Time to call in with your hubSpot problems!
This is a YouTube video titled "Time to call in with your HubSpot problems!" recorded in August 2025. It features a multi-speaker conversational discussion including George B. Thomas, Kyle Jepson, Chris, Casey, and Claude. The conversation centers around HubSpot product updates, AI integration, admin challenges, and preparations for the upcoming Inbound conference. The participants share insights on new features, admin priorities, and the evolving role of AI in HubSpot's platform, blending technical details with personal reflections and humor.
Hello, you've reached the HubSpot Helpline Helpline.
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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, world, it is the HubSpot Helpline. And if you'll notice, the Imperial March music for Chris. Carolyn has been turned off because we have none other than Kyle Jepson back with us today after a fraternity leave that seemed like it lasted for 30 years. We miss you, Kyle.
Baby was born. He's healthy. He's. He's growing a lot.
Nice.
Just kidding. That's a different kid.
I saw a movie like that, maybe the island or something, but that. Yeah, that was wild. No, that the baby. We saw the baby earlier. Baby is very cute. Baby was very sleepy. Baby looks healthy and good. Kyle, you look great, by the way.
Thank you. Here, he's parachuting in again. There we go.
There we go. Nice.
Hello.
Those are some big eyes, too.
He's ready.
I love. I love the name. I love the name Kyle because it's a little unknown fact with the B for George. Oh, no, really, it is George Benjamin Thomas.
So amazing.
There we go.
That's usually the opening I use is Casey, Greyhound of the helpline. Hawkins, Chris, Mr. Profoundly Pro 4000. Carolyn and George. The B stands for Bad Mama Jama. Or, you know, we'd cycle it out, but apparently it stands for Benjamin. That bit is now destroyed. Kyle, you've been back a week. I'd like to ask, is the. Is the flood of all the stuff that you have to catch up with or prepare for inbound? How do you deal with that?
It is. It is wild. So this is the second time I've done this to myself. When Grace was born, who is now 2, I went on leave and I came back two weeks before inbound and had two weeks to prep. That was 2023. And in 2023, it was. It was a. It was a pinch. It was. It was a rush. But two weeks felt about right, which is why I did again this time. This time I came back on Monday and like the. The full structure of my inbound decks, I just threw out the window and I started over. My portal is incredibly Beta bludgeoned right now. There is so much going on. Every day I learn about A new thing that is in the works. So there is a. There's a lot. What a time to be alive.
Yeah.
What a time.
Well, it's crazy because I would have thought if you could have, you could. I'm not. Well, yes, I am actually a betting man. I, I do like a casino every now and then, but not why we're here. Like, listen, I would have not bet that, you know, two weeks before inbound, that this week we would have had customer platform shows that were like 8 updates, 11 updates, 14 updates. I'm like, oh my God, can we slow it down?
Right. And that's, that's, that's this, that's the stuff we're scooting out of the door before the code freeze goes in. In effect for, for inbound. Right. Like, we're not even seeing the big stuff yet. So, George, I think it was at your show, you ran it inbound. Remember a few of us sat on that cool stage they had last year. Yep.
The after hours show.
Yeah. And we were, we said. Right. I think Max Cohen was saying, you know, at, at inbound 2023, it was pretty clear that we were. HubSpot was just getting started in AI and inbound 2024 was going to be more AI. Now we're sitting in inbound 2024. Anybody's guess what inbound 2025 will be? And I don't know what people's guesses have been, but there's just a lot happening.
Oh, without a doubt. It's, it's going to be a very. For so many reasons. It's going to be interesting platform wise. It's going to be interesting because of the place wise.
Yeah.
There's going to be a metric button. A little birdie told me that there's a whole bunch of different kind of people who signed up to even be there because on the west coast. So you got to think different place, different people. And, and by the way, from last year, totally different platform. This year's HubSpot is not last year's house. Throwing that out there.
Well, not even this year. Oh, here he is. George production.
Yeah.
And Chris is here with. We already messed up.
I mean, yeah, since Kyle, Since Kyle mentioned that specific thing last year, I need to. And I still need to find this where I said it a couple times on Lives in response to Max's comment of we don't know what's going to happen next year. Something I said several times is that HubSpot will be the place where you log in and everything is Just going to be contextually placed for you by AI and user experience is going to be driven by AI. And I don't know if we're gonna get all the way there, but I know we're gonna get some of the way there.
So I mean, we're pretty stinking close. We're pretty stinking close.
It seems to get closer part of the transition there. Whenever Chris barged in and said how right he was. Shout out to Chris for doing that. But it was. You said last year's platform. Last year's HubSpot's, not this year's. Kyle, how long have you been out? Because I would doubt that earlier. This year's HubSpot and platform isn't the same even since you left. Right. And so the. I don't know if you've. That's a number on it with updates, but how many have there been in, you know, three, four months since you've been out? Because you.
Yesterday. Yesterday was Thursday. Benjamin hit eight weeks of life. He came, sort of surprised us on a Thursday. That's why I missed the call in show that particular Friday.
Totally fair reason. We got over it. We got it.
Yeah. So it's been eight weeks, it's been not quite two full months. And I have an email folder. So it, you know when you log in to HubSpot and you go to the product updates page and you can see all the product updates internally, we have a. An email group where those just get sent and I have a folder for it. And in eight weeks there were 150 emails that I missed.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean some of those are duplicates. Right. It's now private beta, it's now public beta, it's now live. But sure not crazy to think more than 100 updates came out in two months.
Can I get specific for a second, please? Before you left, Kyle, was there a video marketing platform inside your portal?
Not. Not really, no. That was. That was one of the last things I learned about before I left and I reached out to that team and I was like, I just heard you're working on this. I can't tell you how much I would love it if I, as a person who publish daily social videos, could just do that all inside of HubSpot. If I could record and edit and publish inside HubSpot, like, let me be your alpha tester. Let me be your guinea pig. I am so tired of downloading and uploading and importing and all this stuff.
Yes.
And they're like, great, yeah, we can add you some betas. I was like, oh, by the way, I'm about to leave for two months.
Well, guess what, Kyle? They've been busy while you were away and they have. I mean, it has been pedal to the metal and it's. It's almost to the point where it's like descript inside of HubSpot. It's crazy.
Yeah, I, I look forward to the day. My understanding. I, I have not actually this week gotten a chance to play around with it, so I do not know the current state, but I. There isn't any recording capabilities still. Right. It's. It's. It's editing, transcribing, publishing, not recording.
I. That'll be dope. That would be super dope.
But if I could just someday hit record on my webcam inside HubSpot. Ah, wow. How many. How many Fs would we put out of business? I don't even know.
Well, I mean, and we've talked about that so many times while you've been gone, Kyle. Of like, I. I've. I've had the conversation of like, well, it's almost time for me just to get rid of Aoma because of what HubSpot has been doing with calling and transcripts and all of that. You know, I've almost even pulled the trigger. Is it time for me to get rid of Zoom because of all the Google updates as far as like Google meetings and like auto recording and now, now this has nothing to do with HubSpot, but now that Google Meet has annotation and you can actually like draw on your screen now. So like the whole tech stack, the world of Tech Stack is like, I swear, HubSpot is doing its best to be like, how does it just become one? But then also the app ecosystem on that one as well.
Yeah, we should have turned this into a new segment presented by profoundly called Catching Kyle Up. Yeah, a ton of stuff. And so we've been discussing a lot of it and with that come more problems, questions, needs, communal asks. And so if Chris, if you want to get us into one of those and put something up for us to read or direct me. I thought that was Chris knocking on the door from back in the green room, but maybe it was something else. We can start doing that because, yeah, to everybody's point, there's been a ton of stuff that's happened we can almost do like in the last eight weeks, right? Casey, since you live in beta world, what's the. What's something Kyle should know about pretend he knows nothing and he hasn't seen anything. HubSpot in eight weeks. Something that's happened recently that you feel like Kyle should know about.
I know I already did this with Kyle on Tuesday.
That's true. No. And this has been the theme of the week. Monday, Monday morning briefing. I was just like, what did I miss? Tuesday admin hug. I was like, what did I miss? And here still I'm like, what did I miss? Because I have not heard everything yet.
I am still really excited about the CRM View all in the sidebar, which is what I demoed on the admin hug for Kyle.
It's like, for everyone who wasn't there. This is View all properties. If you're looking at like a contact record or company record, you have a little sidebar on the left where you see a curated list of properties. And if you want to see all of them, you've always had to click away into this full screen experience. Now you get like this slide out drawer on the right side of the screen. So go ahead, Casey.
Yes, thank you. And I feel like that one's funny because it's just. It's such like an admin thing to, like, console.
Yeah. Well, this is, this is. This is part of what is so tricky for me as I'm prepping for Inbound inside the walls of HubSpot. It's all about, like, oh, what's going to be talked about from the stage. What are the big things we're announcing. Right. But for my audience of admins, view all properties in a sidebar is huge. Right? Conditionality for tabs, not having to have enterprise, to have 10 tabs. Right. Like, these are things admins care about and they are never, ever going to be mentioned on the inbound stage.
No.
And so I have to do this balance of like, the. The nitty gritty little things that are coming out the. The. What did you say, George? Like 10 or 14 at a time versus like everybody's gonna hear the keynote addresses and be like, whoa, whoa. Like they always are every year. And so my. My session also has to be like, here's the big stuff, but don't overlook this other stuff. Yeah, it's tricky.
So this is the new beta you get to. It breaks out into the sidebar instead of it taking you to another screen. I also wouldn't be myself if I didn't also mention deal scoring.
Yes.
Speaking of being yourself, Casey, were you able to see today's show or pay attention to today's show? I know you weren't there, but I didn't.
It was a Weird.
It was a weird morning for me.
You've got to check out because I think this is huge for admins as well. Since we're on like a. Hey, what could Kyle talk about at Inbound is now with lead scoring you've got grouping changes.
Oh, I didn't know this.
The grouping amount and stuff and all of that.
Yeah, I just saw that recently. I haven't had a chance to play around with it.
Yes, I. The team actually showed me this before. So previously if you're score limit was 100, if you had two groups, 50.
50, 60, 40, 30, 70.
Yes, exactly. But now it can be 100. 100. So you. If you want to have one group. The use case. I talked to the lead scoring product manager a couple weeks ago and she demoed this for me and she explain the biggest use case for this being if you want to have one action, let's say your demo request, your pricing request form that monopolizes the score gives 100%, 100 points. Now you can do that.
That's interesting. That's pretty cool. Because if you think of like there are all these little things that we know over time contribute to a higher score, but we know if you do this thing, we need to drop everything and talk to you right now. You can now represent that.
So it's literally what we're talking about is it's the hand raiser group, basically.
Yeah.
Group for hand raisers.
They do this. Boom.
Make it all happen. Yeah.
You. You do this little thing and this little thing and that little thing and that little thing and that little thing. Or you raise your hand and you get a phone call from us. That's how it works. That's.
You mentioned that Chris mentioned this in the, in the chat though. And I think we kind of just talked about it for a minute. But there's any other examples that'd be helpful. It's. It's balancing almost hype versus value. Right. You. You mentioned it. The little things that you have to also include in your sessions versus what the keynotes are about, which seems more. We're announcing this. It'll be ready. And whenever it seems like that. That is more hype and more promotional and more awareness than anything. That's like an actual game changing in the details kind of thing. Like, like you were just talking about any. Anything else like that.
Yeah. Active list in campaigns. The way. My God. The way that you should be thinking about your campaigns now because of not just static, but active lists. That's. That's a huge piece for Admins just well, campaigns in general over the like the last three to six months of like what it used to historically be versus now it can be like a sales marketing and service.
Like yeah. This year we've got tool all kinds of sales activities in there and yeah. Ex external websites and now external social posts also.
They're yeah.
Much more flexible. But I think you're right that active lists, that's not just like another new asset available in campaigns. Right. Like this is a legitimately different way to think about what we can accomplish with this tool.
Yeah.
Well, even included in this could be, I would say not net new updates or features, but things that people may have overlooked, forgotten or kind of got blended in. Right. Even talking about the video platform beta that you said lost on up for it and then ghosted and then had a baby for, you know, for eight weeks is something that people that aren't as near to this. Right. George mentioned a new audience, new people. Right. Think about people in Salesforce's backyard or in. In that area of the country coming over for the first time and all of this is brand new to them. Right. That's one of the things where. Where a lot of this that's we've already celebrated kind of, you know, tested and moved on from I think would be a helpful reminder almost from the course of the, you know, the entire 2025. Thus.
Yeah. No, and that's. I mean if we really do just want to turn this into like help Kyle write his inbox presentations that he'll be giving in less than two weeks. The last few years, whether I've had one long talk or a series of talks, the. The format of my things, every HubSpot admin needs to know sessions has always been we're going to talk about implementing, going to talk about optimizing, then we're going to talk about troubleshooting. This year the inbound team asked me to take a different approach and have like a beginner's class and an advanced class. So I have one session called HubSpot Essentials and I have another session called Advanced Topics and that's really hard to define because everything in HubSpot is designed to be easy, fast and unified. Right. This is what we say all the time. And so like essential and advanced is hard. Right. And in the context of inbound, where everyone will be buzzing about all the new stuff, to me today, what feels advanced is the stuff you've never heard of. Right. There are plenty of admins who will come to my advanced session who know HubSpot in and out, but are like lost little lambs when it comes to these new features we're launching. And so helping them through that would be valuable, except there'll be other sessions doing that exact same thing. Right. And there are, you know, if we want to talk about HubSpot Essentials, I can't get distracted by, like, these shiny new things. I've. I've still got to, like, lay this foundational groundwork of, like, this is what it means to be in HubSpot. Right. I got a. I got a LinkedIn message from a guy just today who's like, I followed you for a while because my marketing team uses HubSpot. But now we're leaving Dynamics to. To use HubSpot as our CRM. I am the sales operations guy. I am the admin. Where should I start? And I was like, I don't know. So tell me more about what you're doing. But, yeah, like, what are those essential pieces? Every year, there's more and more to HubSpot, and I still only have 45 minutes to talk. Right.
So here's what's funny is there's all these things that we could be talking about that we have been talking about today. And I tell you that 90% of the room will still be using Personas.
Wrong.
I actually was gonna say I feel like Personas are an advanced tactic.
I'm like, come on. Like, you gotta. I. I did a video, I put it on YouTube. I show you how to use it actually in the right way that makes sense for marketing and sales. 90% of the room will still be using Personas. Wrong. Here's the other thing, Kyle. If this doesn't make it into your deck somewhere, the fact that you can do custom properties in email now, and the fact that you can make these custom properties required in email when they're creating email for, like, organizations that have any type of, like, franchisee department, and now all of a sudden, you want them to, like, add certain information in so that you can report better based on these conglomerates of folks that could be using the email tool inside of HubSpot.
Like, yeah, no, that's actually a really interesting point. I think just before I went out, we got custom properties for workflows just to define what is this workflow for? What team are we solving for, who is owning this or whatever. That's a new way of thinking about assets inside HubSpot, and I think that is really important to highlight.
Go ahead, Casey.
Sorry. The advanced tactics like that come to my mind are Custom. Proper. Custom calculated fields. So that's the word I'm looking for.
Yeah.
Roll ups and roll ups. That. Yeah, that one too. Custom coded workflow actions. I personally, as someone that's RSVP'd for your event, would like for you to help me with.
Let me dig into that a little bit. Because when it comes to things like custom coded workflow actions, for me as a person who is not a coder, that feels incredibly advanced. Right. There's this whole skill set that I don't have that I need in order to do stuff inside HubSpot, but I just like went to heaven or something. Okay, there we go. But don't use that. Yeah. I can't teach you the basics of Python or, or like, you know, any JS node or something from the stage. Right.
Am I foolish to believe that AI can help me do this, though? I just haven't figured. I just, like, there's something missing and I don't know what it is.
Like, I've literally had it help me. Like, somebody came, they had somebody write some custom code, it wasn't working that they wanted. I copied that, I pasted it in chatgpt. I said, hey, we actually want this to also send an image along the way. It rewrote the code, I pasted it in, the client, tried it and it fixed it. So, yes, I can help you do this, but Kyle will be best friends forever if you'll just ask one question. In any session, in any of your sessions, I just want you to get up and be like, by a show of hands, how many of you in the room know what an action set is?
Oh, action sets. Oh my goodness. I was so excited when those came out. And see, there have been so many new things in the last year, year and a half, whatever it's been. Totally forgot about those. Right. And that is. That is such a critical component for admins to know about.
Yep.
Also, Kyle, this is more of a loss, like a larger question. How do you prioritize?
You just do these things for me.
Hey, I will just do the Kyle talks to Casey.
I'll go up on stage. You don't have to beg. So how do you prioritize in these talks? Like the different hubs and the tools available in those hubs. Like, we all know Most people, most HubSpot customers have marketing hub, but obviously there's a lot of service tools now, the content hub tools and things like that.
Yeah, yeah, no, and that's. This is a question I'm asking myself. And historically, because there are two things that are true. One is if I spend my whole time on stage talking about Content Hub or Operations Hub, I'm going to alienate the vast majority of the audience. They're going to be like, why? Right? Like I could, I could teach myself how to use Operations Hub, enterprise to connect HubSpot to Snowflake and like help three people in the room, right? So that's clearly wrong. But if I just spent all my time talking about Marketing Hub and or Sales Hub, then like the people who use those tools and the advanced users who could benefit from using those tools, the people who actually like understand these stuff, then now they're like, okay Kyle, tell me something I don't know, right? And so it is a balance. I do disproportionately weight Marketing Hub, Sales Hub. And now I, I'm thinking one of the big questions is how much do I talk about Service Hub. But I, I, I think those three are always going to be pretty core because it's really hard for me to imagine someone not having Marketing Hub, not having Sales Hub, not having Service Hub, but coming in and buying Operations up.
Right?
Like what would that, or like Content Hub even, right? Like that's not, oh, don't get close.
To Chris is going to come in.
And yeah, here we, here we go.
Here we go.
Down.
All right.
Clearly you can't talk about all six hubs in a way that can, can serve effectively in 45 minutes.
Right.
Especially like here we are like digging into tools and features and functionality. How do you fit in a brand new intelligence layer, right. Exists like I want to hear, like how could, how does Copilot not make an appearance at each level right. Of the talk.
Yeah. And this is, this is one thing that's making it really hard for me to structure these talks. It used to be really clear, really easy for me speaking at Inbound or anywhere else to be like, let's talk a little about marketing, let's talk a little bit about sales. These hubs are kind of mapped to your role, right. And to certain aspects of your business. But we are starting to have divisions like it was, There were a few that were hard, like workflows was never tied to one particular hub. Right. Reporting was never tied to one particular hub. But so I could kind of go hub by hub, have two or three kind of platform level features. Now there are so many platform level features and there are so many hubs. It's, I, it's, this is the question, Chris. This is why I am sweating. Chris.
Here's the thing, since Kyle's sweating, let's make him sweat some more.
Oh boy.
Because here's the thing. Many admins that are going to be sitting in your room, rooms are going to have questions around seats. They're going to have questions around credits and how do they manage these seats and these credits that, that we've been given. And, and they're going to have questions around why can't I see sequence analytics if I'm a super admin and I don't have a sales seat? Like, so there's just some fundamental foundational pieces along with all the, like, here's the buttons that you pushed and things that you can do that, that, like listen, you could probably have a 45 minute session alone on HubSpot credits. When, where, why, how and who.
Yeah, just saying. Yeah. And even just like, I mean to your point of seats and things, like we could just pull up HubSpot's pricing page and fill an hour. Right. It wouldn't be interesting, it wouldn't be engaging, but it would actually be really useful for a lot of people if they would sit and listen.
I mean, if you're doing, it would probably be engaging. I, I think you could make it engaging. I've been to your sessions before.
Thanks, I appreciate that. But that's not how I want to spend my time on the Inbound stage. Right.
And Kyle could, could read the phone book for 45 minutes and I'd come listen to it. So yeah, he definitely could make it interesting.
But like, like, how do you want to spend your time, Kyle? Like, what is the biggest gap that if you didn't have to care about everything else that was going on at inbound.
Yeah.
Whether or not other people were talking about it.
Well, that's, that's a tricky thing. Right. Because I have built my career and my personal brand on helping people keep up to date with HubSpot releases. Right. So, so inbound for me is, is like going to Disneyland. Right. Because there's all these cool things that are happening and they're new and I want to help people understand them. I want to help them understand how this fits into the larger picture. But at the same time my heart is always really with the person who comes to inbound and is like, you know, I, up until last week I thought HubSpot was just a marketing platform and now we bought it as our CRM and I came to this conference hoping you could teach me what that means. Right. And like if I, if I'm going deep into some crazy new thing They're. They're left out. And so I. I appreciate this division between essentials and advanced, but honestly, like, my. I'm so excited about all these things that are new and interesting. That's all I want to talk about. But that's not. There are other people that helps at Inbound who are going to do that. I think this year at Inbound, it's going to be covered pretty well. And so I need to ask myself, if we didn't release all this stuff, what would I talk about? And it's hard because I've been out for eight weeks. I don't even remember.
Kyle, what I love about your statement, though, and your answer there is like, you're focused on the humans.
Yeah.
Chris, ask me what I want to talk about when I go to inbound.
George, what do you want to talk about?
I want to talk about cigars. I want to talk about Jesus. I want to talk about my kids. I want to talk about where we're gonna go out to eat now. Chris, ask me what I'm gonna actually talk about.
What are you actually going to talk about, George?
I'll talk about what the humans need, what the humans need to hear. I'm going to talk about the things that will invoke an impact, will be a catalyst for their future growth. You see? So, like, that's where Kyle's in a pickle, because he needs to know what they need to know, but he also needs to know what's changed for what they need to know. That's the pickle that he's in right now.
Yes. Yeah.
Let me try to make that easier because I guarantee either you're going to get this question or we know all the admins are asking it. Hey, man, all these AI tools. Breeze, copilot, we got a nice, you know, cleanup center. Yeah, I thought I was supposed to be doing that as an admin.
What.
What am I gonna do now, Kyle?
Take a nap.
What?
I said take a nap.
Take a nap. So it's interesting. Let me step away from talking about HubSpot for just a minute so I don't accidentally wander into saying things I'm not allowed to say. But like, I, in my own personal journey with AI, right, I, I now Perplexity is my default search engine. I've been playing around with chat GPT5, right. I have learned that these tools are. Are really good and incredibly fast at doing some things I'm very bad at. But there's some basic human, like, it's hard for me to say this Because I feel like for the last, for my entire adult life I've been screaming at the Internet, your opinions don't matter. But now your opinions are all that matter, right? Like you have opinions, you have experience, you have insights. You are not just crunching numbers, you are not just projecting charts and dragging out the spreadsheet. You as an admin, know what your company has tried before, you know what works, what didn't work. You have at times discretion or the leaders of your team. You've seen them make counterintuitive choices and sometimes they've paid out in spades, right? And so you can turn to AI and you can say like, hey, here's the strategy we're thinking about. How can I draft this into an executive summary? Right? AI will be great at that. But if you turn to AI and say hi, what should I do next with my company? How do we get to our next stage of growth? AI is going to tell you something that is even if it's well cited and founded in research it did is nothing compared to what you already know. And so I think to now go back to HubSpot. We are going to continue to invest heavily in AI. We are going to continue to invest heavily in making HubSpot easy and fast. And for so long because HubSpot was so easy, people said we don't need admins in the first place. Now we've kind of come around. I think for the most part people admit HubSpot admins exist finally. But it's just the same worry again. What if HubSpot becomes too easy and we don't need our admins anymore? What if it comes too automated? We don't need our admins anymore. I just, I don't, I don't think that's where we're headed. I, I, I, I don't think even our, our biggest customers have like teams of 150 admins. Right? If so, maybe those will start shrinking a bit because they can be more efficient. But you're always going to need at least one brain focused full time on making sure this system is aligned with your business objectives. And that's just not a thing you should want to offload to AI. Yeah, I just, I don't think the.
First five minutes of each of your talks need to be that. Yeah, no joke.
So I was trying to figure out what to call this because Casey mentioned this earlier. She's mentioned a couple times. Like I would love to know more about custom coded workflow actions. I'm just not a developer. Thanks Shout out to our sixth panelist on the show, Claude and Chris, for making me start using this. I was trying to figure out a way to ask this question, but what it spit out was that HubSpot is now facing an interesting democratization versus sophistication paradox where the platform has gotten so robust and capable of handling things as it moves up market that it's hard to have a platform that's so easy to use, which it is, and have like entry level stuff happen versus something that would require a developer or something that's more specialized across and to take.
It back to custom coded workflow actions. Ten years ago, when I was hoping to get a job at HubSpot, something I did to make myself stand out as a entry level support rep candidate was I. I did a little online education to learn some basic coding, right? I learned Python, learned a little bit of Ruby, learned a little bit of JavaScript and I was never very good at it. I, I don't, I'm not a, a slow and methodical and careful enough person to realize when I have left off a semicolon at the end of a line, right? But what I learned was how to take a problem and analyze it in a new way. And the, the thing that was the most fun for me in that like six month learning journey, whatever it was, was to think like, can I make a program that finds the lowest common denominator between two numbers or can I make a program that validates whether a credit card number is, is valid and I would just like kind of sketch it out? I wouldn't write the code, I'd be like, oh, I need this variable and I do a loop here and then the output would be here. I'd be like, yeah, I can solve that problem in that way. When it comes to custom coded workflow actions, that is a skill set. I think admins just need to develop, understand what can be solved in this way. Build in your brain these heuristics that are first of all, is this a good thing to automate with a workflow or not? And second of all, do I need some sort of custom code to do this? And if you can get to that point, then absolutely CLAUDE or GPT can write the code for you. But I think what is hard is that initial hurdle. Honestly, I haven't touched coding since I got hired. I've forgotten most of these skills. But when I look at a custom coded workflow action, it's just a wide open field, the limits are imperceivable to me. I can do anything with this little box on my screen. Where do I start? And that's. That's the wrong way to go about it. Right? You need to have some sort of problem or goal and understand, like, ooh, how can I go about this and be able to decide like, ah, yes, a little bit of code in a workflow would get me there.
There's. There's two things I want to double down on. One, and if you're a developer watching this or listening to this, all the hate mail goes to Chris at. I believe that we have entered a world where if you know the brick, the mortar and the trowel, you can take all those tools. You don't have to see this. Here's the thing, when people look at coding, they're like, I need to know how to build the whole building. We're at a point where if you know the brick, the mortar, the trowel, you can throw that into GPT or an assistant and it can build the building. You just need to know the fundamental pieces is what I'm trying to say there.
Right?
Because again, I, I have built things without knowing all the things that were actually working things when they got done. I'm like, oh my God, how did that just happen? But it's because I knew a little bit. Enough to get us there. The other thing is, I got to circle way back around. Kyle, great minds think alike. You said your opinions do matter. We're entering a world where the humanness is the side of this, the you as the human. Chris, can you please share what I have had on my screen I wrote while you were gone? Kyle, this article about the messenger economy, why who you are matters more than what you say. And, And I would just beg anybody who's curious about this, like the importance of your humanness in an AI powered AI. First, I like to say AI assistant, but. But this is the message that's been putting out of the world of who you are, how you need to show up and why is so important moving forward. Just take time to check this article out. That's all I'm, I'm asking. Because it, it is in the same vein of what you were sharing, Kyle, of like, you do matter and those things in your brain do matter a lot right now to go in conjunction with what everybody is trying to use as far as a set of tools.
Yeah. Well, for another tangential example of AI and doesn't replace people or not, I.
I don't.
I don't remember when this was a few months ago, as I Was in bed trying to fall asleep. I got this idea for a, a board game, just like a two person strategy game, like checkers or chess or something. And I was just mulling it over in my mind and I was like, I think, I think this would be really simple and actually really fun. And, and so like I, I went to Claude and I said, hey, I have these, these ideas. Can, can you help me formalize this into instructions? And Claude was a great companion, started giving me and, and I made a little mock up and I played it with my 11 year old son and we both agreed it was really fun. And then I went back to Claude and was like, it feels like some of the mechanics of the game are not quite working. Can you help? And so Claude started giving me advice and I sat down with my 11 year old son. I was like, now I've got the perfect version of the game. And we started playing and my son was like, it's not fun anymore to have. Right. What Claude can't understand is, is this enjoyable, right? What would it take for AI to understand that? Right? Like AI can write you a recipe and then can you say, but does it taste good? And I'll be like, never tried it myself, I don't know. Right. And as admins, you're designing experiences for people, right? And like if you rely heavily on AI, you might find something super efficient, super lean, super automated that you wouldn't have thought of. But like is it, is it helping your employees connect with your customers and provide an excellent experience for them? AI cannot tell you that. Right. And we as humans, we just viscerally know this. We don't even know how we know it. We could just be like, this is not making me happy. Right. And so you gotta, if you're making a game, you gotta play, test it, right. And if you're making a system, you gotta talk to the people the system is for. And so I don't know who this LinkedIn user is that says HubSpot's easy to use. It's also easy to screw up. And that's why admins are so critical. Absolutely. Right, right. Like sometimes you just gotta be the person who can be like, wait a minute, have we really thought this through? Because when I talk to Claude, Claude's always like, you know what would be fun? Yeah, that's a great idea, let's do it even more, let's make it even bigger. And that's not always what you need.
Yeah.
I said this while you were talking and I don't know if it's taste. It partially that, but discretion, right? Of like knowing when to and when not to. You just said even in that example that you had an idea and that was how you started it. And so then you went to Claude to prompt it out. But like the taste and discretion thing, George, I see you smiling part of this and kind of the, like, I wonder the impacts of not failing. Like, think of. Think of AI just fix things cut off all the time it took to like grind through and learn and absorb and fail and make mistakes and then get a little bit better. And then if that's. If that's wiped out, it's almost, you know, Kyle's saying it can think of the best, most optimal way to do it. What about marriage? Right? Like, some of the best parts are the. The time spent and the suffering and the like shared. Like, you build. You build stuff like that, the experience through camaraderie. So I just wonder the impact on removing any obstacle all the time. You know what I mean? Like, that's very interesting to me.
You don't want to do that. First of all, first of all, failure is lessons learned. Like if you try to go through your use of AI, your use of HubSpot, your use of life, your whatever, and you're like, I'm zero failure rate. Sorry. You're a couch potato watching Netflix all day Pop and Snickers. You're not doing anything.
Back to failure.
The only thing you're failing is yourself. If you're worried about failing because, like, it's lessons learned. And. And so no. Just no. And. And that's actually one of the things that I love about AI is I can find failure faster and then I can start over and then I can try a different road and I can find if that works or failure. Oh, she's really. Again. So. But let me finish this because the reason I was snickering though, is because Kyle's like, you're you as a super admin spend time making this super streamlined, super automatical, like thing that edit. And I was waiting for Kyle to end with and it t like crap because we had like this food analogy. And like, you know what I mean? Like, your team thinks it's like garbage. It's split pea soup. Like, like, here's where my brain goes the whole time we're having that conversation. You mean it hasn't changed? You mean the one thing that is still the same is that we should have strategy before execution.
Yeah.
And have goals before we start coding.
Wait, this is the tale is oldest time Problem with adoption. Right. Like, it works great in theory. Is not a good way to build business. Right. And HubSpot, I mean, when you. When you work with AI stuff, that's all theory. That's all it is. That's all it can ever be.
Yeah.
Chris, you.
You were coming in to support George, like, the fail faster. The fail faster comment. Right. Like, because up until that point, George, I was feeling this was very binary conversation.
Yep.
That your choice is either to just give AI the reins or not, like, protect yourself. Because the humans, you know, know what's going on. Yet we have 50% adoption of CRM. Right. And those challenges and obstacles, not everybody's built to actually overcome them. So what happens? They don't. And then teams don't use the system. And like, we were talking about all these use cases right now for AI. Almost everything we've talked about has been outside of HubSpot. I use Cloud for this. I coded this. I did this thing. Freeze, Copilot.
Yeah.
Like, all the things we're talking about right now. You can do it inside of your portal with Breeze. Copilot, in terms of, hey, this is. I feel like this is happening in our HubSpot portal right now. Breeze, I think this. This could be, like, maybe something we can improve. What do you think? What are you seeing? Breeze. And then it can talk to you about your portal in ways that, when I was in an org, like, brought in to lead marketing, you so many people. You're the only HubSpot guy. You're the only person in the org, and you don't have anybody else to talk to. That's why it's like Sprocketeers so powerful. That's why LinkedIn's powerful and the community is so powerful. But when it's divorced from the business context, the community can only do so much help.
Hang on, Rob. Chris, you just blew my mind. Because I have to. I go full circle. Full circle. By the way, Kyle, before you left or while you were gone, like, had they completely revamped and rebuilt Co Pilot or was that why you were gone?
No, that. That happened just before I left. And. Yeah. Okay, Chris, I think this is actually a really important thing. And this is. This is a thing I will likely be saying if I can find the time. There's a really fun video I want to make before inbound hits because Co Pilot is super smart now. Like, when it first rolled out, it was not good. And that was HubSpot failing forward. And we did. Right. It is great now. And I think a Lot of people who tried it a year ago or whatever are, are just like, well, I tried that once and it's not good, right? But like, I literally today went to co pilot and said, hey, I am a company that I offer music lessons in home. I match instructors to students. Can you please make me a lessons object that associates with contacts with label for instructor and label for a student? And can you add a couple of properties for what instrument it is and how frequently the. The. The lesson happens? All one prompt and it said yes, and it did it, right. Pretty nuts. And, and like, it was, it was cool. It was conversational. It was like, do you also want me to make a property for this and that? And I was like, well, no, but actually the, the one you made, could you actually. Let's. Let's rename it to this, you know? And like, it just. It feels great. And I still made the decisions, right? I still architected this. But how often in your life have you said like, hey, can I get a second look, a second set of eyes on this? Right? And now you are your own second set of eyes. You say, hey, AI, go do this thing for me. And it comes back and says, did I do it right? And now you're checking your work in a way you probably wouldn't have before because your brain's in a different place when you're like, oh, someone else made this. I better look for mistakes, right?
Can I tell you, I gotta share this with. With you because you just sparked my brain on something that I have found myself doing much more often in, in the last probably 30 to maybe even 60 days as I will literally prompt. I need you to be completely honest and tell me if this idea is crap. Like, I'm, I'm like, trying to get it to not be nice sometimes where it's like, I. I just need it. And it'll say like, no, no, I don't think it's crap. Or actually, you know what? This is how we could make it better. Like, trying to be against myself in the thing that I think is awesome, to see how well it stacks up and, and what I love about what you were sharing and why my brain went there, Kyle, is. It's like, it is a true interactive experience.
Yeah.
You even said, hey, actually, but can we rename this thing?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's what's really interesting for me as a people pleaser, right? As a youngest of 16 children who just wants everyone to laugh and be happy and have a good time together and who makes a living Putting on a silly orange hat and jumping up and down. You may not be surprised to learn I have trouble challenging people. Right. If someone presents something to me or asks for something or gives me feedback, I have a very hard time being like, have you really thought this through? I'm always like, oh, okay, yep, good, yep, we'll make it work, right? But like I have some intuitive sense that AI is not a human and it will answer my questions, it'll give me what I asked for. I'll be like, hold on just a minute. I think this could be better. Can we alter it this way? Ah, no. I think that thing you said is actually not trick true. Can you double check it? Right. I'm getting good at challenging, right. It will be a long time before I challenge a human in a meaningful way. But maybe I am building that skill. Right. And that's very exciting to me.
That's what I use Chris Carolyn for is he is pretty straightforward with.
We love him for that.
He came in and then left.
I know we don't have like enough time to really get into this but Chris, can you put my screen up? So there's two updates from like the last week or so that are very much powered by Breeze. The first one being prospect using buying signals in sales workspace and the other one is conversation powered deal risks and buyer goals. These are like huge updates. But as we were all discussing, CRM adoption rates often are low and I have one client who these both of these updates they have asked me to build these things manually and I like this week was like great news. It just happens in HubSpot but it doesn't because they have such a low CRM adoption rate that the we don't have.
We don't have data to data.
I think you've mentioned this too. This was talked about several times by George and AI George and Kyle is is that like fail faster right? Like mistakes is is growth. I think part of the part of AI and what I've found useful Chris mentioned like that's the power of sprocketeer. It's power of community. You almost have like a built in community because a lot of times to your point HubSpot admins or people that are in that space are kind of on an island. Like there's one person there. And so your options were to either like get invested in a community and ask and reach out to whoever for feedback and to be able to learn fail and then fail faster so that you can learn faster, like evolve your skill set faster. But the community Part and part of what this is and part of why everybody on this call does a fantastic job as my phone rings is that you can. Mr. B said something with like about becoming viral. I've seen a lot of his interviews. I have four kids. You know the whole thing is he said as a dropout he got with a group of tight knit people that were doing videos and they learned four times as fast because they shared all their failures with each other so that they could upskill that much faster. That is now I think what you have multiple options but now AI built in allows for you to learn quicker. The, the behavioral psychology of this is if Kyle wakes up and as a sales rep and does something wrong at 8:01 in the morning and he doesn't get feedback or corrective measures until his one on one or a week later or that night, it's not helpful. It doesn't change behavior. And so like feedback being a gift is something we believe in, super believes in. And it's not a gift if it's not done real time. It doesn't cause behavior change. And if adoption is the, the goal, the end state to get data so that you can make informed decisions, that type of feedback instantly, you know, quote unquote from AI and from, from whatever else is really, really powerful in order to improve adoption rates. Thus you know, generate all the data for reporting that you need. So I wanted to mention that George, I had a question for you too and I think Kyle can maybe weigh in on this but you, I think you said your, your talks were going to be about cigars and, and whatnot. And then what you're actually that's what you wanted to talk about but your actual talks are about what humans need. Yeah, can flip that around. What do. What does the CRM need? Like oh not, not as far as product but like how can a user or admin impact. Like what does the CRM need to be used?
Well yeah, the CRM needs better humans. The CRM needs humans that will buy in. The CRM needs humans that are willing to learn, have a growth mindset. Like Listen, the CRM's been sitting there for years waiting for you to get the best out of it. But so many humans just stand in their own way because they think it needs to be done the old way or they, they think that it, they'll break it somehow or it like there's just a lot of limiting beliefs around what it is and what they can get out of it. So I'll just make it short and simple even Though I haven't. It's like the CRM needs better humans.
What about better. Better idea like that. That. You're exactly right. But there's probably a better parallel than this. But you know, chess has been around for however long and it wasn't popular. Let's just say Magnus Carlsen. There's ton like the. Just for the point. Magnus Carlsen came around a couple of years ago. Now he's number one. Now it's chess is in vogue like again. So that was just somebody else put into that situation where the game, the sport, like chess is now beyond what people thought it could be. You could put that in terms of a product or a feature. But if I hop in with a video editing tool, right to HubSpot and it is now more like Premiere at some point though that's powerful in that better humans. Yes. Smarter humans. Yes. More creative humans. Right. Like whenever you have something that has become more functional and it can now be used in a different way, I think that not only will attract talent, specifically the developing part. Right. That's what I was talking about initially, but that kind of stuff I think will unlock parts of the CRM and functionality that hasn't been considered yet. Is that a possibility?
Yeah, go ahead, Kyle. I have thoughts, but go ahead. And I also am looking at what time it is, but go ahead, go ahead.
Yeah, we're almost, we're almost done here. I, I have kind of a hot take. This is a thought I've never had before. So I'll share it here and maybe I'll fail forward. We'll see. For so long, the quality of the data and the amount of data inside your CRM and tighter was entirely dependent upon the sales people. Right. Like they had to manually record their emails and summarize their conversations and check a box to say I had a phone call. Right. And they didn't. They never did. There was no advantage to them. The whole reason CRM existed was so the, the sales leadership could have charts. And that was not good motivation for the, the, the sellers themselves. And in the summer of 2015 when I joined HubSpot and I was supporting this brand new CRM that had been on the market for less than a year. One of every, like the, the feature, the only feature was it automatically logged emails from Gmail and Outlook. Right. And, and we would tell people like, look, just turn it on and pretend like you don't have a CRM. Keep doing what you've been doing and then come back later and see what a CRM looks like when it has data in it. Fast forward to today. George, you mentioned in passing like auto recorded, you know, zoom calls or other kinds of video calls, right? Like so much of this data, if you just do your job as a salesperson or whatever kind of person it flows in, as long as the admin has turned it on. Right. I think the burden of having data inside the CRM has moved from the front line sales team, customer success, customer service teams to the admins and the leaders to actually have these features and turn them on. Once that data is pulling in, all these tools, the ones Casey mentioned and others will work and be amazing. But until that data is there and it is no longer, we're no longer in a world where we're like, okay, let's retrain your sales team, let's retrain the support team. Let's make them work in a different space in a different way so that this can be recorded somewhere. It's just about connecting all the different systems so that it's automatically recorded somewhere. And now you've got data and you can do magic.
Yeah. Rob, Rob, I'm going to be late for my meeting. I have to throw this out there. First of all, let's just break down CRM customer. I bet if you go into 90% of the portals, you have more data for non customers than you do for actual customers. Is it really a customer relationship management system also? I will tell you this relationship, you and your sales process and your marketing process is more transactional than it is relational. So it's the wrong word for the middle letter as well. And managers, everybody hates their managers. They want to be independent humans. So we want to get buy in on something that's half being used, not even the right thing that we're doing and something that we don't like, that's what we need. We need a different word for whatever the frick CRM actually means. Clip that.
That was beautiful. George is walking to his next meeting. I mean when I was re, when I was redoing the narrative like, like the, the tagline or something, that struck me as, as, as what I would like for it to be is like a C. A true CRM is a quality quantitative reflection of the qualities of your customers. And if it's not 100, then that you're missing something. So to cap this off, my wife's in the other room. One of the best sales individuals I've ever met. She's empathetic, she's, she cares a lot. She's not the best at data entry. So what that does is allow people with true, like, skill sets to not be hampered or, or, you know, in trouble or, or on a pit, like that kind of thing. Because of the data entry. Right. I think that's kind of where we're moving to.
How about conversation recording maximization?
There we go.
Different. Because the words that we use now don't make no sense for what's actually happening in the ecosystem.
That is true. Well, George, we don't want you to be late, even though you already are. Thanks for joining us, Kyle. We are so, so glad to have you back. We'll see you next Friday and we'll see you at Inbound. Everybody. Have a great Friday and same time next week. Hello, you've reached the HubSpot Helpline.
Help, 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.
