INBOUND25 After Hours Show Day 2

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, day two. And this is a special episode of the Hub Heroes podcast that we're going to be putting out the after hours show. I'm your boy, George B. Thomas. You know who I am. I don't have to really explain all of that. If this is your first time listening, then go back to other episodes. You can figure out who I am as well as the normal guest. But today I'm excited because we have a powerhouse of women sitting in what is I'll affectionately call a fish aquarium, or chameleon aquarium, whatever. Whatever animal might live in here. And we're doing an episode. So first of all, ladies, let's have you introduce who you are, what you do, where you do it, that kind of stuff. Great.

Hey, I'm Omi. I am the co founder of Diaz and Cooper. We are a platinum HubSpot partner based out of Miami, Florida, and I'm excited to be here.

Awesome. I'm Camille Balhorn. I'm a HubSpot solutions consultant with Citizens Simple Strat and we're based out of Nebraska.

My name is Lika Rogers. I'm from mitametrics. Founder of mitametrics. I'm based out of Brooklyn and Platinum Solutions partner.

And I'm Tracy Graziani. I am the geek executive officer at Green Fire Strategy and we're a HubSpot partner located in Cleveland, Ohio.

Oh, Geek what? Geek what?

Geek executive officer.

Oh, I like that. The Geo, that's. That's pretty cool. Okay, so let's go ahead and jump into this. I want to talk about inbound. First of all, San Francisco versus Boston. Have you all been to inbound in Boston, Right? Every one of us, yeah. Okay, beautiful. So this can be the good, the bad, the ugly, the thing that the Hub Heroes podcast listeners like. They like the. The real deal Holyfield, the truth. So give me your thoughts. Boston versus San Francisco.

Way more driverless cars.

Oh, yes. Waymos yeah. Have you ridden in one?

I have not. I think this is going to be a goal for me tonight.

Anybody? Anybody in a Waymo? Okay.

Yes. I've done three waymos so far.

Okay.

Yes. And including one with a woman who said she was absolutely not going to do it and then ended up being the one that, that, that called the Waymo.

Oh, really? Okay. Interesting.

Yeah.

I did. I was with Omi in the Waymo. So I.

Are you the woman that caught it?

No.

Okay. Okay.

Like, you know, I'm game for everything with these ones. I'm like, I'll try it. Sure. But this other person was like, absolutely not. And then she did it and she was like, let's do it again.

Oh, that's funny. That's funny. Okay, so we got off on driverless cars, which, by the way, I will let the listeners know. I have not been in one yet. However, I did tell my wife who came to inbound with me this year, that when we're done on Friday, because we don't fly out till Saturday, we can do whatever she wants to do. And so we're probably going to take one of these driverless cars. I will close my eyes the entire time to go to see the Golden Gate Bridge and then maybe even full house house. And I guess the Doubtfire house is here. And so I guess we're going to go look at houses and buy zero houses because it's California. But let's go back to Boston versus San Francisco for inbound. Give me your thoughts.

So it's a mixed bag for me. I love being in a new city. There's a different energy here. It's exciting to be in a different venue. The venue is fantastic. But I do miss Boston. I mean, I miss the familiarity. I miss the Mike's pastries. Ooh, yeah, you gotta have, you gotta walk on the North Shore. On the north side when you, when you're there. Yeah. But I think just getting used to the logistics just took a little bit longer. But most of us are pretty flexible. Otherwise we wouldn't do what we do.

Yeah, very, very true. What else, ladies?

I have jet lag, which is really ridiculous coming from the East Coast. But I've been up every day at.

4Am See, you're doing good. You're doing good. Because I Woke up at 2:30 and was like, no, I'm like. And I tried to like, you know, lay down and then hit the phone to see what time it is. Lay down. And I was like, okay, it's, it's not Changing. It's time to get up.

I. A couple of people that are west coast based, they're like, well, now you.

Know how we feel.

Yeah, yeah. True, true, true facts.

I'm sure there's a lot of factors at play, but I am loving San Francisco compared to Boston. I just feel like the air is clear, it's more walkable. There's nice restaurants. Probably just in a different neighborhood.

Yeah.

But I love getting San Francisco.

Yeah. Yeah. I will say the streets are clean as, like, I'm like. Because we. Again, if you're up early and you go out, you see, like, they're pressure washing the sidewalks and stuff, which is. I'm like, okay, this is cool. Thoughts on. On Boston.

See, I love both cities for different reasons. I do miss having, like, you know, a daily lobster roll. Cause that's not happening here.

Preach.

But we've had lots of fun, and there is plenty of great seafood here too. So it's not like we're missing out by any means. So I love both.

Yeah, I. I would agree with you. It's. It's interesting because last night we had to go out to dinner. Well, we didn't have to go out. We could have not eaten, but we went out to eat with a client. And it was funny because we were looking at the menu. And my wife knows what. One thing that I love to do when we go to Boston is. I love to get, you know, Mac and cheese, crab Mac and cheese. And she goes, ooh, ooh, babe, babe. Or actually lobster Mac and cheese. She goes, they got lobster Mac and cheese. And I almost ordered it, and then I was like, I'm not in Boston. So instead, I ordered this crazy, like, grilled cheese and tomato soup thing. And it surprised me because they brought it out and it had sauteed onions in my grilled cheese. And I was like, this is the dopest grilled cheese sandwich I've ever had in my life. Okay? So I am loving San Francisco. I'm loving the Moscone Center. But I will say I'm gonna just plant the flag and be like, I'm glad at least. I think prayerfully we're gonna be back in Boston, because I've had to ask for directions more in the last two days than I've had to ask in my entire life. And my wife looked at me earlier today, and she goes, man, you're just not really good with this directions thing, are you? And I'm like, no, I don't remember how to get around to anything in here. Where Are we going? And she's literally been helping me get from point A to point B. Maybe I'm getting old. Okay, let's switch gears from San Francisco to Boston and talk to me about today or yesterday because you guys have the opportunity of two days. What have you heard or seen from HubSpot that you're like, that's the dopest thing ever. And then maybe something that you're like, eh, I don't know.

Dopest thing ever for sure is DataHub for sure. Although I'm a little, it makes me cringe a little bit. The auto merge function. I'm not sure most of my customers are ready for that. The, the one that gave me that freaking heart attack today was the move from the cpq, the custom quotes, moving into Commerce Hub.

Oh.

So I'm excited for the functionality. I think the functionality is going to be more solid. However, I was literally in the middle of a custom quote project with a client. They had not yet published any quotes and so half our work done has disappeared out of their portal.

Oh.

But the lovely HubSpot engineers are going to hopefully, fingers crossed, help me with it.

Let's, let's hope. Let's hope. All right, so again, what is the dopest thing you've heard or seen and what's the. I'm not sure.

I got to second the Data Hub for sure. I mean I definitely have several clients right now that have disparate systems. It's going to help so much. Not to mention the enrichment and the space smart properties that you can enrich from those. I think that's going to be fabulous. I'll also call out kind of a smaller update that's actually before inbound object property snapshots. So being able to have those contact activities roll up to the company, the company that they were at when they occurred. So even if they change companies, you know as well as a life cycle stage reference for that.

Yeah.

And so being able to know, great, they were at MQL when they did this and I think that'll be so great for attribution.

Yeah. Love it. You went nerdy. I like that.

That's my mo.

There you go. I like that. What else, ladies? What, what, what's on your mind?

I, I, I don't think a lot of things made the deadline.

Oh.

I am very curious. What's going to happen at the Spring Spotlight.

Yeah.

And one of the gripes. I'll come up with the gripes.

Yeah, yeah.

Is I like the case study, the AI case study. Features. What I don't like is that it's not theme supported. So if you're on a dark theme, case studies is always a light theme.

Yeah.

And when I spoke to them about it, they're like, yeah, we kind of know when just expect some changes. Whenever they say just expect some changes, I think whole new things come out.

Yeah. Hopefully it just becomes like it's part of kind of content hub and themed and it just grabs whatever you're using. Product team, if you're listening, maybe potentially that is the way we go. What, what else? Where else does your brain go?

So yesterday's session with all the sales updates with Kyle and that, Holy cow. Like, I was all. I mean, fortunately, as partners, we kind of knew we had some advanced knowledge of some things that were coming, but there were more things that. Than what we knew.

Yeah.

And I was literally in the session, like, texting my head admin on my team because there were so many things in that session that specifically are going to help certain clients who had complex reporting issues. Especially some of these new improvements are going to make it so much easier for sales managers to have visibility into the sales process with their team.

Yeah.

In a way that doesn't feel punitive because I think the old way that the dashboards have worked, it becomes about like, well, did you, you know, you didn't make your call quota. You didn't make, you know, it was so much like either you did or didn't hit these specific goals and now you can see these activity metrics, you know, rep by rep. Yeah. And so anyway, it's what's. What's coming, what's rolling out with all of these betas. Just sign up for all of them and they're super exciting.

Yeah.

My moment of anxiety and pause is the same as Omi's. I literally have the same challenge.

Yeah.

We are in the middle of a very complex custom quote project.

Yeah.

And so this is an unpleasant transition.

Yeah. Listen, I'm gonna be honest with you. At dinner with the client, it's funny that this is like first base, second base, third base moment here. We too have been working on how they're going to be doing quoting in their organization. We have tapped in, quote, happily to do some of the stuff that we're going to do with them. And the immediate conversation at dinner table, before I could even get bite one, is like, hey, do we need to think about what we're doing? Like, is this all changing? Like, when do we. And I'm like, hold the phone, let's Just get done with this week and then we'll, like, see what's going to happen. But it was around the quoting and what they're changing there, so. Very interesting. Okay, let's shift gears. And this might be difficult. First of all, everybody's been to some sessions, correct. Because it's possible, by the way, to come to Inbound and not ever go to a session. This year. I've been struggling because I've been talking to a lot of people in the hallways, but I've tried to get to a couple. So everybody. Just. So your listeners, everybody shook their head. Yes, we've. We've been to some sessions. So out of the sessions, if you could only pick one thing that you can see, your eyeballs are like, oh, God, George, what are you doing to me?

Just one.

If you could pick one thing, and that would be the most important thing that you learned, that you would want to teach your clients about what's like, the hashtag, one thing that you. And when I say teach, it's like, I would want to teach them so they could implement it like, yesterday. What's that one thing you've learned.

For?

There was. And this was not part of a session. This was just one of the. On the Heroes stage, Andrew was talking about AI agents.

Yep.

And he basically said, don't sell.

The.

Nuts and bolts of AI. Sell the customer experience that you get from AI. And I thought that was very interesting. And I think throughout Inbound, and this is something that I've really enjoyed about this Inbound is that they've done a really good job weaving in the human. The human element and AI. And even in Yamini's speech of, like, what does the future look like? It's that human aspect. And I'm sitting across from Omi, who has a background in anthropology, so I'm sure she's probably going to be like, yeah, but I'm really appreciative of that. And I think I will probably chew on that for months to come.

Yeah. I'll jump in here real quick. And then Omi, I think you're, like, ready to rock and roll. She's like. She's, like, leaning in on the mic just so you can't see it. I can. It's fun. One of the things that I love is that in 2012, I fell in love with HubSpot because it was about being human in marketing. And so there's been times where I felt like we've maybe left that in the dust a little bit, which made me sad as, like, the guy who on the podcast usually has a button that's like humans. Like, you know, I press it and we go. So I too was pleasantly surprised to hear the word two or three times from Yamini around humans. And as I watched the kickoff, I was like, you're literally setting up my keynote or not keynote, my breakout session that I'm about to do. Like, you are talking about the thing that I'm going to talk about even deeper right now. And so I got excited. But Omi, like, come on, I'll let you go.

Yeah. So I'm going to take this in a little bit of a different direction. Not necessarily something that is implementable in the CRM. I'm gonna say that the last session of Partner Day was freaking spectacular. That session, if that was the only session I had come to in this entire thing. And believe me, there was value to be had.

Okay.

So, you know, it's so many things. I mean, obviously Kyle Jepsen session, whatever.

Yeah, yeah.

But the gentleman's name escapes me. Cast something he used to be with OpenAI.

Okay.

And he, he talked about how as AI becomes more commonplace, he put on a little bit of his futurist hat on and he said, people are just going to have to get used to the fact that they cannot identify themselves by the jobs they do. And there's going to. They're going to have to learn to be a human that is not defined by their job function because AI might disrupt it, change it, remove it.

Yeah.

Whatever the case might be. And so as we embrace the wonderful things that AI can do, we need to remember what, what is it about us as humans that makes us special outside of the job function that we do on a day to day basis? And if I could teach that to my daughters, if I could teach that to everyone that I love, if the world could learn to embrace that, I think that's going to make this journey a lot smoother in the next. Over the next decade or so.

Tracy, you were like viscerally like you were agreeing like wholeheartedly like, so this, the last session of Partner Day must. It must just have been amazing. Yeah. Okay, so what's. What's the one thing. Whoever wants to go next? What's the one thing that you would. Man, I love what you just said, by the way, but what's the one thing that you would. Especially about your daughters, like, or daughter. What's. What's the one thing that you would want to teach. And I'll shut up there. There we go.

I think that Human element definitely comes through. Right. Even though we have AI now, we're having new technology, we've always had technological advances. We're still not throwing out the entire playbook. Right. We still have the marketing basics that we're always coming back to. We're still doing content marketing. We're changing it a little bit for AEO versus SEO, but I think. Right. Making sure that we're still going back to those basics even though we have all these new tools to play with.

Yeah.

So I don't, I, I don't know how to apply this with my clients, but my immediate thought while I was in the session is I'm going to go home and do this with my team.

Yeah.

So I attended the session today about fun.

Okay. All right.

I like, yeah, weird. Like, geez, would. Shouldn't we maybe have fun at work? Probably, yes. But what was wild was, you know, I don't know, these breakouts, these. They're what. There's, it was like a deep dive. So there's what, like more than 100 people in the room.

Right.

Maybe 150 something. I don't know. I'm not sure the capacity. It's a lot of people.

Yeah.

And he had everybody close their eyes and remember when they were a kid, whatever it was they. That they did that was the most fun. That was just like pure joy and fun for them when they were a kid. Like everybody silent, closing their eyes and just thinking through. And he does the whole like visualization. Right.

Like, yeah.

What were you seeing? What were you smelling? What were you. Whatever. Right. The, the, you know, all that touchy feely crap.

Right. Therapy.

Right, Exactly. But we all did it. Right. And doing that, I had this like my own sort of aha moment about like I'm a weirdo.

But.

But then he, he really managed to make it an interactive session. So then he had everybody sort of turn to the person beside them and not the awkward way that many speakers do.

Yeah.

And like actually have people turn this into actionable stuff and go through. Okay. So based on that, like, what are the three values or qualities of fun for you?

Yeah.

And then he just, his whole session kind of walked you through this and I was like, this, this. First of all, it unlocks some things in me that like, I'm going to go back to work a different person on Monday. But I want to do that with my team because I want to unlock that piece of every person I work with.

Yeah.

Because I know it's going to make everything about what we do and who we help a thousand times better.

Well, even how you help, like, the fact that they'll have that transformational moment and then they'll show up for clients in a different way is very interesting. It's funny, when you were talking about that, there's been something that I've said for years where I don't go to work, I go to play. And it's just a mindset choice. Right. Because it could be real depressing and it could be a lot of hours, or it could be like, hey, this is the funnest thing ever. And so I do try to go to play. But also when you said that, I was transported back to being like 4 years old on a big wheel in Lincoln, Montana, no technology, and I'm like, wow, like, why did my brain go there? To like, this moment? But there was no care and there was like, you know, wide open spaces and all that kind of cool stuff. Okay, so we gotta wrap this up because, well, let's be honest, we all want to make it to the comedian. If you're listening to this, I'm not trying to throw, you know, shades your way. You're at home, you're not here. But we got fun stuff to do. But I do want to ask one last question because the acronym was used and I'm curious on your lady's thoughts of this world that we're moving into of aeo. Give me your thoughts.

I think, I think the verdict is still out.

Okay.

I'm always a little bit wary when, you know, one year it doesn't exist and the next year they say we've had an increase of 1850%. Yeah, I, I question those stats. Not to, not to say that that's not true.

Right.

I do think we're getting more traffic from search engines. Unlike SEO, I don't think it's as transparent. So I'm not hanging my hat on all the metrics to it yet. I do believe in the principle though. I do believe we have to get ready for people using AI as search and problem solving. I wouldn't even call it search at this point anymore. It's like, how do I, what do I. Can you help me with? So I think we're actually even querying differently. So I don't want to call it search. Yeah, I do think we have to get ready for that. I'm just a little wary on how do you put data to that yet.

Yeah, it's early days.

Yeah, I think that's a great point.

And I'm really excited to start tracking that data. Right. So HubSpot talked about releasing that new original traffic source of that AI search. I think that's going to be really interesting. Look at it across clients, across industries. See what we're seeing there. And as I mentioned before. Right. We're continuing those content marketing efforts and seeing how those impact and how those come into those, you know, chatbots or cloud questions and evolve from there.

But you know, having, having done SEO for all these years, I mean it was kind of like standard.

Yeah.

You had the ability to kind of figure out what like it started with keywords, what were the keywords? And then it was like, what are the long tail keywords? And then it was like what are the queries? And so we've evolved in that space. It's so early days. I. I'd like to know. And I don't think we can get it yet. I'd like to know what people are asking ChatGPT, Claude, what. What is it that they're trying to get help with? Because if we can show up for that.

Yeah. Is your brain saying to you that it's fundamentally different in a way that they interacted with the little box on Google? Yeah, I do feel it's going to be different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we don't even leave ChatGPT for many things as well. Or Claude. And I mean, you have a clone.

Yeah, I do. I do have a clone. He's pretty cool. I'm just anyway, not why we're here.

I think people are solving everyday problems with the different GPTs. Right. So I have custom GPTs that, you know, help me with research and help me with. I'm figuring things out for my business. I built a little mini, you know, this is my business and these are my metrics. And what do you suggest I do if I want to increase. Yes, blah, blah, blah, whatever. If I want to do this or that. And I. And then I use it for something as mundane as help me find a restaurant within these parameters. And it found a fantastic perplexity. Thank you. Found a fantastic restaurant. I still double checked it on Google.

Though, to make sure.

That's funny, but there comes a day where you don't do that. I believe.

I think that's right. I think eventually we'll just trust it. But I think people are interacting with it in a way that is more like problem solving versus just trying to find an answer.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of the principles that originally were true for SEO, you know, the long form, accurate, deep expertise type content that's going to Be even more relevant. It's just going to be hidden from the human eyes.

Right.

Because people aren't going to want to read this whole long diatribe. They're going to want GPT to give them the highlights.

Yeah.

Is that good or bad?

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah.

So my thinking on this is like, there's nothing new under the sun. Even. Even AI.

Yeah.

And when we were in the pre chatgpt world, our clients, whenever there was a big Google algorithm change, there would be people posting on LinkedIn. Oh my gosh, my client's traffic tanked. What do I do? What do I do? We never really experienced that with our clients because we always had a policy of writing for helping people, not writing for SEO tactics and techniques and hacks and crap like that.

Right.

So we always managed. Our clients always managed to survive. What's different this time is that what is helpful is a shift. And so I read a book on the way and I won't say which one because of what I'm about to say.

Oh.

But I read. Whoopsie. I read a book on the plane on the way here. Four and a half hour flights. About enough time to read a business book, right?

Yeah.

And still watch a movie.

Wow, you read fast. Yeah, I need four days.

And so I read a book and I just found myself like skimming it and flipping through those pages so quick because it was good content when that book was released, which was not that many years ago. But at this point, everything that was in that book I could get from perplexity when I need it, how I need it, like chapter by chapter.

Yeah.

And have that full breakdown and it's good content. And this author probably put tons of work into researching this. But that kind of information where it's just giving me the facts.

Yeah.

Those facts are very easy for me to get at my fingertips right away. And that kind of book doesn't need to exist anymore. That kind of blog doesn't need to exist anymore. And so what we have to figure out is how to be helpful and continue to be helpful in a world where there's. I hate it when people say in a world. Notice that I said this live.

Yeah.

Because Chat GPT always says, in a world where. Yeah, I just did it. It does it. Because we do that, by the way. Yeah, that's why it does it. Everything it does is based on us. So that's why it does it. But I just did it. But.

But we'll delve into that a little bit later. No, I'M just kidding.

I'm just kidding. Like, chat, chat. GBT Perplexity. Those perplexity in particular would solve the problem that this book was solving exceptionally well.

Yeah.

And that book doesn't need to exist now because perplexity will do it. But that person, because I know the author and they're really smart.

Yeah.

They're already writing a different kind of book.

Yeah.

Because they do understand helping people. And so they're going to be fine. They're not going to be out of work as a, as a writer.

Yeah.

You know, and so we just have to reimagine what helpful is.

Oh, I love this idea of reimagining what helpful is. It's funny because I'll kind of end the show here. I had an epiphany moment where I was like, it literally was an OMG moment because at the beginning of my career, I was hired by Marcus Sheridan and he wrote the book they ask, you answer. And I was like, I've been, I've been an advocate of that mindset all along. And it was funny because Yamini, from the state of stage, she said, be part of the answer. And I literally was sitting next to my wife and I said, oh, beep. I said, have we been doing SEO and AEO the entire time with the they ask you answer strategy? Has Marcus Sheridan positioned himself to actually help organizations with the content they need in this frame as well? And it just was this thing of like, listen, if you are actually a happy, helpful, humble human giving people the answers that they need, you're gonna win. That's a wrap, ladies and gentlemen. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. 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 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 we 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.