Why Go HubSpot Operations Hub?

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? 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 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 both Devin and Max are 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 and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, first of all, it's a very, very, very, very, very sad day. That's right. You have to listen to me a little bit more on this episode than you typically have for the last, I don't know, 4, 5, 6, 7, something like that. Because unfortunately, it's the guys club today. Liz is not here with us, but I am super excited that we have Nick Carbone. We're going to get into who you are, what you do, Nick. But first of all, the topic of Today's podcast is HubSpot Operations Hub, and do I have some thoughts? Anyway, let's go. Right. I'm telling you, Max, I have that stick of dynamite. I'm gonna lob it up in the air here in a minute. But before I do that, Nick, why don't you explain to the Hub heroes who you are, what you do, and why really, it's important to you as a human to do it.

Yeah. Thank you for having me. First of all, I'm very excited to to be in this room on the guys epis, but I'm Nick Carbone. I am the go to market manager for Operations Hub. What that means is I'm kind of like the bridge between our product teams and the rest of the business. So as we build new product, iterate on existing product, and kind of refine our go to market motion, it's my job to kind of like, tie all those different threads together, make sure the right teams are talking to each other, and just kind of be that bridge between the product team and the rest of, like, the HubSpot universe. So think like you know, our own sales teams, marketing team, service success partners, Just all kinds of teams that need to be in the loop. I also help, of course, with, like, bringing these actual things to market. I help with the launch strategy, executing on that. So that's a little bit about what I do. Why I do is really, really, really energizing for me. So I get to work on new, cool stuff all the time. I am rarely working on the same thing for more than a week or two at a time. My days can be different, and they are different every single day. So for me, that is super, super energizing. So that's a bit about why I do it, aside from just working for HubSpot, which is really cool and I love this company, so it's good to do that. But personally, it's energizing for me as well.

Oh, Nick. Nick, you should know that we play a disclaimer at the beginning of the actual episode to the fact that you guys work at HubSpot and that your thoughts are your own. So it's nice that you said that you love to work for HubSpot, as does every HubSpot that ever gets on the podcast. We love working here. Now, here's the thing. Before I do throw the stick of dynamite around Operations, hub out and kind of kick this conversation off, I do also, Max, need to address the elephant in the room. First of all, Max, are you feeling good about yourself today?

Sure.

Okay, well, that's a good answer. It took you a hot minute to figure that out, but I'm glad that you said sure, because I just want you to know for, like, the last five to seven minutes before you and Devin got into the green room, the studio area here, I was actually consoling Nick because when I asked him who his favorite superhero was, he said Batman. But that's already Max. And then he started to cry, and so I had to, like, let him know that we'll figure out another superhero for him because Max the bully took Batman away from Nick.

Well, he can be Robin if he wants, I guess.

Well, can I. Can I say why I was upset? Not only because Batman is my actual favorite superhero, but I thought it would have been a really cool analogy between superheroes and ops and, like, ops folks in my Persona. I think there's a lot of similarities there between Batman and operations people.

Do I need a new hero then? Should I. Should I grant that one upon Nick?

Well, no, my question is we should ask the Hub heroes, the community, should we allow there to be, like, there were three spider Men, should there be, like, Batman from other, like, multiverses allowed to come in to the Hub verse? That's what. So, audience, you're listening to this. Should we have multiple heroes from different Hub verses show up and make appearances? You got to let us know. Use the hashtag Hub Heroes podcast. All right, now let's get into this real reason we're here.

Hold on.

I got 2 cents on this real quick. We can have more than one Batman because there has been more than one Batman.

This is true.

You can totally be Adam West Batman while Max is Christian Bale.

Why does he get the coolest outfit?

Good question.

Hey, I'm a huge fan of the Adam west, right?

I would take the Adam west one if we gotta switch it up a little bit, but.

Okay, well, I'll take. I'll take Nolan's Batman then, for sure.

Oh, that's too funny. All right, so here's the deal. We're here to talk about Operations Hub, okay? And the stick of dynamite that I have been waiting all week to just launch into the room is that we called it Operations Hub. Okay? So we got Marketing Hub, we got Sales Hub, we got Service Hub, and. And the world is trucking along just fine. Hub Landy is like, yeah, let's. And then Operations Hub comes out. And I'm. I'm gonna tell you the number one question I got at that point in time was this. Where's the Hub? Where. Where. Where's the Hub? Because fundamentally, when it was released, you didn't really see, per se, a set of tools that were operations tools because they were kind of, like, I don't know, incognito. Already there part of something else. Okay, HubSpot employees, go.

I got an opinion on that. My thing with Ops Hub. Ops Hub isn't so much like a hub in the traditional sense, where you, like, see a whole new corridor of your house opened up. To me, it's just an added level of functionality across the board that does things that an ordinary suite wouldn't previously have been able to do. And if you have it in the right hands, you can make HubSpot stand up and dance.

Oh, I like when HubSpot stands up and dance. Max, what are your thoughts? And then we're gonna kick it to Nick.

I mean, isn't it beautiful that it's not a totally different piece of software? Right? And, like, if you think about HubSpot, right, it's one of those things where, you know, like, how do. How do you even define where a hub starts and where it Begins.

Right?

And it really plays into that narrative that I love that, like, HubSpot grows with you. Right. And why make you get stuff that you don't need yet? Right. If you think about it, Operations Hub, a lot of the times those tools really aren't going to come into place until a certain point in a company's, like, level of complexity, right? Until a company only grows to be so complex when it needs to connect to all these different outside systems, when it needs to do much more specific things than, like, basic automation can do things like that, you know. But the good part is it's just like another one of those things that, like, enhances the thing that you already have versus, like a whole different, like, you know, chunk or piece or separate platform that you have to then learn. Right. So, you know, you could kind of make that same argument that, like, a lot of the other hubs kind of like blended in this one thing. But that's why I kind of think it's like, you know, a beautiful thing. Right. But, Nick, I'll let you give your thoughts on it.

I have a lot of thoughts. I do like Devin's analogy about a house. And what I'd say about Operations Hub is it is like the wiring, maybe your H Vac. It's like all the stuff that's going to make you comfortable to, like, the point where if it's working well, you shouldn't notice it. Like, it should just be, hey, like, I've got faster Internet and nothing lags. Hey, I've got, you know, the right temperature. I've got no hot spots, no cold spots. You know, I've got enough power through all of my outlets or, you know, enough amperage or whatever to power all these new devices or new things I have plugged in. So that's kind of how I think about Operations Hub. It does exist in the background. But to build off of Max's point, having those upgrades is going to be crucial for folks that get to it to a certain point, whether with their house or with their CRM implementation.

So it's interesting you're still going. So Nick goes, wiring, H Vac. Devin, you said plumbing. I'm sitting here thinking, like, I am so surprised. And I'm, by the way, Devin, I'm about to speak your love language. Just for a hot minute, I was like, I am so surprised that Devin didn't just say, operation makes your home a smart home. Yeah, see, I knew that was gonna happen as soon as I said that. Like, it just takes everything and makes it A little bit smarter. It is that underlying element. But here you guys, by the way, ding, ding, ding. You pass. Nobody exploded. The dynamite was a dud. Great answers, but we have to back up 50,000 foot. And Nick, I want you to take this one first because there are going to be people listening this podcast who have been using HubSpot for maybe years, but haven't even really thought about using Operations Hub. There's going to be people who tun into this podcast and aren't even using HubSpot because they're on the journey, try to figure out a HubSpot right for their company. And so just answer the question, what the heck is HubSpot Operations Hub and what problem or problems was it designed to solve?

Yeah, that is a great question and one I am prepared to answer, luckily. So Operations Hub was built to solve for three different things and to kind of help folks do three different things. We call those the three Ps and this is kind of our product philosophy behind Operations Hub. So it's platform, process and perspective. And those three P's we feel are things folks should be paying attention to really at any stage in their journey. So whether you are a five person company or a one person company, or a 500 or 1000 person company, you're going to care in some way about platform, process and perspective. So to kind of break that down very quickly, platform is connecting systems. So I saw today actually earlier a stat that like the average company is using 240 something different apps potentially. So we want to make sure that as much of that is connected to your CRM, to your source of truth as possible. So that's the first P that's platform process. After we've got all that stuff connected, after we've got our data moving in and out into where it should be moving in and out and to and from. Can we stand up an efficient process for the folks working inside HubSpot or working inside any CRM really, if we're thinking more holistically just to do their jobs. And then ideally can we automate that stuff wherever possible? And then the third thing is perspective. So we've got all of our systems connected, we've got a good process in place, we're generating data from like our customer interactions, whether that's in person, whether that's on our website, whether that's from wherever, who knows, can we use some tools and can we get good perspective from all that data, do a bit of reporting, get a bit of insight to drive better business decisions? So Operations Hub is a Tool that layers on top of other hubs on top of the platform again to help with those three Ps so platform, process and perspective.

I love that so much in the perspective one, I don't know if you noticed when you, when you said that my ears perked up because I was like where is that one going? The other two is like, okay, totally get it. I love the fact that we're focusing and when I say we're, I mean you guys at HubSpot are focusing on better ways to see the data and make intelligent decisions quicker to be able to move businesses in the right way. Now what I am curious though, Max and Devin, now that you have heard for probably maybe the hundredth or two hundredth time those three P words, is there something that has been, oh wow, that really wasn't what we thought or what we meant. But people are doing these things as well. Like what is there a shocker involved in kind of what Operations Hub is for some companies or folks that you've.

Talked to, not me personally, because it's such an open ended hub. There is so much that you can do with it once you add it on and have a developer who is comfortable building things out. At that point, the world is your oyster and it's a matter of just imagining how to use this tool to fix your problem. It's such an effective multi tool that can help in so many different sections of the business. From simple things like, you know, housekeeping and database management and data cleanup to integrations. Super important and making it so you don't have to use a third party tool to do it where you can create these custom integrations and custom call outs and you can add automation to workflows and your workflows are so much more powerful when you have Operations Hub. It's like we do this thing with HubSpot partners called impact Awards where we're looking at ways people are using HubSpot's products to innovate and create new solutions for customers. And it's unending. There are hundreds of people who submit every year and it's just when you add in that layer of opsub that that's just one or one like entire toolbox of apps that you used to have to use to get stuff done that you don't have to do anymore. You can do it all within your system. And so as far as being surprised, I guess you could say constantly surprised, because people are able to now bend the CRM and the data within to their will at a whim using this New hub, newish. It's not really new anymore.

I don't know if I'm like shocked, but I think the, the I, I keep stumbling upon like all these new possibilities maybe I've never thought about before when it comes to these different tools and operations hub, especially when you can kind of like think about how they pair well with other tools that like already exist in HubSpot. So like for example, like you think of something like business units, right? Which is not a operations hub thing, that's a, it's a marketing hub tool, right? But the implication of like business units is that, hey, there's a possibility that you have multiple teams from multiple brands, some of which may or may not interact with each other, some of which may have a deep or not so deep understanding of the data structure inside HubSpot, or may not have a whole ton of control over how things are set up, right? And that can turn things like reporting into like a total nightmare, right? But you pair that situation with something like data sets, right? All of a sudden you have this ability to do data enablement, right? So what do we mean by data enablement? Like what if all those different teams, whether it's the sales team from brand A or the marketing team from brand B or the marketing team from brand C, or like whoever it is, Those people controlling HubSpot are able to like enable those folks with sets of data that's only relevant to their business unit, pre filtered the properties that are only relevant to them. So those folks spend way less time being confused about all these other properties or where these big chunks and swaths of data are coming from and they're able to go in there and just use the data that's relevant to them, right? And not having to worry about how they're filtering and chopping and eliminating and cleaning the data before they get to use it. Right? And they don't have to have that deep understanding of the data structure, right? So while like, you know, that specific scenario is like a little bit more nuanced, you start to see these, you know, other different use cases when you're thinking about how people are using existing tools and how this can be like a nice supplemental layer on top of it. So, you know, thinking of those use cases as they come along is always really exciting.

Yeah, so I gotta pause for a minute because I, I am loving right now playing the role of Liz because I am watching Nick and as Max is talking, Nick leans in, he leans in a little bit more, you can see he starts to itch and Twitch, he's like, okay, I'm ready, boss. Put me in. Like, I'm. I'm ready to. I want to get in this fight. So, Nick, I already know where your brain is going, dude. What's the deal with data sets?

Yeah, so, I mean, if I can call it the most underrated tool in HubSpot, I think that might be a fair. A fair thing. I see Max nodding. So Datasets does two really cool things. Well, overall, it's gonna add a ton of power to reporting, but we really wanted to do two different things. Number one, we want to enhance the amount of customization you can build into a report. So think of things like calculations, function and formula library conditional logic into calculations that you can then use downstream in custom reports. So we're adding power there, adding customization, all kinds of cool stuff. But the second thing it does to kind of talk about Max's data enablement point that he made a second ago, it makes reporting easier for end users of custom reports. So if you have a different team, like say a marketing team or a sales team, or just someone that doesn't want to have to route through an entire CRM's worth of data every time they go to build a custom report, data sets, solves for that, we give you basically just a prepackaged little bundle of properties, filters, calculated properties, all that kind of stuff, and then you build your custom report off of that super, super easily.

Remember, Remember when you said I want users to spend more time on the golf course than whatever data sets is great for that. Because now that admin or whoever owns reporting can basically just build people the pre built sets of data, they need to go and do reporting on their own. And they don't have to go and like choose the data sources, add the right filters, do the right thing, like whatever, every single time, right? So it's like, you know, even at its most basic form, you could look at it as like a time saving tool for people too as well, but it goes so much, like further and beyond that.

Well, I think too, when I think about that, two things come to my mind. Hey, we got partway through the podcast without me saying it, but two things come to mind. One, I think whenever I'm teaching the custom report builder, the amount of stuff that people can see is paralyzing to them. And so any way to like decrease that and streamline what they're actually working with, I think is a bonus. The other thing too, because we mentioned calculated properties a couple of times in there, is, man, I wish I could create a. And maybe I'm stupid somebody audience. If I am, please let me know. I wish I could create someday in the very near future, a calculated property that I could actually tell it to spit out as a currency number. Anyway, just gonna throw that out there because I have Nick on the podcast and I can say it. All right, but let's go ahead and get into the actual reason why people are here. And that is one of the things that I battle against, Nick, and I've said it on many of the episodes, is sometimes I feel like HubSpot hubbed themselves to death. Like, wow, we don't need another hub. Why are we like, hub this, hub that? But here's the thing. What I'm really curious because obviously it was important because it got created. Why did HubSpot decide. Decide to tackle operations as part of its suite of hubs, or hub strategy, if you will?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think if I could answer it in, like, one sentence, it was, and it is still to us, the importance of revops as a field and as a stakeholder among our other Personas. So we think about marketing, sales, service especially, and then cms to an extent, but then operations. We want all of those folks to be seen as equal, like stakeholders, equal participants. And we want to recognize them with their own hub and their own set of tools because we believe that their role and what they solve and what they're. They're working on is important enough to warrant its own hub.

Well, I think it also just makes sense too, because think about it like, not, not all small businesses have operations teams, right? They've got the, the front office secretary, the. The owner that just knows how to do everything. The, the. The. The sales guy who's, like, also in charge of marketing. Like, you know what I mean? They don't have, like, you know, formalized operations roles or teams until they kind of grow into a size and complexity that necessitates it, right? So it's like, why make people buy a whole bunch of stuff at the beginning when you don't need it, right? Again, I think it's. It makes sense that it's in the philosophy that it's something you can grow into when your business calls for it and it has a need, right? Which I think makes sense to kind of separate it from other things because it's not going to be relevant for everybody, right? Especially when we look at the smaller end of the SMB, you know, customers that we serve and things like that. So well.

So then that Makes me ask the question, is it always an additional add on? And if you're not enterprise or like unpack that a little bit because I don't want people to get confused of, well, should I start off with Operations Hub or should I get three or six months or a year down the road and then bring in Operations Hub, like unpack that kind of like cloudiness a little bit?

Well, yeah, let's think about what it even does at the front free level and I'll let you guys jump into a second. But like at the free level, you got all these data sync avail, like integrations available to you, right? And if you think about like what's like a basic operations like thing that a small business might be doing, it's like, well, maybe I need my, you know, this app to talk to HubSpot and just like share some basic contact information between people, right? I'm sick of like exporting and importing stuff, you know what I mean? And like you can do that free, like the free version of Operations Hub that everybody has access to is the simple fact that data sync integrations exist and you can use them, right? If you got to use them at like a much deeper level, right? And getting into like custom field mappings and all this other wild stuff, that's when you kind of, you know, start investing into it a little bit more. Right? But you know, it is, there is really important parts of it are accessible to everybody.

Yeah, if I could chime in. You mentioned something before, Max. Everybody has someone that's doing operations, so I think it's important to call out like if I hit you guys over the head with the three P's again, everybody's thinking about those things. You don't have to be super sophisticated and have an ops team, ops manager, ops director, to be thinking about platform, process and perspective and to have needs that could be solved for by any of the Operations Hub tiers.

So this one, I love this question and I love Devin's like, no, I don't have anything for this particular one, but I do think that Devin will chime in here quite quickly because you look at the space, right? You see what everybody's kind of doing, what they're trying to do. What do most people not understand about HubSpot Operations Hub that you're like, come on, just, just get it, will you?

Just get it for me, it's the fact that when it comes to the capabilities, it's such a, it's a lot of functionality, but at the same time it's kind of also a blank slate where what you can use is talented as whoever developer you can get into the workflows tool. And it's just like, I'm going to talk about the workflows tool and Operation Hub a lot because there is so much more that you can automate and craziness that you can do using workflow workflows once you get the Operations Hub. And I think that's. I have a methodology when it comes to whatever tools I'm using for whatever I'm doing. I think about the tools last. I think about the problems that need to be solved. I think about the steps to solve the problems. And then in prior times you would need to, you know, maybe finagle and do things that are kind of unorthodox in order to get your growth platform to do what you want it to do and accomplish the goals you want to go. You don't have to think that way anymore. Now it's like, okay, I have this.

Problem I want to solve.

I have this thing I want to do. Operations up. Oh, what do you know, it's done.

Yeah, Nick. So actually, let me just say this because it's interesting, Devin. I'm paying close attention to you today, by the way. That's the second time that you've mentioned the word developer in Operations Hub. So I'm going to come back to a question of do you need a developer if you're doing Operations Hub? But we'll get to that in the future. I still want to let Max and Nick, I'm going to go to you next, answer this question that we're standing on, which is what do you wish people would just understand, like, get it pertaining to Operations Hub.

Yeah, you teed me up, actually, because what I was going to say is the one thing that I would like shout from the top of the mountain is you don't need a developer to use all the features in Operations Hub. It helps tremendously. I'm not, I'm not not undervaluing or underselling the importance of having a developer to use custom code actions or webhooks or something like that, but there's like half a dozen features in Operations Hub that require absolutely no coding experience and no developer time or resources whatsoever. So that's my one big thing.

I think the big thing I kind of want to say is that it's not as scary as it looks, right? If you go and look at the pricing page of Operations Hub, you're going to see a bunch of stuff, but just like a lot of the other hubs at each one of their tiers. There's, there's, there's a lot of stuff that like, also comes in the same tier of like another product, right? That's like necessary for you to have. But the unique stuff in Operations Hub is actually pretty simple, right? Like again, we talked about the free version that's just data sets. I mean, not data sets, Data sync. It exists. You can use those integrations, right? The paid version, same thing. But you can do custom field mapping now, right? Pro is like a giant upgrade to the workflows tool, right? It gives you one additional workflow type, that scheduled option, which is really, really infinitely useful. And then you've got formatting data, custom code, workflow actions, and trigger webhook within workflows. Now you might say, oh, that's only three things, but that's three things that can do almost anything, right? It literally turns workflows into On God mode, right? Like you can do so much. Like I always call the custom coded workflow action the nuclear button for workflows, right? It's like, oh, does an action not work quite the way you want it to? Well, you can code it to do whatever you want, right? There you go, you know, and then when you think about Enterprise, the Snowflake Integration and Data Sync, that's it, right? Very simple tools, but a ton of power behind it. It's not so scary once you understand the basic parts. I did also miss in Pro, there's the, the, the Data Quality Command center, which is a total godsend for folks who are like stepping in to maybe clean up a portal that's been a bit neglected for a while, right? Or someone who's like managing a portal with a lot of data going in and out. A lot of people have been using it over years and they want to start to really wrangle their data structure, how they have their property set up, how information is getting in and everything, and the health of all that stuff, you know, so there's a lot in there, but again, it's not that many things from a volume perspective, but what they can do for you, it's like crazy.

So I want to dive in there for a second because I want to talk about data and data quality, but before I do that, what's interesting, and maybe I just didn't hear it and it was said, but I believe one of the other things, at least when it was launched, there was some conversation around custom coded chat flows as well. So we haven't mentioned that it's still A thing that people could be paying attention to, right?

Yeah, totally. So we have in Pro Max alluded to it, custom coded workflow actions, which is a blank template inside of a workflow where you can write JavaScript or Python to do pretty much whatever you want. And then we have webhooks. So sending or retrieving data from a third party system, those both exist in chat flows too. We don't talk about them too much, honestly. There are more use cases, frankly, for those in workflows, but they do exist in chat flows as well. And there's some super cool applications.

Yeah. If you're sitting there and you're like, man, I wish my chat could do just a little bit more. It can. But let's get to what I feel like is going to be a very interesting conversation, especially knowing the four of us on this podcast right now is I wish people would understand the moment that they say to themselves or hear these things. If you've said to yourself, man, this data is dirty, or if you've heard your team say, well, I just can't trust the data, I wish you would understand that your brain should go, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Operations Hub. Right. So Nick, can you just kind of wax poetic about data quality? Is it really that important? Just give us your thoughts on that whole ball of wax that so many businesses are jacking up.

I mean, my short answer is it's super important. But for the longer answer, it's I, I kind of think it sucks that so many people have just accepted either poor quality data or data of an unknown quality as a fact of life. They just kind of build in this margin of error to their reports and they'll present a report to somebody or they'll run a workflow and they'll just be like, well, you know, that's an error. That's a number I can live with. You know, that's this is fine, or, you know, they'll have to like, caveat the report they're showing in a meeting because, hey, we can't trust all the data for X, Y and Z reasons. So I don't like that. I do like clean data. And that's kind of something that we're focusing on now. In Operations Hub, we launched a suite of features at the last inbound. It was very cool. We got like the rockstar treatment on the center stage with crafted data Management. This project. We've been working on all these features, but basically we want to do two things when it comes to data. We want to make sure we are Preventing bad data from getting in in the first place. So think of things like property validations not exclusive to Operations Hub. They fall under our kind of umbrella though. So think about preventing bad data from getting in that way or with a better import experience. And then we want to monitor and clean data over time. So we're going to accept the fact that unfortunately, hey, no matter what we do, somebody's going to fat finger or either on our end or when they're filling out a form on our site, something like that. So we're going to have to do things over time to actually monitor and clean this data after it's already in the system. And that's where Operations Hub really comes in with the data quality Command center, with bulk dedupe, with our format data tool or with our, our formatting or our AR powered formatting recommendations, I should say. So we're kind of thinking of like the, the whole holistic solution here and just again trying to make sure that people realize there is a better life out there for them. They don't just have to live in this world where they accept the fact that that half of them, half their CRM data isn't trustworthy.

So Hub heroes, audience. I'm gonna have to get video versions of these out somewhere where you can watch them eventually. Because Max literally raised his hands to the data gods above. Devin was vigorously shaking his head. Devin, what are your thoughts that like to what Nick said or your own thoughts when I asked that question of data quality and its importance.

All right, so PTSD. I'll just talk briefly about when I inherited a HubSpot CRM at a company I worked at years ago. And they said that they wanted to clean it up because it had spiraled out of control. So many people had their hands in it. So many people entered data differently. Hey, I'm gonna do all caps. And just everything was everywhere. And the it like when Nick said it got to a point like you just accept that some of the bad is data is bad at that point it was like they didn't even know what they had. Couldn't make heads or tails of it. And it was my job to fix it. And stop me if you've heard this one before. But what I did was I exported the entire database and then started working in Excel and I cleaned up the database. I did all of our funky little deduplication, all of our fun little fixing of formatting everything and just really did a good job of cleaning up the data manually over the course of weeks. Heads down, children wondering where dad is just so I can import this CSV that is megabytes. And it's like all of that for someone to screw it up again. So I have to do it again in six months. And it was pain. It hurt in just from being able to say this is how many of this we have that did this thing. It was so painful. And then it. Oh my. Just, just so many people out there have horror stories and, and not just in HubSpot, just in general. Since databases were databases I'm having to go through and, and just maintain your data hygiene is just like it can become a full time job if you're not careful. Especially like George said, people with fat fingers or people who just oh, this is the way I always gonna do it. I'm gonna do it this way. Maybe you should have put the customer service team in office instead of a cubicle and I would actually care about what the data looked like. It was. It's like this is. I've seen it happen in so many different places across so many different things systems. It's not a unique to our product problem. It's a unique to the human beings using it problem. And it's something that you're just going to have to constantly fix. And if I had had operations hub back then, not only would I have gotten it done infinitely faster, my children would have seen me at night, but also I could have continued maintaining the database, continued maintaining our database hygiene without having to do a full on basically a sprint. It's just wrong. We should end it. I feel like I want to start a commercial and have in the Arms.

Have that playing in the background during the meetings for developing those features. We were actually listening to snippets of calls from folks like you, Devin, who had those horror stories. And the running joke that I, we always talked about was like we need Sarah McLaughlin over these voiceovers where it's like somebody hired an intern to do 37 hours of, you know, deleting extra white space at the end of a text string or something like that.

But no, I was going to say Devin, when they handed over the portal, did it look like one of those dogs from the commercial? All I could think of. And then you said that it was.

It was more like you're just standing in front of a house after hurricane season. You just got your hands on your. Your hips looking at what used to be.

I have to thank you, Devin. I have to thank you because I mean I know I did just start my business seven months ago, but now I've officially know either what I'm going to turn my side hustle into or when I retire another business I'm going to start. And that is I'm just going to become a dirty data therapist and allow people to just voice their opinions of the. The horror that they've been at. But Max, the entire time that Devin was like going down memory lane and and viscerally getting pissed off at like that he had to go through this thing. You were dying like what was going through your brain?

Because I was just picturing someone making a repeat property for like the third time going oh, I'm gonna do all caps and just having like just like the third property that says address but it's like all cats address 32. Oh, I'm gonna do all caps. It's like because it's like yeah, you know someone doesn't on a form. I get it but I've been in Portals where like I'm looking on the sidebar and all of a sudden you just see a couple properties in all caps and then some that are like a full length question someone else on a form and I'm just like like so yeah. And that was too funny.

It's so funny because I have to admit. And then we'll move on to the next question. I am a little bit of a cheater. Cheater because one of the things I do is I do HubSpot audits and I love when I do a HubSpot audit and I see that they have Operations Hub and the fact that they didn't realize that they could have just seen a lot of what I'm about to talk to them about using Operations Hub anyway. But usually I have that conversation and it's a teachable moment afterwards. Here's the thing we've talked about. What do we wish they'd understand? I'm super curious and I think I know it's gonna probably be the same heavyweight dude. I have this same feeling. But I could be wrong. What is the most powerful features of the Operations Hub?

I. I already know my personal preference is custom coded workflows. Like you. You can any like I. When I saw that feature I. I almost like lost it. It was just you can do anything. Like when George was talking about before when he brought up smart homes. Reason why he brought that up. For those of you who don't cyber stalk me, I. One of my side hustles is a smart home company and one of the things that I love is that I can do custom automations where like for a While I had it set up, but every 30 minutes a light would flash and tell my kid that he needed to use the bathroom. And that took six different systems to use. Like, not even. No hyperbole. I had to incorporate six different platform ecosystems in order to tell my kid he needs to not pee on himself. And being able to have that kind of flexibility, it's like it turns HubSpot into a sleeper. If you're a car person, it really allows you to unlock features that you don't have to be an expert to use, you don't have to be a developer to use. But the thing is, is that the deeper you get and, and the more upmarket you get as far as being an enterprise user and the more complex your problems are, the more you can do and then not only fix problems, but then you can automate them. So it just fixes ad finitum. It's like, dude, that's ridiculous. Like, it's nothing like it. Nitrous.

I have, I think I have to agree on custom code actions, although. So I'm going to give like the politician's answer and say it depends on the person using Operations Hub which features the most powerful. So I mean, to go back to data quality, somebody could have like the most filthy, disgusting CRM data in the world. And for them to get ahold of Operations Hub Pro and clean that up, that could change their business. Right? Like better reports, more reliable automation like that can be truly life changing for someone. But I think if we're talking about in terms of, of just like use cases and sheer power, we'd probably have to go with custom code actions. Just the ability for me to be able to tell our sales reps like, hey, like if somebody asks can we automate blank using HubSpot, you really don't have to say no. You have to ask them some questions to figure out how we want to do this with custom code actions. But I mean, from my point of view, I don't know how our legal team would feel if they heard me say this. It's kind of like a blank check for automation almost those custom code actions. So I think I would agree with Devin and say those CCAs.

Don't worry, Nick. We got a disclaimer at the beginning.

Oh yeah, it's like, thoughts are my own. Right?

You have your own thoughts. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Max thoughts.

Keep an eye on Data Sync because holy, is that tool getting cooler every single month. Right. If you're not familiar with Data Sync, you can think of it as like a standard that the HubSpot is sort of building. And Nick, you could probably position this better than me, but this is at least the way I see it, right? A standard of how HubSpot integrates with other systems out of the box, right? And I think it's really important, especially for the folks who are doing the use case of more classic HubSpot where HubSpot is your marketing tools, but your sales team is living in another CRM right now with tools like Salesforce. We already have that figured out, right? We've got that really great tight integration with Salesforce that's existed for a long time. Deals sync over to opportunities, contacts, leads and whatever. Great. Awesome, right? But when you think of like your sales team using something like pipedrive or Zoho or Dynamics or living in any of these other CRM tools, right, that you know, you might hook HubSpot into, well now you can sync deals and opportunities from those other tools back into HubSpot, right? And keep in mind, if you're doing your marketing efforts inside of HubSpot, you're creating contacts in HubSpot that sync over for that sales team to use. And when those contacts keep existing in HubSpot, but that sales rep starts using that other CRM tool and opens up an opportunity, opens up a deal, opens up a sale or whatever the F that other CRM calls a deal in our world, that deal sinks back into HubSpot and then when that happens, hello, closed loop reporting that you didn't have before. Hello revenue attribution in marketing, Hub enterprise. Hello customer journey analytics. Right? When you're seeing what deals actually get created from these folks you're marketing to, right? It's okay if your team is in another CRM, if you're the marketing team, right? Because you're getting that important information back into HubSpot that you need to do that closed loop reporting that wasn't possible before, right? And just like I don't know if anyone saw this, but like they stealthily kind of like released invoice sync, right? So like now I can be in HubSpot and I can see like invoices from NetSuite in HubSpot without having to create a custom integration or using like a paid third party one, right? Product sync is super cool. There's a bunch of tools out there that will sync product libraries into HubSpot which will allow you to like stealing my thunder.

I can steal ownersync live as of 2 days ago. I know there's someone that was listening to you saying grrr. But it still doesn't sync owners between HubSpot and other CRMs. Now it does so.

And that like, is literal magic. What they had to build to do that because like, the idea of an owner in like other tools is like, can wildly vary. So the fact that they were able to build like a standard to be able to sync that stuff, so when you're using different Data Sync integrations, you kind of already know how to set it up and you already know what's expected out of it is wild. So like, I am so, so bullish on what Data Sync is going to kind of continue to evolve into because it's honestly going to be really, really crazy in the future, I think.

Yeah. See, here's the thing. I was quickly, well, a while ago, because all of you have gone. I was quickly trying to figure out like, who's the small fry in like all of the stuff. Sports, like, and, and I'll age myself as like, you know, the spud web of NBA. But that's as far as I got. But, but I wanted to talk about Data Sync because for me, and, and it's funny, Max, you went to sales and deals and. But where my brain goes is it's so much more than that. Like, you want to bring HR along for the ride Data Sync. You want to bring accounting along for the ride Data Sync. Like one of the most life changing moments for me as the business and Data Sync and Operations Hub was being able to just do products and invoices from QuickBooks right into HubSpot.

Like what?

Yes. Thank you for changing my life and making each and every day just a little bit easier.

And if I could offer a pro tip. Use the data cleanup and data quality tools in Operations Hub to clean the data that comes in from other systems and then push it back to those other systems and boom, Operations Hub is pulling double duty there.

Yeah. Data comes in from Zoho, you clean it in HubSpot and then it goes off to whatever. Right? Like, yeah.

So let's answer two more questions before we kick the kids out of the room and back to their regularly scheduled day. Operations Hub. Who said a right fit for. Who's it not a right fit for? By the way, I position that as one question because another got another question after this. But who's the right fit? Who's the wrong fit?

Only because, like, I have to like, have this conversation with sales reps a lot and people who just like, don't know what Operations Hub is. Not that salespeople don't, but like people new to it are going to have like a little bit of confusion just because it can do so many things, you know, Operations Hub, like data sync aside, Operations Hub isn't a replacement for a custom integration with another system, but is it the best damn companion that that integration could have? Yeah, absolutely right. In terms of the way we can clean the data, keep track of all that data that's coming through, reformat that data, make sure it's getting to the right place, you know, get our automation tools to talk to those outside systems and support stuff that that integration is doing. It's great. So like if you are building a custom integration on HubSpot, there's a lot of tools and Operations Hub that aren't going to replace that like middleware that you build, but it's really going to help cut down on a lot of the work that you would normally have to do with code that you can then do in HubSpot. Especially when you're looking at things like formatting data, triggering web hooks from very surgical specific things that are happening in HubSpot, things like that.

Yeah, I'd say if you have like more than four or five systems that you're connecting to HubSpot, you absolutely need Operations Hub. I'd also say good fits are folks with large teams or folks that have complex automation or reporting needs. So if you need to go above and beyond what's available in say marketing, sales or service hub and reporting or automation, you should look at operations. If you have a large team, chances are you're going to have needs around data quality, needs around automation needs around like reporting enablement, things like that. So those I think would be like some clean boxes I can draw around. Who's a, who's a good fit for.

Me, it's a good fit for people who are dealing with other team members who have confirmation bias and are stuck in their systems and refuses use to migrate over to HubSpot. If you're dealing like let's say you work for a SaaS company that created a homegrown CRM for cheesies and geezies and instead of just migrating over.

Oh man, Nick about just lost his mind with that statement.

I came from Onboarding, Max and I both did. And when I heard homegrown CRM that. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to derail you Devin, but that those two words just make me want to not be in tech I think sometimes.

But yeah, I mean I'm not at all speaking from experience, I'm not at all saying that this is something that I've gone through.

I hope I didn't offend anyone that's listening right now and about to go do more work in there, but sorry, I interrupted. I'll stop.

Yeah, you absolutely need it. It's perfect for people who can't move the needle in other departments. As far as the tools they use, for people who love disparate systems or who are just tied by pride to whatever it is that they currently have in place, it's perfect for those. It's doesn't work for people who are in denial. If you're in denial and refuse to accept the fact that your data sucks, if you refuse to accept the fact that there is a better way and that you don't always have to have a margin of error plus or minus 15 in everything that you're reporting on. If you can't accept that, if that is normal for you and you're happy where you're at and were you then, no, don't get operations up. We don't want to do anything where we might rock the boat too hard. Yeah. But the, the fact of the matter is, is that it. People are going to have disparate systems and whether or not you choose to bring all that like, oh my God, my. I, I hate when we're looking at different metrics and we have to have to go to different tools because one of them is more accurate as a source of truth than others. When we're doing reporting on even simple things like web analytics. And sometimes we're going to use Google Analytics and then other times we're going to use this tool and oh wait, no, we just got Hot Jar. So now we're going to look at this thing and it's it. If you don't, if, if that's you, if that's happy for you, then you don't need operations.

I hope it's not happy for them. But anyway, I can't judge. Usually we end this podcast with like, what's the one action item that you'd want people to take away? However, because I can, I'm going to spin us in a different direction because I think there's a lot of one things that people could pull out of this entire conversation that we've had. I want to give the last question to the second Batman into Multiverse. If the Hub heroes community will let it happen. Because, Nick, I want people to know why they should be excited about ops Hub in 2023. Like, what can you talk about as far as the roadmap and not get in trouble and let us know like, hey, pay attention to this.

I can talk in very, in very broad strokes. So we're going to invest in three broad areas. I'll kind of break it up that way. So we'll see a lot more power with data sets here in the future. And I will kind of spill the beans a little bit on something with data sets that's coming out very shortly. We're going to have the ability to map a calculation from data sets back to a property. So we want to make data sets more connected to the rest of the platform. That's very, very, very, very exciting. More coming on that soon. So we're going to invest in there. We're also going to think about data quality and automation in Pro. So data quality, you kind of saw our first swing at it inbound of 2022. Holy crap, it's 2023 now. Almost said 21. But we're going to keep digging there. Like we know we like have only scratched the surface with what we can do with data quality and then with automation, we want more flexibility with our workflows. So specifically how we trigger workflows and then we're going to probably add a little bit more power to those custom code actions over time this year. So look for us really to iterate on what we have in there and kind of go a level deeper on what's already in Operations Hub right now.

Hold on, did you say more power to custom code actions?

Yeah. So TBD on what that means. I hope. I just didn't write a check that our product team now has to cache, but was looking through our roadmap earlier and there are going to be enhancements. The way it was worded, enhancements to.

Awesome.

Look out.

Yeah.

If I can. Can I say one more thing that I'm excited about that would boost operation. Subs so with workflows, data accessibility has been very tough. So we want to make it easier to retrieve data, bring different. How should I word this? Bring data from different objects into a workflow and then potentially use that in something like a custom code action. So data fetching, data accessibility, things like that, that's a challenge we want to tackle in automation and that would have massive implications for Operations Hub as well this year.

So like fetching from within your own account and making that much easier versus like an outside system, which you might do with like a get request and a web hooker.

Yeah, correct. So basically grabbing data from different objects or things like that, we. More details to come. I don't want to say too much, but we want to make it easier to grab data from inside your CRM and bring that into a workflow when you need it.

You know what, we should just bleep all of that in post because it seems like just entirely too big of a revelation.

Yeah.

I'll double check. No, we'll be fine. It's on. It's on. It's on. Our public facing roadmap. So I didn't say anything that's not on. HubSpot.com new shameless plug. It's another 100 bucks for me.

Can you give me a yes or no? Is there like is is is. I'm Jude. I'm just like so stoked on the future of Data Sync. Right. I don't know if you could just say, yeah, you should be stoked for it or no, you shouldn't be stoked for it. Should I be stoked for it?

I mean, are you? I'm not going to say no. You should always be excited for it. But I mean, but the big thing, I think the big dominoes have fallen, right? We've added new Object Sync. So we launched with what contacts and companies to you almost two years ago. Owner Sync was a huge one for us two days ago. Invoice Sync. New objects like deals have come out over the past few months. We're going to continue kind of working on new field types, things like that. So really finishing the swing on what we.

Okay, Hub Heroes, we've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community or. Or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to thehubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes. FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend, leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hubieroes Podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human. And of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.