Time to Talk HubSpot and Help Humans!

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.

What's up world? It's Rob, the mayor of inbound. I'm here with 3/4 depending on when he is summoned of my best friends in the whole world. On Wednesdays we wear orange and on Fridays we move to Wednesday. You might have seen us on Friday. By the way. We need a new theme song, so I'm on that. I'm actually jotting that down now as a something I open this I'm sad.

Action item from this call.

Every Friday at 3. Come and join us as we help you with HubSpot. And now we got to that. So that's a bit of bad news to start off the day, but we're here Wednesdays at 10.

Good luck rhyming with Wednesday.

Hey, hey. Every Wednesday at 10. Come on and hop in as well.

There we go.

He's a professional.

He is.

I should have never doubted him.

As my father used to tell me all the time, they don't pay me nothing for nothing. So I will. I will soonify that and probably lay down a vocal track. How are we feeling on this Wednesday?

I'm feeling good. It is very cold in I guess I'm mid Atlantic and it's supposed to snow like a ton this weekend. I got stressed out and already started grocery shopping. So the food that I bought is going to go bad probably before the storm comes. Yeah, I did already panic here in Boston.

We got snow this last weekend, but our forecast for Saturday, Sunday, the highs are in the teens.

Yeah, we have received the winter storm warning, which I'm in the south and it's supposed to clip us, but it's supposed to be beyond devastating. And as I don't, I'm always caught in between panic prep shopping, you know, going and buying all the toilet paper and water and all of that versus, eh, there's bad weather all the time. It'll be fun. So as of right now, we're prepared to survive for about 30 minutes if in fact the weather does come in and entrap us.

Today my wife was gonna go grocery shopping, but today we're also getting a new roof on. And when she went to leave, our front door has like netting and tarps and stuff. We cannot leave our house. We are trapped inside for the duration of the roofing project. And so hopefully we don't need food.

Yeah, you guys would be. It's funny, Rob, not that this has anything to do with HubSpot, but when we moved down to North Carolina from Ohio, we're used to snow, we're used to cold weather, we're used to like motoring around and they got their first like two inch flurry snowstorm in like the first like five years ever of us being here. And one of the things that a neighbor shared with us, and I don't know if you guys have ever googled this or searched this on YouTube. Bread and milk. Have you guys seen the bread and milk video? I'm telling you, it's worth your time. Just search south, down south. Gotta get the bread and milk and watch the video because that's about to happen all sorts of down here in the next couple days. It is. I'm just gonna hunker down on my house and let everybody do what humans do it.

It's funny for us. Yeah, it is. Learning more. We'll get to HubSpot in a minute, but it's learning more. Maybe you'll be able to help the.

Weather segment of the.

Yeah, we help you with HubSpot, we help you with weather forecasting, we help you with pipeline forecast, we help you with all kind of stuff. So indulge us for a moment. Let us talk about the nuclear winter apocalypse that is apparently being foretold by meteorologists across the country. Country. Go ahead.

Yeah. Well, when I first moved to Boston in, in. I moved here in 2013, I think it was like winter 2014 into 2015. Boston broke all kinds of records for snow. We got over a hundred inches of snow and it kind of all fell in the month of February. We were getting like 3ft at a time every weekend. And, and the, the, there was no place to plow it, right? And there weren't enough plows to plow it. And there was the, the, there was like a press conference with the mayor of Boston. He was the guy who's named Marty Walsh. So, ma', am, Marty is on there answering questions and people are like, why, why aren't you, why aren't, why aren't you plowing the snow? Do your job. And he's like, look, we're not buffalo. We're not used to this kind of snow. And it made me realize, like, everything Is relative. This thing that was catastrophic in Boston, in Buffalo, it's just like a. A Thursday in November, right? Like. And similarly, George, like two inches of snow, like, some places they just shut down, right? Because they've never seen it before and they have no idea how to drive in it.

And yeah, yeah, they, they, they did shut down Charlotte, Kyle. Which is hilarious that you bring that up, because my son was actually. This is. This is the dumbest story ever. My son was going to college at Johnson and Wales, which is a culinary arts school. If you know anything about the culinary arts. They have all the foods. And he called us, which we were like a 35 minute drive normally, when it's not 2 inches of like, oh my God, I'm gonna die snow. I didn't think that, by the way. I grew up in Montana. And he called me, he said, dad, dad, they're shutting down the college and they're rationing the food. And I'm like, I'll come get you. I take off, I go to get him. There's people are in ditches, there's trucks jackknifed. I'm like, what is the. Where did we move to? I got back and just started telling my wife, like, I don't even know where we moved to. These people are crazy. Nobody can drive in the snow. Only to find out later that nobody can drive in the rain either. Anyway, let's talk about HubSpot.

Cue a really excellent Rob Jones transition here.

Speaking of nobody can drive. That sometimes can apply to results as well when trying to get people to adopt the orange CRM. George, kick it over to you for a special monologue here. Open us up. What.

What am I doing.

Man? It was an alley oop.

I really thought George had some.

Yeah, what am I talking about?

We call that an alley. Oops. Our fearless leader who is not on camera Right now, Mr. Carolyn. There he is. He's. He's always just standing. Yeah, he wanted us to dive into a couple of recurring things. I don't know if you want us to start that now. If you had some stuff prepped as far as like, structure, format, or if you had any, let's call them announces to the format to the switch to Wednesday. I feel like people might want to hear a minute of that first and then dive into some of the, you know, you had CRM object of the week. I think that would be a great one to get opinions on what Kyle learned at the hug, which is great. I saw a couple posts, Kyle, about that, asking people about what they wanted to contribute and a couple other things that we will keep as a surprise. The KC case. And we'll use that as a trailer or teaser for next. But Chris, if you want to. There you go. If you want to, if you want to lead us into. Not into temptation, but into salvation from CRM issues, go ahead.

I think you nailed it and that's why you're the host. I think it's a good idea to maybe list all five or talk about some other possible segments. Maybe we get some feedback from the audience on things that they might want to see. I think personally that what, what Kyle learned from the hug is a no brainer, but definitely open to what, what people want to learn more about in this format.

Absolutely. Yeah. I'll, I'll start and people can interrupt me at will. But the, the move to, to today. First of all, we wear orange on Wednesdays. I have the glasses on from Friday. I think the major driving factor was twofold for that one. We wanted people to be more consistent. And I'm not saying any names, but it might rhyme with Weil. Clemson to be here. We can't, we can't do the HubSpot content without Mr. Jepsen. That is nothing but the biggest of compliments that could possibly be given to you. So that was part of it. Also Friday at 2 or Friday at 3, as the song says. People are, let's be honest, George is halfway to a, to a cigar and you know, whatever special coffee he has. So we want to be more engaged with the audience. We want people to watch, to come and comment. Even the, the call in type of format. Right. Has not worked as well, which is fine. It's not 1995 and this isn't sports radio. However, leaving a voicemail or possibly getting into the show. Chris is the producer. If you have a comment that maybe you forgot to leave a voicemail, Chris posted the wrong phone number again. Or you know, you're seeing this for the first time and want to participate live. I'm open to bringing someone in and letting them give more context on the call. I think that's a great way to engage and you know some notables, Nico, Jeremy Byers, whoever, if you're here, Tricia, if you want to come join. I know we've done that. Yeah. So shout outs to everybody. Go ahead. Casey.

I think Addison left a voicemail.

So.

Addison, comment, Comment. Yes. If you want to join us live and I'll send you the link.

There you go. See? Already making some huge strides and improvements there. The time again the day and time is just so people are more aware, so it's more out there and so that we can get more involvement specifically on either live interactions or voicemail. I still think the voicemails are a great idea and I'm a huge radio guy so I like the call in feature. The other stuff with format and structure similar to the engagement piece. If we are answering questions or searching Reddit or searching areas that are not top of mind maybe like the admin hug yesterday or maybe something with what Chris listed as CRM Object of the week, your weekly Breeze AI psa what was unboxed Update of the week, things like that that are current. If this serves as an aggregate or conglomerate for a lot of I mean most of you are on other shows. I know that is one of the themes. Chris is on air for 10 hours a day it seems, but coming to that shouldn't preclude the fact that we want to provide as much value as we can in this hour. So if it's just an aggregate of the best features or stuff that needs to be discussed at further length, if that's the right way to say that it wasn't an English major. But that's for me what we're intending to do with the pivot which by.

The way, before you move on to the next thing Rob by a show of hands meaning leave a comment yes me if you're watching this live or later do you have Breeze Assistant app downloaded to your phone? Yes, me know me put it in the comments. I'm super curious since you just mentioned breeze Mr.

Rob Jones yes, I I my kids watch enough YouTube that I'm resigned to the fact that I will be one of those every five minute CT comment, you know, drop in the chat, join the join the stream. I'll be one of those dudes. I've seen enough examples from you know, millennials and and younger people, whatever they're called that that I am able to do it. Probably not as good, but I'll get better. The third thing is I was going to let everyone else give kind of their reason and then we'll jump into CRM object of the potential benefits and what we hope to get from this I off camera and in these kind of do we need to move this? How do we make the show more impactful sessions I've listed being here hosting, adding humor, adding some psychology background. Addison's in the lobby so shout out to everybody on this call. It's already working by the way, so we can push that or we can Give one sentence as to what we're hoping to give versus get from kind of switching the format up a little bit, little more structure, a different time. I'll start with the person that looks most eager to speak. Casey, greyhound of the helpline.

Hawkins, scared of trying to look least eager. I am hoping to solve more problems, I think, and I'm curious how that will look, but I think we kind of have gotten in a trap a couple times where we didn't have enough context. So that's why I recruited Addison to come in, because I think a lot of times we can solve the problem with some extra context. So I'm excited to just solve complete problems.

Love it. Kyle, other than launching your mayoral campaign for the city of Boston, what are you hoping to give? Get out of this time and format change.

Yeah. So I don't know if anyone watching noticed, but last week I put a LinkedIn post out. Just saying. All right, give it to me straight. What are the problems with HubSpot? That has gotten 354 comments and it is spreading like wildfire through HubSpot's product team. It was a leader on our product team who asked me to crowdsource some feedback. We had no expectation that it would take off in such a way, and we are frantically using AI to try to quantify and categorize and organize these tasks, and it is resulting in real action items to teams. These are. This feedback is going to make change in HubSpot. We are really focused on gaps and inconsistencies and quality of life sorts of updates right now. And in general, the product team is starting to look to me as the guy who can bring them the real customer feedback. And I am trying to find ways to do that. And I feel like a show like this could be an excellent place. Right? Like, hopefully people will come and have a HubSpot question and the smart people in the room will answer and problem solve like Casey was just describing. But me, if there's ever a moment where the answer is, yeah, that's actually just how HubSpot works, now is an opportunity for me to take that back to the product team and say, hey, look, people don't like this. They have this idea of how it could be better. What can we do? And so most people are here magnanimously trying to give. I'm here just to take. I want to take your feedback, I want to take your complaints, I want to take your ideas, and I want to. To put them in front of the product team.

Love that, George. I'll Transition to you with. I think Dharmesh referenced that recently. And I forgot how he said it, but I think he referenced it's not death by a thousand cuts. It's improvement by a thousand smiles. So we want to improve the quality of life and a ton of other areas to make the overall experience better. Over to you now, George, after that Dharmesh quote.

Yeah, thanks for that Dharmesh quote. That maybe that's a. A weekly segment out of the mouth of Dharmesh. There's gonna be a screen that flies in and maybe use the puppet Dharmesh for that screenshot as well. That would be cool. Call back from inbound years ago. Uh, listen, here's the thing, too. Like, I just want to say the power of a Kyle Jepsen post. Bam. Like, we're changing HubSpot. Like, let's just say that too. It's funny because I'm coming here as a teacher, but honestly, the thing that I want most out of this show is particular is to learn. What I mean by that is I get to see certain ways that I'm using HubSpot or teaching people how to use HubSpot, and I get to see some ways of how people come to me with their HubSpot. But HubSpot is so customizable at this point. There are people doing things that I'm like, wow, you're really pushing the envelope. And so, like, getting on those edge. Cases of people pushing the envelope, therefore, breaking or finding places where they can't do things with HubSpot and learning about those to then be able to, like, put a layer on top of it and be like, well, if you did this, or if you might hack it, like, so I'm eager to learn and teach while I'm learning about these kind of different scenarios inside of HubSpot portals.

Love that. And speaking of scenarios inside of HubSpot portals that need solving, I believe we have somebody ready to join the call. Addison, Chris, if you want to.

Hello.

There we go. Addison, how are you? Welcome to the HubSpot helpline. You know everybody on here, I'm sure. I'm Rob. I usually wear an orange suit, but I only had the glasses today. How can we help you today?

I'm in my tan, almost orange for. For the occasion.

Nice.

Thank you. Yeah, thank you for welcoming me in. I've had experience working with Casey. She is an absolute knight in shining armor for us as we try and navigate just this really great tool that's at our. At our disposal. A little bit of background on Us, we are a govtech company. We sell into municipalities, which has been an interesting paradigm in sales because yes doesn't always translate into yes. Right now there's a whole different sales cycle within the sales cycle that we're trying to participate in and gain insights from. So all that to say it's you don't always get a no, you get a not now or a next year. And I'm trying to figure out, well, how do we get a grasp on how much of our pipeline is converting to closed wins when or versus, you know, closed loss. And what should we consider closed loss in this cycle where it maybe would fall back into a nurture stage. So maybe I've looked at, okay, well can we categorize a slip? Whereas maybe we were at a high pipeline stage and then we didn't get funding or but it didn't make it in the budget. They're like, we're so sorry but another priority got pushed. We want this. We're still talking to you. It's just going to be a next year. Wondering if you guys have had experience working with deal stages in this regard and if you had any recommendations on how to appropriately pull insights and on this type of level.

Addison, can I just tell you that you actually just punched my cranium with what you said and I thought of something that I've never thought of before but I'm like, man, I actually want to chase this down in my brain and see if it makes sense or if I'm just being an idiot. But you mentioned things that every sales team across the entire world say. Closed lost or closed won. Here's what's interesting. There's nothing stopping us in HubSpot to create a closed nurture stage. Now imagine if instead of like closed lost because quit contacting me, it was like, hey, not yet. And it was like a closed nurture stage because then you would still have deals that are in that nurture stage, which you would then have a revenue amount of dollars saying, hey, we have this amount of dollars in a nurture stage that we have them in a now marketing slow drip where we're emailing them once a month, once a quarter. And we set a date because we put a date property of like a follow up date. And actually 30 days before that follow up date we do go weekly. So like my brain goes to like, what if there was a property? What if there was a flow and what if there was just a stage where it could stay there and not everybody like freak out that it has to be like well, we can't, we can't sell them. So like get it out of my view. Okay, well it's considered closed, but it's in that stage anyway. I don't know. What are you guys thoughts?

Casey, if you want to let me go first. Since you, she, Addison mentioned she'd already been working with you, I immediately thought. I had a similar thought, George. It was similar. It was closed nurture or like latent pipe. And the comparison for me when I was more involved in sales was sports teams.

Right.

It's not govtech, but there's a very seasonal element to where they do. I mean I think NBA, NFL, the bigger, you know, larger teams, they have an entire season and then all their buying decisions, changes, whatever, much like the players, but with the equipment or the tech behind it was made in a, you know, one to two, sometimes two and a half, three month window. And so if that's the, if that's your seasonal window or it's kind of the latent pipeline, that's. That is not. No, but not now for decent reasons. That's just when decisions are made. There would be a way to kind of appropriately label and tag that so you're not disqualifying or you know, closed losting pipeline that actually could come to fruition, but you're also doing something that provides a strong business case and providing value to them while they're latent. I think. Is latent the right word? Am I using that word completely incorrectly or is latent is that a word like it is. I need to read more dictionaries. Casey, I'll go to you as I recover from that awkward moment.

So I have the advantage of being in Addison's portal so I can add some like low hanging fruit opportunities to, to this. First and foremost, there is a closed lost reason property that comes out of the box in HubSpot and 0% of your deals have closed lost reason. So I think that might be one way we can like very quickly start recognizing the patterns and even going further into that. Oftentimes we'll set up close loss reasons as like a dropdown. So we'll look at rather than right now out of the box. It comes as an open text field and oftentimes we keep that open text field to capture the nuances. But we could pretty quickly like today add a dropdown select of common closed loss reasons. One of those being like bad timing is how it's traditionally framed and then from there we can segment, we can create follow up tasks, we can do a lot of the stuff George was talking about, even just from like that. Not to say that in your use case or in many use cases, having a separate closed loss nurture isn't a valuable addition as well.

But if we do it like that, would I lose the current data stream from that active deal.

Chris has.

You didn't even play the music.

Oh my gosh.

He commented, tagged me in at the end and he's. He was too. He was losing it.

Like the word that she says, active deal, right. And like so it's very likely that closed. That word does not make sense. And that's often why stuff like close lost reason doesn't get filled out because I gotta close it because some report tells me I got to or some view I want to get it out of my site. When I first joined like consulting and software, coming from manufacturing where there was things like government sales cycles and every kind of sales cycle was like not two months, which is what everybody in SAS will tell you it's supposed to be. And if they're not going to close in two months, then you get that deal out of there. Even though it's a great fit, it's still an opportunity. And they've been very clear as to why they can't buy right now. But they trust you and the value has been shown. But the budget cycle is in September, right? For government or the cycles are a year or two years. So can we just build pipelines that make sense for our sales process? And an example I used to use, and this is ambiguous language starts to freak everybody out. But if you can define the stages and everybody agrees on what they mean so that we're all looking at the same words and understanding them like a holding pattern stage right after value proven stage where they're in they just for whatever reason they cannot move forward right now. But there's no, there's no actual like chosen competitor or like chosen status quo or like direct reason that they give you that this is no longer an opportunity. It should not move to close lost in my opinion. So making the space for. And maybe this is a different pipeline, right. That's needed. Right. Often those are underutilized but just really aligning on the language that the team can understand so that the data does, you know, get maintained in a proper way.

Right.

Chris, I love where you're headed as far as like the. Maybe the problem is just the words that we're using. I also love that Noel, one of the viewers says rocking an on hold stage in pipe because sometimes people ain't ready well, he didn't say ain't. That's me ready right now. Right. So I think all of this is good stuff, Casey. I even love the idea of like, well, maybe it doesn't have to be a stage, it could be staged. But even you are like, hey, we've got this thing and if we use this thing, we could filter down to this thing and then I could probably build a report off this thing. So, like, if the idea is I just want to know the revenue amount that's sitting out there, the potential. I think there's like now four different ways that we said we might be able to do it in HubSpot.

Does any of that, like resonance, but.

Not yet developed or manifest? So I was right. The only other thing, and this, this is not necessarily a shameless plug. But you, Casey, you said that you had been in her portal and that none of the closed loss deals had reason. Like, sometimes the lack of data is a presence of behavioral data. So if you don't have the reason filled out, you know that people aren't doing it. I would argue that you don't have enough data to, like, that. You have data in that people aren't following whatever established, you know, process or rule set you have that would have, like, the mindset and those behaviors would have to change first so that you can, you know, make a more informed decision on the change.

What, Addison, what's the team doing right now? Are they just leaving the deals open?

Yeah, so we leave it open. We keep it in our cadence and we're finding that, you know, sometimes, especially as we're growing and more deals are, are adding on that we're, some of these stages are getting quite a few deals within them. I like what Chris mentioned about possibly two separate pipelines and maybe there's. Because we do kind of talk internally about how there's. There's two sales cycles, there's the, the sales cycle that we can control, which is essentially closing out. When we get our internal champion, when we have somebody on the municipality front that says, yes, I'm going to bring it forward, and then maybe at that point we consider like, close one champion moved it into maybe a procurement pipeline and that's where we can get a little bit more granular and like, well, does this need to go to council? Has this hit different approvals and that might be a good way of delineating, okay, what's our controllable pipeline and what is our supportive pipeline and help us forecasting more, I guess, with a little bit more of a Razor edge. I think that's an interesting approach that we could potentially build out within our data sphere.

Addison, I love all the words that you're using right now, all of them.

Just advise caution on creating two separate deal pipelines that represent the same opportunity. So I like to think about deals and this is where if you can get here with your team and like in terms of governance and language, like deals in HubSpot are built for sales management. Right? If the team activity or process or customer process that we need to track is not sales management, we cannot use deals for it. Right. We've got all these other objects in HubSpot now and so an example like tickets or anything from the object library, like listings. I like to use them in creative ways without needing custom objects to say, okay, the sales opportunity is still represented by this deal pipeline, but between closed one or activated as I like to call it. And like the champion situation where there's an in depth purchasing conversation that needs to be run. That can be. Because sometimes it's not even the same people like involved. It's all of a sudden our finance teams are talking to each other and we can't have them coming in to do stuff in the deal because then it gets messy and sales versus the world, right? So you create this separate object that goes alongside that the other team can own and then they get their job done and you, you can sync up the pipelines based on fields and that's. It looks more complex at first, but it's because it's a complex scenario that we need to support and if we can separate out the data sets like that, now all of a sudden everything starts to look clean and make sense and it's now reportable. That's going to lead to teams using it and filling out the properties and it's a good cycle in there.

Thank you.

Kyle, are you taking all of this for the product team? I don't think there was a product blocker in here that I'm aware of, but I just want to make sure you're.

No, but it's just, it's just fascinating that we've had this whole long conversation, we have not once talked about leads. I think that is indicative of many things. Feedback for the product team.

Do we have another voicemail?

Well, before you go there, because Kyle brought up leads. Kyle, one of the most joyous days in my life in the last like 365 days was when the HubSpot update came up that I could actually help people turn leads off in their portal if they Weren't using them.

Sure.

Yeah.

Just saying.

Yeah. And I do think in some ways the writing is kind of on the wall in that way. That's why I'm not, like, here advocating for the leads object. I just take this as one more proof that leads is not the solution any of you jump to first. Right. And Addison, it sounds like you're really doing fine with deals. You don't need some other place to track this, like starting from scratch. Right. I think this question of what happens when a deal pauses but has real potential for the future has always been a thorny one. Our hope from a reporting perspective is that those deals will be somehow removed from the active pipeline so that when you look at your pipeline, you can report and forecast accurately and also your salespeople can look and see. Can see. These are the deals I need to actively work on. I like Patty's note in the. In the chat, Addison. I don't know if you can see it. Closed loss doesn't need to mean lost forever. It could be lost. For now, we use the closed loss reason and details to keep track of and keep line of sight to those deals that have an option of bubbling up in the future. Keep it simple. So I think some combination of what people have been saying, having a place for it to go, whether that's a different close stage, closed nurture, or whether it's just closed, lost, and now we pull them into some sort of nurturing flow, or we have a close lost reason, or we have some other properties we're using, I think as long as you are able to get the information out of the pipeline you need from a reporting perspective and your salespeople are able to look at the pipeline and know what they need to do, and you don't lose track of those deals that need to pause for a bit, then whatever you do is fine. I don't. I don't think HubSpot has a specific prescription for that. But this leads object was built with kind of the recognition that it often takes several cycles before a deal gets to close one. Right. Like, it is often the case either in early outreach or during later consultative negotiations, that it's like, okay, we're going to come back to this in six or 12 months, and you don't want deals like that just cluttering up your pipeline and making it harder to see the ones that need action today.

So, Casey, it seems like you've got something that you want to say. I'm watching you, by the way. And I'm like, Casey's like that horse right before, like the gun goes off and they're gonna like you say a greyhound. Oh, like a greyhound. Like ready for the rabbit's gonna run down the track.

Casey, I am the rabbit.

What is on your mind?

I asked if there's another voicemail because I at the end of my last conversation with Addison, she asked me a question that was too long of an answer and I said let's talk about that when we chat next. And apparently I decided to ambush her with all of my friends to talk next. But. And I'm going to butcher your question, Addison, but your a little bit of context. Her portal does not have leads active. They are doing what a lot of companies were doing before the lead object existed, which was they have a few deal stages that are basically pre deal stages in is how a lot of people look at it, baby deals. I've heard them referred to as those. And Addison had asked me what do we do do with those people? The people we want to reach out to but like they're not a deal. And I said leads. And then I said, you don't have leads open and five minutes is not enough time for me to talk to you about leads. So I do think leads is another option here as well as, you know, in that kind of pre deal stage, but to someone's point at some point. Kyle, I think are those pre deal stages that you're using harm harming your flow or is adding leads just adding another place for your team to go, adding more clicks? You know, you have a whole new interface to learn. Yeah. You have two main sales reps that, you know, right now they just work out of the deal pipeline view and they can see their leads and they can see the further activities and they can kind of choose where to go. Do they need to learn a new interface? I don't know and I'll give a.

Little, a little bit of background on. Basically what I would like to achieve is we want to, we want to be smarter about our pipeline. We want to have more agility and get more efficient and be able to take that data that we can pull from HubSpot to give a true, you know, example of how long can we anticipate on average our deals are going to run. And if we are starting to really make a robust outbound posture, like yes, we're going to send out an email, we think they're a fit but we. The conversation hasn't started. So if we start an outbound column within our deal stage, our deal in theory, the deal timeline could start there, where maybe we don't connect with the right person or we're in a city, and then we find the right department, and then the conversation starts going. I feel like that's a better representation of how long it takes to get from, you know, first conversation to implementation. And I don't necessarily want these baby deals to be skewing how long our sales cycles are.

Yeah. So I got to jump in here as the guy who said, I sure love when I can turn leads off. I'm also the guy that loves when I hear a reason that they should be in there to, like, enable an organization to. To make sure they're there. Historically, what I've always said, and you're kind of like, tapping into this, the time to actually create a deal and the stages that should be in the deal pipeline is when there is a moment to talk revenue. What you just referenced is not a moment of talking about revenue. It's a moment where sales is trying to get awareness to even have a conversation for fit, which. When it's a conversation with sales to see if there's a fit before we talk about revenue. That's where I'm like, hey, that should probably be a leads pipeline, and it should be a people process with that object. And when they get to a point where they're like, we're on a call, and all suddenly like, yeah, this sounds great. Let's move forward, convert that lead into a deal. Now let's start to track the time in actual stages of. We're talking about revenue now. That's actually. Here's how long it takes when. When we're talking about that. But this is the. I hate to use this term. This is the hunting object. This is the gathering. The. The. The hunt that we just did. Right. I hate that terminology, but it's. It's almost these, like, two parallel pieces that work together. But anyway, you may have a good scenario where, like, you use leads, which then let's go back to the original conversation. The end of the cycle could actually be the beginning of leads. Like, that might be not only just your net new hunting, but you're. And now let's put them in here. Because we've built a process for known humans, but still future leads. Like, there is a world where both of those could work together. I'm. I'm afraid that I'm gonna see. Oh, Chris is already here.

Yeah, I was gonna say.

Oh, my God. Did I get five words out before he showed up? Because I wasn't looking.

It was before you Were talking. Yeah.

Speaking of hunting, Chris is here. I don't see an eye for a weapon, but he. He did appear back in.

I have a question.

He's like, george is gonna talk. Let me come in.

And is the length of your sales process based on you or based on the buyer?

Both. Right now. I think the. The buyer is definitely the. The. The variable or the variable in this regard. We're working on some things internally to make the procurement process easier for the municipalities, which is a lot of why we really want to be keyed in on these. This timeline metric as far as, like, well, are we gathering fruits from our labor? Are we in the right direction or.

Are we supporting the buyer as they need throughout the entire journey? Right. Which is very hard to see if all of our words and labels and processes are built for us. And we can't look at a pipeline and understand what's happening, you know, with the buyer. Right. And that's why the importance of deciding what we want to do with the deal and its purpose. And if we do start to include the lead object. Right. And to Patty's comment, like, I understand why people, like, want to clear out views. And this is, in my opinion, like, when you get in trouble, when you let any kind of software, including HubSpot, tell you how to set up your business process. Because this is how HubSpot works. Right. And not because it's your business process. Keep it simple very quickly and usually becomes, I can't see what I need to see. Our scores don't make sense. These fields don't make sense because we're trying to shove everything and say we're keeping it simple. Right. When in reality, our teams, we have smart teams, good humans, they just need training and in a better architecture. Right. Casey and I talk about scoring a lot. Right. And we're excited to do some unboxing with that team. The reason I bring that up is because the situation where you have two pre deal stages, like deal scores that are supposed to represent health of the opportunity, like, it gets harder and harder to make stuff like that work if we're doing non deal, non sales management stuff in there. Right. Likewise, if we start to engage a lead object, or some might want to call it an interest object, like we are gathering interest and we want to score the level of interest or the health of our relationship with the individual, which is different from the opportunity. When you can architect it in this way, you can start to get the clarity that you need while still capturing all the data in the right way. And I Think we're going to see a lot better use, at least if we have anything to say about it in terms of the lead object, because there's so much signals, so many signals coming into HubSpot right now that we don't know where to put it. If we just capture these signals in a separate object, we can start to get real scores and real understanding that help our teams. Now I'll look at, let's say, a unified customer view, and everybody agrees on what they're seeing, and they have the data that they need to confidently engage the buyer or the customer wherever they are in the journey. So, luckily, you're working with the right person, Casey, because she's very much aligned with a lot of the things that I just said.

Casey rocks.

Oh, we know.

And thank you all for coming to my webinar.

Yeah, yeah. So. So there is a question in the chat area or comments area, is it possible to create a quote in a lead? No, no, no. Quotes are for deals, quotes are for money. And so that's why, like. No. Anyway, I wanted to answer that. That's an easy one.

All right, well, thank you so much. I mean, I feel so honored to have taken up so much of this brain power in time, but I'm gonna exit stage left. Thank you tremendously for welcoming me on your show. This has been definitely, really, really helpful. A great exercise of thought. I think we've got some. Some good work that we can do ahead of this. Casey. Consider. Consider problem solved in my book.

Thanks for coming.

Yeah, thank you for coming home.

Nice.

So just as a follow up to that, because we, we, we. This got touched on a lot. I would love to. To explore a little bit with you guys, this, this idea of deal stages and their names. There is general agreement that the default deal stages inside HubSpot are not great. But I mean, my feeling is like, it's impossible to have standardized deal stages that will apply equally well to every company. Like, even if we had really stellar default deal stages, that would just make it more tempting for people not to customize them. And they should customize them. So let's just assume everybody's going to customize them. We're not looking to come up with the ideal default deal stages, but I'm really curious about this tension between actions the sellers take and actions the buyers take and what the deal stages are representing. Because on the one hand, you absolutely do what your sellers focusing on helping the buyers through their process, being focused on the buyer's progress and definitions of success. But on the Other hand, you also need the sellers to be focused on the things they have in their control and not, you know, being measured on external things that, that are other people's, you know, personal agency. So how do you guys, how do you guys think about this?

I think that was the single and without all of the govtech context. Although she did provide a good amount. The single biggest differentiator and most valuable thing was in our control versus not in our control. And I, just because of the sales cycle and there being possibly two of them, she referenced deals and baby deals. I equate that very much to seasonality. Maybe it's because I'm a sports fan or the NFL is nearing its end, but it doesn't matter how good of a business use case or a deal or a product or a whatever offering that you have, teams are not going to change from July until February. They're just not going to do it. And that is very much outside of the seller or the organization's control. Whereas the.

Yeah, no matter how many calls you make, correct. How many emails you send, nobody's there.

No. And I would just assume there's something similar to that with, I mean municipalities and govtech. Like there is some predefined outside of the seller control timeline with the process that they have. So all of that data that you're capturing, whether you call it baby deals, deals, whether you have pipelines or not, collecting all the data to better understand that for each geo or each organization gives you more, gives you more data to make a decision on how to name it, how to structure it, how to vary it by territory, how to vary it by level of municipality. And that would then allow you to say we have enough information based on previous deals to say the intent's there. Here's all the stuff we're tracking. Here's where they've engaged with content. They did this blog. This is a deal, a pseudo deal, latent deal that we know is not going to need anything but nurturing or relationship building for another six months at that point. And Chris is, I feel like he's gonna hop back in here. I think him saying the terminology and how you label it and having a systemic understanding of those terms is the most important thing that allows everybody to be on the same page so that they know I don't need to focus on pushing a cell or a quote or labeling this as a lead right now. It's outside of my control for this deal, for this to even become a deal, George, because you have to have a quote like a Deal is for a quote, not a lead. You have to have that for this to progress further in the pipeline. And it's making it to finish. My point, more about architecting that process to the. To the buyer, not the seller.

Yeah. So, Chris, you're here. Should I talk or should I let you go first?

I've been thinking about this since 2020.

And I feel like, in other words, let you go first.

Yeah.

Such a power move, just showing up. Everybody else has.

He's like, you know what? This is really my show.

I just figured I'm figuring out this producer role, Rob. Like, you want me to play that? This is where it's like, we want simple. We have to serve both sides. Like, sales process has to be represented. So the team is very clear on next steps, but we have to represent what the buyer needs at the same time. And I guarantee they don't need a call, they don't need a quote. Like, they need understanding.

Right?

So the kind of language that I've landed on, and that's starting to resonate more and more as I try to explain this, right? It does come down to, can you get to a place where your team easily understands the words on the screen? Everybody agrees what they mean at all times, right? You. You name your stages based on that, right? It helps when you can say it's. It's not about any of our internal departments or internal process. This is the buyer, like, in what they need to advance. Right? So in this case is like, this can be, I think, the stages, as you know, as less. Less prescriptive and activity based, as long as you're associating it with the activities themselves. Right. But have we discovered a match here? As. Does the buyer know our value? Does the buyer know our value? Right. If they understand it, can they assess it properly? Are they using the right words? Do they understand the fit level? If they're ready for it, Right. Has that been validated with them and maybe others in their organization? So stakeholder alignment. I think a lot of our stages and deal setups, like, completely miss the fact that we're often having to get multiple contacts involved and everybody is at different stages of their own process. Right. Do we have the commitment, like, solid agreement? And I feel like we can build process related to very clear understanding, like direct either scoring or check whatever boxes this thing has happened, right? Like in this case, validation of value. They. They got a demo. Like, they gave us feedback, we responded with the feedback, and now it's confirmed like, yes, this is a fit. This is great. For us, it's like we want to move forward, but let's right, we got to do some things internally. We get that sign off.

Right.

But then we got to get paid. Right. Contract sign doesn't always mean like payment like to her purchasing example. Right. So really starting to break these up in a way that's like we represent what's happening with the buyer at all times and that's how we get to these unified views that we talk about. But our team also knows exactly what steps to take and when you can align this then marketing. It's so much easier for marketing to come in and help and understand. Oh it's taken a little bit longer to go from evaluation to validation. Like what other content or resources can we help? Because whenever this IT leader comes in, we have trouble with them getting validation. So let's build an ROI calculator or implementation like Journey Map or whatever to help them get to validation faster. Right. So that's just, that's how I think about it.

I like that a lot. I also think just to point out what I feel like is obvious, the bringing someone in. Shout out Casey for bringing Addison in. I think that was a ton of value that was provided context, clarity, even kind of back and forth discussion about is it leads is it pipeline? How do we need to be thinking about this? I think mindset kind of shifts before behavior does and so having that discussion, what I'm trying tldr Great move Chris by moving this from Friday, which maybe she would not have attended to Wednesdays at 10.

It was a team, team, team effort. Team effort there.

Very nice. It is 11 and so with that as host, I don't want to say goodbye because I feel like we were having fun and there's other people that may want to join but that is a good reason to Follow subscribers My YouTube CTA Subscribe Follow Check everything out. Turn on the bell Notification for all of us and this show so that you can be here and ask your question. Possibly getting featured and getting to talk with George Kyle Casey and if you're lucky enough to summon Chris Chris next Wednesday at 10. Thought to end us on Mr. George B. Thomas?

Yeah, I'll share with this. As you probably saw today, there are usually anywhere from one, seven or 14 ways to do things in HubSpot. So I would always go back to your organization, the humans in it and what you're trying to achieve to figure out the best way to build it for you and them moving forward.

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