HUBSPOT PLAYBOOKS: WHAT THEY ARE AND HOW TO USE THEM (HUBHEROES, EP. 24)

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub Heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask into action and become the Hub Hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

Welcome back to the Hub. Here. Damn it, Max. We're leaving that in because your insubordination must be noted.

She said, damn it, Max.

There's the delay.

I will turn the station wagon around. So help me, I will pull over. Yeah, okay. You stay in there. Everybody else, the people who have not displeased me today. Welcome back to the Hub Heroes podcast. I am Liz Murphy, your Hub hero wrangler and content strategist on call. I also have Max the insubordinate Devin. Hey, bud. Hey, you never do anything wrong. And George, who is going to be giving us a vocabulary lesson later today that is mildly concerning, but apparently we're just going to, quote, know when it happens.

Yeah, I mean, listen, when I use words like fuddy, duddy and things like that. And, Liz, you. You call me on the carpet for, am I 80? I'm gonna slip a word in in this episode, and everybody will understand what it is.

You told me not to lollygag. And I thought you were also about to, like, slide a Werther's across the table and ask me to watch Father Darling.

Well, first of all. First of all, don't be hating on the Werther's, because my wife knows, like, every birthday, every Christmas, I need some Werther's. Like, those are dope candies right there. I'm just gonna throw that out there.

Thank you for, like, a good caramel.

Being Big Werther's afloat, keeping that part of the economy safe and secure.

Yeah, they're not sponsoring the show. Just so everybody knows.

Not a shill for Big Wor Classic George. Just. Just shilling for big caramel.

Speaking of big caramel, over the past two weeks we've sunk our teeth into a meaty topic. That's right. I segued like a swan and it was beautiful. Thank you, Devin. Thank you. That's why you're the favorite. That's right. That's why you're the favorite. So over the past two weeks, we have been talking about sales enablement, specifically why most sales enablement strategies fail, even with the best of intentions, or when people think they have quote, unquote, buy in, and how you're actually supposed to be leveraging tools and technology to execute and scale sales enablement strategies across your entire organization. Now, if any of that sounds juicy to you, because when I was planning for this episode, I really wanted a steak. So if it sounds juicy to you, I highly recommend you.

By the way. By the way, if it doesn't, just hit the stop button and go listen to another podcast. Just.

I've heard that's a really great way to build listeners. Wow, all of you are punchy today.

Yeah, one with less juice.

Because we like our podcast juicy. Just saying.

We have the juice.

Juice or juice free. Go back to listen to the last two episodes of sales enablement is a problem in your business. But for this week, we're going to stay on the technology side because one of the topics that came up in that last episode that we had because we were all like, we got to talk about HubSpot playbooks. We got to talk about HubSpot playbooks. They're so freaking important. It's the unsung hero of HubSpot tools. And then we, like, didn't do that. And then we realized, huh, maybe we should talk about it now. For those of you who don't know, HubSpot playbooks are essentially resource guides you can create or within the platform for different teams or individual contributors to use. Like maybe someone in sales on specific topics, processes, pretty much anything you can think of. Now, I am a knowledge management nerd and mouth breather. So, like, when I read that, I'm like, huh, that's amazing. I love it. That's awesome. But for many of you, you're like, wonderful documentation. I'm so freaking excited. You should be hyped about this. And you're about to find out why. Because when Max asked at the end of the last episode if we actually had enough to find, filled the entire episode just talking about HUD Spot Playbooks, George was like, step back. And he was like, it's about Playbooks for sales. It's about Playbooks for service. It's about Playbooks for marketing. It's about Playbooks for the entire organization. It was like Oprah, he's you get a Pontiac G6 that you have to pay taxes for by yourself and you get a Pontiac G6 that you have to pay taxes for by yourself. And that is why we're here today.

Yeah.

What are HubSpot Playbooks real, really? And how do you actually use them? So I want to open up the floor with the first question. Why are we dedicating an entire episode to HubSpot Playbooks? Because there's something about the vision obviously that people are not catching. George, talk me through it.

Oh, well. So first of all, first of all, I want everybody that's listening to know this is not going to be just a sales specific episode. So we are going to talk about sales name, but we're going to talk about the this as Playbooks as a sales tool. But everybody needs to realize, buckle up, hold on. That we're going to talk about Playbooks for service. Playbooks, Playbooks for marketing, Playbooks for an overarching just way to do several different things. For me, I think that Playbooks are important and the reason that we're dedicating an entire episode to it is because there are so many places that people are having conversations that vital information, data, AKA insights, things that can help us make smart decisions, create better content or prove a better experience as we move forward. And they just get lost in the conversations because nobody is documenting in real time. Nobody has a thing that they can follow a lane. Right. Like if you think about the wizard of Oz for a second, the reason that story works is because they could follow the yellow brick road. Do you and your HubSpot portal have a yellow brick road to the proper data and insights that you need? That's my question right now. If you're sitting, you're listening to this and you're like, I wish I had a yellow brick road. Then keep on listening.

It is how you duplicate your success and it's how you take your rock stars and make more rock stars. It's the foundation of greatness when it comes to your organization getting everybody on the same page. There's so many different opportunities for training in so many different ways that I've seen different places do trainings. One of my favorites, however, was an Asana project that linked out to HubSpot Playbooks. It was beautiful. And you're going down this checklist of things you need to know things, you need to read, and then you go do it. It's fantastic.

Okay, so I have a question here that I want to throw out here because it's something I've heard a lot from different organizations and agencies. I don't know if there's some sort of trend happening recently or it's just the circles I've happened to swim in recently, which is there's an aversion to process. Process is bureaucratic. Process stands in the way of agility. We need to be agile. See, Devin knows what I'm talking about. You know, I could see the smile and I want to hear the counter argument because I, I'm of two minds about it. I understand the agility piece. There is a big difference between an agile process that enables scalability that you circle back to when you need to iterate, and, and stuff that's just so stuffy that it basically brings everything to a grinding halt. It's red tape, not a process. So what's your response to that? And George, I saw you making some faces too. Don't worry, I'll come to you.

Yeah, so there are companies, especially startups, especially nonprofits, especially agencies that are used to operating like the buildings on fire. That's their comfort zone zone. When it's like a deal comes in, instead of getting the job done, someone pulls a fire alarm and it's chaos until you get across the finish line. And the reason why they're comfortable with that is because it's how they've experienced success. In some cases, it's the only way they know. But the one thing they all have in common is that they have a talented group of individuals who are able to move mountains in order to achieve goals, which is cool. I mean, I'm not saying that that's bad. What I'm saying is I'm too old for that. For me.

Man, I feel that. I feel. See, I. At my age, I just want to be able to lay back on the davenport and take a nice little nap.

There it is. Oh my God.

I told you I'd fit it in.

Oh, yeah, no, and, and I'm with you. Right, right there. I took a nap like two hours ago. I have no shame in saying that. My thing is that process is only bureaucratic. When you build process on top of broken process on top of broken process, when your process becomes a band aid for other processes, then you have a problem. Part of being agile is evaluating and reevaluating. Agility is not the enemy of efficiency. You can be efficient and agile. It's just a matter of documenting your process, evaluating your process and then iterating on the process. You can't just create something and expect it to be perfection. If you don't hate your V1 then you're doing it wrong. You should. The mentality is growth. And if you want to keep doing the fire sale method of business and here's an objective, everybody run, run until it's done. Like go ahead and do that. Just don't ask me to submit an application because that's not how I get down. I do things. I believe there's a group of people who like to say decently and in order that's how I roll. And that's most efficient. And then that and completely different episode here. But that's is how you separate your people power from your money power. As far as growth is concerned. If you want to talk about moving divorcing your growth from your head count, playbooks are the way to do it.

There are so many nuggets in there. I want to touch on a couple of things. Number one, before anybody gets in their mind some sort of subversive version of what my platform is, I am pro nap, anti davenport. Let's be very clear here. Number one. Number two, I love this conversation about process because if you have a process and it's not written down, that is a wish. If you're saying, well, everybody knows what the process is. No, no, no. They have the version in their head of the process that they like the most and then are very glad that it's not documented. So nobody catches the fact that they're not following best practice. Like it's absolutely. Also, what if you get hit by a bus? There's no security. George, you're gonna explode. Bring it.

I am, I am, I am. Because there's a key point here that we have to pay attention to. The problem is Liz, at that point with what you're talking about, it's their process, not the process. Right. It has to be the process. For the 17 things we do here are the process for that one, this one and the other one. The other thing too. I want to circle back around real quick because Devin, you said something that I absolutely love. But I would say a yes and to you said make your rock stars better rock stars. I would even say playbooks help your non rock star become rock stars in training. Exactly. Because they can learn off of the back of everybody who has done it for 2, 5, 17, 22 years. Because now it's like it's Like Star Trek and the Borg knowledge to create this path that everybody is taking with the right questions that they need to be asking. And so it's like talk about enablement. And again, this is enabling your sales team, your success team, your marketing team. Because Liz, you said something that just like completely exploded my mind. And that is you were talking a little bit ago about it's. Or maybe it was Devin, it was like, why are you putting this first thing out there? Why are you putting this first thing out there and just rolling with it? Liz, I know. I remember what it was. You came to my brain because as a writer I was like, yeah, this is dumb as all because no writer will ship their first draft. They're going to edit it, they're going to iterate it, they're going to process it. So why is your sales team literally shipping your first draft? No, no, no, no, no. There needs to be time, time out to think about it.

Well, timeout for real because you're over modulating just a skosh.

George, I'll back up from my mic.

Back up off my George, quick.

Getting so damn excited is what I heard Devin just say.

All right, there's a lot of excitement happening right now. But Maxi, sweet pea, talk to me.

Yeah, what's up?

What you love about Playbooks?

I think let's, let's, let's do this before we even like go any further for anyone who doesn't know what Playbooks are, because there are a lot of people who don't know what Playbooks are, which I think is why we're doing this episode. Why don't we catch them up to speed? If you're not already familiar with a playbook, a playbook is a little thing that shows up on any one of your object records inside of HubSpot. So think your contacts, your companies, your deals, your tickets, the things you're going into and interacting with when you're, when you're having some sort of conversation with your customer or doing something or following some sort of process, whether it's in the middle of solving a ticket sales process.

Does everyone have access? Is it for all HubSpot customers or.

Is it at a certain have.

Well, go ahead, Max.

Service hub and sales hub. Historically this was an enterprise only feature. More recently they brought it down to professional, which was just a glorious moment for me because I want the people to have their hands on Playbooks. There's a very special feature that is reserved in the enterprise version which we can talk about later. But essentially what these are is these are little. You can almost think of them as like little documents you can open on those records that can be something as simple as words on a page that tell you how to do something, such as a call script or a process outline or like an FAQ for anyone using your CRM. But they can also be interactive. You can add videos to them, you can add a whole bunch of stuff into them, but more importantly, you can input data into them. It's great for questions that you're asking on calls, you can input, put data into it. It's a great way to. To take notes on calls and have a more structured, standardized way for people to do that. That's sort of like level one of like, what, playback.

One thing I want to throw in here, though. Hold on, Church. I know. Hold on. This is important, though. I'm going to play the Elliot Page character in Inception who only existed to ask questions for the audience. Prove me wrong. I think sometimes people could get really confused about the terminology. Max. So can you just take a moment and clarify what an object is? I know we have a whole episode dedicated to objects, but I think sometimes people get confused. Objects, properties, whatever.

So we think objects. The big four. I mean, technically, everything's an object, it's a database. But like the big four, when we say objects, contacts, which are people. Companies which are the businesses or organizations they work at or associated to. Deals active, you selling, ticket active, you helping.

Now I'm going to piggyback on that because. And I'm glad you did that Liz Vax blew by something real quick. That for me is the real poignant put the stake in the ground of. See, I told you they were for the whole organization. Because if Playbooks were just for sales teams, then deals and like contacts, Playbooks would make sense. But the fact that you can find Playbooks in tickets is proof in the pudding that no, there are a lot of people in your organization that should be using Playbooks. I would even say that the content creators inside of your organization. Because here's the other thing. We always talk about Playbooks as external. They can be ran internally as well. Like, imagine you're a content creator. You're on a call. You're trying to create the dopest case study known to man or woman on the planet. And now you've got a case study playbook that you can literally run them through and get all the information, ask all the questions, and have all the notes that you need.

Yeah. And like, so like, if you even look at, at that, like level one, use Case if we say sales rep or like a business development person is, you know, taking notes on a call and like, sure, it tells them what questions to ask, what answers to get, gives them a clean place to put in the data. That's not just for salespeople to have some sort of conversational aid or like, you know, clean way of taking notes. This sort of like level two or level three, thinking beyond how you're using that is how marketers can use that data. And this is where sort of like the creativity side of this comes in. Wouldn't it be great if you have all of these people that are talking to these customers, even if it's maybe a little bit too early or they're not such a great fit yet, or you tend to have customers that engage with you and then fall off the face of the planet. A big thing people try to do as marketers is re engage those folks after. But what if you could passively collect a lot of very pointed information that your sales reps are asking during those discovery calls, capture it in a way that is easily segmentable on your end. And then when you start to do these like re engagement campaigns with these like past opportunities or people who close lost, you now have this hyper specific information that you can use to send super like segmented and like targeted content. And like the sales rep was none the wiser to it. Right. But it could be updating properties in the back end that you're creating lists off of. And as a marketer that's like a really, really big advantage for you that you know what these past prospects were literally saying was important to them. Right. And you can tailor that message in now a hyper specific way for once.

No one wants to just jump right in.

Well, I do, but I want to give Devin space to actually say something if Devin wants to say something. But I, I have something that I can piggyback off of Max and that is I love that Max brought up the fact of it being then data that the marketer can use. Because this is the perfect opportunity to talk about a reason why you might want enterprise. Because here's the thing, there's three layers of love, at least for me when I think about HubSpot Playbooks. There's the fact that with Pro you can literally do an open text field, which means if you set up your settings it could be open text into a note, open text into a call, open text into whatever. Like there's, there's these ways that you can put it into a place in your HubSpot record that you can get back to and see it and everybody can see it. That's the other thing too, by the way. Visibility across all humans instead of just stuck in your little like word doc piece of crap. Like, that's a huge piece. But at the end of the day, we have open text. The second thing we can do is we can actually do a list of answers in Enterprise where now we give them the top five buckets that they might want to select and actually put that information in. But there's also an open note section under that that you can type in like for the, for the people who know, like, well, what if they say this and it's not one of the choices? And we then can show other. Well, you've got that note section for what might be the other. And then the, the, the magic place, the nirvana of playbooks, if you will, is the ability to actually update a property in your HubSpot records. Man, this means that somebody could be filling out a playbook and firing a freaking workflow at the same exact time. I mean, talk about process automation and streamlining what it is that you're doing in your business. It's absolutely ridiculous when you start to think of it at that layer. Right? And so, so again, if I take a, a step back knowing that at least at a fundamental level today, today if you have pro, you could be doing some type of products and service features and specifications playbook, you could be doing a discovery call playbook, you could be doing pricing guidelines, you could be doing the difference between company and competitors negotiation tactics. There's just like a metric button that could be then shown in a call, a meeting, an email, or a note inside your HubSpot record, dependent upon what it is that you're actually freaking creating or the information where it needs to be found. But again, at the next level, it's no, we're literally putting the properties. They don't need to fill out a form, they could fill out a playbook. Or your internal team could fill out a playbook. Oh my God. Never. Just, just let's.

Devin, Devin, hop in if you want. I want to throw in a good example.

Yeah, no worries. The thing that I want to make sure that we differentiate here is between a playbook and a HubSpot playbook. A standard playbook is just really about codifying your process. And a playbook can live in a slide deck. If you want a pretty playbook, it could be a text document. It's that is the foundation of what a playbook could be. So Even if you are, for some reason, not a HubSpot customer. Even.

Oh, good point, good point.

If for, for, for some reason you, you haven't made the leap to the greatest growth platform ever, then what you want to do is at the very least, figure out a way to document, find a place for these things to live. What sets.

It's not a doc if it's not a process, if it's not documented.

That's right.

It's just not.

That's right. It's just a very familiar fire sale. So with the difference between that and a HubSpot Playbook is HubSpot Playbooks do all of that. And they're interactive. They're a way for your team to be engaged one to one with the data.

What is it? Okay, so what is.

Where you're doing your work, what does interaction look like?

Where you're doing your work, what does interaction look like?

Because I got very excited. It's all that and a bag of chips. And then you said, it's interactive, it's engaging. Fantastic. What does that bag of interactive chips look like?

Go for it, George.

All right, so first of all, the fact that you can create a playbook and you have the ability to actually have like a highlighter tool to highlight the very important pieces of the conversations that people need to have. The fact that you can add links to additional resources or scripts that they need to get to from the playbook, the fact that you can add video into there, the fact that you can embed stuff in there, means the only thing that is stopping you is the idea of what you need to show, what you need to say and what you need to document. And it can be literally anything. It is a very interactive document that you are creating that is sitting on the exact record that you need to be like, functioning with this data and this information that you're going to have to use through the process as you move forward.

And the best part is, like, it can just be something you look at and read and consume information from. For instance, you could use it as like a competitive battle card if you know you're going up against a certain competitive, you know, or competitor for whatever you're selling. You could also use it for common troubleshooting guides. If you have these showing up on tickets, right? So if I'm a support person, someone says they have, oh, this issue, I could have recommended tickets show up based on, like, the category of the ticket. Or I can just search and say, oh, they're having this problem. Let's see if There's a guide to help me walk them through the issue. Or it literally could be something that you're using to log a call, log a meeting log, some kind of interaction, right, where you're actually inputting data into it and that's getting logged onto the record. Right, and into properties. So it's not just something you look at, it's something you can also, like, use. I did want to, like, go and hit one of like a really good example of when George talked about workflows, because people don't love manually creating deals, for example, and typing in a whole bunch of information they've already somehow kind of collected. A lot of times, typically when you're opening up a deal in HubSpot, usually you've had some kind of like, discovery call or gathered some information before. You're just like blindly opening up a deal for a prospect. A playbook is a great way to kind of bridge those two things together because you could have like a discovery playbook where you ask a whole bunch of questions, right? And information that's going to be relevant if you ever end up opening up a deal. And as you're capturing that information, depending on how you capture it and the answers that you get, you could trigger workflows off that contact to either, like, disqualify them and like change something about the record, or if it ends up being a good fit, automatically creating a deal off of that information once it's logged. That way you don't have to play the game of like, copying information over into properties, and you just have deals get created for you that have all that information you gathered on that discovery call and you're eliminating a bunch of extra work people would have to do to manually create the deal, manually bring over all the shit. And so it's just it. Once you start getting creative with how you can use this data you're collecting in context throughout all the other stuff you're automating and the stuff you're doing in HubSpot, you start unlocking all these like, wild use cases that aren't necessarily so obvious at face value when it looks like it's just a document.

I don't know if this is the place to let my nerd light shine or not right now.

Yeah, okay, hold on, George. I gotta be perfectly honest, I feel like a mom. Like all my millennial Gen Xers will know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm the mom in the mini pizza bagels commercial where the her boys are not paying attention to her, but suddenly Those mini pizza bagels come out, and they're, like, falling over her and themselves. This is like hurting middle school boys who are excited to eat pizza bagels. So pardon me if I. I regret to inform you, your nerd flag has been flying since the moment you said Davenport.

Dang it. Okay, well, then that's why we love this.

Love this.

I. I'll let it shine.

Let it rip. Let it rip, Georgie.

Shine. First of all, I would probably work for pizza bagels, by the way. Like, I need a cardboard sign. Will work for pizza bagels and just, like, stand out in front of my house and see how many people stop by and, like, ask me to do something. Y' all mow your yard. Pizza bagels. All right, so here's the thing. Here's where I get really nerdy and my brain starts to work is like, I'm gonna go back a little bit where we talk about its process, its iteration. Anybody that's ever done really great A B testing or multivariate testing knows that you can test your your way past what actually was success. And you need to go back to what was working better previously. The fact that in playbooks you have version history, and you can see, like, oh, man, last quarter, we were doing way better. What changed? Well, Marky Mark changed our playbook, and our freaking close rate went down. Well, sweet. Let's revert back to before Marky Mark touched our ish, and let's go back to the way it was. And so you can literally see back to the things that you've changed inside of the playbook as you're building them, iterating them, and using them over time. Like, my nerd mind just loves the fact that that's there.

Dude, I didn't even know we used to do versioning.

Oh, yeah, dude. Right hand side, under the publish button. It's freaking amazing.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did you out chill the show?

Yo, I just outshilled the show. You know what? You know what that means? That means after this is over, I'm gonna go out to my veranda and take a nap.

It's pronounced Veronda.

Well, whichever. But that's two words that I threw in this episode. Cause I'm 80.

I feel like you're taking my wife's favorite coffee personally. Do you need a little Metamucil? Are we okay?

I get plenty of fiber, but nobody wants to know that on this podcast.

I feel like there's a lot of diet. Devin, I have a question for you. What is the stuff that people get wrong About HubSpot Playbooks. Please save us from ourselves.

Oh, it's just right over the top of what George was saying. You're not iterating and you're not deprecating. You're not taking your old stuff and doing away with it. I mean, he nailed it. You can iterate past success and you need to be able to roll that back and you also need to be able to do away with what wasn't working. Going back to the beginning, the V1. You shouldn't be shipping your V1 and just letting it ride. That's not, that's not going to work. What you need to do is constantly update and change but also be prepared to roll back. But most importantly be prepared to scrap something that is no longer relevant. If I were going to create a playbook for my agency today, it would not look like the playbook that I would have created for five years ago. It wouldn't even look like the playbook I created last year. Because times have changed. I've changed how I do things. I've found new ways to be successful. I want to duplicate that success.

Another thing I want to, I want to talk about too is tying like Playbooks into sort of the greater enablement argument, especially specifically as it has to do with HubSpot and like the software itself. So like whenever you're thinking kind of like how are we going to like long term scale out our employees proficiency of using HubSpot but also doing their job correctly in HubSpot? HubSpot's got a lot of resources for you, right? We've got, we've got, we've got HubSpot Academy, we've got our support team. But you know what? We don't have that inside context and nuances of how your business works and operates. Only you have that right as the customer. Maybe you could argue your customer success manager or your onboarding person who gets really, really tight with you. Can, can, can pick up on some of that. But what's really interesting is when you think like how are we going to onboard new users to HubSpot that haven't used HubSpot and haven't used our HubSpot before. And like a lot of times you'll see people say like, yeah, we've got HubSpot Academy and people can go on there and they can learn how to use the CRM, they can learn how to do stuff inside of HubSpot and don't get me wrong, HubSpot Academy is amazing. Like you're going to learn how to Use the software in the. But what you're not going to learn is how your specific business operates within HubSpot and the context of what's unique to you and your processes and your specific nuances around how you're using it. Playbooks gives you the opportunity to bridge that gap. So you've got HubSpot Academy, so that when you get butts in seats and people start using HubSpot, they go, okay, I know how to use the buttons and hit the right buttons to do the thing right. And I know how HubSpot works. But then you could say, here are Playbooks for how our specific processes and best practices go. That take that even further and puts everything they learned about how to use the software into the context of how you're actually using it. You know, so there's that. Just think about how you're layering that stuff together.

So I want to double down on that. I want to double down on that max. Because what I want people to realize is that your employees are probably going to be in HubSpot as HubSpot contacts. They should be. If not, get them in there. There's a reason, because imagine a world where you live in that one of the things that you have to do on a monthly basis is go into your own contact record and you're told to run the internal questionnaire playbook. And now all of a sudden they do a note that they're answering these questions to know how well they know the new release of the product. And you can then go back to their notes and see. See how they did and what additional training. Right. So what I'm positioning here is again, we always talk about external, but playbooks could be an internal tool for you to see the knowledge and information that your team understands or does not understand and training methods that you would go moving forward or even onboarding. Imagine onboarding and they go through a week of what you tell them. If you're a company sitting here and you don't have an onboarding test or quiz or onboarding certification or you don't have the platform or the finances to actually implement something like that. Yes, you do. HubSpot Playbooks. You just have to build it and you can literally have an onboarding quiz or exam or whatever you want to call it. Oh, by the way.

Yeah, by the way.

Sorry, one more thing, Liz. You asked Devin what is the most common mistake people are making with HubSpot playbooks? I want to swing back to that for a second.

Oh, I was going to swing us all back to that.

Yeah. Good, good, good. Because I think it's very important that I just get a chance to, to state the biggest thing that I see wrong is that they go with creation before strategy. They just go in and they start to create something and they don't even know what it is in the hell that they're trying to create. Like, no, what is it that you need? What do you, how do you want to build it? Like whiteboard and like five other humans brains working together. Okay, now let's go build it in HubSpot. So it's definitely strategy and also creation.

And also how are you communicating that those are even there and when to look for them? There are a couple of things that they've done recently because they're, they're, they're doing a ton of work on the back end of playbooks. There's a lot of stuff I know about that I can't talk about. Oh no, but there's a lot of cool stuff. Yeah, I'm not going to, I'm not going into it. But, but a big, but a big thing, but a big thing that they've done recently is those recommended playbooks in context. For example, you can have certain playbooks show up when like tickets are in certain categories or deals are in certain stages. So instead of searching for it, it's showing up as recommended. And you go, oh, maybe I should use that playbook in this. You know, now that this deal is at this stage, right. It's like how to build a quote, how to request a quote, like approval, how to do, you know, all that kind of stuff. So they're doing a lot of really good work in terms of surfacing them and the visibility. But a lot of it also comes down to creating a culture around saying, hey, all the FAQs that you have about how to do your job and a lot of the aids you have and the conversations that you're having with the customers or kicking off internal processes, they're all sitting in these playbooks you gotta use.

Okay? So. Dang it, Devin. Right after this dude, you gotta unlock. Lay it down. But Max, I am so glad that you brought that up because it's one of the things I wanted to bring up and so the listeners understand what we're talking about. If you go into playbooks and go into settings, there's literally a thing that is when you create one set, when to recommend. And what it does is it gives you a drop down where like deal, deal stage, contact link, lead status, or life cycle stage, ticket, ticket Status or category. And based on those things, you can say, I want this playbook to be at the top of the list. Because, by the way, the bane of my existence is every HubSpot user always scrolls before they search. And right now, there's not a search functionality in Playbooks. And so if I can at least levitate it to the top, I'm good to go.

Wait, I'm pretty sure you.

I mean, on the record. If you're on the record and you want to run a playbook, can you search it on the record? Oh, I might.

I'm pretty sure you can.

Oh.

Hey, what's up, Devin?

Honestly, I'm learning new stuff here myself. So the advanced functionality. Advanced functionality of HubSpot playbooks. Some of this is news to me, man. I just traditionally am using them to document processes. That's. That's the primary function of Playbooks for me. Because like Liz said, what if somebody gets hit by a bus? That knowledge deficit is terrifying. So you got to have a place for. For the knowledge to live. But no, this advanced functionality, I'm. I'm sitting along with the listeners, like, ooh, really?

Okay, man, I gotta apologize to the whole HubSpot ecosystem. Son of a gun. There is search functionality for Playbooks. I don't know when that arrived. I don't think it was always there that I remember, but it's there now. However, when I did go over to the portal, it was always there. Max, shut up. Let me feel good about myself. So. So here's the thing. What I did see, that I don't think I've seen before. But again, maybe it's always been there. Max will let me know because he doesn't want me to feel good about myself. There's literally a recently used tag on Playbooks that were recently used, which is very interesting to me. So you know where you've been compared to where you need to go, because maybe you're running two or three Playbooks on a particular contact company or deal.

All right, let's get out of the weeds here for a minute, guys. Also, the chaotic energy of this episode. I'm here for it. I'm also scared, but I'm here for it.

Be very afraid.

It's definitely thick, for sure.

I think we've learned a lot about each other. Today, George will be on the Davernport waiting for people to feed him pizza bagels in exchange for goods and services.

And on a good day, it's. My davenport is on my veranda, and I have pizza bagels.

That way he can yell at the kids to get off his lawn and.

Stop playing the loud music.

Meanwhile, Devin remains the favorite. And Max, I love you, but you screwed up my introduction and I have forgotten. Yeah, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine. But you know what? We get to shame George for one more thing. Are we ready before we go into the wrap up today?

Oh, my God, I can't wait.

Do you know who we haven't talked about today, George? The humans.

I've been waiting for it.

Wow.

It's a lot of pressure. It's a lot of pressure. But at the end of the day.

Give me a real. Just give me a real breathy one.

Humans.

Wow. Okay.

Yeah, I'm not gonna be able to.

At least buy me a steak dinner first. Okay.

Oh, shoot. We have too much fun on this part. I hope, listeners, I hope you have fun when we go through this because it really is about you, the humans, and entertaining and educating and really giving you a journey along the way where you're like, God, I love HubSpot. I love to learn about HubSpot. That's. That's my hope. So it is really. Everything we talk about is about the humans.

So we were just teeing you up.

We're definitely not a cult. We're definitely not a cult. Just, I promise, all hail Big Sprocket. Mostly not a cult. We're definitely. When someone asks you, we're definitely not a cult.

Definitely.

Now, if that were the case, I would paint my walls orange or something.

Oh, here we go.

All right. No, no, no. Before we go into another tape. No, no, no. We have to wrap this up. We have to wrap this up. I love you all, but get off my virtual lawn. So if the humans only remember one thing from today's conversation, what is it and why? Devin, you go first.

Playbooks are one of the single greatest resources you can utilize for onboarding your team members, for getting them to do the job right the first time, the way that your best people do it. If you are. If you are sitting down with your best players and documenting how they achieve success and then using that as a blueprint to teach others, then you're winning. And if you're not doing it, then you're making life a lot harder than it needs to be. You should be using playbooks not only to document process, but as your. One of your primary onboarding tools into how your company gets things done. One of the hardest parts that I found in agencies, life is going into the agency and you expect it. It's something you expect, right? Where you just supposed to just hit the ground running, trial by fire, learn as you go. And then once you achieve something, you can take a shallow breath because, oh look, here comes another wave of stuff you need to do. And with playbooks, it lessens that anxiety. I've seen so many new hires burn out. Personally seen them burn out just because of the amount of figuring it out as they go that they need to do.

There are only two limits of playbooks. First one is the tear of hub spot you have, but the second one is your creativity.

Oh God, George.

No, I, I, I agree with that. I mean this, am I reading Rainbow?

Is this reading?

I was going to say it just needs to end with the more you, you know, you know, take a look.

It's in the playbook. Go close that deal.

Oh, okay. I don't even know how to follow that. Like that's some, some straight up. Just.

You don't have to. You can help me preserve my sanity.

Well, so here's, here's the thing, right?

Preserve your sanity.

Yeah.

Just kidding.

Moving on.

Moving on.

Moving on to playbooks.

How many pizza bagels do I need to give you?

So, so here's the thing. For me, I would want the humans to know that playbooks equals process. And a well defined process for each individual on your team equals micro success. And if you have micro success for each individual, you have company, that is macro success. You're moving the needle in the right way. One brick or one human? One. And so if you're listening this and you're not using playbooks in one shape form fashion, for marketing, for sales, for service, for operations, for the C suite, for whoever. Sit down with a team and figure out how do we want to implement HubSpot playbooks across the organization. What's the three, five, seven things that we could start doing today that are going to impact that micro success? Because we're actually documenting, iterating and refining the processes that make us successful.

I gave you so much crap during this episode, George. And then you had to lay it down like that.

Beautiful.

I mean, that's beautiful. That's what I, that's what I do, people. That's what I do.

Laid it down right on the dab.

Yeah, Yeah, I did.

You know what? Everybody get off my lawn. Everyone get out. To everybody else listening. Do you like us? Do you have suggestions? George? Work works for pizza bagels. What do you work for? Let us know by leaving us a review. It helps us get found. I would love to see us come out of this year with 50 reviews. Reach goal of 100 but I want to start with 50. Help us get there and help us out folks.

I'll ship you some pizza bagels for no he won't.

You will eat them. You will eat them.

I would eat them.

And don't lie to the humans. Don't lie to the humans. And on that note, we will talk to you all next week.

Bye bye bye.

Love you.

Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Hero Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag Hub Heroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time when when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.