To HubSpot Conversations Inbox or Not to HubSpot Conversations Inbox? [HubHeroes, Video EP57]
George B. Thomas, Liz, and Devin break down HubSpot's Conversations Inbox tool, weighing its features and integrations against practical use cases. They cover when it makes sense to use it, how super admins should approach it, and real-world implementation challenges teams face.
To live in Niles and I know like Youngstown and Warren, like almost like the back of my hand. So I would actually go visit. I would come there.
I just don't know when you're not missing much. Like, I grew up in Silicon Valley. If I go home, I won't recognize the thing. If you come home, you'll be like, oh, look, a McDonald's. That's the only difference.
It's been there for years.
Yeah.
And then significantly fewer buildings than the last time you were here. Cuz they just love tearing them down.
Which is crazy. But yeah, tear it down to build it up. That's what you know. I was watching Amazing Race last night. Do you guys watch Amazing Race? Speaking concept. Okay. So familiar with the concept. I was watching Amazing Race last night and they were in India. Two things happened, one in my brain and one out of my wife. In my brain, I was noticing all the buildings and I was like, I wonder if other countries are like us, where they tear down these historical buildings to build new things. And I just started to wonder about that, which is very interesting because I feel like if there was a five or six hundred year old building, you probably might not want to tear that bad boy down. There might be some sentimental reason to it. But then my wife, she was sitting over there and she goes, and this is how I know that I've been married for almost 24 years. She goes, huh. That's all she did. And I looked over at her, I go, not what you expected? And she said, nope, not at all. Because, like, we've never researched what it would be like to go to India or what India looks like. But it's funny how we have these perceptions in our brain and then we see it and my wife is like, huh. Which was a good huh. Like, maybe we should go there. Those elephants are cool. Anyway, Liz, you're not hurting me at all. I'm just running all over the place. We should probably get started on this bat. She's like, I'm not babysitting today.
No, no, you're totally fine, actually, you want to know what this face is? My dudes, guess what I'm doing this evening. Oh, I'm going on my first date with some. Whoa. I know.
I feel like that could be a whole episode.
I know. I'm just like a human being today. That's why. Why don't I look like a cave dweller right now? Because I have to go look like a human and like, have a conversation.
Curious.
What are you guys gonna do? And then how quickly are you gonna debrief us afterwards?
Very quickly. Very quickly.
Yeah, there'd be, like, a Slack channel that, like, should there be a. Like, a date? Slack channel?
A hundred percent. So you wonder how we ended up on this date. So, George, you know that I'm not a gal who kind of beats around the bush, right?
Yeah.
I met this guy at a coffee shop, and I was giving him, like, advice and, like, consulting for his business as a really cool guy.
What?
Imagine as one does. As one does. And then he invited me out to, like, pick my brain on something. And then the other day, I was like, wait a minute, wait. So I picked up the phone and I called him. I said, can we just cut the crap for a second? Are you actually calling to. Are we going out to consult, or did you ask me out on a date? And he's like, well, I don't know. And I'm like, huh? So is this a date or is this not a date? And he went, well, I'll admit the first time I saw you, I thought you were really hot. I'm like, so why don't we just cut the crap and call it a date? He's like, okay, great. I'll see you Friday.
That's crazy. You know, we definitely need to make a Slack channel for this. But what's funny is Max isn't here today. We already have in the chat pane that we're missing a certain kind of chaos. Chad talks about there's no steering wheel, so we don't know how to make course corrections. We're just talking about all sorts of crazy stuff. So maybe we should be done with that and just, you know.
What are you talking about?
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack, Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt knowledge. Never fear, Hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the Hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the League of Extraordinary Inbound Heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute Hub heroes. It's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.
Welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes. And George, I know before we hit record earlier, you were saying, liz is not hurting anything. Liz is not keeping anybody in line.
Well, yeah.
Post theme song.
Yeah.
This is Liz's house. This is Liz's. We're here and it's you and me and Devin, my guy. How you doing this week?
Yeah, feels like I haven't seen you guys in forever.
I know there's nuts. That's what vacation does. That's what vacation. Like, they're literally barking. They're like, what is going on right now? And you realize you still have another day and a half left. Now. I don't know if it's the happiest place. They now say it's the most magical place, but it is the place where my feet were pushed to the limits. But. But my brain and my spirit were filled with Avatar and Star wars and Tron and.
Oh my go. They looked amazing.
Although good.
Looking at the chat pane here for our live audience, joining us for today's recording, Salim, my guy, I love you. His one word response to what you just explained, George, is why.
Yeah, why? Because I'm married.
Freaking love it. You know what else is a good why? Question to answer. Yeah, why are we here today? Why are we here? Why are we congregating?
Not just why are any of us on the planet.
What? Okay, we're. No, no, no. It is Friday afternoon as we're recording this. We are not getting philosophical this late in the day. My brain is done.
Yeah, that's for Monday mornings at like 7:45 and beyond. Your default. That's when. That's for.
That's when we break people's brains, opens and talk about why and what and how and all of the lovely things. But today, today we are actually talking about a topic where I'm going. To be honest, I feel very much like I am the target audience for this episode. I am the salespeople. I'm the marketing pros. I am the service folks. Because you said we need to talk about HubSpot's unified conversations inbox.
Yeah.
And it took you two videos to explain and unpack with screen shares. And I sat there going, so I am aware an inbox exists. I see all of the things that you are showing me and I am excited and panicked and confused. And if I, an active HubSpot user who has been using HubSpot for almost 10 years and looking at something and going, I don't even know how to introduce this topic because it looks like a hornet's nest of opportunity and confusion. I knew this was the exact conversation we had to be coming to the table with today. I knew exactly, like, I don't have any pre baked remarks. I'm coming in here like a member of our audience. I'm like Elliot Page in Inception, whose character only existed to ask questions that were dumb so the audience would understand why the skyline was folding on itself and what it means to go inside a dream within a dream within a dream. So listeners, if you've never heard of the HubSpot Unified Inbox before or the conversations inbox or anything that we're talking about, I am right there with you. I know what the words unified and conversations and inbox mean independently. I have seen the tool and it scares me. And that is why we are here today. We are going to go in the HubSpot version of Inception in inbox, within an inbox within an inbox within an inbox. Because again, that tool, George, has a lot of opportunity. But let's go back to the conversation you and I were having earlier this week, right? You were talking about how many questions you get about this from the people that you work with and how there is so much confusion about it.
Yeah. By the way, in the chat pane, hubception. Well, yeah, I love that. So here's the thing, and it's funny because I had received an email earlier in the week and it was from somebody that I know has been using HubSpot for years. Now when I say using HubSpot for years, what everybody needs to realize is there's different ways you can use HubSpot for years. You could use HubSpot as your CMS and so you're just focused on like your website or like your sales process. But you might not be thinking about like communication from an inbox standpoint. And this question in my email was, should I connect my email to this? And I was like, man, I've gotten this like a hundred times. How come people just don't inherently know that? The answer to that is no, I would never in a million years attach. Unless again, if there's somebody out there that has done this and figured out a reason why in a place where maybe there's no team, that people don't see your email, I don't know. But in 100 million years, I would never attach George, George B. Thomas.com to a unified inbox. But I keep getting that question and the answer is no. This, this is created for something like sales at or support at where historically you've felt the pain points of 2, 3, 5, 17 reps, whether service reps or sales reps going into an outlook inbox, not understanding who's taking what, who's doing what, who's answered what, taking that confusion in that convoluted process and actually giving it a place to live where you can streamline the communication in so many ways you can assign the person who should be carrying on the conversation moving forward. I, I literally feel like the unified inbox is the quarterback able to the plays to the rest of the team.
Can we get a little tactical for a second? Can you talk to me really quickly? So we're talking a lot about here already getting into like these are the ways we can think about it, right? The mindsets. That's one of the things we love to talk about. But first for those of us who may or may not, we're going to talk about why the skyline is folding in on itself. So where is this tool? Is it in all hubs? Is it in one hub? Where are people going to find this inbox and whether or not they have access to it?
Yeah, it's in all hubs. Like inbox. Yeah, Inbox is in free, it's in starter, it's in pro. It's just basically fundamentally or whatever words you want to use there part of what I'll call the baseline CRM communication threat. You know, like no matter what portal you open, you're going to have like five templates, five snippets, a possibility to do an inbox. You'll see contacts, companies, deals, tickets. It's, it's just like part of that lower thread.
So what confuses most folks about Inbox.
What are you seeing and the conversations internally? Like to me it's kind of a no brainer when it comes to using conversations. There's no reason why you should have routing it through conversations. One for transparency. There's not even a three that that's it.
Yeah. Now there is something happening form it's going to make sense to make it a ticketing system. It's going to make sense it to be like this helpful engine that is tickets and ticket pipeline and all of that. But it doesn't have to be that. It literally can just be like for sales. You probably don't want sales threads creating tickets. Right. It just, there's no place for that in there. And so what we have to realize is it there is a baseline that might not be confusing. I hook up a chat Flow and. And all of a sudden I can see all the chats of anybody who's ever chatted me. But when you start to add in, this layer of. It can now be email or now, which, by the way, I'm going to go into a whole conversation as soon as you let me. Liz, talk about the updates and betas for the inbox if you want to switch from chat to email or now calling. Right. So Devin talked about if you want to switch it over to a different person, which we'll talk about, like not only a different person, but a different inbox. But now if you need to communicate in a different channel, that's also available in there. Right. So. So the idea of understanding that it's like everything else in HubSpot, you should come to the inbox with a strategy of what makes sense for this team versus what makes sense for this team versus this outlying inbox that has been a cesspool in your personal hell for the last two years of working at the organization, that maybe you are that individual and you needed to set it up a certain way and it attaches.
To the CRM record.
Yes, yes. So you have all your insights anyway. Where are we going, Liz? Where are we headed?
George. George, I was actually just ready to give you Runway because the next thing I actually want to hear about are what are some of our favorite features, functionalities use cases that we've seen out in the wild. So whether we're talking about features and functionalities that already exist or as you just alluded to, there's some beta stuff that's been coming out as well. Talk about it, what's going on.
So let's. So let's wait to get into the actual tool and the functionality of the tool in. In a little bit, because I do want to take time to if. And it's funny because I was doing the HubSpot Super Admin boot Camp Week 4 this Thursday, and one of the questions we got in the after hours was, hey, as a super admin, do you have things that you do first thing in the morning that all super admins should do? And that was a very interesting question, which, by the way, I answered, the first thing you should do is meditate because you have to deal with humans all day. But the second thing I said is what I do every day when I wake up as who I am, a super admin, I go to what are the latest updates and what are the latest betas. So if you're listening to this and you haven't gone to the right hand side of your HubSpot hub and gone to where you see the name of your organization and done that right hand sidebar and gone to where it says Product Updates. That's the first thing I'm going to beg you to do is go to Product updates. Now, taking that and going back to inboxes, you can literally search like control F and then type in inbox and you're going to see things like this. The fact that there's a public beta for Content Assistant inside of the Conversations inbox that you can turn that beta on and what that means is you get the AI content assistant that will help you not have bad spelling, help you simplify the message that you're trying to do in chat, help you write the response that you may may need to do inside of your internal communication. Whatever it is. You've now got this content assistant in the Conversations inbox. If you turn that beta on, the other thing that is more recent than that that you need to look at as far as a beta is there's now a public beta for calling as a channel in Inbox, which means now you're literally like email, chat or phone that you can communicate with humans. So you. We've pretty much got all of our bases covered at this point with that. Now if we go past the betas, something that is kind of short, easy, but holy crap, powerful is that. And this is as of today, ladies and gentlemen, as we're recording this live, sharing a link to messages in the Conversations inbox and help desk. And so you might be like, george, what is that? Well, no, no more wasted time scrolling through a long conversation to, to find a specific message that happened in that conversation. Because now introducing Message Deep linking. First of all, that just sounds cool as hell. I'm just gonna throw that out there. Message Deep linking. You can now copy and paste the link to any message in the Conversations inbox or help desk and share it with your team for easy reference. Why does it matter? Currently you can only copy and paste specific thread or conversation in the inbox and help desk. However, you cannot do the same with a specific message. We want to promote better collaboration between teams by enabling an easier path to find specific message with a conversation. And literally, if you go to that, it'll tell you how you do it. There's like three little dots and there's a message action and you literally, literally can copy that message and then share it with the rest of your team. So talk about like the, the alternate universe of 20 people in one inbox in Outlook versus, like, here's this very specific thing that this human told me. That means we're going to be able to close the deal for $50,000. Okay. Anyway, so you got to check out updates, you got to check out betas. It's, it's just a must. Again. I do that every morning now, Liz, I'm gonna pause because. I'm gonna pause because there's like people in the chat. Like, that's dope. It's a beautiful thing, Devin, like, what are your thoughts and where does your mind go? Or Liz, when you think about if you had the, the, the ability to be that specific or that granular inside of the communication and especially with teams, like, where does your guys's brain go immediately?
Where my brain goes. Because I'm a process person, I'm an infrastructure person. I immediately think, this sounds amazing. And it makes me want to hear from Devin about best practices on if we are suddenly giving all of the people in your organization the ability to have this type of granular level, type of conversations, the ability to dissect, connect, do all these different things, that means you have the potential for a hundred different people in your organization doing 100 different things, 100 different ways. And that gives me anxiety. So I think about things like, so how do you ensure everybody in your organization is on the same page doing the same thing? How do you processize things? How do you do it efficiently and effectively? So that's where my brain goes, is that, you know, we've talked a lot in, in episodes past about the importance of once you have a complex enough organization relying on HubSpot, you may want to have someone who's an owner of it. That's the kind of thing where it's like, when you start introducing these new tools into your organization, you genuinely need to start thinking about, so what are the best practices? What does the process actually look like? What is, what is the right way to use it for us? But Devin, I'd love to get your 2 cents on that because you're, you're my process king, buddy. You get it? You understand? You understand why I dry heaven when I start hearing new toy. Great, who's gonna break it?
You hit it right on the head. You think about how it's gonna get broken. You have to. At the risk of sounding offensive, in order to idiot proof something, you gotta think like an idiot. And you have to that for me, I think about best practices and then I think about, okay, so how's someone gonna screw this up? And no matter how often, how much time you spend thinking about it, people are still going to surprise you. People are still going to amaze you with their ability to break things. But at the same time, conversations and referencing conversation is. It's pretty easy. I think about how we use Slack@HubSpot, like, how I can start just referencing conversations that I had with someone else and share a link to the conversation, like, yeah, here's what happened. I don't have to do screenshots of a specific point, then have to go back and search for it later. But as far as implementing the tool at large, one of the biggest things I think about is who is and isn't allowed to talk. Because I like the idea of everyone being able to utilize the tool, but not everybody needs to be able to say things. And it's again, we have something similar with Slack, with permissions. There are certain channels where not everyone can talk. Everyone can see what's going on, but not everyone can talk. And if you set those rules ahead of time. But that's one of the great things about conversations is assigning conversation. If I see this conversation's been assigned to Liz, then if I jump in and start trying to get in on it, then, you know, I'm the bad guy. And while some things you would think of as intuitive, like this is Liz's conversation. Devin, shut up. And if there's anything I think should be contributed, I can just reach out to Liz instead of, oh, let me get my message in. You know, that's. That's silly. But again, that's one of those things where you're thinking like an idiot. You'd think like, oh, I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm gonna go ahead and document it anyway. For the one guy who just doesn't really think things through, we got to.
Go to the chat pin on this because Celine really just hit it out of the park here with this. Murphy's Law corollary is nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. Followed up by this made me laugh so hard. If you make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot.
Yeah, it's. And it's. But it's what's fun. And first of all, I did laugh to that and I was like, you know, but here's what's fun is you. You have abilities to make it less than what it might be. And Liz, I want to kind of piggyback on something you said, like you give this tool to the whole organization. First of all, I think that's step One to think about conversations is built for certain individuals to be in the game. Like, you have an entire football team, but not everybody shows up on offense, and only defense shows up on defense. And some people are in that stadium and they never hit the field. Right? And so you got to think of this as the coach, and then you got to think of it as the players. And so you can have certain teams, certain individuals from an organization that are then in that inbox, and that takes down kind of the idiot proofing portion of, like, now we've got these four or five people who are our front line of defense. We've got the quarterback, which is like the SVP or whoever it might be. And now we're just passing the ball to players that actually know what in God's name they're doing. So that's like, part of what we need to kind of think about in here is who should be the players based on their knowledge of our products and services, based on great communication with humans, based on availability around a global economy and where they can be at their desk and when they can actually be answering these questions. But then also going with the football or sports analogy. Devin, it might not be your conversation to jump into because it's Liz's, but dang gone, thank God. You can be up in the top booth and Liz can do an internal comment and ask Devin his thoughts to then give a better response if she's lost on the topic at hand. So that, like, I love how it can kind of go both ways when you're thinking about it in the right direction. Yes.
Devin, here's the thing to you to go along with that same analogy. Not everybody even needs to be in the stadium. So, like, we have, I'm sure, tons of inboxes at HubSpot. I have no idea because I only have access to one of them, and even that is barely. So the thing is that, like, if something comes into an inbox and I'm not a part of that inbox, they can just forward me the email and say, hey, this is it. I don't even need to be a part of it. And then that's the way you can get people who are peripheral to the team of core conversations users to get that information. But the thing is, is that, like, the only person who should. The only people that should have access, in my opinion, to an inbox are the people who literally is their job to use the inbox. Everybody else can stay informed, but, like, svps, stay out of my inbox, bro. This has nothing to do with you, I don't need. If I want you to answer something, I'll forward it to you and then you can respond through your personal email as the SVP and we can still track it using the HubSpot connection and just it'll tie in either whether you're using Gmail, Outlook, whatever, and it'll still tie into the CRM and so it'll still notate on that CRM record without it being in the Conversations inbox. But to me, the only, the only person that should have access to all the inboxes is the HubSpot Super Admin. Outside of that.
Is that our official quote for the for today's episode?
I think that's the official quote. We'll tweet that or we'll exit.
Can we also talk about the other Salim, my guy? So if you for listeners, by the way, you are always welcome to join us live. When we were do you see what I'm about to read? Because this is the funniest sel to.
God, he's on stage with a mic right now. He's got like a half a cup of whiskey and a, and a stool and a mic and he's like on stage right now in the Any machine.
Is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough. I love that so much. Yeah, I want to. It makes me want to ask what are some of the things we're seeing wrong with HubSpot inbox, but I'm not quite ready to go there yet.
Yeah, I actually want to talk a little bit, but using the machine, right? Maybe.
Yeah, I want to talk a little bit first, though, about integrations and what we because we've started touching upon some of the different betas that are available. But George, I'd love to hear from you a bit more about maximizing integrations when it comes to the inbox and also the guardrails you want to see people put up. Because again, this is one of those kids in a candy shop kind of thing, right? Get two Snickers bar, don't get 75. You will get sick and your teeth will rot out of your head. So like, how do people. What are the great integrations for it and how do people make smart decisions about the integrations they're using in Inbox?
Well, here's the thing. I've. I've never even searched for an integration with Inbox other than the fact that like, yeah, the fact that it integrates with my, my inbox, my real inbox, my like, email channel. I've never, like I don't even know if there is, to be honest with you, like, a third party integration of anything that you'd pipe in there or what you'd want to add to it. If there's somebody listening and they're like, oh, my God, guy, yeah, like, you want to do this and it makes your unified inbox, like, way better, then that'd be super dope. But I honestly don't know if there's anything that we would. We would integrate to make it different or better.
It almost makes me wish that Max were here so he could hear the feedback we're getting in the chat, which is, Chad says here there are very few good integrations with inboxes because external integrators do not really understand the difference between a conversation and a ticket. There are a lot of integrations with tickets, but few with conversations. So what if I actually did. This is one part I did do a little bit of research on. I know I did. I did a thing today. I'm so proud of me. And then I got confused and immediately was like, where's George? But when I was taking a look, I kind of ran into a similar situation. And I almost wish Max repping and shilling for Big Popsicle, was here. He's our other host. For those of you who are listening.
For the first time, is it Popsicle or Paleto? Does he say Paleta? Is that the word that he uses?
I have no idea.
Yeah, I don't know.
Max, we love you, but should be here.
Max, your fault.
Should be here correcting us. But that's fine. No, but I think there's a really big opportunity there. So let's. Let's take it a different way then. If integrations is an area where. And this is what's so fascinating, HubSpot, when it comes to integrations, is usually like, you know, it's chef's kiss, top notch.
Yeah.
And there's not much happening there, is it? Because there really isn't a need for it.
Well, actually.
Wish list in your head.
Well, so let me back up, because I don't necessarily think of them as an integration, but Salim, again, instead of just being funny, he's like, let me show you how intelligent I am. Facebook and WhatsApp are actually integrations. So the fact that you can do WhatsApp and Facebook inside of your HubSpot inbox, those are two of the integrations that you should pay attention to. The other thing that I have, in passing heard Max speak about, now that you mentioned his name, was this idea And I can't dang on it. Remember the name of the app. So when we have him on the next episode, I'll have to bring it up again. But there's something about. Because you can do SLAs, by the way, in HubSpot inbox, but there's something about something happily. Timer Man. Thank you, Chad. Timer man allows you to do better. God, I love having a live audience. Can I just say that? Anyway, especially a smart live audience. Timerman allows you to do a little bit deeper level or better SLAs than what is kind of under the. So if we think about this, right? Facebook, WhatsApp, Timer Man. Those are three integrations that if you're not leveraging and they feel like they're things where you would need to be communicating or things that you need more depth into, you might pay attention to those. As for integrations, that's freaking amazing. I feel like Devin's, like, doing research or watching Netflix, one of the two.
I'm not sure I'm looking up conversation, because honestly, before I looked at the outline, I did not know they were conversation integrations at all.
There we go.
Wow.
This is all very new to me.
Yeah, we're all learning together like a family. All right, so.
But here's the thing. But here's the thing, Liz. I got it. I got to unpack a little bit. Something for the listeners.
Yes.
I. I looked at this conversation and I said, really? Like, who wants to hear about inboxes? And the only reason I pushed this forward is because I kept getting this same one dumb answer. But as you went on this journey, you saw and learned things. As we're bringing up the conversation, Devin, who, by the way, is not new to HubSpot or as being a HubSpot user, is, like, now diving into things that he may not have thought about or knew before. I started to learn things that I didn't know before and was like, holy crap, why is nobody talking about these things? And so this is. This is what happens when HubSpot, the platform, gets as big as it is, is there are certain rooms that people forget to enter, and there are certain books and utensils in the drawers and on the shelves that they don't know how to use. And so somebody who wants to talk about those things, AKA us Hub heroes, has to enter all the rooms, has to have all the conversations to enable these things that are even happening for us as we're doing the episode.
Here's one that I completely forgot about that I've actually Used quite a bit in the past was the Facebook messenger integration. Yeah, native. I completely forgot about that. That is so helpful with people who reach out to your Facebook page about questions. Because the thing is, it's so important to have people access to your service team through any channel, or your sales team, or your support team, whatever it is, through any channel, because people are going to ask questions wherever they feel comfortable, be it on the phone, email, or in your Facebook messenger inbox. And this, the native integration, like, I run a Facebook fan page. We got like 73,000 listeners or 73,000 fans.
What?
And the sheer number. Oh, yeah, that was. That was one of the first social media experiments that I did on a large scale was beat out everybody else who had fan pages for this particular. His name's Maynard for Ferguson. He's a trumpet player. And the thing is, he passed away like, what, like 15 years ago? And we're still getting. Oh, yeah, where do you can perform? Can I buy some of your stuff? It's like, yeah, dude, that's not gonna happen. Not without a lot of candles and.
Like maybe a Ouija board. Turn around U turn u turn. Bad conversation.
But the thing is that being able to navigate those messages, I don't use HubSpot to do it anymore. But when we were at the peak of just our inbox being flooded, when we first transitioned over to the page being the official page of his estate, we used to get flooded with messages and oh yeah, small flex. That's the thing too. So being able to navigate those messages now we mostly just get spam. But yeah, there was a time when that was highly necessary. And the other one that I didn't know, I didn't know about this at all, was the WhatsApp business integration. The fact that you can start managing WhatsApp conversations with marketing Hub or Service Hub Pro or Enterprise.
That's outstanding.
Yeah. And I'm literally looking at. Because I think it was Chad maybe in the live chat mentioned, hey, market SMS integration. And I'm literally trying to see if it says something about the unified inbox. And we've got. Yeah, Inbot. Hey, Market inboxes sync with HubSpot conversations. So now if you think about what HubSpot does by default, chat, email, messenger, WhatsApp calling, if you turn on the beta and the ability to bring it in with SMS as well. Now. Now you truly do have all your.
Channels covered and there's an API so you can build your own. It's nice.
I. I wish people were watching. Like, so the people who are in our audience right now throwing down and killing the game with their amazing comments are seeing this. But I wish everybody else out there in the audience could see this. Who's listening? Because this is literally like watching George and Devin go like, and I got next box and I got a bike. Like, this is like Christmas morning. It's adorable. I am loving this so much.
There's more than one SMS app partner. That's wild.
We're all learning something new today. But George, you brought up a really valid point that I want to underscore here. And I think this may be a conversation we need to explore a bit more deeply. Because it used to be when I first started with HubSpot, right, there was only one or two hubs, right? There were. There were a finite number of tools. Everybody became experts in the platform very easily. And now it's like there are so many tools, there are so many opportunities that there's no way for HubSpot in many ways to give each tool the breathing room, the spotlight, the clarity it deserves. So I think we're going to start seeing an increased need for two things. One, how do we start simplifying a monster that is becoming much more complex every single day? And then also, are we going to see a need rise for HubSpot super admins? Because.
God, yes.
Because think about the organizations. I find it interesting that a lot of companies are so hesitant to invest in a HubSpot super admin, but they would drop like money like no other on a Salesforce architect. I'm like, guys, same thing. This rhymes.
Well, first of all. So we're already separate conversation. Well, no, we're already there first of all. And what's what this episode has proven to me there needs to be a conversations inbox part two, because we haven't talked about one freaking feature basically, like at that level. But let me. Let me just kick into. You brought up this super admin and I'll tell you the mindset where I'm at. And I've been there for a while. I've done. I think it's now 4 super admin boot camps where people are signing up to go through six weeks of how to be a dope HubSpot super admin. With each one, we've had 152 in each one of those cohorts come in and try to learn how to be a super admin. HubSpot super admin. This is so needed in organizations now. Moving forward, you're going to see a rise of it. It's going to be a job title that people are going to be putting out on LinkedIn and all the places that you can hire people. And, and here's the thing, like when you think about this, there are going to be very few people who have been around long enough to understand every single one of the hubs to truly do what a true super admin is going to do. So what does that mean? It means that the days of being able to take somebody who was this in life and put them in as your HubSpot person are gone. It means this human full time job is to pay attention to HubSpot Academy, to pay attention to HubSpot updates, to pay attention to Kyle Jepsen, to pay attention to the internal teams, to have internal conversations and understand what's working, what's broken, what can we add to understand integrations. Like, there's so many pieces and directions that this HubSpot super admin has to be that I would even beg that we'll probably get to the point where there's organizations that might have two or three of these humans. Because here's the problem, here's the problem is that you leaned into like, why don't companies want to do this? I don't know, because it's literally like having an Indy car. You have paid like a million fricking dollars to have the car, it's sitting on the track, but you're like, we don't need a driver. Who needs a driver.
Let me push back on that just a smidge, just a scope.
Just a tiny bit or a lot of it?
A little bit. No, just a little bit. So here's the thing. For me, my entire career since 2015 has revolved around the HubSpot product. Every job I've gotten since 2015 is because I am a HubSpot product expert. But the thing is, is that I didn't search for HubSpot Administrator as a job title. I just searched for HubSpot in job listings. And what it turned out is more often than not, quite a few times they were looking for a HubSpot Super Admin, but they titled it Marketing Director or they titled it Marketing. I got one job, it was Director of Marketing Automation. Yeah, right. But it's like I was the HubSpot guy. I've been the HubSpot guy since 2015. And the thing is, is that people are looking for it, they're asking for it, they're just not saying. It's like, hey, I need you to be a platform expert. They're leading it with the job title of the person they think whose job it is to solve this problem. And then they said, oh yeah, towards the end, proficiency in HubSpot or CMS is our CRM marketing. I got one job, it was director of Marketing automation. Yeah, right. But it's like I was the HubSpot guy. I've been the HubSpot guy since 2015. And the thing is, is that people are looking for it, they're asking for it, they're just not saying. It's like, hey, I need you to be a platform expert. They're leading it with the job title of the person they think whose job it is, you know, ideal. But the thing is that it's not just ideal, it's a necessity.
Yeah.
In order to solve the problem, especially if you have an existing tech stack with HubSpot at the center of it, you need a HubSpot product expert to come in and solve your problem.
Yeah. Liz, we should probably write an article on GBT about the job title you didn't know you were looking for is.
To solve this problem. And then they said, oh yeah, towards the end, proficiency in HubSpot or CMS is our CRM is, you know, ideal. But the thing is that it's not.
Just for every HubSpot company using HubSpot.
While I also want to tease the listener.
Ideal. It's a necessity.
Yeah.
In order to solve the problem, especially if you have an existing tech stack with HubSpot at the center of it, you need a HubSpot product expert that.
Probably before the end of this year, we're actually going to be having a dedicated episode on this topic. You know what? Spoiler alert. I'll let the cat out of the bag. We were having a full conversation about do you need a marketer or do you need a HubSpotter?
Yeah. Huge difference. Huge frickin difference. By the way, didn't always used to be that way, but huge effort to.
Come in and solve your problem.
Yeah. Liz, we should probably write an article on GBT about the job title you didn't know you were looking for for every HubSpot company using HubSpot.
Well, I also want to tease the listeners that probably before the end of this year we're actually going to be having a dedicated episode on difference.
Anyway, we have completely gone sideways. No, no, no, no.
But here's the thing, here's the thing I want to say, George, topic. You know what? Spoiler alert. I'll let the cat out of the bag. We are having a full conversation. I I was joking at the very beginning of this that George said I wasn't doing a very good job of hurting. But that was before we hit record. And he knows I'm a good job at hurting because otherwise I wouldn't be in this seat on this microphone. However, what I will see looking this good.
Cuz you got plans.
I do have plans about do you need a marketer or do you need a hubspotter?
Yeah, huge difference.
Huge difference.
Freaking difference. By the way. Didn't always used to be that way, but huge difference. Anyway, we have completely gone sideways. No, no, no, no.
But here's the thing. Here's the thing. I want to say, George, I look cute as heck. But one of the things I really want to emphasize I. I was joking at the very beginning of this that George said I wasn't doing a very good job of hurting. But that was before we hit record and he knows is that I think we're having the conversation today that we needed to have because like I said at the start of this conversation, this is the first time in what over 50 episodes where I sat down and said the only story I know to tell is that I am as I'm a good job at hurting because otherwise I wouldn't be in this seat on this microphone. How confused and as baffled as the people who are emailing George. And I am pretty smart and clever.
What I will say this good because you got plans.
I do have plans. I look cute as heck. But one of the things I really want to emphasize is that I think we're having the conversation today that we needed to have because like I said at the start of this conversation, this is the first, first time inside a HubSpot portal. Like I because I watched your two videos, I had my head in my hands going, all right, my dude, this looks like a lot of promise and a lot of potential for explosions. So we are definitely going to be having a Conversations Part 2 podcast. This was the conversation we needed to have because here's what I'm in what over 50 episodes where I sat down. I want to ask you guys as we start wrapping this up today.
Yeah.
What is the and said, the only story I know to tell is that I am as confused and as baffled as the people who are emailing George and I am pretty smart. Inside a HubSpot portal. Like I because I watched your two videos, I had my head in my hands going, all right my dude, this looks like a lot of promise and a lot of potential for most common myth or misconception. And George, you can give more than one, since you always break the rules. You never just do one, you always do multiple. I'm just going to let you have this. Now, what is the most common myth or misconception you want somebody walking away from the part one of this conversation, having corrected about the inbox. Same for you. Explosions. So we are definitely going to be having a Conversations Part 2 podcast. This was the conversation we needed to have, because here's what I want to ask you guys as we start wrapping this up today.
Yeah.
What is the.
This is tough to use. That's easy.
Most common myth or misconception. And George, you can give for me.
It's like. It is so easy. Convert. There's. It is. Once you get it set up, it's super intuitive. The hardest part about it is setting up, and that's not that hard either. It's.
It's more than one, since you always break the rules, you never just do one, you always do multiple. I'm just going to let you have this. Now, what is the most common myth or misconception you want somebody walking away from the part one of this conversation, having corrected about the inbox? Same for you, Devin.
This is tough to use. That's easy for me. It's like, it is so easy. Convert. There's it invaluable and super easy to use.
Yeah. And it's funny because I think it goes. I try to pay attention to how people talk about things and how they think about things with everybody that I get to talk to around HubSpot. And I think they. They lump it up into two things. One inbox. Oh, that's that chat flow.
It is. Once you get it set up, it's super intuitive. The hardest part about it.
Oh, chatbot thing. And we don't need to do chat flow or chatbot. And it's. It's not.
It's setting up. And that's not that hard either. It's. It's invaluable and super easy to use.
Yeah. And it's funny because it's part of it, but it's not like it could literally be just a form or it could be just an email, or it could be just like. So it is, but it isn't. And people categorize that and immediately go, oh, no, we've got drift for that. We don't need chatbots, so we don't need the inbox. Wrong. The other piece of this that I would say is that they'll just look at the word conversations and Be like, I'm a marketer. I'm going to go to the marketing tab. I'm a sales rep. I'm going to go to the sales tab. I'm a service rep. I'm going to go the service tab. There's. There's no, there's no Conversations department. Svp. So it's just really weird that it lives in this thing called Conversations and there's this weird tool called Snippets that people are like. What's that like? Like the amount of people that aren't leveraging snippets to make their life easier and especially if you tie that into responses in the conversation inbox is mind boggling to me. So just like this kind of misunderstanding of what it is, like Devin said, the misunderstanding of how difficult it is, or this just blatant. I bought HubSpot for an email tool. Why would I use that? And they think about marketing email and workflows and aut and not even the other side of the, you know, simplifying specificity one to one hard communication that actually produces more fruit. Many times if you do what's hard in life, life becomes easy. If you do what's easy, life becomes hard. I'm just throwing that out there. Wrong podcast. Anyway, Liz, that's, that's where I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna stop right there. And I'm just super glad that we're going to have a part two because, you know, the fact that I didn't even get to talk about that. One of the tools that I would love more people to use inside of HubSpot is views. Views for contacts, views for deals, views. Like there's View. How the heck. Geez, I got a little passionate there for a second. There's, there's views and workflows now, but the fact that you have views in the inbox and what does that mean and what can you see and how does that streamline the people's day that we've already kind of been talking about? Like. Like there's so much that we just need to talk about.
I know. I'm really excited for us to get to that too. What I will say as a sneak preview for those who hang around the GBT universe by the time. Actually, no, it'll be next week that it's going to drop out. You are going to have. Don't you have something you're publishing about Views next week as a tutorial?
I might, yeah, I might be creating something.
Oh, you might be creating something. You might be publishing an article about that you might potentially dabbling. Just dabbling.
There might be a lot more coming, actually. But we'll see, you know, we'll see.
We never know. For me, my parting word of wisdom is the dry heaving that I did earlier. I'm just going to circle back around to that. Is that to Devin's point? It is easy. And we talked about making better idiots when you try to make things idiot proof. The thing I will always go back to, that George has told me a thousand times that I believe has always stood me in good stead is that HubSpot is only ever as smart as you are. So you can scale idiocy. You can. What it will do is automate dumb things so you can be dumber faster. So if you don't sit down and you take a look at. So we have these tools at our disposal. How are we actually going to use them effectively? Have the conversations. Yes, it's easy. It is so easy to get started. It is criminally easy to get started. But have the conversation. How is our service team going to use this? How is our sales team going to use. Particularly in sales. Particularly in sales. Because we're going to be having a conversation with a special guest coming up in a couple of weeks. But when you think about those sales organizations that you are dragging out of the Stone Ages into the inbound age, where we have to all work together as a revenue team, what do they all have? Individual undocumented processes where each salesperson is doing their own darn thing and if you don't address that, you're just going to scale that. So that is my parting word of wisdom for today. I brought it home. Considering I had no idea what we were talking about.
That was amazing.
I feel like. I feel like you're on a soapbox and just like, yeah, thank you.
Implement it. I love it.
Yeah.
You know what? I bet it's because I straightened my hair today. I'm feeling more powerful. That's what.
Maybe that's what it is.
You look powerful.
Be powerful, everybody. All the Hub hero listeners. Be powerful. It's funny, I have to say at least one more thing out of the chat pane because when I first said the word automagical like nine years ago, I didn't realize that automagical was going to become a thing that people actually associated or even I have now heard people use that are in the circles with me. But the fact that we have in the chat pane, automatical stupidity.
Guys, we've ascended. I'm just so happy to be here. I'm so, I love our audience so much and it bump. I don't know how we got here. But guys, we're at the end of our episode. We did it. We've completed Conversations part one.
Yeah.
How do you, how do you feel? Feel good.
The first chapter of 23. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, I feel great.
I feel good, right? I feel good, I feel great. I feel wonderful. But for all of our listeners, thank you once again for joining us this week. If you love the pod, please do not forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast provider. Whether that's Spotify, Apple Stitcher, Google Play, every review helps us get in front of more amazing hub spotting humans just like you. And with that, gentlemen, I hope you have a great week. I'm so glad we're back in the saddle.
Your favorite podcast app should be Pocket Cast, by the way. But anyway, shilling.
