Were going to talk about nerdy HubSpot Stuff.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to HubSpot Setup. What pros do first? I'm Casey, and this series is all about answering one deceptively tricky question. What do you actually do first when you get into a new HubSpot portal? I've asked a handful of HubSpot pros to come share their real life approaches because no two admins do it exactly the same. And I'm here to learn right alongside of you. This series is also part of something bigger I'm working on. I'm putting together a program called 30 Days of HubSpot where I'll walk through all the core tools, tips and tricks based on what people really need to know and use every day in the platform. These combos help shape the roadmap, and I hope they help you too. Today I have my friend, the man, the myth, the legend, the human, George B. Thomas.

Well, thank you for that introduction. I feel like I'm just a guy, but. But I have been rocking out HubSpot since 2012, and so I guess if, if, if I can be human and if I can be a guru or whatever, I'm. I'm down for that. I just. I just love humans.

I was. Last night, I was driving home from my parents, and I don't know what reminded me of this, but I just thought about the story you told a few weeks ago about how you were doordashing at one point.

Yeah.

I was like, I was just thinking back on it and I don't know what I would do if I ordered doordash. And then, like, I walk out to grab it and there's. There's George B. Thomas.

Yeah. I'm like, hey, here's your beverage. But, yeah, listen, sometimes, like, because I've been working remote since 2013, and sometimes you get sick of the same four walls. And so doordashing for me was a way to go jam the radio, go drive the roads and make a little coin on the side, just because that's what it is. But, yeah, I've. I've often wondered, like, am I gonna see somebody? Can you. Could you. For me? Like, if you could you imagine being like, gary V. Gary V Brings your doordash. And you're like, wait, yeah. Or he comes to your garage sale, as we've all seen on YouTube. I'd be like, oh, my gosh. Yeah, here's this statue. You can have it for free.

So anyway, yeah, well, yeah, you can have it for free. I'd be like, oh, sure, I guess I'll tip.

Today.

Well, one thing I always like to do in these episodes, George is I like to ask people why this question is so hard to answer and why is it something like HubSpot doesn't offer like a checklist or anything like that. Why, why to you is it hard?

Like as far as the first thing that you do in a portal. Well, let's be honest, there's just so many things that you can do and also it then also depends upon who you are or like what you're in charge of or what strategies you have or what goals you're trying to accomplish. Like listen, if, if I'm going in here from like a sales perspective, the first thing that I need to do is way different than if I'm coming in here from a marketing perspective. And by the way, if I'm a small to medium sized business versus an enterprise, that's going to make it different as well. So like there are some fundamental things that, you know, I have come to believe that no matter if you're small to medium sized business, enterprise, business, sales, marketing, whatever, that you at least need to touch this or these things. But, but I think it's just a complex conversation, complex question. And as a good marketer would do it just like the reason it's hard to answer is because it depends.

Yeah, yeah. I had a friend who actually kind of was a little bit of the inspiration for this series and she called HubSpot one time to ask. And I've had friends all the time come to me. They're like, hey Casey, what's your checklist? Like can you just give me can. They'll say it like so casually. They'll be like, can you just send me that checklist that I'm sure you have? And I'm like, oh, here's the thing, I don't. Because it depends.

The closest thing I have to a checklist is an audit. But that's not really getting like, that's not small, that's like hours and, and like I don't know if you could checklist that. I mean I could probably checklist the top like five top hot topic things that we, we see over across multiple portals, maybe turn that into checklist. But again it does, it does change dependent upon what portal we go into.

Well, you, when I asked you to be on the show, you said you were going to surprise me. I've been waiting ever since that moment. So George V. Thomas, when you get into a HubSpot portal, what do you do first?

The first thing I do is I go into the settings. I go into Properties. I go into the contact property and I search one little word, Persona, and I see if they actually are using the Persona tool at all or if they're using the Persona tool in the correct way that it should be used. Because 90% of people that I've seen aren't using it and the people who are using it are using it incorrectly for the way that it. It can maximize so many things in your portal, from scoring to conversions to segmentation to communication. And the reason I go there first, Kasey, is because fundamentally, if I know that's not being used or I know it's not being used properly, then then there's just some core pieces that follow after that even into like, well, if we knew this, we could ask these second smart questions. And if we know those, we could communicate in a deeper way. And if like, anyway, that's the first place I like to see just to get a feel for what they're doing.

That does really surprise me. And it is a good reminder to myself to never invite you to my portal.

That's funny.

Just. Just a little mental note there.

Yeah, that's funny.

All right, well, so what's the right. What's the right way to use it?

Yeah, so listen, here's. Here's the thing. Usually when you go in there, let's even back up 50,000 foot view. The problem is when you hear people talk about, even HubSpot Academy talk about Persona, it's like this book of information. Heck, there's even books that you can get to read about it. It's that you gotta like build this story and you've got to post it up on in the bathroom wall and the cubicles and like, everybody's got to be able to read it. And the Persona is so that you can spin around and create content based on knowing and understanding the roles, goals and challenges and the demographics and gee, mini Christmas. So one, there is a place in the HubSpot Persona tool for you to put roles, goals, challenges, demographics, all of that. But the first thing that I tell people when I'm helping them go through this process is we're not doing any of that. Now, if you happen to know the roles, goals and challenges from a bullet point list standpoint, we can put those bullet points in there just because. And if you want to build out the Persona like the rest of the world is telling you that you should build it out, you can even do that later. Heck, if you want to add a photo to what this person will look like, you can do that later. Other Than that I don't care. There's two things I need you to do. And so we start out where we talk about positive Personas and negative Personas. And by the way, that historically that was the kind of a biggest difference between what HubSpot Academy was preaching and what I was trying to teach people is it was, it's basically usually used for just positive Personas. People we can help. No, you need to have negative Personas as well, which we can dig into. You can circle back around and maybe ask me about negative Personas. I can give you an example of how we would leverage this or use this. But having positive Personas and negative Personas and so literally in that top bar I get them to do P dash or N dash for positive or negative Personas and then we come up with usually some type of clever or cute name for who this person might be. Right? So if it's like marketing Mary, if we follow suit with HubSpot or like operations Ali or some, something like that. And again, this all changes dependent upon if we're doing like an accounting client or if we're doing like a, you know, automotive manufacturing client or if we're doing like a SaaS company like these names change. And then here's the big piece that we spend a lot of time on once we figure out what we're going to call them in the tool is, it's the description. And so many times I've gone into portals, it's one is blank again not being used or second, it doesn't start this way and we start all of our Persona descriptions because by the way, that's the only place that the people using this from the external side of, of what you're doing will see is that description. And I start all of them out with I'm a, I'm a. And then whatever it is, right? Small to medium sized business owner looking for help with HubSpot Enterprise Company looking with help for my email and automation startup looking for help with my, you know, CMS design, what, whatever it is. But it all starts with I may because this is a psychological trigger, right? If somebody asks you, who are you? Oh, I'm a dad, I'm a mom, I'm a marketer. What, what are you doing? Every time you're answering that, you're, you're saying I may, right? And so when somebody comes to a form, because by the way, we, we do this in a way that we say we're going to build your Personas out, there's going to be positive Ones and negative ones. And the description is always going to be positive intent for them to self identify who they are. Again, even if it's a negative Persona. Positive intent that they. Yep, that's me. And they'd be happy about it not knowing that they've turned on a whole system for us to remove them from our sales process, remove them from a marketing process and and some other cool stuff that we can talk about. So the, so the idea here is to get those I'm a statements in the descriptions to which then the next phase of this is we talk about hey, now we're going to get these in all of your forms, okay. And we're going to put them in your forms in a way where we change the Persona label to how would you best describe yourself? Now they do the drop down and they see the IMA and so they can self segmentize. Well, we're going to put them in your forms in a way where if we get that answer once, we never show it again. Because with dependent fields or queued fields actually in the forms you cannot have any queued fields, but you can set it as a queued fields. And there's this little line of text that not a lot of HubSpot users read, but it says if no queued fields this, this property will not show up in forms in the future. So which means you can put it in all of them, ask it once, once you know it and never get shown again because you're using that functionality. Here's the other piece that we like to teach when it's in a form is now we teach a thing called second smart questions based on the human and them self segmentizing themselves through the I'm a statement that they can pick what are the one, two or three questions that you want to ask specific to them. Because now we can use dependent fields to get more qualified answers to questions that we actually care about about the type of human that we're serving. So now that floats into. What does that mean? Well, that means we can have a high level list, this Persona or we can have micro lists this Persona that answered this way, this Persona that answered this way and this way, this Persona that answered this way, this way and this way. Well, what does that mean? That means we literally have a list that could be the trigger for a workflow to an email series that is very specific to the ways that they answered the second smart questions. And now we can make our one to many feel one to one because we have a foundational piece where we let humans Tell us who they are as humans. I'll pause there and see where your brain is. How questions. But this is why I start with settings, properties, contacts, Persona.

Yeah, and what I think is interesting is because I talked to Chris last week and and Chris hated this question altogether. He it's really nice when you have a guest on that. But one thing he didn't was like obviously Chris looks way more post sales than you and I do. But I do think the Persona piece is important pre and post sale. So it's like we were saying before, like what to do first depends so much on like the business and everything like that. But to your point, Personas are applicable any business, any size and any role and any role of HubSpot also. So just put that together. Just so I'm clear, the I am statement is that a. That's a text field.

So in the Persona tool it's literally like a single line text field. But what it creates on the other side, once you have those three to four or three to five positive Personas, the one to two negative Personas, it takes the all of those I'm a statements that are these descriptions for the Personas and it puts it in a drop down select feature inside of the forms tool. And so you don't really know that you're building that as you're building the Personas unless you go over to forms, drag it in and then you see, oh, here are all of them together where somebody could select one of them and move forward. Yeah. So but you're typing it as in like a single line text in the Persona tool.

So the person filling out the form is selecting it from a drop down list.

Yeah, the person is selecting it from a dropdown select on the form. They don't need to type anything in. Honestly, we don't want them to type anything in. Because if I circle back this back to another important reason of why I like to start with the Personas is at the end of the day I want to be able to report on how many humans of what type of positive or negative Personas came to our portal or our website or filled out our forms, started conversations, conversions down to like, hey, who is the most revenue driving human Persona that we're actually helping? And here's another piece too is one of the things that I love to add into that Persona tool is an other. And for the other, the description I do something depending on the brand. But for like our brand we go wow comma, I'm none of those. Right. And maybe even an exclamation mark because then what we can do is if they select that we can do a dependent field and we can say, well then how would you best describe yourself? And honestly, when we were doing this way back in the day and we were doing it at the sales line, it was this piece that made us realize that there are a lot of agencies that were coming and listening to the Hubcast podcast. And also we realized we had a whole nother set of humans that we could be helping. Now what I want to unpack and what I hope everybody heard is, wow, you could have a form with a property of other doing Persona research for you along the way. Because now you can start to see what type of humans are filling out that other field. And is that a thing that we should start to create content around? Is that a, a product that we need to build and launch? And so for us, we actually created at the sales line agency Adam as a Persona over time. So we, when people would come, we'd get less others and it would be, you know, marketer or sales or agency owner or employee looking for help for with HubSpot or to educate around HubSpot. And so again, we were able to learn over time and kind of iterate. And that's the other thing. Persona property shouldn't be set it and forget it. It should be doing this research. You should be kind of leaning into it and tweaking it. You should be adding or removing things over time. But it's just again, if you, if you start to nerd out and think about and this is the biggest reason, the experiences that you can create based on the knowledge of the type of humans that they are that you're interacting with. Because imagine like they select small to medium sized business owner and one of the second questions might be something like how do you like to communicate? Email or text or whatever. And the other one is, might be how do you like to educate? And it might be video, podcast or text. Now if I know somebody likes to communicate in this way, educate in this way, and they are this type of human, I can start to piece some parts of the puzzle together. Like I want to create this type of experience for them. Therefore this human, I'm going to SMS them information around podcast, show notes to a link to that they can do because they love audio and they like text messages and boom. Now I'm not just thinking in like one direction. I'm able to think in multiple directions based on the human.

You definitely surprised, I mean you, I definitely didn't think we were Gonna talk about Personas today. And that was one of my questions.

You'd be surprised.

You were correct. I should. I never doubted you, but I, I'm even more surprised than I thought I was gonna be. Yeah, I was gonna ask about that other property and of course, revisiting that and everything like that. Do you have any best practices on, like, how many Personas?

Yeah, and again, it depends. But when I'm teaching this and I'm helping people through it, I usually do three to five positive Personas. By the way, it could be two to four. And I like to get them to think of one to two negative Personas. And that's usually, that's the stretch. But when, when they can stretch their mind into, like, who they're not a good fit for. Because so many times we go to business of like, oh, well, we can help everybody. No, no, we have to have specificity. There should be people we can help and there should be people that we know we're not a good fit for. And so again, 2 to 4, 3 to 5, positive, 1 to 2, negative. And, and one of the things that I do love and I'll just kind of lean into this is the negative Personas is where some actual automagical stuff can happen. Where one of the things, we were working with a pest control company one time and they knew that a negative Persona for them was, we called them Apartment Annie. Okay, it could have been Apartment Adam. But at the end of the day, if you're a pest control company and you know that the person above you, below you, or to each side of you does not take care of the issue, guess what happens? The issue comes back. And so as pest control company, they'd be like, yeah, we don't, we don't help people in apartment complexes or apartment style housing. And so what they would have is they would have this. I live in an apartment or apartment style dwelling. Right? Positive intent. That's who you are. That's how you're going to self segmentize. When they would select that, a couple things would happen. One, immediately they would get a negative lead score that would knock off lead score points from them. Right. Because that could be one of the lead scoring rules that were in place. Two, they would, in about five minutes, two to five minutes, they would get an email and explain that they're not a good fit for the company. But here are three DIY ideas, and here are three companies that actually service your type of living. And by the way, if you want to know if you're a good Fit for our organization in the future. Head over to our here's who we work with page which by the way educates them on if you're a homeowner and blah blah, blah. And so now we're leaving them with warm fuzzies because we're helping them fix even though we can't drive revenue, we're educating them for the future. So when you know Adam from B2 and Annie from C3 or I don't know where they live but if they had, you know, get together, get married or whoever, whatever combination and they actually end in a home and there's a rattlesnake in their backyard, who are they going to call? They're going to call people that they know they're a good fit for. That left them warm fuzzies that actually educated them when they couldn't drive revenue. And this was all powered off of. You self segmented yourself into a negative Persona and we built a great user experience based on that. Like yeah, come on.

I mean thinking of myself like I just the other day someone reached out to me about my 30 day program. They were like, hey, I've been using Spot for a while. Is this going to cover like more advanced techniques? And I said no. And I was like, George B. Thomas has a super admin training that you should check out. Like I mean to that same effect. I'm like, no, I'm not the best fit for you. But here is so, but having that negative information and to your point, framing it in a positive way because if you frame it in a negative way, people aren't going to select it because they're trying, they're trying to get through the form.

Yes, exactly, Exactly.

They're doing the 00 talk to operator.

Human please. Yes, exactly.

And you do use those Personas for email workflows based on the Personas.

Oh yeah, yeah. So, so we'll have. And again this is, you know, if you're a good HubSpot user, you use folders and in folders you then have list. And so we'll have like all marketing Marys, all you know, Ollie operations, all Adam agency. And then we'll even have sub kind of lists of like what is the best combination of, you know, answered, what is the medium combination of answered. What's kind of like okay, well you didn't answer it to the best of what we would usually like to work with. And by the way, that's the other thing is when we do three to five Personas we try to get people to think of like Primary, secondary, tertiary, fourth and fifth. Because again, if you go to a scoring model, you know that you would give more points to a primary that answered these ways versus a secondary that answered these ways. However, if a primary answered in like, not the greatest of way, in a secondary, in a better way, then you have that fluctuation of the like scoring that you're actually going to give those humans to like, elevate that. Which by the way, that could be a whole different conversation of like and like that we've done some of the.

Primary like, like, it would be like agency, individual contributor, agency manager, kind of something like that could be.

Yeah, it just, it depends again.

Yeah, it depends so much so it's hard to like.

So for instance, if I give an example, real world example, if I said agency Adam, for us, okay? And I. And the dropdown was like, I'm an agency owner or employee looking for help for my agency. Some extra questions might be like, are you currently a HubSpot user? How many hubs are you currently using? How many employees do you have? Like, what, what goals are you trying to reach? Like, so I might literally have those so dependent upon the way that they answer, no, I don't have HubSpot versus yes, I have HubSpot, or I have these many employees versus that many employees. Or like, this is the rubrics that I can create to understand. Like, each of these answers could be worth a certain score. And so now I have the Persona, I have the answers, and they're giving me this rubrics that I can create of like. And again, it becomes a very flexible and fluid model that you can kind of pay attention to. But, but don't get hung up on the, the mathematics of it all. What I want people to get hung up on is the second smart questions that you should be asking that you might not even ask right now based on, you could start it with knowing who that human believes themselves to be. That's, that's the part that I want you to get hung up on. Because based off of that, now, yes to your question, we have these macro and micro lists that can be the trigger for the email flow or flows that we want to send out. And they can be very written one to one, right? So now imagine this in a world of AI that we live in. Because by the way, this is one of the things that AI does really well, personalize at scale. Imagine being able to say, hey, this is our Persona. This is their roles, goals and challenges. By the way, we want to write this email and you Might give it the original email. But now if this Persona answered these questions in these ways, how could we personalize this email more to them and boom, see what it spits out. Of course you'll humanize it and you'll tweak it and you'll do all the things, but you could literally have three to five versions of what was the base email now personalized on the way that they answer the questions. Because by the way, if they answer a question in a certain way, you know the lack or extreme challenge that they might be facing to lean into when you're actually creating the email that would go out in these different flows. And so again, think of it as how do I use Personas to create a choose your own adventure without knowing you just chose your own adventure as the type of emails then and experiences that I'm going to give you moving forward. Because by the way, we haven't talked about like changing website pages and stuff based on that. Now we know you're this type of Persona content.

Yeah.

Images and this copy.

So here's where you blew my mind, George. I have clients often that have 10 different resources in their resource center and they want to have a different workflow, a different follow up series based on each of those 10 resources. And I'm consistently seeing and telling them it's a lot of work for not a lot of output. And what, what tends like it tends to be better if you can just send them something more up to date, more timely. However, I, I think your, I mean your strategy makes way more. George B. Thomas's strategy makes way more sense.

Here's where my brain goes, right if, if you were using this, you could circle back around and do somewhat of what they, I think they're asking is like if I kn. I would actually know which one of the five, three or two of the ten resources to get to the human. Because like again, why would it start with platform, why would it start with product, why would it start with resource when it should all start with the human?

Yeah, I think often we're talking to the resource, we're not talking to the human.

Yep.

Yeah, that's it said that's it. Any, any final thoughts, George?

Yeah, my final thought is go into settings, go into properties, go into contacts and search Persona. And if you're not using the Persona tool, if your Persona tool isn't have an I'm a statement in the description. If you don't have your Persona in all of your forums asking, you know, how would you best describe yourself if you're in an organization that isn't focused on human first and the type of experiences, communication and segmentation. It's time to stop. It's time to rethink. Like what if this was the model? What if we were actually human centric value first experience, first focused organization? What would we change today? That's my final thoughts.

I you've converted me. I'm going to go set up my Personas this weekend. I don't know if I'll do it this weekend, but I'll do it.

I love it. I love it. It'll be a fun journey.

I think one of my issues with Personas historically has been it felt like a lot of showmanship and I think I need to get past that that.

And it's none of that. Like I want everybody hopefully the takeaway for people past what I just said is it is literally the mathematics of segmentation, conversation, communication like it and it all is just based on the fact that that description is a drop down and then you can expand it out to lists and forms and reporting and like the CTAs that show up and don't show up and like it. Just if you do it right, it fleshes out to so many other HubSpot tools for your for your base strategies.

All right, that's a wrap on today's HubSpot setup secrets. Huge thanks to George V. Thomas for sharing your go to moves and behind the scenes thinking. If you told me a month ago George V. Thomas 2 months ago George V. Thomas and I would just be chatting on a Friday, I would be very surprised. So thank you George. If you're watching and you're thinking, I wish I had a guide for exactly what to focus on inside HubSpot day to day, that's exactly what I'm building with my 30 days of HubSpot Practical Approach course. Designed for people that want to feel confident in the tool without feeling overwhelmed. And if you're Persona is too advanced, I'll send you to George for his sidekick strategy super Admin training. I'll drop the sign up link for both in the comments of this event and thank you. I hope we hope to see you join us and if you have tips of your own or want to be on a future stream, shoot me a dm. Have a happy Friday everyone.

Thanks Casey. Thanks everybody.