INBOUND25 After Hours Show Day 1

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.

All right, we're at inbound 2025 and this is the after hours show. It is Wednesday, September 2nd. Third. Third. Yeah. You can tell Time zones are hacking my brain. All right, so here's what I want to do. I want to talk about. It's. It's the first day. It's San Francisco. I've asked you guys to be on this episode because, one, we've done other podcasts together. I know that you have opinions around things that we have talked about today, whether it be HubSpot, whether it be AI, whether it be just the fact that it's San Francisco in general. And so we're going to just kind of kick this off. First of all, let's go around. So people who are listening this, because I'm going to put this through the Hub Heroes RSS feed as the after hours show. So they're not going to hear Max, they're not going to hear Chad, they're not going to hear Liz. They will hear some new voices on this episode. So let's go ahead and Nico will. No, you know what? You know what? Always a gentleman. We'll start with ladies first. Uh, so, Casey, if you want to introduce yourself, who you are, what you do, maybe where you do it, Nico, Chris, you can follow up and then I don't think I need to probably say anything, but I might say something after that.

Hello, Casey Hawkins here, longtime listener, first time caller. I am of Casey Ko Marketing. I do freelance HubSpot consulting, a little HubSpot coaching, a little HubSpot content. We're working on a. On a current job description and title, and I'm based out of Annapolis, so I am taking over for Liz on the west coast as the Annapolis representation.

Beautiful, Nico.

I am Nico Lafakis and I work at Harvest Rye as their AI specialist slash technical solutions engineer. And what that means is essentially I help to deploy AI for various businesses, clients who need it in areas that they Feel that they're either getting stuck in, they're mired down with too much work, whatever it might be, as well as enabling the team to make them able to do what they need to a lot better, a lot faster. Yeah, that's my shindig.

Nice, Chris.

Chris Garland, HubSpot coach. Focused on customer experience, AI quotes of cash optimization, post sales, order management, all the other stuff that people want to do in HubSpot. You might find me sometimes as the founding pro at Profoundly, you might see me as solutions partner, but either way, you're gonna see me in my beard on LinkedIn. That's at least what I'm hearing.

Yeah.

At Inbound right now, people can tell me that they see my beard, but they cannot tell me about the content that I do.

I've gotten a lot of friends come up to me and say, I saw your friend, the one with the beard.

Yeah. There you go.

I must be doing something right.

We gotta work on that. We gotta figure out how to get the word Chris into their brain. But that can be another conversation. So obviously, I'm George. Hey, listen, if you don't know who I am, you have obviously never listened to the Hub Heroes podcast before. Shame on you. But maybe this will get you to listen to historical episodes. So we're in inbound. We're in San Francisco. Let's start with that. Elephant in the room. For years, right? Since 2012, 2011, it's been in Boston. This year, we moved to San Francisco. When I say we, I had no part of the decision. This was a inbound, slash, HubSpot, probably more than inbound, since they're separate entities. Decision. Give me your hot take on Boston versus San Francisco. I know this is only the first day, but, like, what. What feels different? What feels the same? What's cool? What's like, oh, crap moments? What do you have?

For me, I think some of the walks feel the same in some areas, but outside of that, it is a very different place. The. I hate. I hate to say it. I'm not sure. Oh, the Moscone Center. Bit more organized.

Okay.

It's a little. It's a little easier to, like, basically, like, you've got the T shape going on.

Yeah.

To be able to say, like, oh, all the importance is in this one place. And then, like, everything else kind of around here.

Yeah.

I do actually like the setup here a little bit better. It doesn't feel quite as. It feels a little bit more like ces.

Okay.

Even though I've never been there, I've Watched videos of ces, like, every single year, and it looks super interesting. And I can honestly say that. That this feels way more interesting and, like, lively and interactive than last year.

Interesting. Yeah, interesting. I have thoughts on that, but let's. You guys, what are your. What are you.

So this is my first inbound, so I. I have nothing to compare to other than, like, I've been to Boston.

Oh, well, there you go. There you go. The water smells like water here. The water smells like water there.

There's a really nice Italian name, food neighborhood in Boston.

Yeah.

We're gonna go out and eat Italian tonight, by the way, so you'll have.

To let us know how that compares.

Yeah, we'll have to let you know. Italian to Italian, Boston to San Francisco. What we think, Chris, empty that brain of yours on this conversation.

Well, it's only my third. Third inbound, so I didn't really have time to get attached to Boston.

Yeah.

I think no lawn on D is. Is a big deal.

Yeah.

But the vibe, it's. It's a different vibe, for sure.

Yeah.

I can understand why in this moment that it maybe should be here, and maybe it just. Let's change everything at once while in a space where we can take way mo's around and HubSpot's not the only thing freaking everything.

Freaking everybody out. Yeah.

Like, they're getting help from San Francisco. It is cool to. To come here and see the work that the team put in to put orange and HubSpot.

Yeah.

Yeah, right. That's been really cool to see.

Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is strangely exciting and strangely different at the same time. There's a couple things I noticed, like, coming out of the main keynote this morning, we got funneled too tight, and it took a little bit longer than historically. You would have gotten out of the normal, like, BCEC main area. Honestly, though, that's maybe my only complaint. Like, the space is cool. It feels like you even maybe have a little bit more room. And I'm not sure if that's because the space is bigger or they're using more of the space because of the. I think it's around 13,000 people that are actually here at this event this year. I. I do like the. The vibe is different.

Yeah.

I would almost say maybe a little bit more subdued than it would be in Boston, because Boston is, like. It feels very much more like a party. You know, even some of the things when Yamini historically would have gotten, like, raving applauses, I was like, wow, that's. That's the Applause that San Francisco gives. Okay, okay. Well, that's. It's just a different crowd, different space, different people. Here's the thing that I will say, though, that has been very interesting to me, and it has absolutely nothing to do with inbound or HubSpot. We got off the plane, and we got on a taxi to head over here. And my taxi driver, he was a old Greek guy, spoke broken, broken English. And he said, are you guys here for an event? And I said, yeah, we're here for inbound. And he said, we really need you guys. And I said, you do? And he goes, yeah, San Francisco has had a really hard time, believe it or not, getting back to normal from COVID And I said, really? Like, we're talking a lot of years that it's been. He goes, yeah, no, you'll see when you get there. It is a shadow of its former self, and there are, like, businesses that are no longer there, and we need you guys. And I thought, well, that's interesting. Okay, so last night, I'm at the hotel. My wife and I were like, this might be a little personal for some of you on the podcast. I didn't have distilled water for my cpap. And we tried to go over to Target, and Target close at 8. Yeah. So my wife is talking to one of the workers at the hotel, and she says, man, why does target close at 8? And he said, oh, well, the city is a shadow of its former self, and the businesses never really came back to open or stay later. And some of the businesses are gone. Like, they started talking about Whole Foods and how it used to be this whole other, like, clothing company but went away, and now Whole Foods is there. And he's like, yeah, the fact that you guys are here is a great thing for our community.

That's awesome.

And. And that got me thinking. Like, I don't know if this is the reason. Right. Because I have my theories. One theory is that they're renovating the BCEC because the BCEC now has a new name, and maybe that's not why we're there. But then I have this other weird, interesting theory. After hearing these two human stories and wondering if Yamini and the inbound crew was like, how do we inject some revenue into a city that is actually somewhat struggling now, that's my words. That's not inbound's word. That's not Yamini's word. But I want to tie these strings together. And even if it's not true, I think I'm excited that we're here because we're making an impact in all of the restaurants, in all of the stores, and all of the taxi drivers. And, Chris, you know what I'm about to say. We're impacting humans.

Oh, that was good.

You like that?

Yeah.

Without the soundboard.

You did it.

Okay. So. So that's my. My take on. I'm. I'm glad we're here. I do miss Boston. I'm. I think we're back there next year, which will be good. But I'm. I'm comfortable with, like, hey, we're. We're even if we didn't mean to. We're doing a good deed.

Yeah.

Okay, let's. Let's shift gears. Let's talk about HubSpot Yamini's spotlight. Let's. And again, it's fresh to us, but let's talk about what HubSpot's doing. What HubSpot's talking about how HubSpot is positioning themselves in the future. Casey, let's start with you. Unpack that brain for me.

I'm glad I went first.

Yeah.

So the flywheel is now a loop.

The funnel.

The funnel.

That is a flywheel.

The funnel turned to a flywheel, and now it's a loop.

Yeah.

Which is like an infinity sign for. There are. For our listeners.

Kind of. Yeah. Or it's one of those racetracks that you played with as a kid.

Yeah.

Yeah. It could be that. Yep.

Yeah.

Go ahead, Casey. Keep going. Ladies and gentlemen, I have thoughts. I'm trying to keep my mouth shut. Go ahead, Casey.

I think it makes sense to change the flywheel just on principle that we are in a different time and to act like we. We can keep marketing the way we've been marketing in this age of AI and as content has been changing and attentions have been changing, I think makes a lot of sense. And really, at the end of the day, the flywheel, the loop, the funnel, I mean, they're all just representations of how we interact with our other humans.

Yeah.

And so I'm. I'm okay with the change because at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter the shape. To me, it's. It's all about, like, we are in a significantly different time.

Yeah.

Than we were when the flywheel was introduced.

Yeah. Chris or Nico? Who wants to go next? Flip a coin. Chris, you're being very quiet over there.

Suspiciously.

Right. I know.

I mean, I've. I've talked to a lot of people about the loop.

Yeah.

And I told some people last night when we saw it at partner day. I said there's only one good excuse to call it the loop.

Oh.

And that is it enables you to use human in the loop in your marketing messaging. And that was her last sentence. I think of the keynote.

Yeah.

But otherwise, like when I can't imagine being in the position they're in where they have to try and help HubSpot customers. An ecosystem that loves inbound and that whole. It's like a culture. Some would say it's cult like at times. But knowing where they want to go and the identity crisis that is kind of happening right now.

Yeah.

People assign inbound to HubSpot, which is different from Outbound, which represents sales and doing things differently. And it's not. They got to find a way out of just. They're the marketing platform. They're the marketing people.

Yeah.

And I don't know that they've been able to do that. They've tried customer platform, growth suite, like all these different things. And I appreciate the effort. I like the infinity symbol is finally the right symbol to be using in my opinion. But I'm gonna struggle with it. I think for lots of reasons that AI is already confirming for me. It's a linear process trying to be applied to a non linear, you know, buyer journey.

Yeah.

And I, I get that humans need linear processes to understand things, but I think it's a new. It's a new, new paint on a similar kind of framework. So that's, that's where I'm at.

Interesting. Processing a different shade of orange on the Jaguar Waymo, if you will.

Yeah.

Yeah. Nico. Yeah.

It's been a day. So I will speak to the things that I'm happy about, which is smart. CRM.

Yeah.

And what seems to be a greater push towards modular module. What.

Module? Modular. Yeah, yeah, modular.

So, yeah. I, I did actually like the fact that commerce hub is like. Or that quotes are separating out. A lot of people were like, well, why are we breaking this out now into its own separate thing? And it's like, well, because you had it mashed up with other things before the other people didn't really need. So it makes sense to like have everybody play in their own sandbox. And that way you only have to buy what you need. Right. As opposed to like buying a couple different hubs so that you can give this tool in the middle. Because you actually half of it was on this thing and another part of it was on this other part. I like the fact that, you know, prospecting agent is going across the board. Customer agent is Getting more outreach.

Yeah. And.

Yeah. And that's, those are really like the highlights for me. I don't really know what to. I'm really, I'm with Chris on, on the loop. I don't really know what to make of it. I don't know that it's that much. You know, we went from a wheel to a loop. So I'm not, not entirely sure. Right. Like, they're, they're, they're both circular in ways. Right. But I guess the only thing I can think of is that maybe. And it's assuming, like, it's. So I look at it as the application of a, you know, again, like a theorem of marketing. Not even so much as a playbook. Right.

Yeah.

And so. Okay, as an application, you could definitely say assuming that you actually do come back around.

Yeah.

To the customer. Okay. This is now a very effective new model.

Yeah.

It's. I do struggle with the idea that it's not inbound and that it's something new. It doesn't feel like it in that way. Like in the customer acquisition part of it doesn't feel different from an inbound methodology.

Yeah.

So I kind of see that as the, the, as the jump off point. But then from there, yes, I see it potentially again, assuming that people actually take on that, that extra meaning. Because I've asked partners before, like, hey, you finished your engagement six months down the road. Did you call them back and ask them like, hey, how are things going? Like, ever since we tuned up your, your CRM, like, what's the performance like? Right.

Yeah.

So assuming that this actually, you know, gets rolled out in the right way and partners, you know, do take, take onto this and we do actually make this model switch, per se. Yeah. I can understand the, the, the theory and the, the phrasing behind the loop.

Yeah. So let me get very particular about the words I use right now. 1. I think Yamini is a amazing. I think the presentation that Yaminy did was amazing. I think that everything that Yamity talked about in the slides that didn't show the loop were amazing. Like the concept and the bullet points and the ideas and the strategies and the places that we need to be thinking and going were amazing. The loop lost me. I'm like, couldn't the four things been blades on a flywheel that you already have? Couldn't it be like a cubicle representation of like, segments of your business? But like, why a loop? And I don't know where it came from, who came up with it. But my point is, I understand we're trying to make it cool. We're trying to market something. We're trying to give a concept that people can understand. But to me, it feels like we've gone funnel, flywheel, loop, which is only three steps away from a basic inbound methodology that people should be paying attention to and still implementing in just a way that is today.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's. I wish we would go in the direction of, like, can we bring back the inbound methodology? Can we throw in some AI, like, around what that would look like today instead of it just being social blogs, like the old school one that you saw with, like, the actual tactics in the, you know, layers of the methodology. Yeah, and that's. That's what I was hoping for. And. And if you rip away the loop and you extract the slides and what she. You almost have that, like, you're 80% there.

Yeah.

And so if you love the loop, let us know. If you hate the loop, I'd love to know that too. I will tell you that I've been forewarned by Max, you said. Ooh. And Chad. That we will be having a similar conversation around the loop in a future episode of the podcast. All right, let's do one more question because we're quickly running out of time here. What is the maybe best or most fascinating conversation that you've had today that you're allowed to share? Because we, many of us, have talked to people who are probably one to one sharing things that may or may not need to be on the broadcast air, if you will. But what's like a fascinating, interesting, fun conversation that you've had since you've been in San Francisco at Inbound?

I talked today to Jay Schwedelson. Nice name drop. Thank you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you, everybody.

He's a dope human.

He is. He is a dope human. And we talked a lot about B2B marketing and how stuffy it can be and how we treat B2B marketing as if, to quote you, George, as if they're not humans. Like, we treat them like they're businesses. But behind every business is just a bunch of humans. And I think in B2B, we could do a better job at bringing the humanness into everything that we're doing. And it's gonna make you more successful and you're gonna have more fun doing it.

Yeah.

Had a pretty good conversation with a couple of different people from a partner organization.

Okay. Very specific there. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll definitely be having the same conversation with other partners over the next couple days. So I know, I know this didn't happen last year, but it did happen in 22. So if you were there in 22 for it, then it's coming back again this year, because I'm a correspondent this year, which means that every. Everybody gets an interview, and you have to better be on your toes. Gonna be grilling you. So we were talking about the future of RevOps because.

Oh, AIOps.

Yeah.

Yeah, they dropped that. Yeah. So I literally have. Not to interrupt you, but give me one second. I literally grabbed ChatGPT because, by the way, during the keynote, what I would do is I would start conversations with my assistant and say, article idea, and then give it a line of the thing that grabbed my attention so I could go back and start to work on a rough draft. And one of them that I immediately was like, oh, article, idea, AI Operations. Okay, we need to talk about that right now, but go ahead, Nico.

Yeah. Just talking about whether or not how many partners are actually positioned for this.

Yeah.

And it's kind of funny because, I mean, it's not funny, but it's funny to me, I suppose.

Maybe not in a haha way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

You know, we're talking about agents, we're talking about assistants, we're talking about this roll out. How many partners, internal teams actually, like, dabble in this. Know how to use it.

Yeah.

Know it like, in and out. Could talk to a client about it comfortably. Could set one up for them comfortably.

Yeah.

How close are we to that point?

Right.

And then the only other thing that I. I did have a discussion about, and again, not trying to throw shade, you got to understand people. I love HubSpot to death. And when you love something like, really like that hardcore, you're gonna pick on it because you want it to be better.

You have expectations. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think the one thing that threw me the most was where's the education? So post today, if I wanted to point my client to learn more about Breeze beyond product knowledge.

Yeah. Yeah.

If I want them to learn how to build an assistant.

Yeah.

If I want them to learn how to build an agent.

Mm.

So I, I, I'm not gonna. I'm gonna be the first one to say this. It's a little open. AI today feels a little disjointed for me in terms of what released, what.

Didn'T release versus what you can do, what should. Yeah. Oh, interesting.

Well, we got some content we can point into.

Yeah. Chris, what. What conversation did you have?

I had a good conversation with the HubSpot customer wanting to talk about ERP integration.

Wow.

And I think it's good to. This is why it's an impossible challenge, I think for HubSpot to really please everybody in a way that they've been able to in the past. Because while Nico is like 100% right in that, partners I believe are pretty far away from where they need to be in terms of enabling AI in their client base. But the client base isn't necessarily ready for it either. And that's what came out of this conversation. It was another conversation where the company is finally starting to take their data seriously. They understand it's a mess in the ERP. It's a mess in HubSpot.

Yeah.

In my conversation with that HubSpot admin, like he put up a one to one brain date. I didn't know what he was going to want to. I just knew he wanted to talk about ERP implementation.

Yeah.

And it was about like, hey, this is what I'm thinking about. Is it the right way? Like, am I missing anything? Like, it looks like the data model's there in HubSpot, but I can't find any information or content to support us doing it this way. I can't find other customers that have done this before. And again, that's my favorite coaching moments are, yes, those common sense things that you're thinking about are common sense.

Yeah.

You're in the right to do them. But it also gets to the point where everybody in the organization is like, needs to reach a maturity level with data and with AI now to really leverage a lot of the tools that are being given to us, which are amazing. But that's where this, this conversation brings me back to like, if you don't get the data model correct, you don't. They, they are doing these things and people are asking for more data cleanup because they know they can't get stuff out of AI until they fix that part. They might not be saying that out loud, but this is where it comes back to. If they can get to the unified customer view, then most goals that they have just start to become possible. Sometimes they know about AI being one of those things and sometimes not. But that's where a lot of the message about like, we're all still on board with yes, HubSpot can be the best place for 100% business context to be gathered together. And if you can do that, then AI tool, like there's no better platform.

Yeah.

Like for the cost and for the usability, like it's just going to crush.

Yeah.

To get there, we have to educate people that they can do things like invoices inside of HubSpot now.

Yeah.

Like all this data has a home.

So there's a couple things that come to my mind. One, basically, you're talking about there's still a lot of blind spots out there, which means there's a lot of education to be created, whether that be HubSpot Academy, whether that be profoundly, whether that be psychic strategies, you know, Harvest, roi, whoever. There's some blind spots out there. The other thing that came to my mind is I think. I think Yamini was helping people dip their toe in part of the conversations that you we're having because she mentioned trap data, siloed data, and bad data. And I think that was, to me, was actually a beautiful moment that if people would have been taking notes and writing something down is like, oh, when I go back to my organization, I should look at these three things to make sure they're not happening in my organization. Right. And so this kind of idea around data, I'll tell you, my conversation that I had today, I'm cheating a little bit because it's not really like a conversation which I've had some great conversations, but on stage today, I said something and I've always been curious of the reaction that I would get when I said the thing that I've said before, virtually. But I wanted to see how an audience would participate with what I said. And I said these words. I said, AI is the first tool that I feel guilt around.

I felt that when you said it.

And the amount of heads that nodded. And I said, you never felt guilty for using. 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 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 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.