HubSpot Sales: Snippets, Templates, and Sequences, oh my! (HubHeroes, Ep. 40)

[00:00:00] Liz Murphy: Welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes. Gentlemen, are you ready?

[00:00:06] George B. Thomas: Welcome back.

[00:00:09] Liz Murphy: I, no.

[00:00:09] Max Cohen: Welcome.

[00:00:10] George B. Thomas: Do you remember that show? Yeah,

[00:00:14] Liz Murphy: that. There's also welcome back Coter. We could go many different

[00:00:17] George B. Thomas: I thought that's what I was singing. Wasn't that what I was singing? Oh man. I'm a terrible singer. Nevermind.

[00:00:22] Liz Murphy: We're doing great kids. How's it going this

[00:00:25] George B. Thomas: Going great.

[00:00:27] Liz Murphy: Max, how are you and your hair doing?

[00:00:30] Max Cohen: Tired. Very tired and sleepy.

[00:00:32] George B. Thomas: your hair ain't sleepy. Your, your hair is like taking over the world right now. Which, which by the way, if you're listening to the podcast right now, And you want to see what Max's hair looks like, then head over to community dot hub heroes.com. Uh, sign up for that free account and go ahead and watch the video version of this podcast.

I'm, it'll be fun. Trust me,

[00:00:53] Max Cohen: Wait, my, my, my hair is in the free version.

[00:00:56] George B. Thomas: your hair's in free version.

[00:00:59] Liz Murphy: Sorry. You're, you're, uh, your emo sweet stylings are not a premium.

[00:01:03] Max Cohen: Oh, I don't blame you.

[00:01:06] George B. Thomas: is like, you gotta, max is like,

[00:01:08] Max Cohen: look like the weak weekend right now.

[00:01:10] George B. Thomas: max is like, you gotta pay for this.

[00:01:13] Liz Murphy: And on that note, hi everybody. I'm Liz. You are apparently lacking Hub Hero Wrangler this week, but I am very excited to dig into our topic. In fact, I'm gonna forego some of our usual extra intros this week because we have a lot of ground to cover. So if you've been listening over the past several episodes to have heroes, we have covered.

A ton of ground. We've talked about workflows and service hub and campaigns and reporting and certification week and artificial intelligence. We have even talked about inbound coming up this September, but gentlemen, do you know what we haven't talked about now in many, many moons? Sales. We have not talked about our pals in sales.

Now, to be fair, if you missed any of those episodes, definitely go back, listen to 'em. They are amazing. But today it is time for us to give some long overdue love to one of our favorite teams, making sure that HubSpot flywheel is spinning it ever so smoothly and that sails. So today we're gonna be doing a deep dive into three.

Of the most cool tools in school, in the HubSpot Sales Hub. I know. Look at that. I did rhyming and I didn't even need AI to help me write it. Thank you. Thank you. That, see, that's what happens when you have an entourage. Right? But today we're talking about snippets. We're talking about templates, and we're talking about sequences.

Oh my. Who's excited?

[00:02:41] George B. Thomas: Oh, I'm definitely excited. Uh, I can't wait to see how this conversation goes and what, uh, everybody has to say about these three tools inside of HubSpot pertaining to sales, but

[00:02:53] Liz Murphy: We're gonna get to that. We're gonna get to that question we're gonna get. Don't let the kitty cat out of bag yet. I know. Don't let it outta the bag just yet. We're gonna be talking about what these tools are, what they aren't, and how these tools can be super powerful for you even if you are not in sales.

Now, if you've been listening, we have touched upon these tools before, but we have never done the deep dives, deep dive like we are doing today. So with that, you know what, George,

[00:03:21] George B. Thomas: Oh,

[00:03:22] Liz Murphy: you let the cat outta the bag a little bit. I'm gonna let you jump in here. Why are we talking about these three tools together for a reason?

And why did you get a little bit chafing when we pigeonholed it into

[00:03:33] Max Cohen: Oh, George, are you chaffed?

[00:03:35] George B. Thomas: Yeah. I've got a

[00:03:36] Liz Murphy: All 

[00:03:37] Max Cohen: Does it get, does this, does this subject get you chuffed?

[00:03:40] Liz Murphy: all those opposed to chafing. Please say, I.

[00:03:42] George B. Thomas: I don't like chafing. It's not a good look. Uh, but, but here's the thing. What, what I want. People to realize, and again, we are gonna go at this a little bit out as a, a sales conversation at first. but I want everybody to realize that snippets, templates, and sequences are a, uh, the ability in HubSpot to create a process, uh, to have a system, to streamline communication, to have consistent brand voice to.

Always be ready at a moment's notice for the thing or things that you might have to do in HubSpot or around HubSpot, as long as you've got your Outlook and Microsoft Exchange and Google connected, like there's just a lot of power and unfortunately I go into a lot of portals and these three tools are just usually being used poorly.

[00:04:40] Liz Murphy: When you say poorly, gimme an example.

[00:04:41] George B. Thomas: They're not being used. That's what I'm

[00:04:44] Liz Murphy: okay, so, so it's not necessarily poorly, it's that people have politely abstained from using them for the most part at all.

[00:04:51] George B. Thomas: Yeah. Listen, listen. If I have, and I'm not saying you have to use all 5,000, but if you look at snippets, you have like 5,000 snippets. You can create templates, like 5,000 templates you can create. Ladies and gentlemen, if you got four in there. Or you got even 10 in there. We are not leveraging it to the ability that we could be using across all team members, and especially as marketers, to enable our sales team, and especially as sales teams, being able to streamline their day, spend less time doing the thing that they hate doing, and more time playing golf. I like to play golf. Yeah, golf. Well, maybe you love your family. Maybe you wanna spend time with your family. But most sales reps, when I say golf, they're like, hell yeah, let's go golf More.

[00:05:41] Liz Murphy: Max and Devin, you wanna weigh in here on golf or snippet sequences and templates? No.

[00:05:47] Devyn Bellamy: just had the conversation about golf today and No, I'm good. Thanks.

[00:05:53] Liz Murphy: Wow. Do you like golf as much as you like? Fast and furious there, Devin.

[00:05:57] Devyn Bellamy: Uh, I actually, if I had to choose between the two, I, I, I would choose golf.

[00:06:01] George B. Thomas: Oh my gosh.

[00:06:04] Max Cohen: Oh,

[00:06:04] Liz Murphy: Oh my God. Oh my God.

[00:06:06] Max Cohen: Oh,

[00:06:07] George B. Thomas: I might need a

[00:06:08] Max Cohen: that was awesome. That was awesome.

[00:06:10] Liz Murphy: What in the name of Dominic Totto are you saying right now? He can hear

[00:06:15] Max Cohen: Oh,

[00:06:16] Devyn Bellamy: often. In, in as much as possible, like, Um, I, I, you, everyone who's a regular listener knows my opinion on the Fast and Furious. I don't need to rehash this. I mean, they, they

[00:06:28] Max Cohen: I don't know what your opinion is, but is your opinion that it sucks?

[00:06:31] Devyn Bellamy: Uh, it jumped the

[00:06:32] Liz Murphy: need to do that. We don't need to do

[00:06:35] Devyn Bellamy: movies ago and like, it's like physics are just like, nah, like it's gotten so bad.

They went meta with plot armor in the last one. It's like, how are we not dead? And I'm like, exactly. Tyrese and. Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna watch Fast X when it comes down on streaming, uh, on a night that I have nothing to do and

[00:06:54] George B. Thomas: available on Voodoo right now. It's available on Voodoo right now, so there you go.

[00:06:59] Max Cohen: That makes a lot of sense.

[00:07:00] Devyn Bellamy: is the question. Cuz that's the thing.

I'm gonna use it on a service that I'm already paying for. I'm not paying extra to see Fast x I, I don't need to know about anyone's family anymore. Uh, I don't care about Aquaman being crazy. I don't like, I don't. I don't care.

[00:07:18] George B. Thomas: See, see, you know, way too much about it to have maybe not watched it. I think your closet, your closet, uh, fast and free. But, but,

[00:07:26] Devyn Bellamy: I saw the trailer. That was good

[00:07:28] George B. Thomas: oh, that was good enough for you speaking. Speaking

[00:07:30] Max Cohen: I'm, I'm,

[00:07:31] George B. Thomas: you know what else is in free in HubSpot? Free Simmons.

[00:07:39] Liz Murphy: max.

[00:07:39] Max Cohen: just going to the person listening to this episode with like a pen and paper down, just like. They just wrote snippets at the top and then they're just sitting there just listening to everything that we just said about to hit the, hit the fast forward button. Yeah, I mean, snippets are

[00:07:55] Liz Murphy: us. Bring us.

[00:07:57] Max Cohen: Uh, I mean, I don't know how much I'm gonna save me here. I think, you know, for me, like these are really tools. Much of the rest of HubSpot, I think, you know, is, is. The value you're gonna get out of them is gonna be the creativity in which you use them, right? I mean, You know, if we think about like what a snippet just literally is, it's like, all right, anywhere that you can input text to the crm, it's gonna drop some text in, right?

So the question is, is like, okay, how do you take something inherently simple like that and make it creative, right? Like, are you using it to save some one some time in their day? Are you using it to make sure you're, you know, making sure the language and. Common verbiage that you use is consistent among your folks using like the conversations tool.

are you trying to solve little problems like making sure people don't have to just remember the support phone number, they can type in hashtag sn and drop the support number in there, right? There's a lot of little things that you can do, you know, all the way from that to like using it as sort of like a lightweight version of playbooks where you just drop a call script into like a meeting that you're logging, right?

So there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with it. Again, it's all gonna come down to your creativity.

[00:09:00] Liz Murphy: You know, George, I saw you shaking your head over there, sir. Do you have a few thoughts you'd like to share now

[00:09:05] Max Cohen: to debate? You wanna debate snippets with me, George.

[00:09:09] George B. Thomas: I

[00:09:09] Max Cohen: Let's go brother. Step into the arena.

[00:09:11] George B. Thomas: I, I mean, it's like I, I'm, I am listening to Max and I'm like, Oh man. Like text. Text only. You can only text. But when I think about text, like. The words can be powerful, right? The fact that you can, um, put links in those words can be powerful. The fact that you can use personalization tokens in those words makes it powerful.

So imagine I get asked the same dumb question 50 times a day, which there are no dumb questions, so don't send me hate mail, but I get the same question 50 times a day. I can literally say, hi, Bobby. Hi Susie. Hi, Jenny. Great question. As a matter of fact, we've got it several times, and here are three links to content on our website.

One is a video, one is an article, one is a webinar that you can go check out that will give you full answer on that. I am able with those words to deliver the value and the time for them to journey down understanding versus me writing a freaking 17 paragraph essay in my inbox and having to send it to explain the question.

[00:10:29] Liz Murphy: George, let me actually b have you guys back up here for a second, because one of your biggest airing of grievances. In the earlier part of this episode, our very own hub, heroes, Festivus, was that people aren't using these tools. Which leads me to wonder, is it because some of them may not really understand what they are.

So we're already starting to dig into here, into snippets. George, can you give me the like 32nd, what of snippets, what are they, when and how do you use them?

[00:10:56] George B. Thomas: Yeah. Do you have to speak to people in email? Do you have to? Speak to people in a chat bubble. Do you have to leave notes? Do you wanna be able to log calls and SMSs and all those meetings? Do you need a quick outline somewhere in your c r m? Well, imagine instead of typing it out every single time, you could literally do a pound sign, a couple letters, select it, and it magically shows up wherever you need it to be and do and be whatever you need it to do and be.

Right, so you get a chance to a, you can have a folder structure, you can name it, you can then build it, and then you can give it a shortcut and you're off to the races. It literally is the thing that would allow a human who sits down and strategizes the way that they communicate in a day and broke things down into repeatable pieces as snippets.

I bet you could do double the amount or relax, double the amount by using snippets in your daily life.

[00:11:49] Liz Murphy: So what are some of the creative out outside of the box? Ways that we've seen people use snippets? Devin, do you have any thoughts here?

[00:11:57] Devyn Bellamy: One of my favorite uses that we used to do, we talked about, touched on it briefly, but was, uh, Standardized language. So if we were communicating with a customer, uh, and wanted to, uh, put in something about like if we have like a canned SLA or, uh, another use case is for a call recap email. All of our call recap emails were forwarded the same, or for formatted the same, I should say.

And so we would use it just, we would drop in the, uh, the call recap for, uh, email, uh, format and then, or snippet and then just fill it in. and it's, it's great for templatized, uh, emails or templatized communications that you use regularly. Um, now as far as something out of the box, I, I've heard all kinds of crazy stuff.

like for instance, there was this one company, uh, I listened to them, I wanna say in 20 16, 20 17. What they used to do was use, um, custom data fields, uh, as personalization tokens for, uh, can language that would be sent out to specific, clients. And so they would have a snippet that's specific or, or a little a snippet within a snippet you could say that's specific to that client within that field.

And then they would put in that personalization token. So you have can language plus personalized, uh, information cuz the idea is, Um, and sorry, salespeople, I don't mean to insult you, but they wanted to make the salespeople write as little as possible. yeah. Salespeople don't always write

[00:13:25] George B. Thomas: Well, sales salespeople don't necessarily wanna write though.

[00:13:28] Liz Murphy: be fair though, who a lot of people don't write well, let's be

[00:13:32] Devyn Bellamy: And, and, and, and in as great as you are communicating and as great as you are as getting people to like you, uh, your, your grasp on the written version of the English language might not be that strong. And so we want to make it, uh, as simple as possible. I'm trying really hard to be diplomatic

[00:13:48] George B. Thomas: You're doing good. You're doing good.

[00:13:50] Devyn Bellamy: we, we

[00:13:51] Liz Murphy: Yeah. Um, now we choose to be diplomatic. Now we choose to be diplomatic.

[00:13:58] Devyn Bellamy: we, we want to make it so the salespeople have an easiest time as possible communicating with, uh, prospects and customers, uh, without. Offending them with the fact that they dropped outta high school in like freshman year. So it's like, yeah.

[00:14:16] George B. Thomas: Okay. Maybe that wasn't so nice, but. Let me double down on what, let me, let me, let me double down on what Devin is saying here, because what I want everybody to realize while I'm talking about text and Max is talking about text and we're talking about personalization tokens. I want everybody to understand that you can insert personalization tokens around company, around deals, around tickets.

You even have a section in there that is. Sender that gives you some sender properties. So you can do things like first name, last name, email, phone, number of the sender. You by the way of the snippet. And so now if you think about what Devin was talking about, you can create a company deal ticket or contact property.

By the way, one of the properties that you can now create is a text field. Right. And so you can now have these written text items, which by the way, in a text field, um, can you add imagery in a rich text? Yeah. Yes, you can. And if you can use that as a property that you can pull into a snippet, is that a way that you can actually hack to do more than just text in a snippet?

Yep. Yep, you can. So again, it's getting creative with different pieces of the tool to then bring it into a part of a tool that we're talking today and that's snippets. So you can, you can do almost anything you want. As long as you connect the dots properly with properties, snippets, objects, and the way that you want to communicate, or the way that you want to be able to dictate, uh, the information into your crm.

[00:15:49] Liz Murphy: What are some of the most important do's and don'ts that someone needs to keep in mind with snippets? And I'm gonna open this up and say, you know, I'm, I'm open to do's and don'ts that live outside of the sales teams since we did kind of tease that up at the top, right. That some of these tools can be used by teams other than sales.

Else.

[00:16:04] Max Cohen: Be, be super careful when you're using, like, if you're getting like really, really cavalier with using properties in there, be, be careful that in the context that people would be using them, that you can guarantee the proper text is in there. Because if. If snippets is all about saving time, which I think is just one of the good reasons, right?

nothing wastes more time than having something like, like a sentence of text or like something like that get created or generated and then no sort of like value goes into like where any of these dynamic tokens are being used. And then that person's gotta like, oh, stop all their momentum of what they were doing.

Go back and then figure out how to like reword what they wrote or type filling, missing stuff in or like, and then, so it's like just be, you know, careful in those situations. Like also be very careful with like how you word stuff, depending on how those tokens can manifest themselves in this snippet too as well.

Like you don't want people to like waste time going back and saying, oh, it's kind of awkward the way this is like written now based on the type of information that like came in from that property. And then it's just, Again, you're creating a lot of these like nuanced little time-wasters, like throughout people's days, which, you know, one or two isn't a huge deal, but when you multiply that across, like a whole team of people relying on this, like, you know, quick snippets of text to be doing the job that they should be doing, and all of a sudden, you know, more often than not, they're becoming a hindrance for people.

What's the point of even using 'em? Right? So it's just like, just be careful and if you are gonna put personalization token stuff in there, say, hey. are we sure that when they're using this there's a value? And are we sure that like whatever the values may be, the sentence structure still works, sounds natural, things like that,

[00:17:44] George B. Thomas: Okay. Okay. I gotta jump in here real quick before Devin says something, cuz Max does bring up a good point and it's actually a point that I wanna make that almost could have nothing to do with. Snippets, templates or sequences. But since we're talking about snippets, templates, and sequences, I'm gonna throw it in here. And that's right. I'm talking to you right now. If you have been rocking out your HubSpot portal for two months, two years, I don't care how long you haven't spent the quality time that should and needs to be spent. On your personalization tokens, meaning your property defaults so that when you do, or your team does use these objects, these properties, and we don't have the data collected or input into the CR RM yet that we don't look.

Like we don't know what we're doing then by all that is holy. Spend some time in emailing your settings and landing pages or pages in your settings, depending on if you're using c m s fool or not, and look at the contact company, a k a default properties for personalization that you can set up and have in place.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled show, 

[00:18:54] Max Cohen: So quick, quick thing with that and, and you, you bring up a really good point, George, and. In email, like when you're building like marketing emails, you have the option to use like the global default, right? Or set a specific default to use as a fallback value for personalization tokens. However, snippets only will let you use the global default, right?

So that's something to kind of keep in mind, like when you're creating those global defaults, you can say, Hey, We'll use the global default for snippets, but then whenever we're doing this in like the context of a marketing email, we can kind of customize it to use what we want in there, right? Just cause we don't get that same option when we're inside of snippets.

And actually like building one, as you know, to only say, use this value for this specific snippets, always gonna default to what a global fallback one would be. Devil's in the details baby.

[00:19:37] Liz Murphy: All right. Right gentlemen, let us turn our attention to templates and we're talking specifically about, we're talking about a very specific type of template here. So what, when we, when we're talking about templates in the sales case, what kind of templates are we talking about? What are they, what are their intended use case?

Because you hear template, you could be thinking of website themed templates, you could be thinking of email templates. There are so many different templates inside of HubSpot.

[00:20:05] Max Cohen: One-off email templates as if you were sending an email through Gmail or Outlook or whatever. Not a marketing email template. Not a website template, right? So, You can kind of think of them like snippets. Snippets, except they only work when you're sending like a, a sales email, if you will. I hate the term sales email.

Think of like a one-to-one email, right? So you're on a CRM record, you're sending an email to somebody. The big difference is that it's not just like the body of the text, it's the subject line as well, right? So a template will, a template will include a subject line and then full body of an email. Um, and then when you're actually in there, in that email, like personalizing it further, You could even drop in other snippets.

Right? If you, if you have the need to do that. Right. But think of a template as giving you sort of like the overall beginning structure of a email. You commonly send out a whole bunch.

[00:20:57] Liz Murphy: George. No, George, I'm gonna need more than a Yep. From you.

[00:21:03] Max Cohen: This is the commentary people are coming for.

[00:21:04] Liz Murphy: Yeah,

[00:21:05] George B. Thomas: No, no, I, I mean, again, if I think about, um, Snippets, templates and sequences, and I go into what my normal kind of narrative is. I think about a sequence as a, a wall, like a wall, right? And um, or actually a sequence as a house. I think of a sequence as a house. I think of the template is, a wall, and I think of the snippets as a brick.

So like you can use snippets inside of templates. By the way, we'll probably get back to that because talk about having a template that is like 70% done. I'll get back to that too, and being able to do like 10% of completing it with snippets, I'll tie that together, but then again, you have to think about the end means here it's like, These three templates or four templates are going to be put together to create this sequence, the house in which you're trying to build, to communicate in a streamlined way, but not only streamlined way of communication, an entire process that you're gonna like, reach out on social, give them a call, send this email, do this other thing, you know, uh, take a nap and then send this other email.

Whatever it is, it's the process. So when I start to think about these templates, I start to think about a way that I can build the messaging tube about 70% complete, knowing that I'm gonna customize it. 30% meaning, I am gonna find any personalization tokens that I can put in there that's gonna be 10% of it.

I'm gonna find any personal trigger moment that I can put in there, not trigger in a bad way, like, oh, you triggered me a trigger moment, meaning, Hey, we met at the luncheon learn, or we were talking at the barbecue and you asked me these three questions about your content strategy. Blah, blah, blah, whatever it is, like to the connect or trigger point that this conversation is starting on based on the connection of the humans.

And then I use another 10% if it is a piece of content that I've created snippets around. Now I've got this template that is 70% done, 10% personalized, 10%, 10% specific to the human, and 10% filled in with the content of snippets that I actually wanna share with them. And I am off to the races.

[00:23:12] Liz Murphy: Devin, when I talk about templates, where does your mind immediately go?

[00:23:15] Devyn Bellamy: Version control.

[00:23:16] George B. Thomas: Ooh.

[00:23:17] Liz Murphy: What about it?

[00:23:18] Devyn Bellamy: So the thing is, is that it's really easy to. Mess up your sales team by use, by changing what they're used to using. and that's just in general where you can create a template. And this is even, uh, uh, for snippets as well. Where, let's say that there's something, uh, language that you wanna deprecate in the old one, but you didn't maybe talk to the sales team and say, well, we actually like it saying this because, they're able to know one, that there's a newer version come out if you put out version control and they can give you feedback on the two If you don't have feedback, uh, Uh, incorporated in it.

Um, but it also keeps everybody on the same page as knowing, okay, here's what we've changed. If you do do updates, here's what we changed. Uh, here's what you need to know. Uh, everyone start using version six now.

[00:24:06] Max Cohen: Yeah. And the other thing too, like it helps with like, I mean, that helps with consistency, right? Because like, what are you doing when you're not using a tool like this is, everyone's got that like, you know, uh uh, Google Doc full of like, Fire email templates that people have been using and you just copy and paste it and forget to remove where it says hi, first name.

Not that I've done that a million times. I have, uh, very, very embarrassing. Um, but like the, I think the other thing, and, and maybe Liz, you're, you're getting to like the best practices part of this, but you know,

[00:24:36] Liz Murphy: go ahead and dive into it. Let's

[00:24:37] Max Cohen: Yeah, let's dive into it. The, the big thing, well, actually, like, there's one other thing. We're, we're also kind of forgetting about like what templates are, cuz I forgot about this.

They're not just for email. Now if you go into the templates tool, you might also see that there's a WhatsApp section, right? So, You can build WhatsApp conversation templates that will like start new conversations with people. Um, I don't know how it works cuz I've never used WhatsApp, but if you see that in there and you're using the WhatsApp integration, it basically is like a con conversation, like starter, like through a WhatsApp message, right?

You can, you can build as like a template. Um, and I think you have to get 'em like approved through, uh, WhatsApp or, or something like that. But anyway, going back to like the more classic sort of example of it, George, did you have a.

[00:25:22] George B. Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before you dive into that. So hold your thought. Uh, if you're listening, To this podcast right now, and you are rocking out the world of, uh, WhatsApp and HubSpot and you're doing dope stuff. Uh, you need to reach out, uh, to me or anybody on the team, let us know. And we might just need to get you on an episode where we talk about everything, HubSpot and WhatsApp and what the teams need to know.

Sorry, max, go ahead. I just wanted to put that out to the community.

[00:25:51] Max Cohen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, calling all WhatsApp gurus. Um, anyway, so when it comes down to like the, the best practices around it, you know, uh, what you definitely shouldn't be doing with templates is just using it as a way to like enable your salespeople to become mass emailers. Like that is like, that's the wrong.

That's the wrong way to do it. Like Gmail or Office 365 are not meant to be high volume marketing email sending platforms. And you have to remember when you're sending emails through HubSpot, right? These one-to-one, you know, you know, emails sent from the CRM record or through sequences or whatever. It's not going through HubSpots like mass email, sending servers.

It's going directly from your Gmail account, which has a daily limit of how many emails it gets sent. Yeah, exactly. So like, You need to treat these like regular emails. Like I would use templates when you're doing like one-on-one emails with people, but you know it's an email that you type all the time and you wanna save some time and get it in there.

But the other big thing is like leave room for human personalization. It's not meant to be the entire email, it's meant to be the framework of the email. Right. And then go in and kind of add your own personal flare to it so it's not just like a copy paste send job. Right. They added a really cool feature a while ago where like, not only can you drop in personalization tokens, like that's been around since templates have been around, but they also allow you to add in what they call placeholder tokens.

Right? Which to me is like one of the cooler things that they've done. So when you add in a placeholder token, what you can basically say is like, you can say, all right, at this point of the email, Write about a personal experience you had with the last person on the last call or something like that, right?

So, you know, make some sort of personal reference. Ask them some sort of genuine que, like whatever it may be, right? And you can build in. Sort of like these, these, um, not notifications, but I forget the word I'm looking for, like context clues to say, Hey, sales rep, mention something personal here. Add your own set of like, you know, uh, personality to this email, right?

Instead of it being just like a rigid copy of the same thing you're sending out to everybody, right? You know, so leave room for that. Leave room from like other snippets that you may like kind of toss in there, like depending on the context of the email, um, it doesn't have to be the entire thing, but also like, think about how you could fold it into different processes that you have, right? So if you are someone who is onboarding new customers, right? This could easily have everything you need in it to get someone to like book time with you and start your onboarding process or like, whatever it is.

Because you can easily drop in like meeting links. You can drop in stuff from HubSpot video. You can put in any documents that you have from the documents tool, like it talks to all these other productivity tools in HubSpot that you could then include in your template, right? So use it. It doesn't just have to be text and like a personalization token of how first name, like you could do so much more with it.

[00:28:34] George B. Thomas: Dude, you're stealing my fire. You're stealing my fire. I totally wanted to talk about the documents tool, right? And, and the ability to have that meeting links in there. and, and by all that is holy video, having video that can sit in a template that you can then grab and send and not have to like, search for it and upload it and embed it and find the link and li blah, blah.

Like, I, I love templates.

[00:28:58] Liz Murphy: That's all you gotta say about templates, George.

[00:29:00] George B. Thomas: Well, no, I wanna give Devin some space to talk about templates

[00:29:03] Liz Murphy: All right. All right. I just wanted make sure you

[00:29:05] George B. Thomas: I mean, I didn't want to be a max about it. Right. Max is stealing all the fire, you know, not really letting us have stuff to talk about, you know?

[00:29:13] Max Cohen: That's cuz I'm just the, I'm the alpha right now, so I'm just doing alpha shit.

[00:29:18] Devyn Bellamy: Why?

[00:29:19] George B. Thomas: damn.

[00:29:19] Liz Murphy: Devin Devin, please come in and restore order.

[00:29:21] Max Cohen: no, no. That was a joke.

[00:29:25] Devyn Bellamy: Well, just, just a small, uh, use case that, uh, I've used in the past was for, uh, a franchisor that was using a single, uh, HubSpot dashboard to manage all of their franchisee communications and, and I mean, uh, customer communications via, uh, the franchisees. And what we did is we created a workflow. That automatically assigned, um, the evp, um, general, uh, manager I think it was, and the sales rep to each of The people by region, each of the, uh, contacts by region.

And then what we would do is we would use those personalization tokens within the templates. So then we would be able to utilize one template, uh, instead of one for every person using like the signature function. And it would have all of the correct people and their contact information autopopulate into the template for that particular contact.

[00:30:23] George B. Thomas: Nice. Nice.

[00:30:25] Liz Murphy: Max, did you enjoy that one in particular?

[00:30:28] Max Cohen: It was tight. It was very tight. Yeah.

[00:30:30] George B. Thomas: it

[00:30:30] Liz Murphy: was good. It was

[00:30:31] Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:30:32] Liz Murphy: right, gentlemen, what are, what are some of, you know what, let me come down to your level. What are some of the don'ts around templates before we move on to sequences?

[00:30:38] Devyn Bellamy: Don't overdo it. Don't have a template for every possible conversation. Leave some room for personalization. Please. Like the, it it, cuz you gotta navigate these things, people. And then the last thing you want is like, 50 different templates, and they're all saying kind of close to the same thing, but you never know which one you want in order to pick J.

Just don't stay chill, stay general with templates. Uh, you don't have to have one for every kind of conversation,

[00:31:07] George B. Thomas: And, and

[00:31:07] Max Cohen: Check in with your team every once in a while to make sure like you don't have too many that you don't need. Yeah, that's right, George.

[00:31:13] George B. Thomas: Oh yeah. There's nothing wrong with deleting a template, by the way, if nobody's using it, it doesn't have to hang out in HubSpot. My God. Uh, so here's, I wanna kind of go a little bit in the same vein as Devin is. I think I. And by the way, this happens in a lot of spaces.

Like if you talk to marketers about creating an article, historically, they might think about one article at a time versus like a trifecta of three articles that belong together that go actually through the funnel. And so when I bring it back to templates and start to think about this is not only just thinking about a singular template, but thinking about a template that might be paired with another, or it might be a set of three, meaning there's probably gonna be.

Different places in a sales funnel, uh, in marketing conversations, in a podcasting process that you're gonna have to meet people. And so when you think about it as a process of communication instead of a singular thing to communicate, now all of a sudden you're building a, a tool set, uh, that you can use instead of these kind of one-offs.

So, so think of how you can pair 'em together, I guess is what I'm trying to say

[00:32:23] Max Cohen: Yeah.

[00:32:23] Devyn Bellamy: One more thing. Um, be mindful of the voice used in your templates, in your templates and your snippets. Um, one thing that can be extremely jarring in a customer, uh, experience is when you've been interacting someone with someone and then you get an interaction from them. That is obviously not from them.

It, it definitely takes away from the customer experience. Don't be overly formal. Uh, in, in your templatized speech, in, in your snippets, um, try to sound like a human being, having a conversation. Uh, there have been numerous times where I have been in an organization that we use templates and snippets, and I'll take it and I'll just rewrite some of it.

Because it, it doesn't sound like me at all. And it is so, it, it was com like, so hilariously obvious that one, it didn't sound like me. And then two, it was verbose and like overly apologetic and then it started giving me solutions and three, and, and then they sent it within 30 seconds of my, uh, response.

And it's like, so obviously it's a cut and paste job. So, yeah, just, just be mindful of that and, and don't discourage people, uh, from editing templates as long as the information is there and accurate. empower people to make your messaging and your templates and snippets their own if they feel so inclined.

[00:33:49] George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's, it's interesting because, uh, max, I'll give you one second here. Um, we can tell that it was a copy and paste job, Devin, because I might have gotten that template from you. And the first line said, how much you actually love Dominic Totto. Uh, and that you are, you're a big fan of his, so I immediate, I immediately knew that it wasn't coming from you.

It was, it was coming from somebody else. That, that's no good.

[00:34:12] Max Cohen: It's some identity theft right there.

[00:34:13] George B. Thomas: here's what I'll say too, before I pass it over to Max. Is that, uh, if you're, if you're C-Suite right now and you're listening to this, I hope you would take what Devin said to heart and realize that the templates, and probably the snippets too, are really meant to be like kind of a little bit of guardrails that people play with, but that we are allowed to have the freedom to.

make it sound like us. Be us. because again, if we go back to the whole thing that makes all of this work is that we come off as humans and we're

[00:34:48] Liz Murphy: There we go.

[00:34:49] George B. Thomas: humans that we,

[00:34:50] Liz Murphy: There we go.

[00:34:51] George B. Thomas: So I'm just gonna throw that out there. Just throw that out there.

[00:34:54] Devyn Bellamy: That was so organic too.

[00:34:56] Liz Murphy: Uh, that's it only took me 10 episodes of coaching of you telling you like if you try to squeeze it in in the first 30 seconds. Done count. So I'm glad here we are finally 18,000 episodes in and we've got it.

[00:35:07] Max Cohen: That one felt good. Yeah, that felt good. I'm not gonna lie.

[00:35:10] Liz Murphy: We did it. We did it.

[00:35:11] George B. Thomas: Max, you did have something important that you wanted to say though.

[00:35:15] Max Cohen: yeah, yeah. Um, ah, man, this is gonna be the goofiest transition back to what we were talking about, but, um, I say the one thing is like, you know, templates should feel like a tool that, like you as an individual contributor should feel comfortable experimenting with, right? As long as you're. I mean, I would, I would hope that your organization would give you kind of the autonomy be to be able to do that and not be such like a, um, I don't know, uh, police that the templates and emails, stuff that you're doing with people.

But like, the one thing I'll say in terms of like template etiquette, if you have some templates that like you're experimenting with and you haven't wanted, To like, release them to the team yet put that thing as private, right, instead of available to everyone, because you're only gonna confuse people if you make a whole bunch of templates that you're testing around and playing with and, and testing out and stuff like that.

Um, when everyone can see 'em, they might get confused about what they should be using, right? And maybe those templates aren't like really fully baked out and, you know, performing that well yet. So make sure you're setting stuff to private and hey, if you end up getting a pr, like a, a template that. That hits right.

Don't, don't keep that to yourself. Share the wealth. Open that thing up. Make it, make it available to the rest of the team so they can use it. Just make sure you have some conversations with them about why it's there, what situations you use it under, how you go about adding a little bit of personalization to it, just so people can use it with the proper context and get out of it, what you got out of it when you were using it.

[00:36:38] George B. Thomas: One more thing

[00:36:38] Max Cohen: just a little bit of template

[00:36:39] George B. Thomas: more thing before we go away from templates too, by all that is holy use a freaking folder structure. Like, just, just, just use a folder structure. Be, be a good human. And, and by the way, while I'm on this soapbox, HubSpot. That's right. I'm talking to you if you work at HubSpot.

If you work at HubSpot and you know somebody that works on the templates and the snippets tools, it is 2023. Can I please, please get folders inside of folders because the fact that I can't go and make a folder for Jimmy. And give Jimmy a folder for outlines question asks like different things that Jimmy might need to dive into. I love you HubSpot, but can I get folders in folders please?

[00:37:24] Max Cohen: You just go talk to the workflows team. They just did some folders and workflows, baby. They

[00:37:29] George B. Thomas: go over there, chit chat with him. I'm just saying.

[00:37:32] Liz Murphy: Big orange sprocket shots fired. All right, now let's bring it home with sequences. Who is gonna tell me what they are and what they are supposed to be used for?

[00:37:41] Devyn Bellamy: One to one communications.

[00:37:44] Liz Murphy: so Devin, I see you have a couple feelings here. Maybe five of them. You wanna unpack them with us? It's a safe space, buddy.

[00:37:51] Devyn Bellamy: Sequences are not workflows. They are, they are not designed for one to many communications. You should not be attempting to bulk enroll people into C sequences in order for sequences to do your job for you. Sequences are meant for salespeople to nurture more effectively

[00:38:19] Liz Murphy: max, are you okay?

[00:38:21] Max Cohen: Can I piggyback?

[00:38:22] Devyn Bellamy: include not just emails, but reminders.

They tell you, Hey, you should connect with this person on LinkedIn. Have you given them a call yet? And, and it's, oh my gosh, like they're one to one. Communications is what sequences are for. If you're gonna do one to com, one to many communications first, rethink it. And, and it is like, because you're, you're doing sales, not marketing.

You're interacting with human beings, not bombarding them with spam. Like there, there was a reason why it took so long. Like, I don't even, like, I, I feel like you can mass enroll, but, but, but don't, don't just stop. Don't.

[00:39:01] George B. Thomas: Okay, so that was

[00:39:02] Max Cohen: Never. And if, hold on, I was patient. Hold on.

[00:39:07] Liz Murphy: has been rocking back

[00:39:08] Max Cohen: the sales director out there that thinks you are gonna go and buy a list of

[00:39:13] Devyn Bellamy: Come on, brother.

[00:39:15] Max Cohen: and you're gonna take that list of contacts and you're gonna give it to your sales reps brother, and you think that they're gonna enroll those 1000 new contacts, That you just bought, you need to shut the, delete your HubSpot account and never ever do that cuz you can't and you shouldn't.

And you, you won't be able to. And just, it's a bad strategy.

[00:39:39] Liz Murphy: Max, can you tell me how you really feel about that? I'm, I'm a little

[00:39:42] Max Cohen: I feel, I feel like I finally don't work at HubSpot anymore and I can speak my mind truly on how I feel about it. Okay. I've been waiting to get that out for a while. Listen. There is no good strategy of I'm going to go buy a list of contacts and tell my salespeople to shower them with sequences.

It doesn't work. Don't do it. Stop.

[00:40:03] George B. Thomas: that's, it's, 

[00:40:04] Max Cohen: you. 

[00:40:04] George B. Thomas: love first of all, that that

[00:40:06] Max Cohen: so good. Oh my God.

[00:40:12] George B. Thomas: first of all that, that,

[00:40:14] Max Cohen: gonna log off. Thanks

[00:40:15] George B. Thomas: That right there is hitting the internet tonight, I swear by all the powers that I have. Somehow I gotta clip that out and put it on LinkedIn and be like,

[00:40:24] Liz Murphy: Please include the five minutes of rocking in.

[00:40:27] George B. Thomas: Oh my God. Oh, it's, it's hilarious. So, so here's, here's the thing, because I wanted to immediately ask the question, and now I think I know. But what do you two think about the fact that I can actually use a workflow action that is mass enroll people into a sequence like. It never made sense to me. I, I know there are people that probably have use cases. If you're a listener and you have a use case that isn't spammy, that isn't crappy to how you're actually auto enrolling in a workflow.

People into sequences. I wanna know. But Max and Devin, have you guys ever heard of a good reason for this?

[00:41:05] Max Cohen: No. Okay. No. Okay, so here's the deal. There's been, I, I, I can't tell you how many people I heard over the years going, why can't I enroll someone in a sequence via a workflow? Right, and that's because people don't understand that sequences send emails from your Gmail or Office 365 account, not from HubSpot's email sending service.

Now here's the deal, when HubSpot sends Mass marketing emails out, okay? You may notice that you can't send those emails out without the little information in the footer that shows the address of your company,

[00:41:43] George B. Thomas: Can

[00:41:44] Max Cohen: that's, I, I believe that's CAN spam, right? So what is actually happening in the backend? You know how you have to go into the settings and HubSpot somewhere and type in your company's information versus actually typing it in in the footer of an email?

That's because it inserts these tokens into those emails to guarantee that you have your canned spam information in the footer to protect your ass from getting in legal trouble. All right? Because you can't be sending out mass emails without canned spam information at the bottom. Okay, so here's the deal.

If HubSpot were to allow people, because do you really think it was that hard? For them to build the, the, the feature that enrolls people in a sequence? No. No, it, they didn't do it because if you did allow that to happen, Right, and it worked the way people wanted it to work. You could then use workflows to mass spam people using sequences.

In theory, right now that's bad because of a couple of things. One, you're, you're, we, we have no guarantee that you're not violating the can spam. Uh, rules or laws or like whatever it is, because that email's getting sent out by Gmail, not our servers that can check to see if that token is present before the mass email goes out one, right?

So HubSpot didn't do that to protect your asses, first of all. Okay? So give HubSpot some respect there. Second of all, what was the second one? of all, there's another reason. Oh yeah. If you were to just like be able to enroll sequences via a workflow, right? You could easily like go over the total amount of emails that you could send like from your Gmail account and all of a sudden, oops, you know, you sent a, you enrolled 5,000 people in like a sequence or something.

My email's locked up for the rest of the day because Gmail only lets you send out like, what, 3000 emails total a day. Right? So it's just like, It's not that it was a deficit in the product, that it wasn't in there, it's just that the way those emails are sent are not meant to be sent in a mass way. Right?

So for all the folks who were like dying for HubSpot to be able to send sequences via workflows, there's reasons why HubSpot didn't do it. Now they did eventually roll it out to people, right? But it's done in kind of like a very limited capacity and there are some limiters in the backend that make sure that it doesn't screw up your email and stuff like that, right?

But, You know, that's like the way it works now is you can really only send out a sequence from a specific person, right? Instead of just like from whoever the owner is, right? And that's cuz you can't really guarantee who's connected their email and who hasn't. Cuz again, these emails get sent from a connected inbox right now.

I've found certain situations where it actually makes sense, where you might have one or a couple people in the company that need to set up some automation for them personally or maybe a couple other possible people that a lead could get rotated to. Right, but you gotta do a lot of like branching logic stuff and things like that.

It doesn't really work too well if you're scaling it up to a massive amount. Like if you have like hundreds of sales reps, you're probably not gonna use it cuz you gotta make sure all of them have their email connected, all of them have like access to the right sequence. Um, you know, like all this stuff is set up and it's just not a super scalable thing, but that's because it's meant to be used on a one-to-one basis and not for mass email guys, like, let your marketers take care of the mass emailing.

You can send emails from HubSpot that are marketing emails that accomplish the exact thing you want them to accomplish and make it look like it's from a sales rep. You can do that. It doesn't have to be in a sequence, right? So, sorry. Yeah, this one makes my blood boil a little bit, so I just had to, I had to set the record straight

[00:45:17] George B. Thomas: Hey, it makes great tv. Makes great tv. I'm just gonna throw that out

[00:45:21] Max Cohen: Yeah.

[00:45:21] Devyn Bellamy: There, there, there's the thing, and I, I, I know Max said it repeatedly, but I don't think we stressed it quite enough. Sequences come from your inbox. They're not coming from HubSpot. When HubSpot sends out a market, when you send out a e marketing email through HubSpot, that's coming through HubSpot's IP address.

If you have a dedicated one or if you're like most people doing the shared IP address, all of that is coming from HubSpot. Imagine if you log into your email and you can't use it. Your personal Gmail and then, and then you might have the audacity to get mad at HubSpot about it. No, you did that. With great power comes great

[00:46:09] George B. Thomas: Oh, let's go. Let's go right

[00:46:11] Max Cohen: go. Yeah.

[00:46:13] Devyn Bellamy: blow your whole stuff up. If you do this wrong.

[00:46:17] George B. Thomas: Can you

[00:46:18] Devyn Bellamy: Don't do it.

[00:46:19] George B. Thomas: can you imagine you wake up in the morning, you got your, you know, PJs on. You're like, I'm gonna get my cup of coffee, I'm gonna check my morning emails. And then you can't, can you imagine the call to your boss of like, uh, uh, boss, I think I screw something up.

[00:46:35] Devyn Bellamy: we can take it. We can take it one step further. Can you imagine if your regular email that you're sending to someone goes directly to spam because you shot up your entire company's real IP address over doing something you weren't supposed to be doing? I know a guy who tried to send me driving directions, just regular old email, went straight to spam.

Like hit, every communication you send will go to. You can't get, you can't get out of that there. There's no com You gotta change your domain. Now you gotta put in a sub-domain or something because you, you just shot your own self in the foot one to one

[00:47:15] Max Cohen: you just, yeah, which is also just another reason why you don't buy lists of contacts and just shower them with emails randomly. You're gonna blow your domain reputation into the stratosphere.

[00:47:27] George B. Thomas: so,

[00:47:28] Liz Murphy: All right guys. Guys. Alright. I'm putting a pin in this one. I'm putting a

[00:47:31] George B. Thomas: hang on.

[00:47:31] Max Cohen: so much trauma. There's so much trauma that we're unloading right now from years of talking to people about this stuff that didn't understand it, like it just has to come out.

I'm

[00:47:42] George B. Thomas: One. One more thing. One more thing. One more thing I gotta add in. Then Liz, you can take it to wherever we gotta go, but I can't wait until we hopefully do a live. Episode at Inbound of the Hub Heroes podcast cuz I'm gonna wait for just the most opportune time to light a stick of dynamite and be like, Devin Max, what do you think about enrolling people in sequences via workflows?

I'm just gonna throw it out there right in the middle, everybody, and just watch it

[00:48:11] Devyn Bellamy: People are gonna start throwing chairs. Anarchy's

[00:48:14] Max Cohen: gonna start fighting people.

[00:48:15] Devyn Bellamy: just like, just elbows everywhere.

[00:48:18] Liz Murphy: You know, Georgie said, uh, Liz is gonna take this wherever we need to take this. I don't know if I need us to go to like some sort of therapy office or maybe just to the bo. I don't know. I will come around and hug all of you after today's episode, cuz clearly we've. Georgie will be last, but

[00:48:35] George B. Thomas: Oh, not nice.

[00:48:38] Max Cohen: But hey guys, sequences are cool too. Like they're great. Like you can use them to make sure that people book time on your calendar

[00:48:44] George B. Thomas: a

[00:48:44] Max Cohen: that you'll stop emailing them cuz they book time with you. They're great.

[00:48:47] Liz Murphy: fan gentlemen. Outstanding. All right, guys. You know what? If there's one thing from this episode that someone needs to remember that has nothing. To do with sequences not being mass email explosion machines. What would it be and why?

[00:49:02] Devyn Bellamy: I don't even know, man. I've like wiped out all higher functions now. Like I can only focus so much and, and, and y you really lit a fuse with the sequences question. Um.

[00:49:12] Liz Murphy: know, how

[00:49:13] Devyn Bellamy: So, oh yeah, no. Here, here we go. Here we go. Sequences are more than just sending emails. They're an opportunity to keep your salesperson on track.

When it comes to interacting with a, uh, prospect or, or, uh, a customer, this is an opportunity for them to set reminders, to do things, to reach out. And also, uh, you can unenroll someone from a sequence and put them in another sequence depending on where they are in the buyer's journey. And so these are all things to keep in mind.

They're, they're. Uh, there, it's about process. Like George said, this is all about helping you streamline your process and keeping your sales team accountab accountable keeps leads from falling through the tr uh, cracks. Once you start engaging, once they're supposed to be in that sequence, because you only enroll people in the sequence, if it's a one-to-one communication, you don't let, let me stop before these people in this hallway start knocking

[00:50:05] Liz Murphy: so George, so George and Max, if, if people only remember one thing about snippets, templates, or sequences from this episode, what should it be and why?

[00:50:15] Max Cohen: Be creative. Uh, we talked a lot about sales, but these tools are just as great on the service side, right? I mean, I will tell you it is, it was. When I was an implementation specialist, it was the best thing ever when I got a new customer just to put someone in a sequence that would just take care of getting that onboarding call booked, right?

Like, and for me to not have to think about it, for me, not have to like manually make reminders of myself for myself to reach out to people when they wouldn't pick up the phone when I was trying to book this call, right? Being able to re-enroll people in a sequence at a different step, at a different date.

Like, there's so many cool things that you can do with it. But again, um, I'd say find the nuanced, repetitive interactions that waste a lot of time and figure out how you can use these three tools to plug those holes right, and make things a lot more efficient.

[00:51:01] George B. Thomas: I'm gonna go back to the very, very, very beginning of this episode. And the thing to remember is that these tools are not just for sales teams, they are for all teams, um, to do exactly what we've said you should do and to not do what we've said you shouldn't do. So just like we're getting all hype about buying lists and auto enrolling and sequences and stuff like that, uh, make sure your sales team is being human.

Make sure your service team is being human. Make sure your marketing team is being human Again, these tools are tools. They are there to help us be better versions of ourself, faster versions of ourself, more concise versions of our ourself. Like it all comes down to snippets, templates and sequences are at our fingertips to create a better user experience for prospects, leads, customers.

Evangelists, whoever we happen to be communicating with at that point in time,

[00:52:04] Liz Murphy: Gentlemen, thank you for a really tame uninspired

[00:52:08] George B. Thomas: it's kind of

[00:52:08] Liz Murphy: my coach. My coaching note to all of you is next time can you give a damn? Just next time try.

[00:52:15] George B. Thomas: Give a little

[00:52:16] Liz Murphy: time try. Give a little more, give it a little, little more. I love you all

[00:52:19] Devyn Bellamy: shell.

[00:52:20] Liz Murphy: and to all of our

[00:52:21] Max Cohen: Hey, li.

[00:52:22] Liz Murphy: hope you're all right. Yes, max, what?

[00:52:25] Max Cohen: Hey. Thank you for listening.

[00:52:30] Liz Murphy: Get outta here. Please go. Everyone leave. We're done now. Goodbye. No poetry. I was gonna do a poem today and I am poetry out.

[00:52:36] George B. Thomas: Oh, oh

[00:52:38] Liz Murphy: I know, I know.

[00:52:40] George B. Thomas: wow.

[00:52:41] Liz Murphy: I might be saving up for next time

[00:52:43] George B. Thomas: Oh geez.

[00:52:44] Liz Murphy: I.