Hubspot Sales: Snippets, Templates, And Sequences, Oh My!

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? 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, move into action, and become the Hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub Heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.

Welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes. Gentlemen, are you ready?

Welcome back.

I know.

Welcome back. Come back. Welcome back.

Well, there's that. There's also welcome back, Cotter. We could go many different ways.

I thought that's what I was singing. Wasn't that what I was singing? Oh, man, I'm a terrible singer. Never mind.

We're doing great, kids. How's it going this week?

Going great.

Yeah. Matt, how are you and your hair doing?

Tired. Very tired and sleepy. Well, your hair ain't sleeping.

Your hair is not taking over the world right now. Which. Which, by the way, if you're listening to the podcast right now and you want to see what Max's hair looks like, then head over to community.hubheroes.com Sign up for that free account and go ahead and watch the video version of this podcast. I'm. It'll be fun. Trust me.

Wait, my. My hair's in the free version.

Sorry, your. Your. Your emo suite stylings are not a premium.

Oh, I look like the weekend right now. Max, you got to pay for this.

And on that note. Hi, everybody. I'm Liz, your apparently lacking hub hero wrangler this week, but I am very excited to dig into our topic. In fact, I'm gonna forego some of our usual extra intros this week because we have a lot of ground to cover. So if you've been listening over the past several episodes to Hub heroes, we have covered a ton of ground. We've talked about workflows and service hub and campaigns and reporting and certification week and artificial intelligence. We have even talked about Inbound coming up this September. But Gentlemen, do you know what we haven't talked about now in many, many moons? Sales. We have not talked about our pals in sales. Now, to be fair, if you missed any of those episodes, definitely go back, listen to them. They are amazing. But today, it is time for us to give some long overdue love to one of our favorite teams, making sure that HubSpot flywheel is spinning ever so smoothly and that sales. So today we're going to be doing a deep dive into three of the most cool tools in school in the HubSpot sales hub. I know. Look at that. I did rhyming and I didn't even need AI to help me write it. Thank you. Thank you.

That.

See, that's what happens when you have a entourage, right? But today we're talking about snippets, we're talking about templates, and we're talking about sequences. Oh, my. You're excited.

Oh, I'm definitely excited. I can't wait to see how this conversation goes and what everybody has to say about these three tools inside of HubSpot pertaining to sales. But also.

We're gonna get to that. We're gonna get to that question. We're gonna get that. Don't let the kitty get out of the bag yet. I know. Don't let it out of the bag just yet. We're going to be talking about what these tools are, what they aren't, and how these tools can be super powerful for you even if you are not in sales. Now, if you've been listening, we have touched upon these tools before, but we have never done the deep dive IOUs deep dive like we are doing today. So with that, you know what, George? I'll let you let the cat out of the bag a little bit. I'm gonna let you jump in here.

Oh.

Why are we talking about these three. Three tools together? For a reason. And why did you get a little bit chafing when we pigeonholed it into.

Oh, George, are you chasing.

Yeah, yeah, I've got a cream for that.

Does this subject get you chuffed?

Yeah.

All those opposed to chafing, please say.

I. Yeah, I don't like chafing. It's not a good look. But. But here's the thing. What. What I want people to realize. And again, we are going to go at this a little bit out as a. A sales conversation at first. First. But I want everybody to realize that snippets, templates, and sequences are a. The ability in HubSpot to create a process, to have a system to streamline communication, to have consistent brand voice, to always be ready at a moment's notice for the thing or things that you might have to do in HubSpot or around HubSpot. As long as you've got your Outlook and Microsoft Exchange and Google connected, like, there's just a lot of power. And unfortunately, I go into a lot of portals, and these three tools are just usually being used poorly.

When you say poorly, give me an example.

They're not being used.

That's okay.

So. So it's not necessarily poorly. It's that people have politely abstained from using them for the most part at all.

Listen, listen. If I have. And I'm not saying you have to use all 5,000, but if you look at snippets, you have, like, 5,000 snippets, you can create templates. Like, 5,000 templates, you can create. Ladies and gentlemen, if you got four in there or you got even 10 in there, we are not leveraging it to the ability that we could be using across all team members and especially as marketers, to enable our sales team and especially as sales teams being able to streamline their day, spend less time doing the thing that they hate doing and more time playing golf. I like to play golf.

Golf.

You like to play?

Well, maybe you love your family. Maybe you want to spend time with your family, but most sales reps, when I say golf, they're like, hell, yeah, let's go golf more.

Max and Devin, you want to weigh in here on golf or snippets, sequences, and templates?

No.

Literally just had the conversation about golf today, and. No, I'm good, thanks.

Wow. Do you like golf as much as you like Fast and Furious there, Devin?

I actually. If I had to choose between the two, I would choose golf.

Oh, my gosh.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God.

I might need a minute.

I might need a minute. That was awesome.

What in the name of Dominic Toretto are you saying right now?

He can hear you often and as much as possible. Like, everyone who's a regular listener knows my opinion on the Fast and Furious. I don't need to rehash this.

Why?

You hurt me.

I don't know what your opinion is, but is your opinion that it sucks?

Max, we don't need to do that.

And, like, it's like, physics are just like. Like, it's gotten so bad. They went meta with plot armor in the last one. It's like, how are we not dead? And I'm like, exactly, Tyrese.

And.

Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna watch Fast X when it comes out on streaming on a night that I have nothing to do.

And it's available on Voodoo right now. It's available on Voodoo right now. So there you go.

That makes a lot of sense.

Free is the question. Because that's the thing.

I'm going to use it on a.

Service that I'm already paying for. I'm not paying extra to see Fast X. I don't need to know about anyone's family anymore. I don't care about Aquaman being crazy. I don't. I don't care, like, see, you know.

Way too much about it to have maybe not watched it. I think your closet.

Exactly.

Your closet.

But.

But I saw the trailer. That was good enough.

Oh, that was good enough for you. Speaking. Speaking of it. I mean, free. You know what else is in free in HubSpot?

Free. My brain was just going to the person listening to this episode with, like, a pen and paper down, just like, they just wrote snippets at the top. And then they're just sitting there just listening to everything we just said, about to hit that. Hit the fast forward button. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how much I'm going to save you here. I think, you know, for me, like, these are really tools and much of the rest of HubSpot, I think, you know, the value you're going to get out of them is going to be the creativity in which you use them. Right. I mean, you know, if we think about, like, what a snippet just literally is, it's like, all right, anywhere that you can input text to the CRM, it's going to drop some text in. Right? So the question is, is like, okay, how do you take something inherently simple like that and make it creative? Right? Like, are you using it to save someone some time in their day? Are you using it to make sure you're, you know, making sure the language and common verbiage that you use is consistent among your folks. Using, like, the Conversations tool. Are you trying to solve little problems, like making sure people don't have to just remember the support phone number. They can type in hasht sn and drop the support number in there. Right. There's a lot of little things that you can do, you know, all the way from that to like, using it as sort of like a lightweight version of Playbooks, where you just drop a call script into, like, a meeting that you're logging. Right. So there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with it. Again, it's all Going to come down to your creativity.

You know, George, I saw you shaking your head over there. Sir, do you have a few thoughts you'd like to share?

Oh, now you want to make snippets with me, George? I mean, let's go, brother. Step into the arena.

I mean, it's like I, I'm, I am listening to Max and I'm like, oh man, like text, text. Only text. But when I think about text, like the words can be powerful, right? The fact that you can put links in those words can be powerful. The fact that you can use personalization tokens in those words makes it powerful. So imagine I get asked the same dumb question times a day, which there are no dumb questions, so don't send me hate mail. But I get the same question 50 times a day. I can literally say, hi Bobby, hi Susie, hi Jenny. Great question. As a matter of fact, we've got it several times. And here are three links to content on our website. One is a video, one is an article, one is a webinar that you can go check out that will give you full answer on that. I am able with those words to deliver the value and the time for them to journey down understanding versus me writing a freaking 17 paragraph essay in my inbox and having to send it to explain the question.

George. Let me actually have you guys back up here for a second because one of your biggest airing of grievances in the earlier part of this episode, our very own Hub Heroes Festivus, was that people aren't using these tools. Which leads me to wonder, is it because some of them may not really understand what they are? So we're already starting to dig into here, into snippets. George, can you give me the like 30 second what of snippets? What are they? When and how do you use them?

Yeah, do you have to speak to people in email? Do you have to speak to people in a chat bubble? Do you have to leave notes? Do you want to be able to log calls and SMSs and all those meetings? Do you need a quick outline somewhere in your CRM? Well, imagine instead of typing it out every single time, you could literally do a, a pound sign, a couple letters selected, and it magically shows up wherever you need it to be and do and be whatever you needed to do. And B, right? So you get a chance to A, you can have a folder structure, you can name it, you can then build it and then you can give it a shortcut and you're off to the races. It literally is the Thing that would allow a human who sits down and strategizes the way that they communicate in a day and broke things down into repeatable pieces as snippets. I bet you could do double the amount or relax double the amount by using snippets in your daily life.

So what are some of the creative outside of the box ways that we've seen people use snippets? Devin, do you have any thoughts here?

One of my favorite uses that we used to do, we touched on it briefly but was standardized language. So if we were communicating with a customer and wanted to put in something about like if we have like a canned SLA or another use case is for call recap email. All of our call recap emails were forwarded the same are forward formatted the same, I should say. And so we would use it just, we would drop in the, the call recap email format and then our snippet and then just fill it in and it's, it's great for templatized emails or templatized communications that you use regularly. Now, as far as something out of the box, I've heard all kinds of crazy stuff. Like for instance, there was this one company, I listened to them, I want to say in 2016, 2017, what they used to do was use custom data fields as personalization tokens for can language that would be sent out to specific clients. And so they would have a snippet that specific or a little snippet within a snippet. You could say that's specific to that client within that field and then they would put in that personalization token. So you have can language plus personalized information. Because the idea is, and sorry, salespeople, I don't mean to insult you, but they wanted to make the salespeople write as little as possible. Yes, salespeople don't always write well.

Salespeople don't necessarily want to write though.

To be fair, though, a lot of people don't write well. Let's be fair.

And as great as you are communicating and as great as you are as getting people to like you, your grasp on the written version of the English language might not be that strong. And so we want to make it as simple as possible. I'm trying really hard to be diplomatic.

You're doing good. You're doing good.

Now we choose to be diplomatic. Now we choose to be diplomatic.

We want to make it so the salespeople have an easiest time as possible communicating with prospects and customers without offending them with the fact that they dropped out of high school in like freshman year.

So it's like, yeah, okay, maybe that wasn't so nice. But let me double down on what, let me, let me double down on what Devin is saying here. Because what I want everybody to realize while I'm talking about text and Max is talking about text and we're talking about personalization tokens, I want everybody to understand that you can insert personalization tokens around company, around deals, around tickets. You even have a section in there that is sender, that gives you some sender properties. So you can do things like first name, last name, email, phone number of the sender, you by the way of the snippet. And so now if you think about what Devin was talking about, you can create a company deal, ticket or contact property. By the way, one of the properties that you can now create is a text field, right? And so you can now have these written text items which by the way, in a text field, can you add imagery in a rich text? Yeah. Yes you can. And if you can use that as a property that you can pull into a snippet, is that a way that you can actually hack to do more than just text in a snippet? Yeah. Yep, you can. So again, it's getting creative with different pieces of the tool to then bring it into a part of a tool that we're talking today, and that's snippets. So you can, you can do almost anything you want as long as you connect the dots properly with properties, snippets, objects, and the way that you want to communicate or the way that you want to be able to dictate the information into your CRM?

What are some of the most important do's and don'ts that someone needs to keep in mind with snippets? And I'm going to open this up and say, you know, I'm, I'm open to do's and don'ts that live outside of the sales teams, since we did kind of tease that up at the top, right, that some of these tools can be used by teams other than sales.

Be, be super careful when you're using like, if you're getting like really, really cavalier with using properties in there, be, be careful that in the context that people would be using them, that you can guarantee the proper text is in there. Because if, if snippets is all about saving time, which I think it's just one of the good reasons, right. Nothing wastes more time than having something like, like a sentence of text or like Something like that get created or generated and then no sort of like value goes into like where any of these dynamic tokens are being used. And then that person's got to like stop all their momentum of what they were doing, go back and then figure out how to like reword what they wrote or type filling missing stuff there. So it's like just be, you know, careful in those situations. Like, also be very careful with like how you word stuff depending on how those tokens can manifest themselves in the snippet too, as well. Like, you don't want people to like waste time going back and saying, oh, it's kind of awkward the way this is like written now based on the type of information that like came in from that property. And then it's just again, you're creating a lot of these like nuanced little time wasters, like throughout people's days, which, you know, one or two isn't a huge deal. But when you multiply that across like a whole team of people relying on this, like, you know, quick snippets of text to be doing the job that they should be doing, and all of a sudden, you know, more often than not they're becoming a hindrance for people. What's the point of even using them, right? So it's just like, just be careful. And if you are going to put personalization token stuff in there, say, hey, are we sure that when they're using this there's a value and are we sure that like, whatever the values may be, the sentence structure still works? Sounds natural, things like that.

Okay, okay, I got to jump in here real quick before Devin says something because Max does bring up a good point. And it's actually a point that I want to make that almost could have nothing to do with snippets, templates or sequences. But since we're talking about snippets, templates and sequences, I'm going to throw it in here. And that's right, I'm talking to you right now. If you have been rocking out your HubSpot portal for two months, two years, I don't care how long you haven't spent the quality time that should and needs to be spent on your personalization tokens, meaning your property defaults so that when you do or your team does use these objects, these properties, and we don't have the data collected or input into the CRM yet that we don't look like we don't know what we're doing, then by all that is holy, spend some time in email, in Your settings and landing pages or pages in your settings, depending on if you're using CMS full or not. And look at the contact company, AKA default properties for personalization that you can set up and have in place. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled show.

So quick, quick thing with that and you bring up a really good point, George. And in email, like when you're building like marketing emails, you have the option to use like the global default, right? Or set a specific default to use as a fallback value for personalization tokens. However, snippets only will let you use the global default, right? So that's something to kind of keep in mind. Like when you're creating those global defaults, you can, hey, we'll use the global default for snippets. But then whenever we're doing this in like the context of a marketing email, we can kind of customize it to use what we want in there, right? Just because we don't get that same option when we're inside of snippets and actually like building one as you know, to only say use this value for this specific snip, it's always going to default to what a global fallback one would be. Devil's in the details, baby.

All right, gentlemen, let us turn our attention to templates. And we're talking specifically about, we're talking about a very specific type of template here. So what, when we, when we're talking about templates in the sales case, what kind of templates are we talking about?

What are they?

What are their intended use case? Because you hear template, you could be thinking of website theme templates, you could be thinking of email templates. There are so many different templates inside.

Of HubSpot one off email templates as if you were sending an email through Gmail or Outlook or whatever. Not a marketing email template, not a website template, right? So you can kind of think of them like snippets. Snippets. Except they only work when you're sending like a sales email, if you will. I hate the term sales email. Think like a one to one email, right? So you're on a CRM record, you're sending an email to somebody. The big difference is that it's not just like the body of the text, it's the subject line as well, right? So a typical template will include a subject line and then full body of an email. And then when you're actually in there in that email, like personalizing it further, you could even drop in other snippets, right? If you if you have the need to do that. Right. But think of a template as giving you sort of like the overall beginning structure of a email. You commonly send out a whole bunch.

Thanks, George. No, George, I'm gonna need more than a yep from you.

Give me the commentary people are coming for.

Yeah, no, ditto.

No, I, I mean, again, if I think about snippets, templates and sequences and I go into what my normal kind of narrative is, I think about a sequence as a.

A wall.

Like a wall, right? And. Or actually a sequence is a house. I think of a sequence as a house. I think of the template is a wall and I think of the snippets as a brick. So, like, you can use snippets inside of templates. By the way, we'll probably get back to that because talk about having a template that is like 70 done. I'll get back to that too. And being able to do like 10 of completing it with snippets. I'll tie that together. But then again, you have to think about the end. That means here is like these three templates or four templates are going to be put together to create this sequence. The house in which you're trying to build to communicate in a streamlined way, but not only streamlined way of communication, an entire process that you're going to like, reach out on social, give them a call, send this, this email, do this other thing, you know, take a nap, and then send this other email. Whatever it is, it's the process. So when I start to think about these templates, I start to think about a way that I can build the messaging tube about 70 complete, knowing that I'm going to customize it 30%, meaning I'm going to find any personalization tokens that I can put in there. That's going to be 10 of it. I'm going to find any personal trigger moment that I can put in there, not trigger in a bad way, like, oh, you triggered me a trigger moment, meaning, hey, we met at the luncheon learn, or we were talking at the barbecue and you asked me these three questions about your content strategy, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, like to the connect or trigger point that this conversation is starting on, based on the connection of the humans. And then I use another 10% if it is a piece of content that I've created snippets around. Now I've got this template that is 70% done, 10% personalized, 10%, 10% specific to the human and 10% filled in with the content of snippets that I actually want to share with them. And I am off to the races.

Devin, when I talk about templates, where does your mind immediately go?

Version control.

What about it?

So the thing is, is that it's really easy to mess up your sales team by use, by changing what they're used to using. And that's just in general where you can create a template. And this is even for snippets as well, where let's say that there's something language that you want to deprecate in the old one, but you didn't maybe talk to the sales team and say, well, we actually like it saying this because they're able to know one, that there's a newer version come out if you put out version control. And they can give you feedback on the two if you don't have feedback incorporated in it. But it also keeps everybody on the same page as knowing, okay, here's what we've changed. If you do do updates, here's what we changed. Here's what you need to know. Everyone start using version 6 now.

Yeah, and the other thing too, like, it helps with like. I mean, that helps with consistency, right? Because, like, what are you doing when you're not using a tool like this is everyone's got that, like, you know, Google Doc full of like fire email templates that people have been using and you just copy and paste it and forget to remove where it says hi, first name. Not that I've done that a million times. Very, very embarrassing. But like, I think the other thing, and maybe Liz, you're getting to like the best practices part of this. But, you know, let's go ahead and dive into it.

Let's start talking about this.

Yeah, let's dive into it. The big thing. Well, actually, there's one other thing we're also kind of forgetting about, like, what templates are, because I forgot about this. They're not just for email. Now if you go into the templates tool, you might also see that there's a WhatsApp section, right? So you can build WhatsApp conversation templates that will like, start new conversations with people. I don't know how it works because I've never used WhatsApp. But if you see that in there and you're using the WhatsApp integration, it basically is like a conversation, like starter, like through a WhatsApp message, right? You can, you can build as like a template and I think you have to get them like approved through WhatsApp or something like that. But anyway, going back to like the more classic sort of example of it. George, did you have a. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Before you dive into that. So hold your thought.

Yeah.

If you're listening to this podcast right now and you are rocking out the world of WhatsApp and HubSpot and you're doing dope stuff, you need to reach out to me or anybody on the team, let us know. We might just need to get you on an episode where we talk about everything. HubSpot and WhatsApp and what the teams need to know. Sorry, Max, go ahead. I just wanted to put that out to the community.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Calling all WhatsApp gurus. Anyway, so when it comes down to like the best practices around it, you know, what you definitely shouldn't be doing with templates is just using it as a way to like enable your salespeople to become mass emailers. Like, that is like, that's the wrong. Yes, that's the wrong way to do it. Like Gmail or Office365 are not meant to be high volume marketing email sending platforms. And you have to remember when you're sending emails through HubSpot, right, these one to one, you know, emails sent from the CRM record or through sequences or whatever, it's not going through hubspots like mass email sending servers. It's going directly from your Gmail account, which has a daily limit of how many emails it gets sent. Yeah, exactly. So like, you need to treat these like regular emails. Like I would use templates when you're doing like one on one emails with people, but you know, it's an email that you type all the time and you want to save some time and get it in there. But the other big thing is like, leave room for human personalization. It's not meant to be the entire email. It's meant to be the framework of the email, right. And then go in and kind of add your own personal flair to it. So it's not just like a copy paste send job. Right. They added a really cool feature a while ago where like, not only can you drop in personalization tokens, like that's been around since, since templates have been around, but they also allow you to add in what they call placeholder tokens, right. Which to me is like one of the cooler things that they've done. So when you add in a placeholder token, what you can basically say is like, you can say, all right, at this point of the email, write about a personal experience you had with the last person on the last call or something. Like that, right? So you know, make some sort of personal reference. Ask them some sort of genuine question, like whatever it may be, right? And you can build in sort of like these, these not notifications, but I forget the word I'm looking for, like context clues to say, hey, sales rep, mention something personal here. Add your own set of like, you know, personality to this email, right? Instead of it being just like a rigid copy, the same thing you're sending out to everybody, right? You know, so leave room for that. Leave room. Some like other snippets that you may like kind of toss in there. Like depending on the context of the email, it doesn't have to be the entire thing, but also like think about how you can fold it into different processes that you have, right? So if you are someone who is onboarding new customers, right? This could easily have everything you need in it to get someone to like book time with you and start your onboarding process or like whatever it is. Because you can easily drop in like meeting links. You can drop in stuff from HubSpot Video. You can put in any documents that you have from the documents tool. Like it talks to all these other productivity tools in HubSpot that you could then include in your template, right? So use. It doesn't just have to be text and like a personalization token of hi first name. Like you could do so much more with it.

Dude, you're still in my fire. You still have a fire. I totally wanted to talk about the Documents tool, right? And the ability to have that meeting links in there. And, and by all that is holy video. Having video that can sit in a template that you can then grab and send and not have to have to like search for it and upload it and embed it and find the link and blah, blah. Like I, I love templates.

That's all you got to say about templates, George?

Well, no, I want to give Devin some space to talk about templates too.

All right, all right. I just want to make sure you sound.

I mean, I didn't want to be a Max about it, right? Max is stealing all the fire, you know, not really letting us have stuff to talk about, you know.

Oh my God.

I'm the alpha right now, so I'm just doing Alpha. Dang.

7 Devin, please come in and restore order.

No, that was a joke.

Well, just a small use case that I've used in the past was for a franchisor that was using a single HubSpot dashboard to manage all of their franchisee communications. And I mean customer communications via the franchise. And what we did is we created a workflow that automatically assigned the EVP general manager, I think it was, and the sales rep to each of the people by region, each of the contacts by region. And then what we would do is we would use those personalization tokens within the templates. So then we would be able to utilize one template instead of one for every person using, like the signature function. And it would have all of the correct people and their contact information auto populate into the template for that particular contact.

Nice.

Outstanding.

Nice.

Tight.

Max, did you enjoy that one in particular?

It was tight. It was very tight. Yeah. Good.

It was good. All right, gentlemen, what are some. You know what, let me come down to your level. What are some of the don'ts around templates before we move on to sequence?

Don't overdo it. Don't have a template for every possible conversation. Leave some room for personalization, please. Like it. Because you got to navigate these things, people. And then the last thing you want is like 50 different templates and they're all saying kind of close to the same thing, but you never know which one you want in order to just don't. Stay chill. Stay general with templates. You don't have to have one for every kind of conversation.

And check in with your team every once in a while to make sure, like, you don't have too many that you don't need.

Oh, yeah. There's nothing wrong with deleting a template, by the way. If nobody's using it, it doesn't have to hang out in HubSpot. My God. So here's. I want to kind of go a little bit in the same vein as Devin is, I think. And by the way, this happens in a lot of spaces. Like if you talk to marketers about creating an article historically, they might think about one article at a time versus like a trifecta of three articles that belong together that go actually through the funnel. And so when I bring it back to templates and start to think about this is not only just thinking about a singular template, but thinking about a template that might be paired with another. Or it might be a set of three, meaning there's probably gonna be different places in a sales funnel, in marketing conversations, in a podcasting process, that you're going to have to meet people. And so when you think about it as a process of communication instead of a singular thing to communicate, now all sudden you're building a tool set that you can use instead of these kind of one off. So. So Think of how you can pair them together, I guess, is what I'm trying to say here.

Yeah, one more thing. Be mindful of the voice used in your templates, in your templates and your snippets. One thing that can be extremely jarring in a customer experience is when you've been interacting with someone and then you get an interaction from them that is obviously not from them. It definitely takes away from the customer experience. Don't be overly formal in your templatized speech, in your snippets. Try to sound like a human being having a conversation. There have been numerous times where I have been in an organization that we use templates and snippets and I'll take it and I'll just rewrite some of it because it. It doesn't sound like me at all. And it is so. It was com. Like so hilariously obvious that one, it didn't sound like me, and then two, it was verbose and like, overly apologetic. And then it started giving me Solutions. And three, and then they sent it within 30 seconds of my response. It's like, so obviously it's a cut and paste job. So. Yeah, yeah, just. Just be mindful of that and don't discourage people from editing templates as long as the information is there and accurate. Empower people to make your messaging and your templates and snippets their own if they feel so inclined.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It's interesting because, Max, I give you one second here. We can tell that it was a copy and paste job, Devin, because I might have gotten that template from you, and the first line said how much you actually love Dominic Toretto. You're a big fan of his. So I immediately. I immediately knew that it wasn't coming from you. It was. It was coming from somebody else. So that. That's no good.

Some identity theft right there.

But here's what I'll say too, before I pass it over to Max, is that if you're. If you're C suite right now and you're listening to this, I hope you would take what Devin said to heart and realize that the templates, and probably the snippets too, are really meant to be like kind of a little bit of guard rails that people play within, but that we are allowed to have the freedom to make it sound like us, be us. Because again, if we go back to the whole thing that makes all of this work is that we come off as humans and we're serving as humans.

There it is.

We actually have sir right.

43 minutes in.

I'm just gonna throw that out there. Just throw that out there.

That was so organic, too.

That's smooth. It only took me 10 episodes of coaching of you telling you, like, if you try to squeeze it in in the first 30 seconds, it doesn't count. So I'm glad. Here we are finally 18,000 episodes in, and we've got it.

Hey, don't felt good. Practice makes perfect.

Perfect.

Practice makes perfect.

We did it. We did it.

Max, you did have something important that you wanted to say, though. Yes.

Yeah, man. This is going to be the goofiest transition back to what we were talking about. But I say the one thing is, like, you know, templates should feel like a tool that, like, you as an individual contributor should feel comfortable experimenting with. Right? As long as you're. I mean, I would. I would hope that your organization would give you kind of the autonomy. Beep. To be able to do that and not be such, like a, I don't know, police that the templates and email stuff that you're doing with people. But, like, the one thing I'll say in terms of, like, template etiquette, if you have some templates that, like, you're experimenting with and you haven't wanted to, like, release them to the team yet, put that thing as private, right, Instead of available to everyone. Because you're only going to confuse people. If you make a whole bunch of templates that you're testing around and playing with and testing out and stuff like that, when everyone can see them, they might get confused about what they should be using, right? And maybe those templates aren't, like, really fully baked out and, you know, performing that well yet. So make sure you're setting stuff to private. And hey, if you end up getting, like, a template that. That hits right, don't. Don't keep that to yourself. Share the wealth. Open that thing up. Make it. Make it available to the rest of the team so they can use it. Just make sure you have some conversations with them about why it's there, what situations you use it under, how you. You go about adding a little bit of personalization to it just so people can use it with the proper context and get out of it what you got out of it when you were using it.

So one more thing before template. One more thing before we go away from templates, too. By all that is holy. Use a freaking folder structure. Like, just. Just use a folder structure.

Be.

Be a good human. And. And by the way, while I'm on this soapbox, HubSpot. That's right. I'm talking to you. If you work at HubSpot. If you work at HubSpot and you know somebody that works on the templates and the stuff snippets, tools, it is 2023. Can I please, please get folders inside of folders? Because the fact that I can't go and make a folder for Jimmy and give Jimmy a folder for outlines question asks like different things that Jimmy might need to dive into. I love you, HubSpot, but can I get folders and folders, please?

You know, just go talk to the workflows team. They just did subfolders and workflows.

Go over there, chitchat with them. I'm just saying.

Big orange sprocket, shots fired. All right, now let's bring it home with sequences. Who is going to tell me what they are and what they are supposed to be used for?

1 to 1 communication.

Okay, so Devin, I see you have a couple feelings here. Maybe five of them. You want to unpack them with us? It's a safe space, buddy.

Sequences are not workflows. They are not designed for one to many communications. You should not be attempting to bulk enroll people into sequence.

Oh, I can't wait to ask a.

Question for sequences to do your job for you. Sequences are meant for salespeople to nurture more effectively. Include not just emails, but reminders. They tell you, hey, you should connect with this person on LinkedIn. Have you given them a call yet? And it's, oh my gosh, like they're one to one communications is what sequences are for. If you're going to do one to one to many communications, first rethink it. And it's like because you're doing sales, not marketing, you're interacting with human beings, not bombarding them with spam. Like there, there was a reason why it took so long. Like, I don't even. Like, I, I feel like you can mass enroll. But, but, but don't, don't. Just stop. Don't.

Okay, so that was gonna be my question.

Hold on. I was patient. Hold on.

Max has been rocking back and forth.

Sales director out there that thinks you're gonna go and buy a list of contacts.

Come on, brother.

And you're gonna take that list of contacts and you're gonna give it to your sales reps, brother. And you think, think that they're gonna enroll those 1,000 new contacts that you just bought. You need to shut the delete your HubSpot account and never ever do that because you can't and you shouldn't. And you, you won't be able to and just. It's a bad strategy.

Max, can you tell me how you really feel about that? I'm a little lost.

I feel like I finally don't work at HubSpot anymore and I can speak my mind truly how I feel about it. Okay. Been waiting to get that out for a while. Listen, there is no good strategy of I'm going to go buy a list of contacts and tell my salespeople to shower them with sequences. It doesn't work. Don't do it. Stop.

So, so that's, I love. First of all, that, that is good. First of all, that, that right there is hitting the Internet tonight. I swear by all the powers that I have. Somehow I gotta clip that out and put it on LinkedIn and be like, how?

Please include the five minutes of rocking.

Oh my God. Oh, it's, it's hilarious. So, so here's, here's the thing, because I wanted to immediately ask the question and now I think I know, but what do you two think about the fact that I can actually use a workflow action mass enroll people into a sequence? Like, it never made sense to me. I know there are people that probably have use cases. If you're a listener and you have a use case that isn't spammy, that isn't crappy to how you're actually auto enrolling in a workflow people into sequences, I want to know. But Max and Devon. Okay, have you guys ever heard of a good reason for this?

No. Okay. No. Okay, so here's the deal. There's been, I, I, I can't tell you how many people I heard over the years going, why can't I en someone in a sequence via a workflow?

Yeah.

Right. And that's because people don't understand that sequences send emails from your Gmail or Office365 account, not from HubSpot's email sending service. Now here's the deal. When HubSpot sends mass marketing emails out, okay, you may notice that you can't send those emails out without the little information in the footer that shows the address of your company. And that's the, I believe that's can spam, right? So what's actually happening in the back end? You know how you have to go into the settings in HubSpot somewhere and type in your company's information versus actually typing it in in the footer of an email? That's because it inserts these tokens into those emails to guarantee that you have your can spam information in the footer to protect your ass from getting in legal trouble, all right? Because you can't be sending out mass emails without canned spam information at the bottom. Okay, so here's the deal. If HubSpot were to allow people because you really think it was that hard for them to build the, the. The feature that enrolls people in a sequence? No, no, it. They didn't do it because if you did allow that to happen, right? And it worked the way people wanted it to work, you could then use workflows to mass spam people using sequences. In theory, right? Now, that's bad because of a one, you're, you're. We have no guarantee that you're not violating the can spam rules or laws or like whatever it is because that email is getting sent out by Gmail, not our servers that can check to see if that token is present before the mass email goes out. 1. Right? So HubSpot didn't do that to protect your assets, first of all. Okay, so give HubSpot some respect there. Second of all, was the second one. Second of all, there's another reason. Oh, yeah, if you were to just like, be able to enroll sequences via a workflow, right? You could easily, like, go over the total amount of emails that you could send, like from your Gmail account, and all of a sudden, oops, you know, you sent a. You enrolled 5,000 people in like a sequence or something. My email is locked up for the rest of the day because Gmail only lets you send out like, what, 3,000 emails total a day, right? So it's just like, it's not that it was a deficit in the product that it wasn't in there. It's just that the way those emails are sent are not meant to be sent in a mass way, right? So for all the folks who are like, dying for HubSpot to be able to sen sequences via workflows, there's reasons why HubSpot didn't do it. Now. They did eventually roll it out to people. Yeah, Right. But it's done in kind of like a very limited capacity, and there are some limiters in the back end that make sure that it doesn't screw up your email and stuff like that. Right? But you know, that's like the way it works now is you can really only send out a sequence from a specific person, right. Instead of just like from whoever the owner is. Right. And that's because you can't really guarantee who's connected their email and who hasn't because, cause again these emails get sent from a connected inbox. Right. Now I've found certain situations where it actually makes sense where you might have one or a couple people in the company that need to set up some automation for them personally or maybe a couple other possible people that a lead could get rotated to. Right. But you gotta do a lot of like branching logic stuff and things like that. It doesn't really work too well if you're still scaling it up to a massive amount. Like if you have like hundreds of sales reps, you're probably not going to use it because you got to make sure all of them have their email connected, all of them have like access to the right sequence. You know, like all this stuff is set up and it's just not a super scalable thing. But that's because it's meant to be used on a one to one basis and not for mass email guys. Like let your marketers take care of the mass emailing. You can send emails from HubSpot that are marketing emails that, that accomplish the exact thing you want them to accomplish and make it look like it's from a sales rep. You can do that. It doesn't have to be in a sequence. Right. So sorry, this one makes my blood boil a little bit. So I just had to, I had to set the record straight for folks.

It makes great tv. Makes great tv. I'm just gonna throw that out there.

Yeah.

There's the thing, and I know Max said it repeatedly, but I don't think he stressed it quite enough. Sequences come from your inbox. They're not coming from HubSpot. When HubSpot sends out a marketing. When you send out a marketing email through HubSpot that's coming through HubSpot's IP address. If you have a dedicated one or if you're like most people doing the shared IP address, all of that is coming from HubSpot. Imagine if you log into your email and you can't use it, your personal Gmail and then, and then you might have the audacity to get mad at HubSpot about it. No, you did that. With great power comes great responsibility.

Let's go right now.

Yeah, you can blow your whole stuff up if you do this wrong.

Can you imagine? Can you do it? Can you imagine you wake up in the morning, you got your, you know, PJ's on, you're like, I'm gonna get my cup of coffee, I'm gonna check my morning emails and then you can't. Can you imagine the Call to your boss of like.

Hey, boss, I think.

I screwed something up.

Yeah, we can take it. We can take it one step further. Can you imagine if your regular email that you're sending to someone goes directly to spam because you shot up your entire company's real IP address over doing something you weren't supposed to be doing? I know a guy who tried to send me driving directions. Just regular old email went straight to spam. Like, hit. Every communication you send will go to. You can't get. You can't get out of that. There's no comment. You got to change your domain now. You got to put in a subdomain or something because you. You just shot your own self in the foot.

Yeah.

One.

Which is also why you just. Yeah. Which is also just another reason why you don't buy listed contacts and just. Just shower them with emails randomly. So blow your domain reputation into the stratosphere.

So.

All right, guys, Guys. All right. I'm putting a pin in this.

Drama. There's so much trauma that we're unloading right now from years of talking to people about this stuff that didn't understand it. Like, it just has to come out. I'm sorry, one more thing.

One more thing.

No need to be sorry.

One more thing I gotta add in. And, Liz, you can take it to wherever we gotta go show. But I can't wait until we hopefully do a live episode at Inbound of the Hub Heroes podcast, because I'm gonna wait for just the most opportune time to light a stick of dynamite and be like, Devin. Max, what do you think about enrolling people in sequences via workflows? I'm just gonna throw it out there right in the middle of everybody and just watch it.

People are gonna start throwing chairs and our.

Yeah, we're gonna start fighting people.

Just, like, just elbows everywhere, you know?

George, you said Liz is gonna take this wherever we need to take this. I don't know if I need us to go to, like, some sort of therapy office or maybe just to the. I don't know. I will come around and hug all of you after today's episode because clearly we, George, will be last. But yes.

Not nice.

But hey, guys, sequences are cool too. Like, they're great. Like, you can use them to make sure that people book time on your calendar.

They're a process.

Emailing them because they book time.

Gentleme. Outstanding. All right, guys, you know what? If there is one thing from this episode that someone needs to remember, that has nothing to do with sequences not being Mass email explosion machines. What would it be and why?

I don't even know, man. I've like wiped out all higher functions now. Like I can only focus so much and, and, and y', all, you really lit a fuse with the sequences question.

I know. How dare I ask what sequences are?

Here we go. Here we go. Sequences are more than just sending emails. They're an opportunity to keep your salesperson on track when it comes to interacting with a prospect or a customer. This is an opportunity for them to set reminders, to do things, to reach out. And also you can unenroll someone from a sequence and put them in another sequence depending on where they are in the buyer's journey. And so these are all things to keep in mind there. It's about process. Like George said, this is all about helping you streamline your process and keeping your sales team accountable. Accountable keeps leads from falling through the cracks once you start engaging, once they're supposed to be in that sequence. Because you only enroll people in a sequence if it's a one to one communication. You don't let me stop before these people in this hallway start knocking on my phone.

So George and Max, if. If people only remember one thing about snippets, templates or sequences from this episode.

What should it be and why be creative?

We talked a lot about sales, but these tools are just as great on the service side, right? I mean, I will tell you it is. It was when I was an implementation specialist, it was the best thing ever when I got a new customer just to put someone in a sequence that would just take care of getting that onboarding call booked, right? Like, and for me to not have to think about it, for me not have to like, like manually make reminders of myself, for myself to reach out to people when they wouldn't pick up the phone and I was trying to book this call, right? Being able to re enroll people in a sequence at a different step at a different date. Like there's so many cool things that you can do with it. But again, I'd say find the nuanced, repetitive interactions that waste a lot of time and figure out how you can use these three tools to plug those holes, right and make things a lot more efficient.

I'm going to go back to the very, very, very beginning of this episode and the thing to remember is that these tools are not just for sales teams, they are for all teams to do exactly what we've said you should do and to not do what we said you shouldn't do. So just like we're getting all hype about buying lists and auto enrolling and sequences and stuff like that. Make sure your sales team is being human. Make sure your service team is being human. Make sure your marketing team is being human. Again, these tools are tools. They are there to help us be better versions of ourself, faster versions of ourself, more concise versions of ourself. Like it all comes down to snippets. Templates and sequences are at our fingertips to create a better user experience for prospects, leads, customers, evangelists, whoever we happen to be communicating with at that point in time.

Gentlemen, thank you for a really tame, uninspired episode.

It's kind of boring.

My coach, my coaching note to all of you is next time, can you give a damn? Just next time, try, give a little Next time, try, try, give a little more. Give it a little more. More.

I love you all about the show.

And to all of our listeners. Hey, I hope you're all right. Yes, Max. What?

Thank you for listening.

Get out of here. Please go. Everyone leave. We're done now. Goodbye. No poetry. I was going to do a poem today and I am poetry out.

Oh, I know.

Oh, I know, I know.

Wow.

I might be saving up for next time, though.

Oh, okay. Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out. In the next episode, make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you'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 hubberospodcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.