The HubHeroes Lampoon's Wild, Wacky, And Winning HubSpot Forms Adventure [HubHeroes, EP51]

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

So not only an employer, but. Or employee, but MC of Partner Day coming up in a couple days. Let's just throw that out there.

Let's go.

I'm having the Janet Jackson headset mic, so I'm geeked.

Oh, are we gonna be a part.

Of a rhythm nation? Are we gonna be a part of a rhythm nation?

I was considering it, but I figure the first time a black guy's on the big stage, he shouldn't be dancing. So I'm gonna.

I. Hey, I would pay good money to see Devin dancing on the main stage.

I'm saying I got two whole quarters.

I'm going to every single party every night at Inbound. I'm going to the speaker party. I'm going to the VIP party. I'm going to all the parties.

Yeah, fancy. I love it. You know what I would like to lobby for, though, George, at the end of that Safe harbor statement, I would love for it us to just add. And George and Max and Liz are employed.

Yeah. Somehow they do. They do stuff.

They get money from people for things and stuff.

Yeah, also stuff and things. But that's a little bit more of a nuanced discussion, much like the discussion today. Wasn't that segue flawless? Look at that.

Good transition.

Thank you.

Yeah, that actually deserves a, you know, little.

Thank you.

Yeah, you.

Thank you.

Thank you. I am so excited, actually. I am very excited for today's conversation. I know I say this every week, but one of the reasons why I'm particularly excited about this episode is because I know the moment I say out loud what it is that we're talking about, I'm gonna Hear people falling down as eye rolls in the back of their head, because they're not gonna see immediately off the bat why this topic is important. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Hub Heroes, National Lampoon's wild wacky winning HubSpot Forms adventure. Everybody get in the station wagon. We are going cross country to Wally World, and we are talking about forms. Because in a world where HubSpot and inbound and content reign supreme, it's easy to overlook probably the most essential HubSpot tool that exists. Not the blogging tool, not the email tool, not all the marketing capabilities. No, no, no. Not even the CRM. And I'm not saying those things aren't important, but my point is, is that the form is the nexus. The form is what makes all of those other things valuable. That's where all of your contacts and your leads come in. Or more specifically, George, they're not contents and contacts and leads. Who are they really?

Oh, I love the setup. I love the setup.

Let's do it. Let's do it.

Are we ready? Yeah. I'm just saying I love the setup.

That was so beautiful. But likely, without forms, actually not likely. There is no inbound. It does not exist. So whether you're new to HubSpot or you've been slinging HubSpot forms for years, you got to consider this episode mandatory listening. I'm serious, because we are not going to sit here. Well, so you drag and drop the different fields, and that's how you get first name in front of the last name. We're not talking about that. We're going bigger, we're going deeper. And I'm just going to say, by the end of this episode, you are not going to look at forms the same way again. I'm saying it now. I'm making the declaration.

It's going to happen. Yeah, absolutely, it's going to happen. There will be one, if not many things where your brain starts to tweak and change and think.

So, George, actually, I'm going to start this conversation with you because typically, the way I begin all of these episodes is I start by going, gentlemen, start your mindset engines. What do people need to be thinking about? But I want to take a step back from that. You're welcome, Max. Happy Friday. But I want to take a step back from that for a moment because I want to ask you, quite frankly, a leading question based on something that you said that blew my mind open. When you and I were throwing around this topic as an idea for the podcast, you said to me, and I Quote, I actually wrote it down. The moment you start thinking about your forms as conversation points rather than conversion points, everything changes. And that's one of those things where I'm like, wow, he sounds so smart. What does that. What. What does that mean? So, so first, for a friend of mine, me. What does that mean? Tell. Tell us about what that means.

Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, you know that it is for me about the humans and the humanity of it and, like, treat me like a human, not like a customer. And you also know a little is that I like to simplify the complex and I like to get down to the root principles of why things actually work. And so if you talk to a marketer, it's about conversion rates and it's CRO and it's the mechanics of it all. And what I want everybody to realize is when it comes to your HubSpot forms, it's less about the conversion, but more about the conversation that happens afterwards. Now, this could be an automated conversation with a workflow and three emails, or this could be a sales conversation that happens after this. But when you start to think about conversation versus conversion, it enables you to lean into the human side of doing business. And, and as my buddy Mark Schaefer says, the most human companies will win. So while this sounds like a very small word, it is a massive mind shift or change in the way that you think about what's happening now. If it's a conversation. We created the content to start a conversation. We created the content to be valuable and helpful to start conversation. We've got the form, we've got the lead intelligence of the human that we can use during the conversation to help them through the hurdle or to the aspirational. It like it's. It's fundamentally different than. Yeah, it's 25.7% max.

And Devin, what say you? What do you think most people are thinking about incorrectly or misunderstand when it comes to HubSpot forums? Whether we're talking about mindsets or anything a little bit more granular. Devin, I see you nodding. I saw that nod. You ready? You ready?

Yeah.

Here we go.

One of the most common misperception about HubSpot forms or forms in general is that you only need one, one form to capture them all. Yeah, man, that ain't gonna cut it like, the whole thing. And I'm sure people who have been to Inbound Scene talks on the conversion paths, all that stuff taking the courses is that information is like currency. The more valuable of a thing you're giving them the more information you can ask of them. If you're asking them to sign up for a newsletter and you're asking for anything more than your email address, you're going to get like, not much. If you're asking for like their whole life story and all you're doing is giving them an ebook, it's like, nah, man. Different forms, different flavors for different pages, different. So depending on how valuable whatever's on the other side of that form is, that should determine how much information that form is asking for. You can also, if you want to get more granular without, you know, getting overly detailed, what you could do is you could start using, you know, the, the, the, the smart fields and, and, you know, if you have one bit of information, then, all right, well, instead of that, let's ask for another bit of information. But your form shouldn't just be the same static contact us form on every page for everything. And it's like, that's, that's me is a huge mistake in something. Like, I was literally on a friend's client's website last week and it's like, what was going on with this form? You're literally just saying, reach out to us, but you're asking what their net worth is. Settle down.

Yeah, let's get married. Devin, I'm so glad that you dove into this and I just want to throw in a couple of pieces here and then I'll sit back and enjoy the melodies of Max Cohen and what he has to say around this topic. One, I'm glad that you brought in this idea of the form needs to be contextual to the experience that the human is happening on the page of your website. Therefore, one form doesn't capture them all. But because there's going to be different questions that need to be asked if you're asking them out on a date or if you're asking them to marry you, you can ask more and you can ask fewer and you can ask different. But also, I love that you dipped your toe into the waters of depend fields and something that I lovingly have been calling for about the last nine years. Second, smart questions in a conversation. If you're talking about something and something comes to mind, what do you do? You ask that person a question. When they give you the answer to that question, what does it do? It breeds more questions and understanding that if the forums are about conversations, that the conversation can start on the form and based on the information that they have provided you, you can ask the next, you know, two, three second smart questions to then really empower the true human conversation that happens after that conversion. Now we're getting somewhere.

I think, like in. If you're looking for more of a philosophical take here versus, like a very tactical, you know, how do you make it happen? You know, I think there's too many people that think like, the form is just the form, but like the form is also the landing page it's on and the accompanying context that's surrounding that form. It's also what happens after you submit it. Right. It's the, it's the thank you page after that sets the right expectations about what's happening now that you just clicked that scary button.

Right.

And, and what you're kind of telling people after they've made this choice to sacrifice some of their information to you.

Right.

You know, it's a lot more than just the fields that you're asking for. I think also a lot of people still are just like, you know, they, they, they don't know how to balance, like, not asking for too much. You know, I think that probably tanks a lot of folks, you know, conversion opportunities there, you know, because you're asking for information you don't need at that time.

Right.

But we can probably get into that like a little bit more later. But like, just know it's. It's so much more than just the fields. It's. Everything around that form is part of that form. Right. And not enough people kind of take that into consideration, I don't think.

Max, I love that you bring this up again. I'm dipping in because my BO spitting fire today. I'm just going to throw this out. The fact that you, that you dipped into that. Whoa, that's a little bit funky weird. But that's okay.

We need to call the. Okay. Do we need an adult? Do we need another adult?

I feel like we need somebody to do some adulting right now, so.

But here's.

I don't want to lose a track of where we're going. I love that you brought it down to a customer experience. The whole thing. It's a piece of the puzzle that you're creating. More importantly than that, I love that you dipped into this idea of you're trying to ask too much. And many times I found they're trying to ask too much because they're not asking things along the way. And to put your comment and Devin's together, the fact that there aren't more people using queued fields across multiple forms to actually stop asking the same dumb five questions on every form you create. First name Last name, email, job title, company name. Thanks. Have a nice day. No, if they fill out one form or five forms, you still know the five dumb pieces of information. Instead, if you're using queued fields, you'd have like 15, 20, 25 pieces of information because you're automagically replacing something that you already know with something that you need to know.

Okay, so George, I want to chime in here for a moment and I actually, I'm going to throw this out, this question out to all of you, but George, I want you to start. One of the things that Devin brought up right at the beginning is a big misconception is that people were like, will rely on one form as opposed to creating multiple forms. Now sometimes that's because people be lazy and they just don't want to make a bunch of forms. But in other cases, it comes from a genuine lack of understanding around what a form strategy is. But also, most of all, we have already been throwing out a bunch of terms that people might be listening and they're like, what are you even talking about? So we've talked about smart field, we've talked about cued fields. George, could you give us a quick primer on maybe including those two? Just a few of the different types of features that people may be missing with forms if they're new to it or they just get a little bit skittish when they start thinking about getting a complex.

Yeah, there's three that I'll just bring up. There's probably more, but there's three right now that I wanted to find. The first one that we did talk about was dependent Fields. And this means that you can show or ask other questions based on a response that somebody gave you. Let's say it's Personas and are you a marketer? Are you sales rep? Are you other. Oh, I'm none of the above. Oh, then how would you describe yourself? That's a dependent field that could be thrown in there because they didn't actually have an answer that they could have picked. The other one is queued fields. This is where it lives at the bottom of your HubSpot forms tool. And you can drag the 5 to 7 arbitrary number, 7 to 10 pieces of information that your sales team tells you. If we were able to collect that information along the way, man, we could close more deals. Then you actually drag those 5 to 7, 7 to 10 properties in that bottom part of your form and you turn on the feature in things that, like, if we already know the job title, we don't need to ask it again. If we already know the company name, we don't need to ask it again. Ask new information. The third one that I'll say that people need to be paying attention to is hidden fields. Because if we already know the answer to the question, we don't need to ask the question. If this form is literally sitting on a landing page for residential roofing, you don't have to ask, are you or an individual? You freaking know they're on the page for residential roofing. It was roof. Oh, God, here we go with needing adulting again.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry here.

But that's the thing, right? So, like, you can answer some of your own questions, but also you can get real ninja with it and you can start populating information from like, UTM parameters out of the URL into these, like, hidden fields. So hidden fields, queued fields, and dependent fields are three things that, if you're like, oh, you've never heard of these things before, go to your local Google, search for the knowledge articles and start to figure out how you can implement those in your strategy. Or, hey, just call George B. Thomas LLC too. You could do that. I mean, just. It's like the easy button and we'll help you, but.

Sorry, I'm sorry. Look at that. Shilling for what?

Big, big GBT Chat.

Gbt. Okay, now, since Devin did us all a fantastic service by being like, seriously, you should just go back and listen to his first answer this episode, because he covered like 18 really critical talking points to the point where we're actually going to go back to another one that he brought up. So we've talked about the humans on the other side of this equation, right? We've started dabbling a little bit into, like, you want. You don't want one, you want many. And you can do all of these different things. And again, just like anything you can do in HubSpot, it is so easy to get stuck in the me, me, me, I what do I want? What do I need? What? But Devin brought up a great point that people react positively or negatively, depending on how you're formulating your strategy to the ask for personal information. Ten years ago, when inbound was just starting out and people weren't trained to think like, oh, that content may be bad. Oh, that content may suck. Oh, what are they going to do with my information? Like, people were probably a little bit more open about giving their information now People are a lot cageier, right? So I want to talk about this. What is important to remember when it comes to how people react psychologically to request for personal information. Because, George, I could make the most complex question asky form of all time just using all three of those powers combined. But I shouldn't. So talk to me about that. I'm going to throw that open to the group. Max, right?

Yeah, I want to talk about this.

Max, bring us home.

Max is like, tag me and coach.

I saw literally he did the mic pull and the lean forward, which means we're going to church. Sorry.

So this was my, this was my favorite. This was my favorite, like, bit of advice that I used to. That when I, when I did new hire training. I loved talking about this stuff because, like, forms seem like these very simple things. It's like, oh, it's fields and you're getting information and so on.

It's just a net, but.

But there's like a lot of psychology behind it all, right? And everything is like a very tactical choice, right? So giving away your information on the Internet is terrifying, right? Just because of all the identity theft. You don't know how businesses like misuse your information. Do they sell your information? Could they get hacked and then someone has access to your information? Is someone going to contact my boss when they know that I work at some company? Is everyone else going to start getting calls from sales reps? Are they gonna start cold calling into my business?

Right?

Like, you know, is this form gonna take a long time for me to fill out? Do I have time to do this?

Right?

So like, you gotta remember, it's like when you're exchanging personal information, right, for something, that stuff that you're giving them has to be like super valuable, right? And I think everyone, like, if you've, if you've been like studying inbound in any way, shape or form, and you know, you grew up putting ebooks behind landing pages like that, there needs to be like a good value exchange there, right? But the other kind of way I look at this too, and this is the, the calculus that I always encouraged people to deploy when they're building forms is every single time you add another question or another field to a form, you need to balance the risk and the reward. The risk of someone not filling it out because it's just too much information or just, just, you know, I'll fill out three fields, but four fields is kind of pushing it, right? Like it's, it's the risk that someone won't fill it up. Maybe that question's a little bit too personal. Maybe they don't want to give out that information.

Right.

So there's risk there when you ask a question, and that risk could mean no submission whatsoever.

Right?

No conversion at all.

I got to throw shade at Big Sprocket here for a second. I can't tell you how many.

I know.

Yo, be careful. That's my. That's my dog. You know what I mean? That's my dog. Slow your roll.

Slow your roll.

Hold me back. Go ahead.

Listen.

Yeah, we're fine.

Do we need a nap? Are we okay?

Fine.

We're fine. It depends on the next words that.

Come out of your mouth if we're fine or not. I'm just gonna throw that out.

Wow. As if I'm the first person to throw shade or do a hot take toward Big Sprocket. Come on. Come on.

Just messing with you.

No, they were messing with a little while with the idea of we're gonna give you a seemingly simple form and then you click a button and then they give you, like 18 other fields to fill out. And I'm like, my dude, that's gonna be a no. They've since stopped doing that or at least don't see it more often. But the reason I bring that up, Max, is exactly what you just said.

Oh, yeah.

This thing where I'm like, I'm fine. This is totally fine. So why do we need to do. Why do you need to know my revenue right now? This is a top of the funnel offer for a really broad audience. Why are we getting into revenue, company size? I'm like, no. At some point, I'm just like, you have not earned this.

They also used to ask, like, if you were providing marketing services to figure out if you were a partner on, like, every single forum too. That one was fun. But anyway, the going back to, like, the risk and reward thing, right? So like, the risk. Yeah. Every single time you add another piece of, you know, another question on there, like, the risk goes up that someone's not going to fill the form out. So if you're taking the risk, there must be a reward for you as the marketer.

Right.

So the question is, is like, what's a reward?

Right.

The reward would be this information is valuable for me as the marketer to either market to this person better or to enhance their experience or to help with something else that we got kind of going on on the inside.

Right.

That's the big thing. Like, you have to make sure the information is valuable because you are risking an extra question in the form that might tank the conversion completely.

Right.

So just always kind of be balancing that Can I use this information? Either create a better marketing experience for them, right. Or to like enhance something that my team needs at this moment, right? That is, if you're just like, if you're offering a newsletter or a friggin e book or something and you're not passing this person on to a sales rep, why are you asking for their phone number? Dog you don't need it. You don't need the phone number, don't ask for it. You don't need to know the Social Security number of their firstborn child in order just to like give them a piece of content. Like, like only ask for what you need at that moment, right? Because there's, if there's, if there's, if you're not going to use the information in any valuable way, there's no sense in risking the entire submission to get it.

So yes, yes and yes. And first of all, four words that you need to right now, grab your little notepad and your little pencil, your iPad or whatever you use. You need to write down risk, a reward, and you need to write down value and time. There is a matrix between those four words that came out of Max's mouth that I want you to be able to focus on. And I want you to realize too. I've talked about this stuff so much that I fundamentally said something and it probably skirt, skirted right past everybody when I was talking about second smart questions. If you rewind this, I said and you might ask two or three questions. I didn't say you'd all sudden ask 18 questions, right? The form goes from two fields to 18. No. Shame on you for even thinking about doing something like that. Because it's about adding context. Two or three questions, one or two questions based on what you just learned. Because what we're talking about here and what I need everybody. And unless you even said there's like psychological things, ladies and gentlemen, when they come to your page, when they come to that experience, there is one thing that you need to pay attention to that is the hurdle that the human has to go over. There is a psychological hurdle that you need to pay attention to. If they at, for any moment say I have to give away my firstborn child, my right arm or any other piece of body part, if they feel that way to actually start a conversation with you, that form is going to be dead in the water. Which is, by the way, I go back to why, if you use queued fields, dependent fields and hidden fields, you can ask less questions during the time of that psychological hurdle and create a better experience and even still ask maybe, you know, 4, 5, 7. But now because you got over that hurdle and it's part of the journey, they're not like, oh, well, yeah, that makes sense. It's just part of the process. Let me go ahead and fill that in real quick.

I love that. Devin, do you have any other thoughts you want to add here on the psychology piece of this? Because I know this is something that you led with and I. And I know it's important to you when we think about the humans.

Mute.

Sure am muted, but okay.

Muted.

Leave it in. Noah, leave it in.

You did.

Yeah. I don't have my button set up so I feel left out. We need to get those buttons for Christmas. But so we do. Here's the thing. Filling out forms gives me anxiety. I hate doing it. I'm a huge fan of ungated content. If I want. If I'm going to fill out a form, I'm assuming it's going to be because I'm either registering for someone or someone's going to try and sell me something. Like please, please put an opt out button on the thing. Or, or, or you can have an opt in button and leave it unchecked so that way people aren't accidentally signing up to be heard from you.

You.

If that's not why they're here. It's like all I want is an ebook on how to find a good podiatrist in my area. I don't want you to reach out to me with your podiatrist searching services. Like you should really just, yeah, just. Just be good and don't pester people. And the whole thing around the inbound methodology is not interrupting. And the. One of the biggest ways of interrupting someone's life is trying to talk to them about something that they don't care about or didn't ask you for.

Yeah. Which by the way, there's a pro tip in there. There's a pro tip in there. Your feet are important. People make sure you make a diet just appointment. Your feet are important.

True.

Especially with inbound coming up.

You know what I love about this?

Yeah. With the amount of walking like go, go to inbound and then get home and make a podiatrist appointment and get your feet checked.

We're here to make sure that your HubSpot is healthy and your tootsies. You're welcome. Guys. We are a full service hub organization.

Big Foot. Big Foot.

Yeah, we're trying.

We're chilling for Bigfoot.

Hey.

We're trying to be Holistic for those humans.

Okay, yeah, that was good. That was good. That was good. All right, so we've talked a lot about the humans, but let's be honest here. The mindset is important, right? Going into this conversation, understanding that these are conversations, right? That every time a form is initiated, you are beginning a human to human interaction. And with that said, these are technically conversions. And I know the listeners at home are interested in how you can optimize it. We've talked about how you can accidentally turn forms into buyer repellent. But let's flip the script here a little bit, right? Let's talk a little bit about how you can optimize for those conversational conversions. What are some of your favorite powerful tips for that?

Well, I don't know if this is like specifically optimizing conversational conversions. Well, I guess one way you could think about that is like take a look at like what the names of the fields are when they get put on the form and like maybe turn them into like actual questions.

Right?

You know, like instead of maybe it just saying email, you could say, what's a good email address to reach you at? Or you know, instead of like, you know, writing having like message as the field, it's like, what can we help you with? Like prompt them with what would be a helpful response for them to give you, like in a field, right. I think the other thing too, when I think, at least when I think of like more of like starting a conversation with a form. I think typically that's happening when you're filling out a form where you explicitly know you are requesting some kind of conversation with someone.

Right?

So something towards the, you know, going into that tail end of the engaged phase or bottom of the funnel as we like to call it, and things like that. But like, if you're setting up someone for a conversation, that form shouldn't just be saying, like, give us all the possible contact information you possibly have, right? It should be what can we do to set our sales rep, consultant, solutions engineer, whoever is going to be having a conversation with this person. What can we actually do to like, one on? Because again, it's just, it's more than just the fields. Remember, it's everything on that page that like has to do with the form. What can we do to like set the right expectations around what that conversation is actually going to be? Is it a demo? Is it more of an introduction? Is it more of a discovery call? Is it more of a consultation?

Right?

Like what can we get people to do to put them in the right. Right. Mindset when they're filling a form out going like, I know what I'm asking for.

Right?

And then what questions can you ask that will actually set that person to have. Set that person up for success? To actually have a worthwhile conversation with your mouth and words and audio over, like zoom or a phone. Or a phone over Zoom.

Right? Yeah, right.

Imagine that, you know, so like, think about like, like this is leading up to a conversation. Am I doing a good enough job setting expectations with that person?

Right.

Including after they fill the form out.

Right?

Like, are you saying, is someone gonna reach out to you to book something? Is someone gonna call you within a certain amount of time? Like, what are you expecting? But also, like, get the conversation started by, you know, asking a couple questions that that person should know going into the conversation versus wasting time figuring it out on the call.

Right?

Because your time is time is money.

I. I want a yes. And again, on this episode, Max, I love the fact that you were like, instead of just email or business email, maybe it's like, what's a good email to reach you at, like actually turning it into a question, humanizing it. I don't know how the demographic exactly of the podcast. I. I might be able to use the example of like, you know, the Justice League or some people might be old enough to remember, like Wonder Twins, where they would activate their power and, you know, form of an E. Powers.

Activate, form of a camel.

Yeah, exactly. Become water. The fact that I go into hundreds of portals and nobody is using placeholder text, and nobody is using help text. This is literally your league of heroes. For each property, the label, the help text, and the placeholder. If you want to create a good user experience. If you want to do what fundamentally, Max, I feel like you were banging against the door of like, how do you simplify it all? How do you help them just not have to think and fundamentally understand it, then activate the frickin Wonder Twin powers that actually live for each property that you have. Here's the other thing though, I'm going to challenge people with. Actually, I'll ask you guys. You get on the Internet, you go to a website, you land on a page that has a form. What are the first three things that you see in that form? Tell me.

First name, last name, email. Boom.

First name, last name, email. Why is that the first thing that we're asking? I'll tell you. Because we're selfish as. And we want their information. We want that. Hey, I'm just gonna keep it real deal. Holy field for a second. We want their information so that we can achieve our tasks. I have challenged many businesses with what if the first question on your form was how would you best describe yourself? And they could actually pick a Persona that they fit into and from that you could then ask a second or third smart question based on that. And, and the. But guess what? The first name and last name and email now live at the bottom of the form. Because now that we know who you are, now that we know the hurdles that you're facing, now that we actually have context to the fact that we can help you or not, by the way, we just need your first name, last name and email so we can send you the information that's going to help you with that.

That also, here's, here's. Do you need last name?

Probably not.

Do we really need last name? Like, honestly, like, if someone gives you their email, you can probably get it from there, but like, until like you're getting them on a sales call, right, you probably don't even need last name.

Yeah, I mean, my podiatrist calls me George. He doesn't call me George Thomas. He doesn't need my last name at all.

Yeah.

And like, if this is quite a turnaround from a few episodes ago when you and I kind of duked it out about whether or not you actually needed to have a name in the form.

Listen and learn.

I listen and learn when these episodes.

Pocket of big form in the pocket of big.

I'm just saying, I listen and learn, people.

No, I love it. All right, so quick question for you all. Obviously HubSpot forms cannot do everything. George, I know you've got a few locked and loaded ready to talk about this because you've got feelings about some of the capabilities that HubSpot does not have when it comes to their forms, but you do have a couple of of outside of the box hacks that you like to teach folks. You want to share a few of those little secrets?

Well, first of all, yeah, I don't mind sharing that at all. I think that HubSpot forums can almost do everything, by the way. Like, it just needs a little bit of help.

Big update. Big update today.

Big update.

Yeah.

Wait, what? Just tell me the deets.

So.

So first of all, there's a beta. I think it's still in beta, but being able to route to meeting links on the actual form is like a core piece of the new functionality that's happening. So if you've ever wanted to like, route to a special rep based on the fact that it was like a vertical or something like that, now you have the option to actually set that natively again. I think it's beta, but it'll be coming out soon.

It's public beta. Yeah, it should be out to everybody.

The baby steps to being able to do what we now do for clients with just an extra little bit of code. And that's what I hope everybody realizes. If you talk about HubSpot forms and you go like V2 level up on this bad boy, if you're using HubSpot landing pages or HubSpot CMS, you now can look at it as less of just about the form, but the form module. And whenever you look at it as a four module, now you can develop a four module that if, let's say we've done this for a client where they had seven different territories based on what they would select in a drop down, we would send them with this form module to the landing page for that territory. Right. Not native out of HubSpot but can be done if you're thinking about a module. Multi step forms, not native out of like the, the features. But if you treat it as a module, encode it now you can build a multi step form module. And so that's the thing that I love about HubSpot is you've got these fundamental things. I need a form, I need to embed it on a website. Good, go for it. I have, I wanted to do these special things. Cool. Call up your local developer or partner agency and we're gonna make magic happen for you. So, so like that's the thing. You can do these special things. The, the funny part is people just aren't curious and they're not asking the question to the right people. Hey, is there a way that we can do this? Because many times there is. Like there's so many things. Like I know when we got excited about doing this episode, I reached out to Max. Max went gorilla bananas ape crap on Forms API. Yeah, yeah.

I have a, literally a question here that I have keyed up here. Let's talk about this Mac. What the bleep is power HubSpot Forms API. I don't have a button, so I have to say.

Oh yeah, well wait one, one thing before I do the Forms API, the one thing I wanted to also mention about that beta that George is talking about. So not only does it let you use like conditional fields to pass to like basically set a dynamic thank you page for which like which meetings like to go to, but the other thing that it does is it packages up and passes along the values of the form field into the Meetings tool or into that Meetings page. So it will auto fill anything that came from the original form submission. Now that sounds like, oh, it should just do that.

Right?

But if you've ever like built a form and then set up a meetings link for a thank you page.

Right.

That has some of the same information on that form, it never auto fills if the person hasn't already been cookied before because the database doesn't have enough time to update with all the new information from the form submission and then go there. So, like, oftentimes you'd have to put like a buffer page in between or some sort of script that like delayed it for a little bit and it's just like, you know, it's not cool. So with the new beta, intentionally, part of that beta is that it's got some mechanism in there that passes that information onto the Meetings tool and it's not waiting for it to update in the data database and then get inserted by the cookie. So, like, that is huge.

And this is where we, this is where we insert the music. It's a whole new world. Like we just. We throw that right there. I'm just saying.

Yeah.

The chaotic energy of this episode.

Yeah, yeah. So forms API. Forms API. Here's. Here's where you should say, hey, maybe we should use the forms API.

Right.

So, so oftentimes, like with any other website, another really cool feature of HubSpot forms that we haven't even mentioned on this broadcast is that you can embed HubSpot forms on other websites or other CMS platforms that aren't HubSpot.

Right.

So if you are a WordPress website and you've got a bunch of like, marketing forms on your WordPress site, you can rip those out, build forms in HubSpot and go embed them on your outside, you know, web pages. Now. So that's a common thing that people will do when they start setting HubSpot up for the first time. They'll go replace all their other forms with HubSpot forms. Great. That was like one of our big things we did during onboarding. Right. And so you go and you replace them all. However, sometimes you come across a form that is not appropriate to replace with a HubSpot form. Generally, two situations. Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah. And also apps.

Right?

So like if you have. Yeah, exactly. All right, so here's the deal. If you have a form that you can't replace with a HubSpot form, maybe someone's like registering for a product and that form submission has to go somewhere in a back end and build someone an account or like whatever, right? So you just can't replace a form with a HubSpot form. Maybe you have a marketing form that's collecting information that's not appropriate to hold in HubSpot and you only want to get some of that information into HubSpot, but the form still needs to collect everything. There's this wonderful API called the Forms API. And what the Forms API does is you go and create a form in HubSpot so you can get this little global unique identifier number and that just acts as like a dummy form, right? Because one of the best parts about HubSpot Forms is when they get submitted, you can trigger automations, you can report on it, you could build segmentations. Like there's so much you can do by knowing a specific form got filled out. But if you're not using that form on this other form that you need to use and it's still an outside form, how do you do that? So you build a dummy form in HubSpot. You don't even have to fill out all the fields and everything that this form has on it. You just build it so you can get this global unique identifier and you have a form to kind of act like that outside form and represent that form inside of HubSpot. Then what you're doing your developers can do, and I'm not a developer, so I don't know how to write the script or anything, but they go and write some script on this other form, right? Where when that other form gets filled out, you're basically hitting HubSpot's forms API and saying, hey, HubSpot, tell this form to act like it got filled out. So the dummy form that you built inside of HubSpot and what happens is that form goes, oh, I got filled out, right? And it fires off a submission as if it was an actual form form getting filled out, right? And then I don't know if it's through the Forms API or if it's having you use the Contacts API for this or something. You can then pass that information in and it'll look like it's a form, it'll look like it's part of the form submission essentially. I'm sure there's like some developer going, well, that's not technically how it works, but that's basically what you do, right? And, and you can, you pass the information through and you tap this form on the shoulder and Say, hey, act like you got filter out. That way the information can still be going through that other form. That other form remains intact. But you have a HubSpot form in HubSpot acting like it got filled out so you could do all the cool analytics, reporting automation stuff with it. And that information that is getting into HubSpot, and the best part of it is you can isolate it so only the information you want to come in actually comes in. Maybe you don't want to store that password on the login page, but you want to know someone hit that login. And maybe you don't want to pass that HIPAA compliance information in, but you need, like their email and stuff to do, I don't know, marketing, like whatever it may be.

Right.

So forms API is huge. When you have a form you can't replace with a HubSpot form, of course you need developers or a partner to get it done, but, you know, it's. It's all possible.

So it's super powerful. But I have to. I have to go sideways for a second here. HubSpot, HubSpot people. HubSpot commercial people. I need you to just listen for a second. Second. If you remember Schoolhouse Rock, there was a cartoon character. He's a bill. He's an only a bill. You know, it was really. Yeah, super dope. We need a Schoolhouse Rock version of HubSpot forms character. I petition right now. I petitioned right now that the voice of the form character would be done by Max Cohen because. Oh, I just got that filled out. Probably made me just pee myself a little bit here on the podcast. I'm gonna throw that out there.

That's worse than I said when I said dip me, daddy earlier. Dip it down.

Guys, guys, guys. Adulting it when I'm sitting here being the responsible one. You know, we have crossed a threshold. Oh, yeah, because usually I'm the one who has to get censored out by George's son.

Many edits by Noah are usually.

This one's gonna.

This one's gonna straight up.

This is.

This one's gonna straight up traumatized Noah.

Oh, my God, I know. So well, he's gonna love it anytime. Haven't you heard the new rule, Max? And I don't mind pulling back the curtain on this. Noah, if you're laughing, cut it.

Didn't we talk? If Noah finds it funny, it gets.

Removed from the podcast. Just saying.

He's gonna start saying dip it, daddy to you. I guarantee you.

If you haven't cut at least 25% of Liz's dialogue. We've got a problem. All right. Definitely. And save us from ourselves. What are some of your favorite just general best practices that you want people to keep in mind after they're leaving this episode? Because we've talked a lot about technical stuff. We've talked about a lot of, like, we wish that we could have this. We've talked about if you have a WordPress website and conversions and conversations. There's so many things other than not having one form to rule them all. What are your other best practices?

So something I've mentioned in other episodes that we haven't covered in this one is that forms don't just have to be for leads to fill out. Forms are an excellent way for people who you don't want to have access to HubSpot but still need to get data into your CRM. Wonderful way to do it. Case in point, if you are dealing with an archaic sales team and they just can't get their stuff together, then all right, fine, I'm gonna make a form that's password protected that only you guys can get into. And this is where you're gonna enter information. And then, you know what? I'm just gonna take it from there. I'll just take it from there. Another example is I worked with this one organization when I was still in the agency world. One of our clients was using a call center whose database was basically locked. It didn't. There was no way to do API connection sections in or out of it. And so the only way they can log their calls was into HubSpot. Well, I'm sorry, I'm not giving 300 people in a foreign country access to my CRM. But what I will do is I'll create a form for them that again is password protected, that has all the fields and everything that I would need them to enter so they can log all of their calls, get everything in the system, and then that way what I can do is take every entry that came in through those forms and run them through my cleanup filter. Because I don't understand how they don't get that all caps is not allowed. Stop writing everything in all caps. But you know what, Operations, I got that tool. I got that thing that does that thing. So don't even worry about it. But at the end of the day, you can think outside of the box with how data gets into your CRM. Most people are familiar, you know, with APIs, and they're familiar with app integrations. But it can be just as simple as using a form for someone who you don't want to have access to your CRM or at the risk of insulting some people, it's idiot proofing data entry. I'm. I'm just gonna. You know what? Don't, don't even worry about where to click. Don't worry about where to go. Don't worry about this button. Don't worry about that button. Go to this website, fill out this form, hit submit, then do it again.

Yeah, okay. I actually have to chime in here. I have to chime in here because I actually have a tip and it's based on something that Devin just said that that kind of bummed me out. I'm gonna be honest. All right. I have to stand because this is something that I find very upsetting.

Oh, my gosh.

Hello. Thanks.

You literally have to stand for this?

Yes.

It's that big a deal.

If you are in the hub heroes community, you can see how aggressively close I am getting to my screen right now to talk to you.

Yeah, you should watch the video making.

Your buttons just say submit.

Yes.

You're not a robot taking over the earth. You are not here going, submit. Resistance is futile. That's my job. My buttons can say that. Your buttons can't say that. Do things like, get it now listen, now get your copy. Literally anything. Stop putting submit. Oh my God. It makes sense. Me freaking bonkers. Like, why, why, why? And not only that, can you just stop making.

Yeah.

Thank you. Now when you click submit. It did that.

That would be amazing.

But like, oh my God, it kills me. How many websites do we go to, George, where they're committing the two cardinal sins of buttons? Cool toned colors, so blues, greens, grays, things like that. Stuff that fade into the background and psychologically creates no urgency. And submit.

Yeah.

Change it to something human.

So many.

Make it red, make it orange, make it something where there's good contrast between the text and the button color, but make it warm colored. One of the things I remembered from.

We just broke the Internet, by the way, just so you know. You just broke the Internet. There's hundreds of thousands of marketers. Well, we don't have hundreds of thousands of lists listeners yet, but there are marketers listening to this, going, oh, God.

Yeah, I'm mad at you. I am mad at you. I am. Stop it. Anyway, so that's my suggestion.

Both of both of you. So the, the submit thing. Yes. This kind of goes back to like when someone's filling out a form, it should be a hundred thousand thousand percent clear of what they're actually Doing? They're not filling out a form.

They're not submitting to getting.

Yeah, they're getting a piece of content. They're asking for a conversation. They're expecting a specific thing in return. So the button should match what's actually going on.

Right.

So they know what they're getting when they hit the button.

Right.

Request that consultation. Get in touch with sales. Get like, you know what I mean?

Like daddy.

Yeah, exactly.

Daddy. Here's the thing.

He's gonna bring you, like, I think a queso one day and you're gonna grab a chip and he's gonna go, dip it, Daddy. And it's gonna be, no, please do it. It's.

Anyway, do it, do it, do it, do it.

Before I forget the. The dev. What Devin said about using forms for things other than lead generation or like, whatever, everyone. Everyone uses forms for, like, using forms internally is awesome. There's a big setting you want to make sure you turn on, though, if you do that. And it used to be called disable cooking tracking. Now it now it's called create a new submission for every new email address or something. New contact for every new email address or whatever. But essentially it does the same thing. It rips off the cookie. Now why do you want to rip off the cookie? Well, because the person that you're filling this information out for is not you on your computer that you're using and probably filling out that form multiple times from the same place. This is also something that I highly recommend people do for any page that signs people up for events. And here's why. Oftentimes if you are like saying, oh, register for an event or whatever, and it's like one person at a time, which you're kind of limited to doing when it comes to, like, HubSpot forms.

Right.

Someone will sit there, whether it's like the boss signing up everybody for an event, or the secretary signing up everybody for an event or an operations person or whatever. And they'll sit and they'll refresh the form and they'll fill it out for each person. And then you and the marketer go in there, oh, this one person filled out the form seven times and their name changed seven times. What's that about? Well, it's because you didn't disable cookie tracking. So, like, in some cases, like where it makes sense, you know, if you don't care about where that conversion came from and you think more than then someone might submit multiple times. Rip off that, like, cookie tracking option and save yourself the headache.

Okay, I want to double click. Hang on. I want to double click on a word. Everybody rewind a what Max said, because there's a lot of gems in there, but the word expectation, that's where I.

Was going to go to.

Expectation is so important. Your expectations. But more importantly than that, at their expectations, what they they expecting. Because expectations is like the cousin, brother, sister, grandma, grandpa, I don't care what term you want to use to experience and. And the great experience that you're trying to provide them through whatever.

That's why the thank you page is so freaking important.

Yep.

Right?

Someone just gave you their stuff, and the very next thing you need to show them is, hey, thank you for giving that. You're giving your stuff. Give me. Giving me your information. Okay, Rest assured, this is what to expect now. And make sure it's in line with what you said it was before they hit that button.

There's probably a whole episode on the power of a thank you page, to be honest with you.

Okay, you know what? We got. Okay, that's officially going in the hopper. The other thing I want to mention here, because, Max, you had that incredible thing that we needed to talk about, but I want to make sure. Sure I give the data point that I heard from Unbounce at marketing Profs forum like a few years ago. I don't remember the specific percentage, but they're like, it's a marked increase just changing the button color from a cool.

Color to a warm color.

I'm sure it's such a simple thing because psychologically, something red makes me want to click it. It's urgent. You want to click it, touch it, do the dip it, bop it. Whatever it is that we're doing.

Oh, that's a cool old game, by the way. The bop it. Bop it. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of bop it, I've got like, we got like three minutes left. Time flew. Holy crap. How do. How did this happen?

I know, George. I don't know. But that's why we're going into our. Our closing question.

Okay. It's like you're wrangling cats or something. You're doing a great job at it.

Thanks, buddy.

Cool cats.

Zip it.

Dang.

If people remember only one thing from this episode. One thing, Nothing else. Only one George B. Thomas. One thing. What is it?

I gotta go first.

You follow the rules. No, no, Devin's gonna go first because he follows the rules. George, you need to wait and pare it down from 8.

Don't be afraid to create more than one farm.

Go. Go find your. Your. Your stupid your stupid Contact us page on your website and nuke it into oblivion. Go full Oppenheimer on that thing and just replace it with with forms that actually have a purpose. And also like just stop being like so butthurt when people give you fake email addresses. But we can talk about that later. I have a whole theory on that.

All right, mine before George chimes in with his 20 different one things is do not put submit on your form. I will find you. I will find you. Not for cupcakes, not for hugs, not for kittens, just the cuffs, violence, murder.

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 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 hubieroes 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.