're so general, like you don't have any content. So to suggest that I can come in based on that information and do an audit and start deleting things like, no way. Like maybe we're quarantining. Right. I think the thing that's missed is if somebody's asking for it in the moment, half the CRM might not be used, but they are asking for it, which means there's pain, which means there is interest and energy towards getting it right. And that pipeline might have been put in three years ago because we actually do need the separate pipeline. We just never figured out how to get the sales team to use it effectively. So it's empty, but it might be super important. And I'd say I'd rather like coach the team into that instead of just deleting it and then having to regenerate it. Because now the team is engaged and they're recommitted to HubSpot and. And all the reasons that people want to ask for this, this help in the first place. I think if you go in and you delete that pipeline, that they're like, they might have not told you yet. Right? Like, oh man, we're going to finally make this thing work. And then you tell them you deleted that thing because it was empty.
Yeah, built well, but built early. Almost like, you know, whatever that looks like. I'll go through the last two real quick as a combo, a twofer. I also check how lifecycle stages, wait until we got there and lead statuses are being used. When both are set up properly, it's a lot easier to see where someone is in the funnel and what should happen next. Lastly, I go through pipelines and dashboards. I remove any that aren't being used and check whether the main dashboards are still relevant or just leftovers from years ago.
News flash. There is properly. There is no properly anymore. Life cycle stages are customizable. Lead status is customizable. Again, we go back to it has to be a conversation to what is the objective or use of these two things properly for them. But there is no properly that those days have set sail a long time ago.
Yeah, love it.
And I would. And we can end on this. This is my. The important part here. Like AI can already do 80 of what's being described here in the fact of the human challenger coach part that we're talking about is not mentioned anywhere. Like that's how you audit a messy portal. That's like. It's like the portal is separated from the team that's using it in these cases and that's not going to work. Right. And we, we talk about admins needing to move into that coach mode. Like if I'm a new admin and I come and find this post. Oh man, I'm just, I'm not set up for success. In my opinion.
There is no properly anymore. Shout out to gbt. There's no proper way to end the show either. But we will see you back next Friday at 3 Eastern on the HubSpot Helpline. Casey, good luck. Chris, good luck. Have a great weekend. Vote for Casey, please. See ya.
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