Time for the Live HubSpot Call-In Show! 7/18/2025
George B. Thomas, Rob Jones, Casey, and Chris take live calls about HubSpot workflows, automation challenges, and AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT. They dig into product features, user experience issues, and answer community questions about the platform.
Hello, you've reached the HubSpot helpline.
Helpline.
Help behind Helpline helpline.
It's Rob, it's George, it's Casey and Kyle. Come with a problem and leave with a smile. Every Friday at 3. Come and join us as we help you with HubSpot. Open up your link in. Just make sure you call in and leave a voicemail about HubSpot. Make your Friday divine with the HubSpot helpline.
Hello and welcome back to the HubSpot help line. I am your dancing behind the scenes host Rob Jones, AKA the mayor of inbound. And I'm joined by the. We didn't even have to do the Star wars marching theme. Chris, Carolyn is on camera today and well, here it is. And the one and only thing that.
George did when he, when he joined before we started recording was hit that button.
That's, that's appropriate. And George B. B stands better. V stands for by golly. He is a dead gum HubSpot extraordinaire. George B. Thomas. How are you today, George?
I'm doing great. By the way. You have no clue that I usually do this, but when people ask me what does the B stand for? I just tell him it stands for Benjamin.
Benjamin.
Because it's. My middle name is Benjamin. I don't even know if a lot of people know that. But the, the B is for Benjamin and. But I've been jamming on some HubSpot this week.
I've. I've seen it and you might as well add a S in front of the bees. I'm sure you've been stacking. Benjamin's helping all the people with HubSpot with sidekick strategies. Chris is from profoundly. He's a founding. Profoundly pro. A lot of pro words in there and I, I think maybe this is the first show where the, the green thing has been replaced by a pink thing. I am now brand at superd. I wish I had a lightning bolt emote that I could deploy more time.
Yeah, next time. Next time we expect something.
Right?
Yeah, they're not very super yet, I guess.
Oh, I mean I, this, this was before day one. So I'm, I'm on point a little bit. I do have telling this to you guys before the live started is that I've decided to start dabbling in two things and it's, it's long overdue. One of them is obs and so inner stream deck. Pretty soon I'm pretty, pretty excited to start doing that. And two is Claude. Where Chris, I know you've, you've been Preaching to me like, just give it a shot, man. I wanna, I wanna apologize publicly.
Welcome to the party, man.
Yeah, in order to maybe filibuster here for a minute because you'll. Any returning viewers, I know we've been doing this for years, eons, millennia even. You'll notice that there are two faces missing. One of them is at home with his. With a baby. Kyle is not here. He's on pat leave. We wish him the best. And Casey is not stranded at a loves in Iowa. She is. She should be showing up any minute. So we want to give her some time to get here. But let's, let's start off really quick because we do have a call or two to get to. With to a lay person, right? To me, I'm admitting that the differences in CLAUDE and GPT, I will tell you and you can just verify that this is correct.
Incorrect.
The way that it intuits information without having to engineer a prompt to me is a lot smoother. I use the same prompts and the same things almost as a comparative. Chris, I know you've talked about having them kind of talk to each other and assign them different roles. So I understand the. You're a blank, like the what, where, when, why kind of, you know, prompt introduction. But doing that, the results that I got were immediately closer to kind of the desired end state. So there was less iterations, there was less back and forth. Have you experienced, is there a term for that? Is there some tangible difference in anthropic versus OpenAI or. I mean, I'm sure both of you guys kind of speak to this. Speaking of open AI, let's give a round of applause for Casey being on time. Here we go.
Round of applause for the show.
Just kidding. Just kidding.
Yeah, she's like, no, goodbye.
And she leaves immediately. Well, she can, she can join this topic in the show whenever she wants. But Chris, George, I'll open it up to you just on the Claude question.
So I'll just give my two cents what I have. By the way, I, I still use Chat GPT a ton, but I have done some massive heavy lifting in instructions and memory to get it to give me outputs that I want to see. But for the normal user who just comes in and does like some simple prompts, Claude, it spits out more human feeling responses versus like again, I have over a year of engineering my instructions and my memory to get me to that point because back when I started that wasn't necessarily the case. But Claude has gotten really good at like just sounding like A human would sound.
Yes, Casey.
Sorry, no, I'm late. Go ahead, Chris. And I'm also gonna have the opposite opinion. So I'll let everybody have their.
She also doesn't decline. So there's that. So yeah, I think I like to think about, you know, when you hear what the companies are doing, like behind the scenes and their goals with the LLMs, in this case OpenAI and anthropic. Like when you hear the founders talk, like definitely the goals of Anthropic is to be like humans and taking care of humans and human values and like even it has, it's. The name is Claude, not Chat GPT. Like right, it's a name. But then on the other side you've got, you know, open AI saying like we want productivity, like get this in the hands as many people as possible so that they have an assistant everywhere they go for everything. So when you don't, without any setup, OpenAI ChatGPT is going to act like that assistant, delegate me tasks and I will get the tasks done. If you want anything else, it's going to require a lot of setup because I'm always going to go into that productivity mode versus Claude has been the opposite for me. That's where whatever the goal is, like either one can work. Right. So it's about and it's not surprising me Rob, like the way you like to tell stories and build, do world building and just think outside of the box. Like in my opinion, Claude is more built for us out of the box because we like to not do things the normal way when we're open to those random things that come up. And as soon as Claude does it, like, oh yeah, let's go down that path. Serendipity.
Serendipity with your AI assistant. Here's what I'll even throw in there too. Like I have as of late even gone into the world of I start with one and finish with another. So let me explain. Like right now I'm working with a client. We are building an eight week live training program based off of some content that he has historically created. And I'm using Chat GPT to build the outline and the speaker notes and, and the like. What should we have on screen? However, before he ever sees a draft version that he'll had his own information to, it will go from ChatGPT to Claude to re spit out the speaker notes to then go into a doc that I can listen to, refine and then deliver to the client where they can refine it. So again, depending on where you have the context and the information and what you're trying to build to where you're trying to go. It may be a joint assistant process.
Yeah. And to your Casey, I'll let you weigh in with the. Your. I like the dynamics. Like, it's helpful to have differing opinions or preferences. For me, Chris, you nailed it. And even, you know, Talking about the CEOs and the companies and their goals with the tools, I didn't know or I'd forgotten that I know GPT3.03 mini for whatever Claude's is sonnet. Like, as somebody that. That has been published and written and done creative writing and took those classes in. In college, that to me immediately kind of underlined the difference was. Holy crap, a sonnet. Yeah, I. I need more of. Kind of the creative freedom and I need more of the empathy. If GPT is the, you know, logical portion of. Of whatever, then it seems that Claude has more of the empathetic or empath version of whatever that is.
Careful.
I don't want it. Yeah, Casey, go ahead.
How about you?
So worth noting, I'm cheap. I don't pay for either.
Wait, what?
What?
Say that a different way. Please, just say that a different way. Frugal. The word for is frugal. I'm frugal.
I don't pay for either. So just worth noting.
We need to vet the kind of experts we have on the show, I think.
No, here's what I'll say. I. I would bet that many people fall in the Casey camp where they're using it, but they're not quite ready to pay for it yet, because not mere mortal humans aren't a Chris, aren't a Rob, aren't a George, aren't a Nico. Right, where, like, we're super nerdy, super deep in the weeds, using it for work every single day, like Casey might be using every single day. But if Free gets her what she needs. Fine, fine.
Voice of the people. I've said it before, I'll say it again.
There you go.
So I'm using the free versions of both, which I, I suspect a lot of people watching are also. Um, and for me, I do what George mentioned. I'll start in one and I'll move to the other. Um, and for me, right, recently, I'm. I'm starting in Claude, mostly because I can paste more text into Claude than I can in chatgpt. Um, so I will start there. Our morning show. I take the transcript of our morning show, I send it to Claude, I have Claude write a post that sounds like me. But I haven't gotten Claude to sound like me, which I know is my prompts. I know that I know Everybody, whatever. But ChatGPT, I've put so much work in, all I have to do is send chatgpt whatever Claude spit out and say, make this sound like me. That is my prompt. Make this sound like me. Yep, and it does. And it sounds better than me. Like it's funnier than I am.
Nah, get out of here. Come on, you gotta work on the way that you talk about yourself, girl. My goodness. Funnier than me. It's not cheaper than you, I can tell you that.
Anyway, this is becoming a therapy session between me and George. Sorry everyone. Thanks for.
No, we do have our voicemail caller like patiently waiting. You are, you are so right mentioning like if this, if I was hosting this show in particular, this might have happened. But good thing Rob Rob is hosting.
Well, I wanted to bring that up and it went a little bit longer, but I blame that fully on Casey for being late. We couldn't start the helpline portion of HubSpot helpline without all of the help and we might need it. So Chris, if you don't mind, we're going to hop into that. I do have some, some closing remarks that we can save for later. But yeah, let's get into this voicemail. We have one. And Chris, do you mind teeing that up for us so that George, yourself and Casey can dive right in?
Alrighty, let's get it started. And there's a two parter here because he ran out of time and I tried to curate it a little bit. So we'll start here.
The problem is an automation for renewal deals being auto created 120 days before the renewal date. Previously this was entirely human done. Now it's almost fully automated except for one part which is I have to go after the deal is created, I have to go add the line items manually to the created deal and then calculate and populate the line item amounts based on last year's deal something. Context here is we use the recurring revenue reporting in HubSpot to calculate GRR NRR. So it's heavily dependent on the annual recurring revenue property that is auto populated by HubSpot based on the line items. So a lot of automation downstream happens based off of whether that value is greater than, less than or equal to the prior annual renewal amount. So the problem is I'm unable to figure out a way. Sorry, the dogs are barking. I'm unable to figure out a way to have the deal Created with the correct line item at the correct price. The deal creation workflow is a company workflow with the enrollment based off of the renewal date property on the company level being less than 120 days from now. And then in that workflow or in a secondary deal workflow, I haven't been able to figure out how I can add the correct line item and have their values be populated based on last year's amount. On the deal level, I can have the amount property be calculated correctly so that it shows what the amount should be. But if I put a line item on there, it defaults to that line item default value.
All right, so that was him running out of time. I'm going to pull up part two here, but yeah. Any responses so far? We got another deal quote, line item challenge. Maybe this is a regular thing in the ecosystem.
I built something trying to solve this a few weeks ago.
I can show what a cliffhanger. Did it work? I mean, can you show us?
Well, I'm not actually just, you know, dead air. That's what people want.
I can confirm. I don't think that is what people want. People want solutions, Casey. Come on.
Put my screen up there, Rob.
Oh, I don't have admin, Chris. If we have the screen ready, we can throw her screen into the mix.
Let's listen to the part two here. Because he starts sharing dollar amounts.
Yeah, too eager.
Hopefully it will help us out here.
Hello, it's Riley again. I'm not shocked that my long winded problem reached the voicemail limit. So I'll pick up where I left off. But y' all can handle this how you want. Sorry. So I can't figure out how to get the correct line item added and the amount added without overriding the like the default value, say the deal. The line item amount should be for one subscription of $14,000. But the default product for that subscription just has like $10,000 in it because most of the subscriptions are that amount but not all of them. So the whenever I add it into the initial deal, it just overrides to the $10,000 instead of the $14,000. It is doable because I've connected the deal to last year's deal. So there this year's renewal deal that gets created is associated to last year's renewal deal for that same company with a one to one association label of preceding renewal deal and subsequent renewal deal. So I can get at it. What I just can't figure out is a way to have that line item change to the information that I needed to change to. I will hope.
So. So here's the thing, Mike. I guess I would have a question of this year's renewal is the same price as last year's renewal. And then I'm just gonna say this is why I love cloning things. So I'm super curious of like, if that's even an option of like. And again, I'll say like, historically, I use something like Clone Attack to clone a deal based on just bringing that information and putting it wherever I wanted. But now, and I haven't checked this out, by the way, because it's a newer feature, but we can manually clone Records in HubSpot. What would be interesting, HubSpot, if you're listening, is an actual, like, clone workflow action. Because then all of a sudden you could just clone the thing that Riley's trying to do, like, with a simple action. Anyway, I'll shut up because, Casey, you had thoughts? Chris, I'm sure you had thoughts.
Yes. So just to recap, Riley's attempting to add a line item for a subscription of 14, 000. And Riley, since you're watching, let us know if you. The AI summary here is inaccurate in any way. The default product value for this subscription is $10,000 and it's causing conflicts. There's an existing association with last year's deal for context on this year's renewal. Trying to avoid looking in all the places to make this stuff make sense is what I'm hearing. So we'll take a look at Casey's solution now.
Yeah, I don't think it's all problem. I mean, I'll show you what I did, but. Yeah, just. I'll show you what I did. I agree the clone piece would be the ideal situation. The problem with the clone is what I mentioned the other day is that it only clones what's on your create form. And it's possible, especially when you're cloning a full complete deal, there's relevant information that's not relevant on the create form piece. So something to say, something to watch out for.
Because you can watch out for that create form to whatever you need it to have if you were going to go with the cloning version. Yeah, which by the way, cloning in an automated way isn't a thing yet. So this would be like manually cloning it as of right now.
Correct, Correct. So either way, I have this workflow. It creates a new deal. This one creates it for a year out in this specific record, and then I copy some properties over the workaround. That I was going to demonstrate is I have this property previous deal amount, which actually is. It must be a sync property. Now that I'm pulling it up. Original deal amount and I'm copying that. I'm copying the amount from the original deal to the new deal to enrich the deal record with the correct amount. However, where this does not meet Riley's needs. I just checked. It's not populating the line item. So we have a line item here for renewals. Get out of here. We just have a line item for renewal. There's. I don't know of a good way to clone your line items at this time, but because of that it was just showing the deals were zero because you also. You can't set a deal amount if you have the line items. But again, my line item, my deal that I just checked. Although the deal amount is correct, the line item amount is still incorrect.
Which by the way not anything to do with Riley's question. The fact that the deal amount and the line item amounts can become unsynced is forever a bane of my existence. The amount of times I've had to go in and hit the little pencil and put it back to 2500 five grand and whatever. Oh, my aching. Anyway, sorry, HubSpot, we love it.
I wonder, and this is not my area but like could a custom code action up the. Okay. Chris is shaking his head.
Oh yeah, I bet you give custom code action Chad and this question, we might have an interesting conversation. But Chris, you shook your head. I'm interested in what you're thinking.
Yeah, I mean in most of my experiences like to manage line items the way that most people are trying to. You almost have to get custom code involved. Like every time. There are things that I'm expecting and in the first half of Riley's first voicemail, the cash flow stuff is pending. The quoting is getting better. I do expect things like the syncability between line items and deal amounts and like to get better. But that's where like understanding what each object's role is in the process. Like if a deal at some point is supposed to be a projected value, right? And you have multiple line items that are possible. It's like quantity of 1, quantity of 10, quantity of 100. The, the. The value of the deal and the pipeline and the forecast should not be a total of all those three of those three lines. And that's where you, you have to be careful before we just say, all right, the deal amount needs to sync to the line line item total every time we See multiple quotes and some people would want the quote amount to sync to the deal. So this is why we need this. I mean this is why HubSpot bought a whole company like to solve this problem. They've been specific to that space and we need that level of expertise to, to solve this problem. And looks like Riley added some, some information here.
Yeah, my problem mostly. I'll speak for you Riley mostly boils down to I can't find any action in the workflow where I can indicate that it needs to change a specific line item amount on a deal record that exists to a specific value. I can get the line item on the deal. I just can't find a way to automatically put the number I need in the amount column on the line item on the create deal action I can add the line item problem is it defaults to the standard amount set in the product record.
Yeah. Riley ideas.HubSpot.com have you done that yet? Because I gotta imagine if it's. If it's. If you're. I. There's. There's other. Hang on, let me get prepped for this. There's other that are having probably the same problem. So like let's throw that into the ecosystem and let HubSpot product nerds and AI fix that real fast first. Because again I think about an a workflow action around line items or just general line item workflow actions like you there's a handful of like if you could get in there and do stuff with line items that you could decimate with or even like a cloning record action of some sort in workflows. But who knows? We'll see.
My. I had a couple questions. One of the the two discrepancies in the amount from 10,000 to 14 it seems like we have it kind of hand. But the other thing I noticed and this was a question quote was I use recurring revenue reporting in HubSpot. It's heavily dependent on the ARR Property populated by HubSpot. I don't really have a comment on that other than Shadab Leiden Brian at RP Built like solving for net revenue retention involves monthly MRR non recurring revenue and then rolling that up and it took six months to even have like a V1 of that. So if you're heavily dependent on something that is incorporated incredibly hard to like calculate. Right. I don't think it's factoring in churn or like any of that with ARR, but I would. Aside from the line items, aside from that, you know what is kind of a known Need I would start with making sure that's like updated and calculated, you know, correctly and make sure that it's not pulling something that you don't want in there. But it seems like it can't do it at all. It's not, it's not an incorrect value. It's. It just won't happen. He has to do it man, manually.
Glad we could validate. This is a hard problem they solve off the cuff is the cavalry is coming with the cash flow team. They're doing a lot of great work in Commerce Hub specifically to solve the MRR ARR problem. This is where the double edged sword of HubSpot is. Lots of teams working on stuff. So in order to do a lot of the, the other stuff we need to have line item level reporting. Of course that update happens and now we think we can do all the things and then it causes all these other issues because we haven't synced up everything that's going on. But that's why we have a commerce up now. It's not just, you know, baked into everything. We need specific focus on developing this to, to get that revenue experience right.
Yeah, I can't say a lot but I had a, a meeting with some folks from the team about CPQ and the future and I like where their brains are, I like where it's heading and I like some of the things that I saw. So it's. I think it's gonna get real interesting real quick. Inboundish or post inboundish in the life of what people are trying to do with those tools.
Yeah.
What I think we should do and start aggregating. This would be a good segment to update once a month so that we can check things off because a lot of what we've experienced from the community, from people calling in from Reddit, from wherever we've sourced questions is recurring theme. One of it for us is being able to see and visualize and have more context. So shout out Riley for being here listening to be able to provide that. Right. And the affirmation of like am I insane or is this just, you know, am I. Can I figure this out or is it not, you know, quite up to speed yet? But aggregating almost like a top five list of things that HubSpot needs to update like by people in the community, by partners, by solutions, partners, by you know, pros, whoever that is. Do we, do we have a working list like George, Chris, Casey. If there were five things as like a hierarchy of things that the HubSpot product team, those Hard working people need to. Need to spend time on. Do we tireless, right? Do we have that? I'm sure that we have different opinions but being able to. I listen to a lot of sports radio. I think we all know this. Maybe you don't, but I do a top five list of like most requested product feature or product or feature updates because it seems like a lot of them are are CPQ or like reporting related in that area.
I think for me there's a lot of quote and a quote in commerce hub things. The quote customization is one for me that has is a current pain point.
The.
It's just kind of messy and clunky. You'd think it would. You'd think it would look like a landing page editor or an email page editor.
Wait, what?
Nothing.
What am I missing?
Can't talk about it.
You said the quote editor.
No, can't talk about it.
There's a private beta available that people should check out. That's all I'm saying.
But I do think that is a big pain point for me and for a lot of. Of non techie kind of people who are just trying to use HubSpot to create quotes. Yeah, that's a major one I have on my. That is a major one I have on my radar to watch out for at Inbound.
But if anybody wants to help answer this question for Rob, we can just.
Well that's not what we were trying to show.
Check out. Check out the ideas for them on Community and you can go to top ideas and look at that. Cloning a deal 2017 close that bad boy. Yep. Just happened. I think that went live today like out of beta. Cloning records is a thing. So to that point you guys are making earlier, I think workflow action is probably not far behind now that it's out of beta so.
Well, I mean even looking at this will be a fun exercise. You said this one's done. What about customized deal cards and deal dash? This is from eight years ago. I you know I feel like if you can refilter them by most recent.
Maybe that would help even even like not seeing delivered because you can literally see the ones that have been delivered. Like is there is there a you know in progress or in planning or. That's what we want to see is like yeah, what happens if you go not currently plan. What are the ideas that have spot themselves are like. No, no.
There we go.
Huh.
I've seen this.
This is still old. Can you sort by recent on the third drop down right there trending Maybe that's.
That's trending. That's. So it's. There's no date.
Yeah. I mean it's not based on. That's where it started.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But when you look at the newest.
Yeah. It can be kind of.
I'll tell you one. One that is quickly showing up amongst multiple clients that I help is to not need to have a sales seat to see sequence analytics. Excuse me. Not every super admin is a sales professional. Not every super admin should need to have a sales seat. The C Analytics to make super admin decisions. Anyway, HubSpot. Love you, but that's just a weird coinky dink right there. Since the seat thing was launched.
Bring it up along those same lines. Leads are not available in like an index page the way that our other options objects are available.
Yeah.
You have to look at them in the sales workspace, which I still think there is a seat issue with. I have a client that I have permission to view leads, but I don't have like I have to find the contact and then find the lead through the associated contact every time.
Yeah, well. And yeah, there's a whole thing of like you actually have to own the contact to be be able to like see it as a lead anyway. But I agree with like a view or index page for leads is definitely a needed thing in the. Hopefully in the near future because we've done so well. And when I say we. I don't have any of HubSpot's money nor do I work for HubSpot, but we've done so well of like making this look like that and this work like that. And this is one area where it's not quite there yet. Yeah.
I think that relates to one of the conversations that we saw on LinkedIn this week about seats and service Hub specifically. You want to set that up, Rob?
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to share, see if I can figure this out. I don't have admin for what I guess it's. Since I switched over, this is. Is what I'm looking at. Do you have that on your screen, Chris, while you. While you do that? Yeah, while you do that. I'll say there's. There's a couple things. One is that the intent of this is in no way irreverent or accusatory. For me, the intent has always been to. To provide help and affirmations in the case of Riley, so that in a more communal sense. Right. So some of the language you may see in here, especially in the comment thread is, is not as like gung ho. Yay, HubSpot supportive, especially with the the top line. Another WTF moment. But being able to show up and to Lars credit, kind of address this. We've been connect. Reluctant to implement Help Desk. Yeah, that was something I tagged you guys in on. Chris, I know you have some thoughts. More specifically, if you want to give some context, be able to help Laura out a little bit.
Yeah. So I think what we're seeing is this relates to HubSpot having a bunch of product teams moving as fast as possible, getting to AI first, updating everywhere. And we've been sharing Help Desk updates like every day on the morning show. And what happened here is one of those updates is they've been playing around a lot with tickets and trying to make that a better experience for everybody. Almost everybody thinks you have to have Service Hub to be able to use tickets. Nope, that's right. And which makes sense because tickets are for service and Service Hub. But it's a standard object of the CRM that everybody gets even at free level. As the team tries to improve the Help Desk experience. It's been very intentional about the way that they do things and now they're kind of overcorrecting because a lot of the work that they're doing is not free. And that's where the service seats come in. But now we're seeing they're kind of detaching. Like the George's point admins had not been able to do their job without paid service or sales seats. In a lot of ways that surprised everybody. Right. And I think what we're seeing here is the process of them starting to decouple things from seats. But as they did that, that means there's another toggle in settings and permissions. Right. And because that was not toggled and there was no notice. But also the team didn't necessarily realize that this was an impact. You know, Laura here had had a whole team that even though in the fine print was like, oh, to still get to where we're going, just click this. This part. You know, most users, they're going to see that lock like first thing and then they go right to the admin. Right? Hey, I can't get the. I can't get to what I'm supposed to be getting to. You just wrecked my whole day basically.
Like, yeah, yeah. And what's crazy, it's funny, you, you, Chris, you mentioned a switch, like a setting switch this week alone. And by the way, I've been using HubSpot since 2012, I. I have been in almost every settings portion of HubSpot known to man or woman or whatever HubSpot user you are. Two times this week, I got caught with settings that were turned on that I didn't even realize were settings. And I'm like, wait, when did this happen and how did it get flipped on? And so like, I, like, I switched them off. I'm like, I don't need either of these for my portal. Now for client portals, they totally would make sense. But for my portal and like the small amount of humans. Dang it. Small amount of humans that are in my portal. No, turn it off. So, like, there, there quickly is becoming, dare I say, a monthly HubSpot settings checklist may need to be created. Like, have you checked these settings lately to. To make sure that they are on or off the way in which you need them to be?
George, Specifically, I mean, I have some seating. Pricing versus credit versus whatever. It seems like there's a lot of stuff going on there we don't have. I'm not gonna. No, I'm not getting there yet. It was more of a discussion question. And Chris, you can keep sharing or not share, but it's. Do you think that would be a good. You said it would make a lot of sense in some client portals, but not in yours. Like, not in. So do you think there's a use case for AI or breeze or whatever to be able to like, see that and understand which settings you normally use? Wouldn't like, that would hinder or help your progress based on your activity history and make that almost default as they update, like as their new settings or whatnot as they're installed and available? Why would that. Like, why can't the AI be used in a case to kind of intuit that and make the experience better without you having to go in and change it? Is that something that could be done?
So Chris is shaking his head. I'm shaking my head side to side because I'm torn. I don't know if settings is the place that I want AI to take charge. I, I would teach and I would be very deliberate in the settings that I would set. Now I can see maybe when you're setting up a portal that you would go through a portal process and it might do like a here's what we've done for you, now go change any of these that you feel aren't right scenario. But if all a sudden I Woke up tomorrow, HubSpot had launched AI settings, and all of a sudden all my stuff was changed. I'm a nice guy. But the ramifications of that support ticket would be like, what happened to George B. Thomas? Like, where's the happy, helpful, humble human? Because he would be gone for at least long enough for me to vent. Probably go sit in my backyard, drink a beverage, smoke a cigar and talk like to myself for a hot minute. Like, I just, I can feel where like people would get super uneasy with that.
Maybe I, I may have mispositioned what I thought would be the, the way to do it. Right. In the same way that there's a wake up customer platform and all of the stuff that you guys are currently involved in. Right. A lot of. And I've seen this from Chris and I don't think it's like not public knowledge, but there's like a day prep like that's one use for like here's your meetings, here's all this stuff, here's things you might want to know. Right. Almost like a news feed. I it. It would almost be the case where if anything happened or like on a weekly basis where like these things are now put in. Here's what we recommend based on your activity history. And it didn't automatically install or change anything in your system for you. But knowing you, knowing the operator, like with the context being portal dependent, like whichever one, it would make those recommendations to you because that is a, if they got it right, that would be a good use case of AI to update and provide recommendations based on your activities.
So Rob, what you're talking about by the way, and my brain goes, this would be a beautiful thing for the new home page where all sudden you log in and it tells you the three or four potential settings that you might want to actually look at. Yeah. And Chris is literally showing like a home page right now where like that I can see where like there's a section for like settings you may want to investigate based on what we've seen inside your portal or whatever.
Yeah. And we've seen that in the settings area there's the audit, the, the audit log. Right. Where you can see login history, security activity. I think that's one thing we should expect is a lot of this, A lot of the settings area is making its way into the rest of the portal where the people like do the work. Right. And I think you're, I think you're on the money, Rob, in terms of at some point AI will do this for us. I think the key is that they have to get to the point where George B. Thomas doesn't Even know it's happened.
Oh, God. That makes me even more sick to my stomach.
I know, but that's where we're at. Because, Casey, what have humans done historically when it comes to user permission setups?
Super admin. Super admin. Super admin.
Whoopsie.
Yeah.
Especially when the random stuff happens and you can't like, you know, time or the. The patience to figure it out. You're like, all right, I tried to. I tried to do permissions. Right. Just super adminning it.
Oh, God. And now I'm gonna really get sick.
On Rob, are you talking about settings, though, or are you talking about updates?
This is more philosophical. It's both. Right.
Okay.
If. If HubSpot is launching into this AI first, AI powered smart CRM thing, like in customer data, I think they should also put an equal amount of emphasis on operators, which would be the people that are manipulating and using the customer data to be able to execute outcomes for them on the business side. So before all of unstructured versus structured, what I.
What I.
What I would think and suggest is how. How can the people operating, the consultants, the pros, agent, whatever it is, make better use of themselves as a human in the loop? And part of that is one awareness of change update that may impact, may not. And you could have that ranked or rated. One of the great use. One of the things I use Claude and GPT for is like, rank these ideas, right? And so there could almost be like a, you know, some percentage. This will 100% affect you based on your usage history of these portals. Like, that's more what I'm talking about. It's a combination of both.
Are you aware.
I'm gonna ask a favor. Casey, hold on to that box.
I feel like I'm in trouble.
I'm gonna. I'm gonna have.
You are. You are in trouble.
I'm gonna have to ask a favor of you. Can you never, ever, ever on this show or any show that we're ever part of, say, AI first and AI powered when I'm in the room?
Yes.
Oh, my God. Oh, okay, I'm done. Go ahead, Casey. Go ahead.
Rob.
Are you aware of the weekly product updates email?
Yes.
Because this is what it's supposed to be doing. This is personalized for at least the portal. I don't think. I don't believe at this point it's personalized to the human. I could be wrong, though. No one's consulting me on this. But this comes out every Monday.
You.
You do have to enroll in it. You can do that. In your. This is personal to your to you as a person as a HubSpot user. You go to your settings, you go to your notifications and then you type. You don't scroll to there you go search before scroll to this product updates and check email and then you'll get that on a weekly basis. I am a person who's in multiple portals so I get multiple different versions of this email every Monday. It's different for each portal that I'm in. It typically has 5ish betas and then it also has some upcoming scheduled for release and more information.
It gets interesting if all of a sudden there was this but it was for settings like new this weekly settings because by the way when you get a new feature you get new settings like so imagine if there was like a new settings or settings updates or something like that that you could actually. And not that it's that big. Maybe it's not weekly, maybe it's monthly, I don't know But I'm just saying like somehow we gotta know that things are in there that got switched on or we need to switch off or. And it's just so much much. It's like there's so much under the hood. It's like 27 engines under the hood running this bad boy.
I have a lot of comments. Number one is thank you for reminding me I need to re enroll in the new portal because I you know it's two weeks at super so I need to to go do that Also you guys help out a lot with with the Pro like the shows that less of a point than that is like I could get it as a direct mail too but I don't. I rarely pay attention to that and so like there's this user preference thing where I'd actually like it to be just wherever I do the most work and wherever I'm the most active where it makes the most sense. Toggling and switching between tabs is like I mean Casey to your. Your inbox 0 I have a Gmail account personally that has 80000 unread emails.
Oh my God.
That's not the way to get to like put important necessary business critical in some cases information in a way that I'm going to ingest it and be able to act on it it quickly and I know that's like I am taking some of the all of the responsibilities for that but it would be.
You should just inbox zero rob it.
Would be a nice touch. Dharmesh had a post this week where he was talking about lovable and, like, on their ux, on their site. It's like the tiny little reminder of, like, here's how you logged in last time. Right. That kind of thing is like, if they could put it into, you know, into wherever is most native. So that might be, to your point, like, the homepage or dashboard of, like, here's the. Here's things that have changed. Here's whether you should care about them or not. Like, to me, that'd be a nice thing. And. And then finally, George, I didn't say it. That's. Those aren't my words. I'm just. Don't shoot the messenger. I'm just, you know, that's what I've been picking up from the tea leaves and from other places.
I'm past that. I'm past that. I. I need a new sound. I need a. It's the big one, Edith. I need to find that sound from Sanford and Son. How many emails did you say you have in your inbox?
It's right. I'm. I'm planning a post for, like, thanks for you guys. Get me to 80,000. Not followers, but emails. It's 79 and some change. Yeah. Wow.
That's all I got to say about that.
I was gonna do that at 10,000. Not nearly as cool.
At some point you just give up, right? I mean, like, yeah, I think that's.
At the heart of Laura's request, which I think it's a. It's a fair request, but is it a realistic expectation? As we know HubSpot, we know what they're trying to do, and they're trying to move as fast as possible. They're gonna break things on the way there. It. It sucks when it happens to you, but show me another company that responds on LinkedIn and it's fixed, like, within. Within minutes sometimes. Right?
Yeah.
So it's the path they've chosen. So that's where it's like, adjust. Adjust the expectations a little bit. But also understand this is why they're going so hard on AI. They want AI coaching and assistance to be everywhere in the portal. Because at the end of the day, how long did it take Laura to write the LinkedIn post to notify HubSpot that this thing is wrong? Like, all of that takes time. And what she needs is users who run into that screen, like, can immediately solve it themselves.
Right, Right. So maybe, maybe this metaphor will land better with George and we can weigh in on it. Maybe not. You know, George, hopefully I'm one for two on this. I. I'VE long thought and there's plenty of these analogies out there, right? But, you know, whenever we talk about revenue vitals and diagnose all of that, like the health of the business, this to me, with all of the speed and with all of the iterate, like with all of the changes, I understand in the long term they're good. In the short term, some of them are functional and whatnot. But I've always viewed this from a more of like a healthcare metaphor dynamic. And to me, those types of things are preventative care. Right? The. A lot of the emotionality behind her message was like, now we have to go do rework. And like, this is slowing revenue down, this is slowing everything down. This is causing more of a massive problem that requires surgery than it is being a preventative update. And so as they're moving very quickly, a lot of what they could put in place, like the dashboard, like, a lot of things that have been requested are like preventative CRM measures so that you don't injure a client, a customer, your own business, whatever, like that type of thing. And I'd be interested to know if there's anything that. There's tons of stuff I know that they've done to equate that part. This show is like helping people out. So anything else that they could do that would be less of a fix, less of an update and more of a preventative measure to prevent, like to prevent massive critical errors for people that are using HubSpot, hopefully that was a better way to view it.
So first of all, I love this, this metaphor because especially in this scenario, like, they literally clogged the arteries which gave the organization a heart attack. So they went to Dr. LinkedIn to see what WTF. Like, you know, so like the, the metaphor analogy, whatever, works great. Here's where my brain goes with that statement is it's gotten really difficult. Chris kind of was talking about it, like, listen. Well, actually, first thing, HubSpot, you are the most listening organization that I have ever met on the planet. And I appreciate the amount that you listen to customers and the things that you do. Now with that said, there are so many teams pulling so many levers, building so many things that it's amazing that this only happens every once a while in. In a while versus happening almost every day where somebody writes a line of code that breaks a piece or puts a screen that shouldn't be in a place. The fact that it's as seamless as it is normally without outages and without like just random crazy Ish, like kudos, to be honest.
Absolutely.
Yeah. And what we're seeing is like there's, I think there's preventative but there's also changing, just changing the way things are done to a more efficient process. Right. Where my first, where my mind went first is like, okay, if AI coaching is there an assistant is there, there is time for them to, for the AI assistant to see the error page before the user does and then solve. But in reality the users are going to start telling breeze, handle this ticket in this way for me please. And then the user is never even going to have to go to the ticket record. Right. That's why I think from an admin perspective, which I expect to see it inbound because even though we don't appreciate it, we should understand, expect like AI first. They've said that enough. That means a certain thing. They've, they have not, you know, made any bones about what their plans are. That's what I mean. Like it's very hard and that's why we're here doing shows like this. When you're in the day to day, you're used to doing process. It's very hard to see outside of your world and understand HubSpot is being very loud about what their intentions are. And I appreciate it because if we want HubSpot to be around next year and win against platforms like Klaviyo and all the other ones that are just coming up because you can build things very fast and very user friendly ways the way that people have been asking for, for years if you're an administrator. Step one, make sure all the data context from the organization is plugged into HubSpot. Step two, teach your team how to work with the AI assistants in HubSpot. Enable them, empower them, then they don't have to come to you. You become the architect and the coach instead of the fixer.
Yeah. Preventative slash proactive. And again there's tons of stuff already like permissions for God's. Like you talked about it earlier, there's a lot of stuff like that. So the question is like what do you put more value on the speed or the efficacy of what's, what's being done? Is it prevent? Because solving for the customer is always interesting to me as somebody that doesn't have an MBA. It's like HubSpot has a lot of different customer types, especially in the ecosystem, App partners, solutions, solutions partners, their client, like all of that kind of stuff. So there's a, there's, there's definitely a speed, there's definitely this AI push. But if the people that are executing a lot of this on behalf of others, you know, like a physician or somebody in that metaphor, are unaware of updates or unable to understand the context for what they should do based on those updates, that I don't think the outcome, I don't know what the outcome would be, but it's not favorable. What I was trying to. Trying to get up. Casey, your thoughts close out. It is 3:02 we we've had a great show that had a question that once again we were very close to, but it's a known thing. So any final thoughts from you on this July 18th?
I had a talk with a friend recently about content fatigue, update fatigue and people feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelmed with the amount of content that people, myself included, are producing and the amount of updates that HubSpot is producing. And all of this is powered by AI. And we were discussing like, what does that mean? Because this is only sustainable for. This is like we're in the.com boom. You know, like at some point people have to bubble. People have to stop buying domains. Like, you know, like at some point we reach a. We have to even out somewhere. And for at that time during the dot com bubble, whatever, Google was the answer because there were so many websites being put up online that people didn't know how to find the answers. And now there's so much content being produced, there's so many updates being being produced. It feels very overwhelming for people to stay up to date with that stuff. And what is the answer? And one answer could be something like you're describing, like HubSpot putting on their homepage. Here's what you should care about. HubSpot agents doing some of the legwork for you so that you can, you can kind of focus on other areas where you are.
I have a response to that value. Another metaphor, of course. But what what I assume like they're also trying to grow new TAM and steal people from Salesforce and prevent the Klaviyos of the world for doing whatever, right? So here do you want a destiny or a DND metaphor, Chris? I'll let you pick.
DND for sure.
Dnd. All right, so let's say you're a dm, right? And you have a game or like you have something that's been going Dungeon.
Master for the Dungeon Master.
Dungeon Master, by the way, stuck on whatever the hell TAM is. He might explain that later too.
Total addressable market.
Jones here today.
MB G to G. But look, that what I'm trying to say Is like it's. If you, if you're a Dungeon Master and you have a campaign that's been going on nine months, right? And then it, it's gone to whatever level of depth and extreme that is. And then you, let's say you have somebody that wants to join. What, what is their responsibility to catch up on all the stuff that has already happened in the context. Does it matter? So what I'm trying to say is like with all of, to Casey's point, with all of the updates, all of that, that's, it's not only is it necessary, it's critical to keep operators and to keep people, customers apprised of what like the direction they're going and what they can do, but there almost is like this distance created from having a foundational like CRM Architect architecture understanding from the basics of HubSpot. And so if all of the updates are just like hey, in the Settings tab on like very, very nuanced and specific, no one is going to know where to start or learn or like how to translate that into. George B. You're a perfect example of this. You said you've been using HubSpot what, 12 years. So you have the 12 years worth of context of updates and how it's progressed, how things used to be and where they are now. You can be somebody like you being optimistic about that is great. It's great for HubSpot, it's great for the ecosystem and all of your clients, but somebody that is just trying to learn this as an admin or operator for the first time. And most of what they're seeing, to Casey's point, is very nuanced and specific and is more change management. Doesn't that create a massive barrier to entry like. Or do they have to go and outsource learning to somewhere that makes it easier to understand and to give the kind of the foundational elements of how to think through this.
So listen Rob, you literally just described my business people how to use HubSpot. I take the complex and I simplify it. Yeah. For 60, 90, 120 days, however long. I will meet with you on a weekly basis and I will give you the. Well, actually it was 2012, this is 2020, 25. So it's more than 12 years. Now I will give you the years of foundational baseline experience injected into your veins to the. To try to get you caught up to where. Because right here, here's the thing. I can't imagine if I tried to enter the ecosystem right now.
That is a. Is that Is that a problem or not? Like plug sidekick strategies, you know, for sure, but like, just, just my awareness of that. It's great for you to have a business, but the fact that there is a need for someone like you to be able to do that, is that a problem or, or no? I mean, not for you.
I mean, it's not a problem for me, but it's a problem for the, It's a problem for the humans trying to grow their business and use HubSpot in a streamlined way. And, and, but here's the thing. It's a necessary problem because we're trying to reach a. Well, I don't even want to call it a destination. The platform will continue to get better and better and better and better and better. Right. That's the thing that I like. We're headed in a direction of better, which means change, which by the way, if I just want to give you a real deal, Holy field, there's something I've lived my life by for the last probably 20 years, and that is 1% better every day. Guess what that equals? Freaking change as a human. So if HubSpot gets 1% better each and every day, guess what that means? Change for a platform, which means there's going to need to be change for the people, which means there's going to be. Need to be changed for the process, which are the three things that if you're not thinking about in your business, people, process and platform, then what matter with you? Okay, I'm done.
Yeah, I mean that's like.
Yeah.
First of all, shout out. The level of conviction I think is important and the level of content. I haven't been doing this for 13 years and so I would put myself in the category of people that would require it almost from like an emotional standpoint. It's like, what's the point? Right? And so somebody, something like a sidekick or profoundly that helps people get up to speed. You need to shorten that gap. And so that, that is what I was trying to say is like is that overall good or bad? Overall, the direction of better is always a positive and there will be 1% or, or more it seems like with the product updates every day.
Day.
But Casey, to what you were saying, like, there needs to be a, A, an element of trust, authority and centralization that I don't think necessarily can come from HubSpot themselves with the change. And, and honestly, that was kind of the, the impetus for the start of this show is to put everything that you would need to know that has happened this week into one spot. So, so just very transparently, HubSpot helpline was kind of intended to evolve into that type of, you know, that type of format where there's a beginner and intermediate advanced. Chris is bursting at the seams. I'm gonna shut up. I'm gonna shut up. Go ahead, Chris.
Yes. And it is in the face of so many people saying, do we need more content? We can't handle the content we got yet. Nobody knows about Content Hub. Nobody knows about Service Hub, nobody knows about Ops Hub, nobody knows about Commerce Hub. The knowledge gap is real and we feel it every day. And that's because nobody made content about it.
Well, listen, to back you up, I was talking to a seasoned pro earlier today who was excited about starting to get involved with CMS Hub because they didn't realize the magic that was possible. Yeah, because nobody ever has been educating on CMS specifically, like down and dirty, like to the nitty gritty of it. And so this is where we land.
Yep. And so if we don't create the content then it's just going to be a perpetuating problem while HubSpot blasts forward. So I would argue that problem is not the right word. It's not a good or bad thing. It is a challenge related to finally getting a platform that solves for quote to cash properly. After 25 years of SAS not solving it right, the data integration problems, the event management never working quite right. And now we're finally starting to get that functionality in HubSpot. What they're building in Ops Hub to bring the data together like it's unreal. We've never had platforms that can do the things that HubSpot is doing combined with the user experience that is still delightful, combined with the cost, like the amount of things you can do in HubSpot. People like businesses go through million dollar implementations of other softwares to get this stuff done and they need teams of IT system administrators to support it. HubSpot is giving us something better than all that. That's why it's the only thing I've seen called the customer platform. I believe in that a ton. And it creates the challenge of trying to keep up. And we are here creating the content so that anybody that makes a living off of HubSpot, I would argue it is your responsibility to keep up with HubSpot. If you say you are a HubSpot expert.
Mike, I'll say something that you can clip. This is a. I don't even think it's a prediction at this point and I'm excited. I'm not. This is not even an announcement but I'll use one last metaphor and then we can, we can get out of here. In the same. I think it was 1975 where ESPN then they just had the SBS was like what you're seeing today is a revelation. You might have think you stepped into the future right. There was all this stuff but teams across the world were that had owners and they had commissioners and they had all this. And somebody was like there needs to be a trusted centralized place to report on updates because people care a lot. And in the same way that to me it's not a, it's not a question of good or bad like Chris said or content. It's. There's so much freaking content. I don't know what's the best. I don't know how to rank. I don't know who to trust. So in that way I don't think it can be HubSpot. But in the same way ESPN is the worldwide leader in sports. There needs to be somebody that aggregates experts and different like it, it has to be some sort of media network which media means showing and responsive quickly. Yeah, I mean like this is exactly what is on your hat right now. That whole concept of media being like audio, visual, whatever, graphics. That's not it. Media means instant media means on scene media means like day of media is relevant and trending and like what people should care about. So in this like that is that will happen. Chris, I'm looking at you doing this but like in some way it's, in some way it needs to evolve to capture all of those different things. Right? So it, right now it's not going to be an hour long show or a, or neither will it be a 24 hour news coverage network. But the worldwide leader in CRM or the worldwide leader in Orange Tech, whatever that is that it's, it's a big enough ecosystem, it's a big enough you know, customer platform to where I think that's, that's the next somebody is gonna, is gonna be able to solve that.
Somebody certainly will.
Hit us with that jingle.
Put the show notes that Rob winked like eight times but he's fine. This was not a struggle. Great, great show guys. I will, I'll end this with a salute. Have a great weekend. Happy Friday Friday. George, Casey, Chris, pleasure as always.
Thanks Rob.
Thanks for having me.
Next Friday.
Hello, you've reached the HubSpot helpline. Help behind Helpline helpline.
It's Rob, it's George. It's Casey and Kyle Come with a problem and leave with a smile. Every Friday at 3, come and join us as we help you with HubSpot. Open up your LinkedIn. Just make sure you call in and leave a voicemail about HubSpot. Make your Friday divine with the HubSpot helpline.
