Risk Management In HubSpot

Hello, friends. As Kyle said, I am Ryan. I am a PM at HubSpot and I'm here to talk to you a little bit today. Sorry for the funhouse mirror thing. We're going to get that out of the way real fast. There we go. All right, here to talk to you today, a little bit about managing risk for HubSpot admins. So here's our agenda. Going to talk a little bit about process management today and risk management today and how it works in the future. Hopefully. We're going to talk about sort of the framework for process and risk management for admins and a framework for mitigating process risk and then some of the risk management tools we have today. And then I'm hoping that we can spend the bulk of our time actually on this, like what's on your wish list and having you all sort of talk to one another about strategies that you've learned. I'm a senior product manager working on the Security Health check app at HubSpot. I don't know if you've used a Security Health check before. If you haven't, it used to be called the Security center you might have seen us mention. Primarily helps you understand, like, security risks in your account today and potential recommendations for improving your security posture. Recently I've been talking to a lot more customers and especially admins to better understand the admin Persona and how admins manage business processes and risk in their accounts. Sort of what we've found is that the Security Health Check accidentally helps you manage this stuff. We set it up specific to security because security has a lot of settings that kind of spread out all over the app and you have to go find them all individually. And the Health Check app just points you to, like, all of the security settings so you can manage them in one place. But the more we've talked to more admins, the more we've kind of started to realize that that's not a unique problem for security. Right. Managing process actually requires you to jump all over HubSpot and it can be hard to do. And so we're trying to better understand how people struggle with that and sort of the strategies you all use to deal with those problems when they come up. When I'm not at HubSpot in front of this computer, I enjoy reading books, making coffee, traveling, listening to records and playing a lot of video games. I'm kind of your, like normal millennial, you know, tech dude. So I don't have that many unique qualities. If you want to talk about Dune in the chat, you can Pop some dune thoughts in there. We can do that. But process and risk management today into the future, like Kyle said, I think this is going to be a little bit of an unconventional conversation. I think you all are actually the subject matter experts here. I am starting to wrap my head around this problem of how do admins actually manage process in HubSpot? Because it feels like it requires you all to wear a lot of hats and juggle a lot of Jenga blocks. You pull a lot of things out of the tower and you hope it stays up and you hope that you build the tower really, really, really high as you go. But your job is to make sure that as a block leaves, you have a workaround to make sure that it doesn't fall over. I don't know if that metaphor is load bearing like a Jenga tower, but hopefully it is. We want to provide admins more tools to manage these business and operational risks and processes, but we know there are gaps in them because we haven't really consciously looked at the admin experience holistically in a lot of these places. And so you all probably are asked to fill those gaps by creating process of your own. And so I really want to hear how you bridge those gaps to make sure your business succeeds. And I've seen all sorts of stuff we can get into that really works for people and sounds really unconventional. And I feel like if you have a super unconventional way of solving a common admin task or process management problem, but you know that it works like you've got a Google Doc or an Evernote Doc that you keep all track of all this stuff in, or some notion database you've built to make sure that you can see who's responsible for managing each part of your workflows. Like that's stuff that ideally you shouldn't have to do in HubSpot. That's a gap that we have. We should give you more visibility there. But today you have to do it or risk not succeeding. So what is it that you do? As I said, I'd love for this to be a two way conversation. Like please use the chat, please use the Q and A feature. I'm a one monitor guy, so I can only see the presentation right now. So I want to get through this pretty quickly and then get to just like talking things through together. All of your input will be used to help us decide what features to build and problems to solve for admins in the future. There is no input too minor to mention. Like please just tell us where you struggle and tell us where you been uniquely ingenious in solving a weird problem that is helping you succeed as an admin, a person who manages a HubSpot instance. So I wanted to take a look at sort of the hats that Admins wear in HubSpot and there are a ton of hats. And this list is not meant to be an exhaustive list right now. This is a lot of what we think we see admins doing, right? Change management, managing the quality of data, protecting data, account security, which is sort of what the security health app is primarily concerned with. User management and access management and then process creation and automation. If there are other types of tasks and risks that you all manage as an admin that are critical to your success, like what are those things? How do you keep track of them to make sure that they succeed and that you're not, you know, mucking up business process or it's running smoothly. As I said, the Security health check really is concerned specifically with account security and a little bit with user management and access management. But that framework potentially could expand to some other some other things. And if you think about a framework for mitigating risk, there's actually a really good metaphor internally for us at HubSpot, it's software building, right? When we build things features for all of you to use, we run a pretty serious laundry list of tests and checks and dry runs and reviews. The ability to monitor the health of something, make sure that it's working the way you want it to and immediately roll it back if it's not. In a lot of these places, we lack a lot of tools for admins to do the same thing. If you're thinking, okay, I really want to be able to make sure the thing I'm building is even going to work, your only option is to bring it right now into a sandbox and try it on some test data and hope that it goes or run a test contact through it in your production instance. That's not really a good system for people who have really delicate sets of process. In HubSpot down in orange below here, I highlighted some stuff that we're thinking about is potential future ideas, ways to help you test these things and assure the quality like automated approvals where we're saying, okay, this person technically has permission to do this, but they're doing it and it looks a little weird. Let's just make sure that it's legit. Let's have another super admin thumbs up. This thing that's happening because it looks legit, but this person is logging in on A new device, and it's a little spooky. Let's make sure that what they're doing is okay or testing us. Helping you validate your emails, that you get your leads, that you get to say they're not gibberish, that the email address is legitimate. Results are legitimate domains, so you don't have to spend time figuring out if a person is a real person. And then today we have a lot of these audit logs and a lot and we offer some alerting on, say, anomalies, weird behavior that we've seen. A lot of contacts got created, things like this. But when it comes to actually rolling things back or monitoring health, it's a little patchwork. You have to go to different parts of the app again to really understand the health of your account. And for some admins, jumping around through different parts of the app all day is probably fine. But I would think that you could all be spending your time doing things that are a little more valuable than like clicking through 15UIs to get the updated number for a thing and then putting it in a spreadsheet and then sending the spreadsheet to your boss. Right? How can we help you, like, avoid needing to make more spreadsheets? I feel like that's actually a pretty decent distillation of why we're here. My big question here is if you look at these four categories, development, customization, quality assurance, testing, going to production. What's most important to all of you? How do you feel about needing to go through and handle testing? What needs to work well for you to make sure that you know going to production is safe? Or do you have a system that works pretty well for you today and you're just kind of working with that maybe outside of the confines of HubSpot? As an example of like a risk management tool, today I wanted to touch briefly on the Security Health app, which I've talked about not only because I work on it and thus know more about it than most of the other things in HubSpot, but because also I think that it does provide us kind of a framework here for what a list of action items for an admin kind of looks like. Right? These are all security or access management action items, but they are action items that tell you this thing you're doing could be improved. Here is a way you could improve it. We're monitoring the health of some of these metrics in your account for you on your behalf, and then we're giving you action items to make sure that if those metrics dip down, if they seem like they've fallen off a cliff a little bit. That we can give you next steps to make sure that you can get back on track and that your account is in good health. This feature is about a year or two old, I think. I did a hug on this about a year ago. And so we're still doing a lot of active work here, specifically on security. But the goal is really to think about this holistically as a health monitoring application, as something where you could say, what are the risks in my account? And I don't just mean security risks, I mean risk to business process, to business continuity, potentially to the health of your actual account. Working well on HubSpot processes that might be going wrong that are really critical to you. A critical workflow that is, that starts failing and we flag it and say, hey, this thing is really important. Maybe you want to take a look at this. The reason for that really is because again, I think admins currently, if you own all of these things, you are sort of responsible for following a breadcrumb trail of where are the problems in HubSpot? I see a symptom of a problem over here. My email didn't get delivered to a lot of people. Okay, now I have to go look. Let's look at the list. Is the list full of low quality emails? No, it looks like some of this didn't send. Oh, the workflow that sends this email is misconfigured and more people should have gotten this than did get it. Okay, now we need to go figure out how to fix that workflow. Right. That takes you a lot of steps to understand the downstream impacts of something and understand how to fix it. And so if you look at sort of the left to right here scaling to really be able to tell you when things might be going sideways or when there might be insights into risk in your account. Risk that might derail your business, risk that might be security related. And also making clear that action, that list of action items. What can I do to mitigate this risk right now? What should I do to make sure that this risk doesn't actually derail my business in the future? Being proactive about this instead of. And the security help app today kind of works this way. More reactive. What should I be doing? Oh, I'm doing something wrong. I need to stop doing it wrong. Rather than if you keep doing this thing this way, it could have a negative impact. Right. Getting to the point where we can help you avoid those problems before they sort of blow up. So I did want to talk A little bit about a tool that I think is a really great heuristic for risk management and process management, and that is approvals on different objects. In HubSpot, there are a handful of places you can apply approvals today, but I think generally this framework, the framework of someone wants to do something, but that thing is kind of risky. So even if I want to let them mess around with this tool, I still want someone to give them a thumbs up and say, hey, this is okay. What you're about to do is good. We've heard this a ton, specifically with things like workflows, where building a really complicated workflow, like you might trust someone to build a workflow, but that doesn't mean you don't want someone else to look at it before it goes live and say, yes, I'm pretty sure this won't cause a huge headache once you turn this on. Right? Right now, there is nothing like that. And thus a lot of people have to do things like seriously reduce the number of people that actually have access to workflows and then have those three people build all of the workflows. That's not really helping you all figure out how to get the most value out of the tool. Right. And I've. One of the places that we've heard a lot of these sort of crazy workarounds is definitely like how people manage approvals for workflows. There are folks who have like one guy who is the workflows guy and you email him what you want your workflow to do and he makes it right. There are people who have like three people that have access to workflows and like a Slack channel and they post all the workflow links in the Slack channel. And the other two people in the tribunal have to like give a stamp to the workflow or else it can't be turned on again. Y' all have found ways around these problems. You've figured out how to, how to bridge these gaps and I think that's what really is something that we can really learn from. You've figured out those workarounds that help you succeed in spite of the fact that HubSpot doesn't give you these tools. What tools would you want us to give you so that you don't have to do this kind of stuff anymore? Where else would you like to see more approvals? Places like workflows. Right. And if you had them, what would you expect that experience to be like? Such that you don't actually have to keep your workflow approvals. Slack channel. Right. Ideally that is not a thing we want to encourage you all to go do. I'm in 200 slack channels and it makes my brain melt. I don't wish that that on anyone. So that's. That's the end of my overview here and I really just want us to jump into like, yeah, give us your strategies, ask questions. Other admins here who have strategies too. What do you think is a really good way to solve these particular gaps that HubSpot has for the admin experience? What works for you? What new features do you want us to add to some of the tools we've talked about today and what new features generally on your admin? I really, really wish this thing worked this way. Wish list. Do you use integrations to do this? Are there particular integrations that you're really confident in using to solve a specific problem that is currently not solved in HubSpot? Like, do use Kickbox to validate email addresses so you don't need to worry about sending that email to a listing HubSpot, for example. How can we just make your lives easier? I think the fact that admins wear all these hats is kind of a pun. Not a pun, little word play. But it's admirable. Right. Like, you all work really, really hard and I know how difficult managing all this stuff can be, but our goal is to make it not difficult for you. How can we really succeed at doing that? So, yeah, I think we just want to turn it over to the. To the group chat and like, we'll go through some. Some topics and people ask questions and we get some good answers. Like if you just read them out and sort of just throw your ideas around, I hope that it is helpful to do that.

Yeah, sounds great. So if you want to. Yeah. Stop sharing your screen. Actually, the chat is popping. There's a lot of. A lot of thoughts here and I'll make sure this gets exported out afterwards so you can share it with your team. So if you want to just be in the moment and respond to people and not feel like you have to take notes, sure.

Yeah. Actually, I think I've deputized Kenny on my team to sit in the audience and. And note things down. I don't know if I told Kenny this before I just said that sentence, but Kenny, you've been deputized. Think that Kenny, I know he's here. I see him in the chat.

So yeah, there's lots in the chat. There's also a few things in the Q and A. Haven't had a chance to look at Those yet. One thing, I don't know how wild west you want to get with this conversation. I believe we do have the ability to let people turn on their cameras and mics.

Oh. So I would love it.

Like, let's start with the chat and if there's something you want to dig into, we can invite people on stage if you all are comfortable with that. I'm not going to force anyone on stage, obviously, but yeah, I think there's lots to talk about here. If you want to peruse the chat, I'll peruse the Q and sure.

Can I make a request to folks if there are questions or things in the chat or the Q and A that you also really agree with, can you like thumbs up those messages so that I can see the ones that have a lot of emoji reactions? My brain functions entirely based on emoji reactions due to HubSpot slack. So please, please emoji react to stuff where you're like, I strongly agree. So yeah, I think that would be a really helpful way to do this. I'm gonna scroll all the way back up and probably sit here awkwardly reading for a minute.

Yeah, I don't have a better suggestion.

Yeah, I wish we had the. The. The Jeopardy Music. Yeah, I don't have it. If you have a question and you.

Do want to come on camera, just.

Put it in the chat and I will tee you up for Ryan and Kyle Martin. I just want to. I just want to say that you guys saying send it before you do it absolutely does work. I have a co worker on one of my teams who, when we were in the office, before he deployed anything to production, he would rate. He would like put his desk into the sanding desk position first and then deploy to production from standing. And it gave him some kind of magical power that that meant that he could deploy to production with confidence. So if sendit helps, maybe I need to put an April Fools send it button into the email editor or something. I've always really wanted to make a HubSpot April Fools thing where you just change one button text and see how many people notice. Okay. I think we actually have some stuff getting upvoted here, so I'll start with. Okay, so Ali more things like workflow, enrollment and list size alerts. So is this just to make sure I understand is the ask here? We want to see more ways to say, hey, this is going to put a lot of people into this workflow or this list is really big or it's gotten really large. This idea that kind of Giving you a heads up that this thing might be doing something a little bit weird or out of character for it. Is that sort of an appropriate reading of that feedback?

And while you're waiting for a response there, Ryan, I've just been doing my quarterly roundup of my highest performing posts of the last quarter was proactive notifications for potential duplicates.

Yeah.

Another thing you can set a threshold for, and for me at least, I think the thing that's really cool is to be able to set this threshold. Right. I don't necessarily want an email every time a potential duplicate shows up in my system, but if I know, on average one or two show up, I can set this threshold. So if it's more than 5, or if it's more than 10, I'm going to get an email to tell me, hey, Kyle, check on this. Something's gone weird. And I suspect that sort of theme like places where I can be alerted because there's so many spots in HubSpot for an admin to check what's going on. Right, right, of course. Various dashboards, all the ops hub features, if you have those. And to just have some proactive notifications of like, this needs your attention now, I think.

Yeah.

Perhaps not putting words in Ali's mouth.

No, I mean, exactly. So you're. You're not off, she said.

Exactly.

That's. That's absolutely, like, one of the things that. That we're thinking about now. And I know that it's very buzzwordy, but it's a good buzzword, which is, like, you shouldn't have to define thresholds. Why don't we just figure out what's normal for you and what's not normal for you and tell you when something enters the abnormal category. Right. That's what machine learning is actually for. That's what AI is for. Saying you usually import 100 contacts. Somebody just imported 200,000 contacts. Are you sure? Are you sure you want us to process that? Import is, like, probably not a bad idea. If you say yes and it takes you an extra 10 seconds to get the yes in there, then fine. But if you said no and unwinding 200,000 imported contacts would ruin your life, then we've saved you a pretty substantial amount of anguish. I'll go on to Caitlin's next chunk of feedback here in the list, which is properties to archive easier if they contain data. Okay. Being able to get rid of this stuff without needing to first make sure it's not used anywhere. Saying, I'm okay with nuking this Even if it means some data is going to be incomplete or something's going to be a little weird. I think that makes sense. You might still want the data but you want to hide the thing from active view as well. This goes back to that idea of a long live HubSpot account. Just accrues a lot of detritus. There's a lot of clutter in your account after a while. If you don't clean it up again as admins job is it to clean it up? Does it become your job? That would be a bummer. And then you don't do it because you have like 700 more important things to do and then you have 200 properties you don't want. Like that sounds depressing. I could absolutely see, see the difficulty of that. And okay, here Matthew, some comments about the audit log. Let me see. Wow.

Oh wow.

So you had an actual data breach, man. Okay, I have an off book question for Matthew and people like Matthew who have maybe seen something like this happen, which is we flag. We have a new feature that alerts you when we think a login is anomalous. It's a notification, you can turn it on for yourself. We may turn it on by default pretty soon. We're just making sure it's not super noisy. It tells you if somebody's logging in in a way that is a little bit weird or if they're doing something during that session that is a little strange. One thing that I've toyed around with as a future piece for that kind of work would be the idea that we could automatically deactivate somebody if we thought they were doing something weird. Because like you got this, the audit logs flagged this and you had to go do some tracking of what was going on there. But like a person pulled that report, I assume they got that report out right. They may not have actually stopped it. You may not have actually stopped it from happening again. The ideal thing with this is not just giving you visibility but giving you the ability to take quick action when something is not right or ultimately taking action before you when we have a pretty good Spidey sense, for lack of a better term, that it's not right. Is that kind of thing something that would help admins like handle these sort of reactive tasks? I feel like that's one of the things for admins that you may all struggle with is this idea that like some things are really important to keep the account healthy, but there's a lot of stuff you need to do that is reactive and you have to do right now or else you might as well not do it or it goes to somebody else's to do list. It takes up a lot of time. How can we help you avoid those kind of like smaller tasks such as, like setting those notification thresholds? Like ideally you wouldn't have to type anything in, right? We would do some work for you and you wouldn't have to figure out these sets of rules. I think so, you know, is that a thing that would be helpful to folks us sort of taking more proactive action on top of things like this? I see Sarah saying options for backup approvers. That is pretty interesting idea. I think ideally there should be more than. We do this a lot with super admins. Like the ideal number of super admins is more than 2 but less than, you know, everyone. You don't really want a lot of them but you need people who like if a super admin decides to go out for coffee, will be able to do the super admin task. Right. I think the same is true with approvers. You want to have a proliferation of people there to help you so that things don't get sort of messy that way. Jason, I see report approvals. That's interesting. It's not one we've heard before, but definitely I could see the value there and I see Emily user level reporting and dashboards. That's pretty interesting. I feel like a lot of this is, you know, when we did the security health check work, a lot of what we heard from people was just, it's not that the data is not in HubSpot, right? The data is there. You can learn all this stuff. It's just the amount of time and effort it takes you to parse all the data because you actually need to get it from a lot of different places. Parsing it takes a long time and often if you miss a data source then you don't get a complete picture. How can we help you pull in the things you need to know about a user's particular set of activities and things that are actually important to you and help you disregard the rest of the stuff. A good example for those security features is if you want to enable 2fa today, right? You go to the security settings, you turn on two fa. You also have three other security features. You have all the audit logs there. Like you got to know that stuff is in that UI because it's not always intuitive where to find the thing you want to find. And if you don't know how to find it, then maybe you just don't find It. Right. How do we help you, like get the digest of what really matters? Oh, that's interesting too. Well, I think, I hope there is a good amount of feedback in here on the approval side. Absolutely. Because I think that, like, I hope that that's a tool that for folks who do use it gives you a lot of value. I think having another person just like give a thumbs up on something is super powerful. And it is one of those cases where HubSpot can't always know exactly what you want to do. We can't read your mind entirely yet I hope for the sake of humanity's future we don't get there. But if we, if, even if we could, having another human being who works with you to give you a thumbs up on something is really, really helps. So, Thomas, for best practices for security and permissions for business user business units, that is definitely one where I think the Health Check app can actually help with some of those things. Today the health check app has a bunch of things and we're actually rolling out a new feature pretty soon. If folks in this chat want to hit me up on LinkedIn or whatever and ask for beta access to this, go for it. It is a critical permissions anal analysis app. In the security Health Check, it tells you who on your account has what we're calling critical permissions. That's things like everyone who can export your contacts, everybody who can delete all contacts. It will give you a list of them. It will, if you click on one of those people, show you all of their critical permissions and it will tell you why they are critical, why are they scary, what do they let somebody do? And then if you check the box next to any of those critical permissions, you can just take them off. It's just a good idea to keep an eye on who has those things. Right. Nobody likes everybody in your account, probably doesn't need to be able to export all your data. Or you could end up in our earlier situation where somebody does that and then you find out that you had what amounts to a data breach because an employee exfiltrated information. In terms of best practices for permissions for business units, I don't think it's that different from regular permissions best practices. And a lot of that stuff just comes down to like, know what permissions do and know the ones that are scary. And if you don't know, that's where like, we should be helping you because it's scary for us too. So if that's a feature y' all want to Try out. You just want to, like, muck around with permissions in your account. Hit me up. I'm happy to get people into. Into the beta and start really diving into this. Not allowing people to merge contacts and companies as it messes with integrations. Lucinda, I want to pull on that one a little bit. I want to pull on the integrations piece. Here is why. Integrations have a lot of power in people's accounts. Right. Y' all know, and I'm sure that, like, if you've worked in a place like you've worked in software like Outlook, that even some places let you say, like, should somebody even be allowed to use this integration? Should we be allowed to install it? How do I mark like, certain fields or processes is, like, really important, dependent on. On those, you know, on that integration. Is there a way to stop something from happening before I know it's going to break something, even if that thing is outside of HubSpot? I think there's a few sort of, like, chunks of feedback in there. One being that integrations are really powerful and knowing who's using them and how they're being used is really important. And I think today is kind of tricky. So if folks have feedback about, how do you do that, how do you keep track of what's plugged into your account and what it's doing? How do you make sure that you're confident in people installing particular integrations? I'd love to know how people handle that today, because personally, I don't know how I would. If I were in your shoes, as it happened, I don't know how I would handle that. I think I would just regularly look at the installed integrations page and if a new one came up, send an here to my company, Slack. Being like, who installed this and what is it? Why? Why do you need it? Because I don't know how else I would really, really handle that, that issue. Oh, well, I love the idea that, like, multiple people making oopsies all at once. Yeah. I think a big part of this problem is, like, people don't intentionally try to mess things up. Right? They don't. They just, like, make mistakes. And we just don't do a great job of giving you tools all the time to help you, like, undo a mistake. An undo button is a regular, a normal thing in lots of software, but Hustle doesn't really have one. Right. You can undo some stuff, and if you're really smart, you can undo almost anything, but it's not straightforward all the time. And so, like, that's One of those things where, as an admin, how do you handle. How do you handle undo. Where. Where are the things you know you can do and where are the things you know that you have to enlist some help? When do you call. When do you call HubSpot and go, all right, I don't know what to do here. Please tell me you have some magic tool that will fix this thing when I do this. Will, I wanted to ask a little bit about your question about security measures about data coming into the system that shouldn't be. When you're. When you're saying it shouldn't be. What. What do you actually mean about that? What. What type of data are you thinking? Everything. You know, like sensitive PII data. Somebody's got credit cards coming in, and you shouldn't be putting credit cards in HubSpot. Are we talking about, like, low quality leads where, like, somebody hasn't vetted that these are good contacts, so they shouldn't be in the system? Are we talking about data coming from, like, one integration into HubSpot that just, like, doesn't belong in the database? Where. Where are we trying to find that?

Will is responding to you in real time in chat. He says he's okay turning his camera. Okay, so do it.

Yeah, go for it. Sorry, I feel like I'm just totally winging this, so thanks for everybody.

I know, me too. I've never actually done this before. Oh, Deanna.

Apparently I love Dr. House. I love the Dr. House profile pic. I didn't see it from here, but now it's great.

So can you unmute, Bill?

I'm sorry, I didn't think you were actually gonna put me on camera, to be honest. That's fine.

We're all the way in here, man. We're just winging.

I. I'm trying to be delicate, but there are situations that come up that partners, projects with multiple partners, people, consultants. Data comes in the systems that we know shouldn't be coming in the system.

Sure. Okay.

Data of all sorts, and this is an issue of billions of dollars a year globally. This is an issue in black market data that 1/4 to 1 third of all that data pretty much annually, from the most left wing organizations at the UN to the most right wing security agencies, say, go directly to militant and conflict problems across the country. So I'm not trying to be dramatic, but if it is the tens of billions of dollars a year, and we are CRM admins, we are central to huge amounts of data coming in that shouldn't have been bought, shouldn't have existed. And that money's going directly to literally those stories we see on the news every day.

Sure.

So it is a hell of an ethical situation. And I hear people. Kyle is laughing right now. You know, I'm desperately trying to not make a joke about when is Kyle gonna buy curtains and change the topic. Because you can see the body language of everybody involved right now. Everybody's uncomfortable, everybody's twitching because we all know it's happening all the time. And there are big things that happen because of this. And how do we address this? How do we deal with it? Because I'll tell you, HubSpot's approach, and I adore HubSpot. Kyle will tell you I love him and I've been hassling this poor man for years. You know, I'm surprised that's why you put me on camera. But you guys don't make it easy to get a hold of you.

Sure.

It's like you need help. Well, I'm like, yeah, I got some data here. I don't think it should be here and be like, we don't speak English well, we're sorry, what just happened there?

So what do I do?

What do I do? As a person who doesn't want to get in trouble? Sure.

Well, okay. So I think. I think there's a few things there. Right. One of them is that we. Absolutely. And I think, you know, the more data comes into systems like HubSpot, we do have. We have a responsibility to try to help you understand when that data might not be good quality data. Right. It doesn't only like, not. Not not only morally, but just like generally too, like, oh, junk.

Yeah, don't put junk in there.

It makes trash in your CRM. Right. And if we can help you understand what trash is, whether it's. Whether or not it's radioactive trash, that when you touch it, it's going to put you in front of some kind of, you know, like, legal problem. It's all trash is trash.

Right. Let's just say that can't happen.

Let's just theoretically say this comes up.

Yeah. Like, I think that there is a really interesting piece there. And when we don't have that functionality for admins, you guys end up having to do it. Right. And the reality of a process that, like, this is something I think in software development we think about a lot, but it's true everywhere. If you make something that is really, really, really important, also kind of impossible, people will know that it's important and still not do it and just go, yeah, I'm trying but like fighting a losing battle. What am I going to do? If you do that to people over and over again, then like you can't really be surprised when they don't do it, right? You have to understand that that's the reality of the way people use software. And so I think one of the, one of the things we can do more of here is like helping understand those, those bad types of data, right? Whatever they are, flag them for people. This is again like we think about use cases for why you'd want to put ML into stuff. And this is actually where it's super valuable. Pattern recognition on what makes spooky data is really, really, really like a, it seems like a valuable thing to do. I think, you know, and this is a thing you'll probably heard me say a few times during this conversation. Like these are absolutely things we're thinking about internally that we are trying to figure out how to identify this kind of stuff. Because again, even if it's not radioactive trash, like helping you not spend time sorting through trash is a valuable thing for us to do, right? That's not a good use of your time. And it's a thing that a product that understands how to like vet information should be able to help you sort of filter away from your, your, your work. I think, you know, we say admins wear many hats and one of those hats shouldn't be like janitorial work. You know, the system should help you avoid janitorial work. And I think we try to. And in places like the Security Health Check, that's a big part of the ethos, right? It's okay, get rid of like here's the, here's the best of, here's the greatest hits of what you need to know. The rest of it you can ignore, right? But I think that like doubling down on that, there is definitely a thing we want to do and I think too like the compliance parts of this, the legal parts of this, they do make those conversations quite different for a lot of customers. So like, I definitely hear you on the value of all this. It is definitely something we're thinking about. And I think too that like thinking about it from that more like moral and legal perspective helps put a fine point on when you get it wrong because you don't have good tools to do it. There are major downsides to getting it wrong. Right? It's not just like, ah, bad leads, what are you going to do?

And I'm going to do it. I'm sorry, Kyle. Dan, I know everybody's freaking right now. But I'm going to ask the question, what do you want admins to do at a agency that's buying data and selling it to clients? How do you want us to handle that as admins for HubSpot? I would love to answer that. I know. I am so sorry. I've been asking for a couple years and I know there are people know that I've been asking this, this question, but this is what's happening. What am I supposed to do in that scenario?

I don't know that I have the answer to that question in my head.

And I don't mean to put you on the spot.

No, no, no, I know.

I don't have it. I have a therapist. That's what I got.

So that said, like, there are a lot of people who work at HubSpot who think about things like this, and I've never been asked that question before. I am happy to ask them that question and I'm happy to give you whatever their answer is because I really do think there are people here who have thought about those kind of problems. I may not know them, but I am happy to, like, follow up on that with my friends over on our compliance teams because I think it is a reality of people and it's not.

All this drama because, I mean, I can think of years ago where just a client was uploading some imports and it just scraper one, scraper two. He kind of didn't know what he was doing, kind of didn't care. Count got temporarily suspended. Everybody freaks out. Like, okay, you can't do this. What are you doing, knucklehead? I got to teach them the rules and go through it and it's no big deal. But then there are other instances where that's not what's going on. It's a massive, gigantic international operation that you're like, oh, this is going to be on the news. Yeah. And that is happening. What? It's a horrible situation. Like, sometimes when it pops up, it's. It's an interesting thing to gossip about. It's not nearly as fun gossiping at the happy hour than Right.

Oh, what?

Just. Oh, boy, look who just called. Oh, yeah. Like, this is. It just. It's a horrible situation. I know HubSpot has liability and people have private information out there. I'm a private guy. I like my privacy. And you can tell I'm on a hundred person meeting. I want to shut up. You see how private I am. But like, a lot of people like that and it just. Man, it just feels like a no win no matter what you do. Yeah, that stinks. Because I love what I do and I know most of these people here do, you know, we love it.

Yeah, no, no, no, thanks. Well, I think that's really helpful. I think those are problems that I think people really do worry about and for good reason. I want to just say again, like, I think if you all didn't love what you do, you probably couldn't do it very well because, like, it requires you to do a whole lot of like, workaroundy, weird stuff. And so thank you all for being willing to like help HubSpot close, like close those gaps, you know. I know, I know. We've probably got some other questions here, so I'm going to take a look at the, the qa. I know. Oh, Matthew's back.

Yes, we have another caller.

Wrong button. Okay. No, no. Okay.

Hi, how are you?

So minding started from approvals for deployments from like test builds and things like that. It started from integrations is really what this is about. So I'm integrating Zoom info right now to HubSpot and there's no sandbox to like integrate this to, to test records to flow through. So that way salespeople don't see these records because we can't really segment them out once they're in our data, you know, like. Yeah, and so having something that's in place for us to deploy, especially integrations, that's. I mean, that's my bread and butter. Right now we're doing Ringlead next and then roller and then, you know, like we've got stuff on the plate to go a while for integrations. So to have a place that is a sandbox where once it's refreshed, it also refreshes your reports and a little bit of data or pulls in something so that way you're not left rebuilding everything to track. Make sure like, you know, your final touch of analytics is looking okay and.

Sandbox like a limited, like a quarantine area. We airlock that, we let people in.

Yeah, something similar to that where it's like, you know, you have 200 dummy records and you're going to segment those out and really populate them and make sure that they're away from everybody's viewpoint except for the super admin and the integration.

So some way of like, again, like going back to that graph I showed about the like, development process, like you don't really have any ability to do that full on that, full end to end testing. Right, Right.

Yeah. And that makes me nervous for when we actually do spin up some of these broader integrations like Ringlead coming up or the stuff that really just touches our data and manipulates it. I understand we're going to have to eventually manipulate our data, but I want to be able to configure to do the change management to make sure that the stakeholders are aligned and that they are doing their pieces fully enabled without any dependencies down the line.

How do you handle that change management piece today? Is it just you say don't touch this and I'll figure it out and you work in your corner? How do you do that?

This week we had a list of 1400 contacts go in from a marketer who wanted to send an email invite. But it was all new contacts that we hadn't really marketed to before. It's the gray area of GDPR and it was in Europe. So like it was a really great area of gdpr. And you know those, those records, they were sent an email. Now we have to track that that happened and we have to keep that somewhere. But I still just deleted those records. I kept a copy of those records and I kept a copy of the email send off like the activities.

Yeah.

Now I have a ton of data dumps just sitting on my computer when I wish I could have just gone and tested a contact list with sure. To make sure that they understood how to use this tool.

Right. So you now have all this stuff stored locally entirely just to have the record that had happened because you need to nuke it out of HubSpot and you need no trace of it in the system. Right?

Well, yeah, because the, so it's the zoom info contact list of like contacts at this company that you haven't spoken to yet, but you might align. Yeah. So it's, it's people that we've not reached out to yet that we're getting sent an invite to something out of Zoo without ever having any footprint on us.

Right. And so yeah, there's a GPR question of like did they ever consent to contact you or are you actually cold emailing them?

Right, yeah. And so like having a place where I can like fully enable or do a change management process, do a training call with our team, with the stakeholders. Like right now I'm sitting in marketing Ops having a place to do that with a marketing team without having to worry about them breaking a system or going off road mode and off compliance. Hardcore like. But that would be super nice.

I see. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I think it does Come back to that idea of like, how do you, how do you end. To end test things in HubSpot? How do you make sure that something you're about to do isn't going to cause a domino effect problem? And I think that is one of the things we hear a lot from admins. Again, I'd be curious if folks deal with this a lot. It's the downstream effects of something you do in HubSpot also are kind of unclear. So you start a process and you know it's going to do something but you don't expect it to do everything that it does. And you have to figure out what happened. You have to trace all this stuff back, you've got to delete that data, store it locally, make it look like you. It never happened. You know, how do you keep track of that, that kind of thing.

And then that final piece is just like making sure that things work from like, like for me again, marketing ops is, is analytics. How are you tracking like? We do a lot of the lead a lot with MQLs, a lot of lead qualification. If I had an easier way to just report on a segment of our data in the sandbox, it would make my life so much easier instead of having to rebuild it.

Yeah, I think the idea too, somebody said in the chat, like pushing to production. Michelle said pushing to production, like getting it. Just being able to push it in and say, yeah, it works, I love it. Bring it over here. Yeah, absolutely. All of that. Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Thanks. That was great.

Yeah, I just want to call out. We have a lot of good stuff in the Q and A. Oh yeah.

Let'S move to the Q and A.

If people want to go over there, there is an upvote feature and so if you want to look through everyone real quick, just take 30 seconds, upvote the ones that most resonate with you, then we can sort them most to least popular and Ryan will work through them that way in the last 10 minutes we've got here.

So yeah, thank you, Kyle for tempering my desire to just continually scroll and say that's a good point.

Again, I will export this all out and you can dig through it more. But yeah, that was a good 20 seconds. So I'll go ahead and sort this by Most voted but 10 upvotes. Parker Short. Hey Parker, good to see you. Definitely a more robust workflow go live process would be great. Inevitably, seeing how it impacts other workflow enrollments would be huge.

Yeah, that's one that we've heard more than a few Times I think if I had to pick one tool where CRM admins have the most simultaneous reverence for it but also fear of it, like the fear of God kind of thing, it would be workflows. It can do anything which is awesome but it can do anything that is super, super valuable. And it's definitely thing that if you had to ask me one tool where we want to do a lot of more thinking like this, I think workflows just continually comes up. So it's definitely something we're thinking about. And promotion approval process for workflows just feels very natural given how powerful it is.

Cool. Also From Parker with 10 upvotes related to imports having the ability to roll back and import would be huge. If you are ever importing records and trying to set associations, there's no way to bulk remove edit associations. So the ability to just undo an import maybe within a set window would be great.

Yeah, that's, that's definitely what I've heard too and I we've done some conversations with the imports team. I think there are like it's feedback that they get. I believe that, that you know they have some functionality that can help with some parts of imports. But the whole process because imports touch so much data it ends up being kind of tricky to do. But it's absolutely something again that we do hear feedback on.

Something I, I saw in the chat that's sort of related or at least would accomplish the same thing in some circumstances is an ability to like revert back to a checkpoint.

Right.

Like let's just, let's just roll back to Monday because Tuesday was not good. You know I think that's, that's similar.

Yep.

Our good friend Matthew says approvals for marketing handoff sales of MQLs and approval for moving up funnel approvals for merging records or approvals for reassigning owner to you or away from you. That's a lot of, a lot of things. So basically changing lifecycle status and changing owners.

Yeah, I mean I think that actually the bigger theme there right. Is like certain CRM properties probably need a way to have approvals for changes. Right now the way that approvals functions with CRM objects is fairly. I think the only one that even comes remotely closest quotes. But yeah there are certain properties that given and again it's about that wide ranging impact of change. I assume when somebody moves from MQL to SQL there is also maybe a workflow that kicks off that round robins them to a sales rep. Right. And so when you do that kind of thing. How do you make sure that moving them forward is going to cause a domino effect? How do you make sure that that domino effect is correct and that the change people understand the impact of the change and that it is vetted? I think that's absolutely a fair piece of feedback for some of these things in the CRM.

Yeah, it's interesting. In deal stages you can set. You can't move the deal into this stage until these other properties are filled in. I wonder if there's a workaroundy kind of way you could do that with conditional property logic like ah, cannot set to SQL unless we have this other stuff. Yeah, I've also, I've seen people do interesting things where they will set particular CRM properties to can only be updated by super admin. But the thing about that permission is workflows can still update it. So you can require people to fill in certain properties and when the properties reach a certain set of criteria, then the workflow triggers and updates, for example.

Oh, that's very clever.

So that people can't touch it directly, but they can still like without having to involve the super admin.

Right. You make the super admin control essentially the same as a human being. Can't change this because a super admin will never change this.

Right? Yeah.

And only work will actually change it.

Yeah.

Right. That makes a lot of sense.

Jeanette asks would love a Qlikseize type function within HubSpot that validates emails before they enter HubSpot.

Yeah, that's some stuff. We're definitely. I feel like I've been saying this a lot, but I promise it's true. We're definitely thinking about these emails. This like sort of the same thing we talked about a little bit with Will. Although Will's point was a little more on the legal side as well. It's just like if it's junk, like if it's never going to be a reachable email when this person is entering your contact database like functionally, what are you planning to do with that lead? What is the, you know, what's the CTA for you besides like I guess delete this. Right. So can we do something to prune away those things that we're essentially just saying? Like to use one of my favorite Mitch Hedberg jokes to like here you throw this away, right? Like the idea that you're going to get this data in and then later on you're just going to be like, guess I should delete it. It's not good data. Can we help you figure that out before the content is created, before it processes an import. What are the signals we could use something like email validation is absolutely an option there.

It's really interesting. Operations Hub has a thing that like highlights these contacts. Emails look like they are probably not good. Operations Hub seems to have a lot of things that like, hey, here's some stuff that happened, right? Like here's how you're. Three months ago, something really weird happened with your data. You should maybe see if you can figure out what happened. Right. Sounds like everybody wants everything to be a little more proactive. Like, can we just stop it from happening in the first place?

Yeah. And again, like that's, that's absolutely, I think the right way for us to go. Right. The hierarchy of those things is first, provide visibility. Hey, this thing happened, maybe you should know about it. Next, let you take action on it. This thing happened, here's what you should do about it. And then eventually this thing is going to happen and it shouldn't. We'll just make it not happen. Right. Solving those problems in that way.

Yeah. Parker, the hitmaker short is back again. Related. The ability to connect workflows to each other just to organize and then be able to see how any change would impact all of them. Zapier's canvas is a good idea to look at for this.

That's interesting. So that domino effect I mentioned of turning on this workflow will cause all of this stuff to happen in these workflows, Maybe in these list criteria Again, I think that that's one of the blind spots that admins really struggle with. It's that question of if I do this, it doesn't happen in isolation. What happens if I update the criteria for this list? I think I'm only updating the criteria for this list because it's used in my report and I need this person to be in my report so I change the criteria. But if that list is also included in this workflow or referenced over here, what does it mean for those other things that got impacted? How do I quantify the impact?

Yeah, the imports team, who is consistently really great at creating new features like this, just released one where when you're running an import, it'll tell you, hey, these properties you're importing to are used in this many lists and this many workflows. Did you know that? It just seems like more stuff like that, like, hey, I'll just, just, I'll just turn this workflow off or on or whatever. Like, oh, actually here. Downstream effects.

Yep.

Just, just for your visibility, I guess.

That's a good question for the group a little bit. It's like, honestly, you know, technical complexity wise, complexity of the system wise undoing things is often very hard. It's probably less difficult for us to do things like helping you understand what will happen when you do something and telling you, are you sure you want all this stuff to happen than it is to say, well, what you did made all this stuff happen. Would you like to make it unhappen? Right. That is a different set of problems. Is that visibility where you can say, yes, I am okay with all this stuff happening? Is that valuable? Would that help you sleep at night turning this kind of stuff on and using these really powerful features?

Yeah. Okay, I'm cheating you all. I'm sorry. I'm hopping down the list of upvotes just to get to. We've hit a lot on, like, workflows. We've talked a little about business units. I'm trying to hop down to some other themes. Quote approvals gets called out by Ann. It needs to be more than one person. Would be great to send it to a team. We've been forced to just turn off approval since one person is always available. So you mentioned, like, the stepping out to coffee thing. I think, I think quote approvals were the very first approval in all of HubSpot.

Yeah.

And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if.

It uses a different framework than the other approval stuff uses because the other approval stuff does allow you to say, like, these people can approve.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I wonder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I wonder if maybe there's a. There's an opportunity there for that tool to sort of, like, fit into the framework of the other approvals where you could say, like, this is my list of allowed approvers. Any of these people can do this. Someone is asking for approval for this. Yeah, that's a good point. I like Ali's point in the chat of like, but if we give you the big list of things that will happen and you do it anyway and it breaks something, then at least you can be like, well, you knew it would break it. That does help.

All right, well, we are at time you mentioned earlier. If people want to get in contact with you, LinkedIn is a good way.

Yep. You can hit me up on LinkedIn. You can email me. I am radhubspot.com R A D. You can reach out to me via email if you have more feedback. Thank you guys all so much for doing this. I know it was like a weird hug format where we just kicked ideas around. I hope that it was valuable. I hope it was fun to talk about this stuff and if you have more feedback about things that really, really, you know, could help with the admin experience and help you feel like we're really in your corner, please send it to me via email. I'm happy to get to hop on a zoom and just chat. I hope that I appear like an approachable human being in this session. So please feel free to chat with me about this anytime. It is something we really care about and we want to do right by admins because, like, admins are the number one, I think, indicator of success for a company. Using HubSpot, like a great admin can really drive success for HubSpot. You're a bigger factor than we are a lot of the time in really being able to use the product to accomplish your business goals. And that's why I said, like, all that work you do to like make things work and bridge those gaps. You glue this product together for your, your customers. We want to help it make sure you have to use less of your own glue. We want it. We want to give you some tools. But, but I really think that you should be like, commended for all of the effort you put into making sure that HubSpot works for your business. We just want to help it work better for you.

And that's a lovely note to end on. So we'll, we'll end it there. Thanks. Thanks, Ryan, so much for being here. Love this. I feel like it was a big success. Thank you all for participating, let you all get back to your Tuesdays, your data, your users, your therapists, and we will see you again hopefully next week. Bye, Ryan. Thanks.

Bye everybody. Bye, friends.