Why go HubSpot Sales Hub? Featuring Kyle Jepson (HubHeroes, Ep. 12)

TRANSCRIPTION OF THE SHOW

George B. Thomas (01:09):

And for another week, I have to add a caveat. Otherwise, I would pay that gentleman with the really dope voice. Many, many dollars to have to do this every week. But we have to add Kyle Jepson, he has his own thoughts, believe it or not. Ladies and gentlemen, and Kyle, let's start there with the shenanigans. I'm sure 99.9% of the internet knows who you are, at least the HubSpot space. But why don't you, for any listeners who are like, who is this Kyle JSON guy on the Hub Heroes Podcast, why don't you let him know who you are and what you do? My friend? Yeah.

Kyle Jepson (01:41):

I'm Kyle Jepson. I work in HubSpot Academy. I have been there since the start of 2016, so that's a while now. My official job is to create sales related education, mostly sales hub trainings, but I kind of have this thing I do on the side where I post videos to LinkedIn every day because every day there is a new update to HubSpot to talk about. And now I'm running a user group for HubSpot admins, and I still create sales education. I still have some coming down down the pipe right now, but I am rebranding myself as the advocate of HubSpot admins everywhere. And I hope to hope to do a lot of work in the coming years on that front.

George B. Thomas (02:17):

Oh yeah. Which means we might just have to have Kyle back for the, what the heck is a HubSpot super admin episode to come in the future. But today we are talking about the sales platform, the sales hub, and really the question, and obviously the title that you saw is why HubSpot Sales Hub. This is not only for current users, but it is for folks who might be on the fence wondering, should I use the sales hub? Why would I want to use the sales hub and learn some tips, tricks, hacks, techniques around all of this stuff? That is the HubSpot sales Hub. Now, Max, you, I amazingly can't believe that you're this quiet at the beginning of this episode seeings, that there is a little bit of a battle between you and Kyle and who can get content out quicker around these daily updates that Kyle is doing. Is

Max Cohen (03:12):

It a battle or is it brotherly Love <laugh>. That's all. I'm I'm, That's, that's what I'm, look I'd say it's playful. It's playful is

Kyle Jepson (03:20):

One of those. And the line between battle and and brotherly love is, is very much blurred. At least in my house. I have two sons. Yes. And it's always a battle and it's always loving. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, so

George B. Thomas (03:29):

Yeah. Yes, yes. And with my brothers, I just love to battle em. So we'll throw that out there ladies in general. Also,

Max Cohen (03:35):

To be fair, I wasn't being quite, I was eating a piece of cheese <laugh>, so I am stoked that Kyle, you are here. I am. Like I've been so pumped for this all week. It's an honor to be in your presence today, man. That's

Kyle Jepson (03:46):

An honor to be with You two.

George B. Thomas (03:47):

 Well see, it's just a big bro fest because I'm just happy to be here with everybody that's on the screen. And unfortunately we have to do say this, our friend Devon is not feeling well. He won't be on this episode, but he was super sad not to actually be the fourth four horseman of this episode. Now here's the thing, let's start like we do at the very beginning. Kyle will let you go first, probably Max, and then I'll follow up on this first question. Well, I'd love to do foundational pieces, get people up to speed because remember, we're not only just talking to HubSpot users who are geeking out to the fact that the three of us are on an episode together. We're talking to people that don't know us and maybe don't know HubSpot. And so historically, when you've had to answer the question or explain what is HubSpot Sales Hub, where the heck do you go? What do you say?

What is the HubSpot Sales Hub? Is it just a CRM?

Kyle Jepson (04:32):

Sales hub, It's got the core CRM functionality you would expect from any crm and it's got this fully integrated set of, of some sales acceleration tools and it's, it's all part of this HubSpot platform that has marketing tools and service tools and a cms. And it's all this big interconnected platform that you can run your front office efforts out of. And the thing that I think really makes Sales Hub different in the world of CRMs, if we wanna talk specifically about that world. So when we first launched HubSpot CRM in 2014, I think it was, it was very lightweight, It did very few things, but we started from the beginning to solve problems for the reps. Most CRMs, they're built to solve for upper management. The VP of sales, the ceo, they wanna know how revenue is doing, they wanna have the, the reporting on whatever sales activities.

We really wanted to build a thing that would make it easier for reps to do their job to find the information they're looking for, to be relevant to their prospects, to deliver a message that resonates and attract their progress. And so that's where we started. And for a long time, Sales Hub didn't have great reports for managers and VPs didn't have a lot of sales ops kinds of things. It was all about the rep experience. How can you keep track of your sales, your contacts, identify at the right person to reach out to tell them the right thing at the right time. And that is really at the heart of Sales Hub years have gone by, it's now fully grown up and we have all those reporting and permissioning and other things that executives and VPs and ops people care about. But at its heart, it's still a platform that helps reps sell better.

And I think that is a very important thing to keep in mind. Cuz you look at most CRMs, getting reps to adopt them is hard because it's a miserable experience for them. It wasn't built for them. This is somebody else's problem being solved and it's like, Hey rep, you gotta go use that CRM so I, your manager can get credit for the work you're doing. Like what sort of incentive structure is that? Whereas with HubSpot adoption tends to be easier because it's, Hey rep, here are these tools that's gonna help you get more money. How about that? And that's what I love about Sales Hub,

How the HubSpot Sales Hub makes CRM adoption so much easier

George B. Thomas (06:33):

Man. I love more money. I I'm, I mean not in a like weird way, but I mean I, money, money is good as a sales rep for sure and I love Kyle that you started at the beginning and that, and you even used the words cuz my mind was like, Oh, but ladies and gentlemen we're all grown up now. Like we but Max, it's your turn, not my turn. When you have to explain what is HubSpot Sales Hub, where do you go? Historically I

Max Cohen (06:55):

Had to kind of, I I had to spend a lot of years trying to make this as like simple and succinct as I could. Because again, explaining every single part of HubSpot to a class of 60 new hires in a limited amount of time is a pretty difficult thing to do. I think what a lot of people forget sometimes is like the HubSpot crm, while it's the bone, like it's the core structure, it's the bones, the, the backbone of fuel of like all of HubSpot CRM is free. So like you can still go in there and run a sales process alone in theory without paid sales hub features. Well, not in theory you can do it, you can run a pretty substantial, like you would actually do a lot with the free tools. Let's be honest, the way that I always kind of like positioned what's the gist of Sales Hub is that it's really what supercharges the crm especially for your sales reps.

So like a lot of the stuff that you're getting in there besides like a lot of like the reporting things and and and stuff like that is tools that just make your day to day life for a sales rep not suck. You know what I mean? Sales rep spends too much time sending the same email over and over again, figuring out when people can book meetings, doing follow up, all these mundane administrative BS tasks that they have to waste so much time on that they could be spending actually talking to people who wanna talk to them. Sales hub really helps enable your team to do that. I'm a big believer that you can't create a really great sales process if you're not taking care of your sales reps and making their lives easier and their lives more enjoyable. You c also can't like expect them to use a system where they need to input data so the stakeholders can see what's happening.

If that's not an enjoyable system to use, that's actually bringing them value and letting them work faster. When you look at a lot of the productivity tools that Sales Hub introduces, which you see a lot of it too in the, in the service hub, to be fair, that's really all, it's everything. You need to really make sure that salespeople have a delightful experience actually being a salesperson in a crm and it gives 'em the tools that they need to get their job done faster and not hate it. So whether you look at that through a lens of reducing burnout or just making people more efficient, you can kind of approach the way you, you use the tools through a lot of those different lenses. So again, comes down to super charging the CRM and and making it a, a wonderful experience for your

Streamlining and visualizing your sales process with HubSpot Sales Hub

George B. Thomas (09:02):

Sales rep. Yeah, I totally agree with this and I love the narrative that we're talking about because many times you're right, we're gonna be talking to companies that it is about the sales rep and all the things that you guys said, but I'll be honest with you, up until about six months ago, I could teach the sales tools and I'd love to get buy-in from sales reps for the sales tools. Really good at that just from a communication standpoint. Six months ago though, when I started the business, I actually had to really dive into the sales tools and use the sales tools as a owner of a company. So I'm gonna go at this a little bit of a different direction, but it is all the same stuff. Meaning if you're a company of one and you're like, I need to do some things, I need to be able to streamline my sales process, I need to be able to set goals and visualize it.

I need to be able to communicate easy or easier and I, at the end of the day, I wanna be able to find a quick way to get paid. There is a set of tools that does every single one of those things in the HubSpot Sales hub, from payments to quotes to snippets to templates to pipelines to stages to deals, tasks to keep you organized. And here's the thing, I love Max, that you are like so that you can talk to more people. No. So you can go golf or spend time with your family more. That's what those tools are in there for. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm just saying true. Like you gotta optimize your life and if you can optimize your sales process, life gets better, life gets better. Let's dive back in. Let's get into the, Well I

Max Cohen (10:30):

Meant talk to the talk to the caddy. Yes. You know what I mean? Talk to the Yes. Talk to the person where you buy the golf balls from.

George B. Thomas (10:36):

Yes. The guy who sells it, you would line yes he

Max Cohen (10:39):

Would. Let me finish my Sentence short. That's what I would've said.

George B. Thomas (10:41):

 That's it. That is it. Exactly. So here's the thing, okay, so we talked about what is HubSpot sales hub? And here's the thing we, we kind of dived into this a little bit. Kyle sort of cheated a tiny bit in his answer because really what I want us to paint a picture of is there are a lot of CRMs out there, there's a lot of sales tools out there. And so when you think about all the things that we've talked about thus far, what makes HubSpot Sales Hub special or different than kind of these other tools that are out there that one might choose if they're listening to this and thinking, well is it HubSpot versus, and then insert CRM here. How

Kyle Jepson (11:21):

About I I take another stab at that and tell another thing that I think makes HubSpot different and that's just the velocity of our product updates, which is unbelievable. Couple years ago I got this idea like, hey, what if I posted LinkedIn videos anytime there was a product update so people could know the product got updated. Big

Max Cohen (11:39):

Mistake.

Kyle Jepson (11:40):

<Laugh> like

George B. Thomas (11:42):

Now

Kyle Jepson (11:43):

I literally post a new video to LinkedIn every single day. I'm in the office and it's not enough. I've got like this, Oh I can tell you I've got my backlog here. Let me tell you the number right now I've got 28 things waiting for me to right. And like I'm doing daily videos, sometimes I talk about multiple things in a video. It's just impossible to keep up. But the good news for, for anyone who adopts HubSpot is that means at any time in the last six months somebody said to you, Oh don't use HubSpot, it can't do X. Better revisit it cuz it might not be true anymore. We are moving so fast and the rate is just accelerating and we love feedback from our customers. Our idea forum is not like I I I, there's this sense that SaaS companies send you to their idea forum when they really just want you to go away.

But our product managers are on that ideas forum all the time and the highest bonus ideas turn into features in HubSpot, turn into videos on my LinkedIn feed. And it's just amazing how the platform continues to grow and accelerate the development rate even as it's reached this, this sort of enormous size of having more than the 150,000 customers using it or whatever. So I think, I think that's incredible and and in the CRM world it's very normal to have annual releases or every six months. Here's what's new and HubSpot is, is playing an entirely different game in that

George B. Thomas (12:58):

Regard. Yeah, Max go here in a second but I gotta unpack something by the way because I love Kyle's updates and I do wanna let the hub heroes listeners know that we're actually working on something. And Kyle, the fact that you just said you have 28 more videos like a backlog of them, I have to share a a little bit of an experience. First of all ladies and gentlemen, you might not know but you will know after this that I have about two episodes ago stopped editing the Hub Heroes podcast. Oh my gosh. Say it's not so. But my son, I've actually hired my son to do podcast editing and video editing for me because I needed a claw time back in my day earlier this week. I gave him a task. I said there's a task. We've got this guy, he's super dope, he's amazing.

He does HubSpot updates on the daily and LinkedIn. You're gonna start adding them to the YouTube channel so people can find them easily. He looked at the sheer mass amount of videos and was like, oh my God. And I said, yes, you're gonna be busy for a while but we're gonna do this because as a problem solver, my problem was I love Kyle, I wanna find all of Kyle's videos. I hate LinkedIn cuz I can't find all of Kyle's videos. So we're working on getting 'em all in one place. It's the massive Kyle JSON HubSpot update jam playlist that you'll just be able to know every HubSpot update that has ever happened almost in time. And so when Noah is editing this and he realizes that it's never stopping, it's gonna keep coming. I'm actually excited. He might be a little bit freaked out but, but here's the thing Max, I'm gonna pass it back over to you after that little bit of a tangent and also probably got some people excited about mm where's the YouTube channel that I can find Kyle's Jams. Anyway, when you think about this, what makes HubSpot Sales Hub special? Where do you go Max? Yeah,

The top HubSpot Sales Hub features that make it so freakin' great for businesses

Max Cohen (14:45):

Well I think a lot of the times like when you think about the tools that sales Hub provides, oftentimes your CRM and then your sales acceleration tools are two totally separate things. Two totally separate pieces of software and it's usually something you're plugging onto your CRM system. So then you often find the problem of being able to like, hey do we need to build any extra integrations between these two things or where are the reps expected to spend their time? It's one more interface they gotta work out of. It's one more set of tools and a whole nother support team we gotta deal with. It's a whole nother bill that we had that's pretty tough. It's like your sales acceleration and your sales enablement tools should just live in your crm. They should just be part of your crm. And the reason it's cool and and it's kind of like the other bigger reason why like HubSpot is the whole idea behind HubSpot grows with you when you need that.

It's available when you start growing a sales team that needs these tools because they need to be more efficient, maybe marketing's producing a lot more leads and you have to be efficient in the way that you work through them or you're just scaling up a sales team and you need to be able to provide them aids to do their jobs through like playbooks or whatever. You can start investing in that stuff when you need it cuz it has those additional levels. But the whole point is that it's all just in your crm. It's not another thing you're attacking on top of it. And I'm not clowning on integrations here, like integrations are a big part of the game, but a lot of that stuff that enables your sales team to do their job should kind of live natively where they're working versus making them go somewhere else. I think it's cool that when you need it, it can be there and you can grow into it as your sales team kind of grows and you don't have to go out and buy like a separate tool to do it, just use the CRM in a better

George B. Thomas (16:13):

Way. I love that that was your answer because honestly I'm gonna be a true hub hero. I'm gonna swing in and save the day because my answer to this is actually integrations. And let me get very specific. The fact that I can generate a QuickBooks invoice via a workflow action and invoices and quotes and HubSpot payments all work in a magical cylinder of making my life easier is amazing. The fact that if I wanted to do sales videos and I wanted an integration, if I, there's just so Zoom info SalesLoft, so if you want to do whatever with whatever it's possible and there's so many tools that it's impossible or the bonus that I'll add to this is that HubSpot is really making themselves special in the way that they actually show the tools that are integrating with them. Meaning if you go into many, dare I say Salesforce instances, it might be a hot mess for you to figure out how to work or get to anything in there, but HubSpot is really focused on a sleek clean user design just makes sense platform and I think that makes it super special. Speaking of special, I wanna get to our next question because I know my answer. I'm super curious about the two of you what your answer is, but do you have a favorite HubSpot sales hub tool dial

Why playbooks are Kyle's #1 favorite HubSpot Sales Hub tool

Kyle Jepson (17:33):

Off playbooks and I love that playbooks recently moved down from the enterprise tier to the professional tier. I think it is so cool for anyone who doesn't know playbooks is this thing you can, you can create a playbook inside of HubSpot and you can put basically whatever you want in there. If this playbook is, some people use it for for competitive battle cards so your rep knows they're going into a call and there's this particular competitor on the line. You can have a playbook that has like videos and images and charts showing us first them and where we win and where we lose and they can study that up before they get on the call so they're ready to go. Or you can have a playbook that's more like just in time information like, oh I'm on a call, this concern came up, I'm gonna open that playbook now I have an outline and the really cool thing about playbooks, my favorite part is you can insert these interactive questions into it.

So we're not talking about just giving your reps a RO script and you're gonna recite these words at every person you meet with. We're more hel helping the rep organize their thoughts and ask the the most important questions and collect that most important information in the simplest possible way for them. Instead of having like a typical call script where they read it and they're typing their answers somewhere the the playbook could have a question, what are your top three priorities for the year? And you could even have buttons in it where they can just click the buttons that best match the answers they're given and type any additional notes if they want. But basically the rep can just click buttons and talk and focus on listening rather than focusing on, I've gotta type down what you're saying so I don't forget it later, which I think is so huge.

And then we've introduced a lot of cool features to playbooks in the last year or two. You can now connect those interactive questions to your CRM properties, which then can trigger automation and do all kinds of magical things. We recently made it so you can recommend specific playbook when a deal is in a particular deal stage. So now like, oh I'm in a discovery call, there's the recommended discovery call playbook, gonna open that up, gonna ask these questions, gonna collect this information, it's gonna trigger this automation. And it's just, again, it delivers on this promise of we're trying to make the reps experience better, we're trying to make it easier for them to do their job and I think playbooks does that exceptionally well. I'm

George B. Thomas (19:26):

Telling you ladies and gentlemen, Kyle Jepson is a walking wiki of what you can do in HubSpot. See that's what happens when you pay attention to every update that slams in here because that was probably a rewind point where you should just water all the things that I should be doing with playbooks like yesterday immediately. Again, I'm gonna hold my goal or not my goal but ah dang it, I just let it slip but I'll get back to it. My favorite feature son of it could be Max. Max. I wonder what it could be. What's your favorite?

Why Max loves the deal-based workflows feature in HubSpot Sales Hub

Max Cohen (19:53):

Kyle stole mine. I am the self proclaimed on LinkedIn. Biggest fan of playbooks, Oh this might be a rivalry Max. Yeah. Yeah, I will say I had the pleasure of sitting down with Drew McDaniel who was at the helm of playbooks now within the HubSpot product in the future is very bright, let's say for playbooks, which is extremely exciting. I'll leave it at that. But yeah, playbooks are just, what I'd love about playbooks is that it's really only limited by your creativity in terms of the use case. You know what I mean? There are so many cool things that you can do with just a blank canvas of questions and fields to input data. It's wild. Anyway, I'm going to then pick my second favorite and there'll probably be deal-based workflows, just like with the sheer amount of things that I've heard from sales leaderships or sales managers complaining about either their like visibility to what's going on with deals and and things like that.

And a lot of the manual work that has to be done maintaining a pipeline. A lot of people, people forget that workflows tool on the backend can center around other objects besides contacts and with the sales hub you unlock that ability to do workflows and automations around that specific deal object. And there's a lot you can do with that, especially when you pair it with a lot of the other things HubSpot has, including that newer feature you were talking about in one of your updates earlier, Kyle, where you can prevent people from editing deals when they're in certain stages. You pair that kind of stuff with the power of workflows. There's like really a lot that you can do there. Just simple stuff in terms of saying when deals reach certain stages, let people know or do you hit some sort of notification, let's use a SaaS example.

You could do something crazy like if a deal close wins, you could have a custom coded workflow action that maybe creates someone's account in your SaaS software. There's so many different things that you can do when you really start thinking about automation that has to do with like the deals you're closing. A ton of power comes out of that, which again, especially in the days of operations hub, is really limited by your creativity and and really kind of thinking outside of the box of what like regular deal automation would be considered workflows for deals is great. It's not just a tool to just send automated emails to

George B. Thomas (21:52):

People. I'm super shocked you two did really well because I love this question but I hate this question because when I put this question in for the show, I was like I don't know how I'm gonna answer this by the way, because it could be snippets because it streamlines the way that I communicate. It could be meetings because I don't have to deal with dumb people asking me if I'm free at two when I already said I was only free at four and five. No they're not dumb people, they're just calendar challenged. So let me digress on that one. But here's the thing, I thought to myself, what is the thing that I've seen a lot of people not using in their HubSpot hubs and what is the thing that actually brings me joy when it happens? And I fully understand that the joy is because I am a big fan of a big dose of dopamine.

I love me some dopamine. And so my favorite one and I let it slip out the bag, is using goals for your sales team. If you don't have goals set up and all of a sudden your rep can see that they're 104%, 125%, 160% pass their goal and they're killing it or they're not killing it and they need to do some things, well you should have that in place And I, I know it's like a little kind of really is it that important? Yes, it is actually that important because without a goal, without vision, hmm, I could go somewhere with that one. Anyway, let's move on to the next thing. Oh wait Kyle, do you have something to say? I

Kyle Jepson (23:09):

Was just, and we have fully custom goals now. Hubspot's always had goals. You could like set quota and stuff but like if you wanna get really granular on you wanna have some sort of deal creation or call count or something goal and hold your reps accountable to that. Like whatever it is you need to do, you can do it now.

Max Cohen (23:24):

Yeah and they do like formula based stuff too in there. It's almost like a calculation type thing that you can do. So yeah, it's, it's pretty

The most common mistakes companies make with HubSpot Sales Hub

George B. Thomas (23:31):

Sweet. You can keep it simple or you can get nerdy with it. It's totally up to you. So we've had, we basically for these first three questions we've had if you will, a HubSpot sales hub love fest. Now let's get into the trenches for a hot second and let's talk about and Max, I sure you have some horror stories, Kyle, you as well. What have you seen that most companies get wrong when they're using the HubSpot sales hub, the potholes, the hurdles.

Kyle Jepson (23:54):

One thing I wanna mention is we each just shared our favorite features and tools, but that's actually kind of the wrong way to think about Sales Hub because like Max was saying earlier, they're all connected together. So like sequences a great tool, it lets you automate tasks and emails, meetings a great tool makes it easy for people to book time for you. If you aren't using those two together, you're doing it wrong because like sequences you can set up these automated email things and then if someone replies they automatically get unenrolled from the sequence. So you don't keep bugging 'em after they've replied. But if they don't reply but they book time on your calendar also unenrolls them because HubSpot is this big interconnected system. Each tool is awesome in its own right great, but start looking for ways to put them together and and you can really unlock a lot of, a lot of potential there.

But if I have to stick with just one, I will stay on the sequences train here for a minute. Sequences for a long time it was kind of one of the the first sales acceleration tools we introduced in Sales Hub back before it was called sales hub even. And it was just basically the ability to automate up to five emails in an outreach and then we expanded it. You used to have to enroll people one at a time. Now you can roll groups of people but kind of quietly over the course of the past couple years, sequences has become a lot more than just automated emails. It's become like this task orchestration tool and if you're just using sequences to send a series of five emails and now the limit is 10, so a series of 10 emails you're living below your privileges, there's so much more you could be doing with that tool And and I really love, it's interesting if you look at sequences and you're building a sequence, you can put in an automated email or you can put in a task to send an email and you might wonder what <laugh>, like why would I, but actually it depending on what you're trying to accomplish here.

And again it goes back to goals and visions that George was just talking about. Those are two very different things. If you have a stack of business cards from people you just met at a trade show, by all means send some automated emails with your meeting link in there, say hey, it's great to meet you, let's find some time to talk and that's fine. But if you're doing literally anything else with email, the email tasks are probably gonna be better. You can still select an email template. But what happens now is let's say you're enrolling 50 people into a sequence at one time. If you're doing automated emails, then at that time of enrollment you have to personalize and update all those email templates and hit send all at once. And if you're doing five, or especially if you're doing 10 emails to anticipate the way the world and your relationship might have changed by email number 10 and try to update it ahead of time, it's kind of crazy.

Again, if it's just like hey great to meet you at that trade show, let's find some time to talk. Relationship isn't changing, world isn't changing that much in relevant ways that's probably gonna be okay. But any other part of your sales process where you're, you're connecting with people or trying to help them move forward, these emails have to be really, really great because now you enroll those 50 people and all those tasks get scheduled for the future at whatever cadence you've selected. And then that day comes and now you have an email task and when you click on that task, it takes you right to their contact record opens the email pane, there's the email template right there all filled in. If nothing is changed you can just hit send. But you can do a quick look over the contact record, see if any properties have updated, look at that timeline, see if they've taken any new actions or anything and then you know, drop in a few personalized touches and then hit send.

This is still way faster than the typical process of just checking in with people and writing an email from scratch. But it's so much more personalized and contextualized And I think if you are just using sequences to send automated emails, you should definitely look at the task management part of it cuz it's not just emails. You can do calling tasks and to do tasks, LinkedIn tasks, you can do lots of different kinds of tasks and help. Now again, we're helping reps know what to do when to take particular actions and and making sure nobody gets left behind.

Max Cohen (27:30):

Yeah, I I I think also like to even add to that like task thing, it's also making sure that tasks that don't need to be created don't get created. There's nothing worse than when you have like automation set up that's creating tasks but it turns out there's no need for them to have ever been built in the first place and you end up with a whole bunch of bloat of these tasks that just aren't relevant anymore and people are spending time deleting stuff. What's really cool with the sequence is that when it gets to the point where the task actually does need to be created because that person hasn't reengaged with you, then it only then does it get created when it's needed. So that's like a really cool thing. And I think I'll hit the sequences thing just again real quick. A big mistake that I see people, it's not an email marketing tool.

Sequences in HubSpot Sales Hub vs. the marketing email tool

Marketing email is the email marketing tool. If you're the sales director saying, Hey here's a list of people, we're gonna blast them with a sequence, guess what dude, you're just gonna burn your domain, your Gmail, your Office 365 business email is not meant to be email marketing server. And again, like you're, you're trying to use it that way. If if that's what you're trying to do and if anyone's wondering why there are certain limits around how much you can do it, it's to protect you. Cuz again, sequences is not made for bulk email marketing. The best sort of use case you can or the way you can kind of frame it up is that it's made to automate a lot of the things you do in the different scenarios where you're either introducing yourself one on one for the first time reconnecting with someone or just trying to, to get back into like yeah either reconnecting or introducing yourself for the first time.

Like that's like really the big thing. What I tell people is in terms of what sequences should you set up, think of all the different scenarios where you would deploy that sequence because the, the cadence that you would create to kind of follow up with someone, whether it's the first time that you're assigned and you need to book that kickoff call or you're in the middle of a deal and they ghost you or you're just trying to reconnect with someone you haven't talked to in a while. Those are all different ways that you would engage those folks. So if you build these, if you talk to your sales team and say hey what are the common scenarios where we usually follow the same sort of standard operating procedure to reengage with someone, let's build those in as sequences so we have those there at our disposal and we can use them and and get some reporting on them and all that.

That's kind of the best way to approach it versus just saying, oh this is like an email marketing tool. Cause it's not, it's not that. It's not that that beyond the sequences stuff though, I think one of the biggest things that I see sort of people get wrong at a more like macro sense is trying to recreate their sales process exactly as it was before and not using this as an opportunity to make it better. And I think also a trend that I've been seeing a lot that I'm not totally in love with is the idea of having competing sales teams working out of a single crm. I've heard a lot of requests of people wanting to be like, yeah well we've got these competitive sales teams and they like to shark each other's deals and deal information from each other so we wanna make sure they can't see other stuff and we wanna be able to have duplicate records.

They can all work on their own and keep it separate and it's just, you realize that's gonna create an awful customer experience One and also, and this is a maybe something to think about not only for sales hub or for any other part of HubSpot that you're using. Some things are people problems and some things are technology problems. They're not always technology problems. If you have like a toxic sales culture or you've set up your sales incentives in a way where your own employees or people under your same umbrella have to compete with each other, it really doesn't matter what technology you're using, at the end of the day you're creating a bad experience for your employees and for your customers. Just going into it thinking technology is gonna solve problems that need to be solved in other ways that aren't technology is just what I see a lot of people be blind to when starting to use

George B. Thomas (31:01):

It. Yeah Max, I love that you went in that direction and by the way, the way that I love to look at this is it's platform, it's process, it's people, those are the three kind of vector areas that you can pay attention to when you're trying to fix something. By the way, let me just back up for hot second cuz I feel like I'm at HubSpot Sales Hub church or stuff like I was getting, I was getting sales goosebumps as you two are talking, I'm like this is so good, it's so much great value for the HubSpot and inbound community. And then what was amazing is that the thing that I am like this is a travesty, it's a train wreck. It didn't even hit the map of like the brains of Max Cohen and Kyle json. Here's the deal ladies and gentlemen, if you were using your deal pipeline for some type of process that has zero to do with revenue dollars, ooh stop it.

<Laugh>, stop it. It's a ticket pipeline, it's a custom object, it's something, but you are not to build a process that is not revenue based in your deal pipelines because you will jack things up, reporting goals, forecasting it will get ugly real quick. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. Let's move forward. The next thing that I wanna talk about, because we're trying to squeeze this all in the amount of time that we have is, is there a ninja or samurai or I don't know, whatever your favorite thing is, ladies and gentlemen, tip, trick or hack that you like to use or you've seen people use inside of the sales hub that you're like, oh, oh that's pretty

Kyle Jepson (32:29):

Dope. There are lots of crazy things people do in HubSpot. We could go into some really technically advanced stuff that I don't even fully understand cuz it's over my head. I mean George you mentioned just briefly early on in this episode snippets and I feel like snippets I people are not excited enough about snippets. So a snippet for anyone for, for anyone who's new to HubSpot or not in hubs, Slott is just a tiny block of text. It can have personalization tokens in it, you could have format it with in whatever way you want and then you assign it like a hashtag shortcut and then you can just use it so many different places inside of HubSpot you're sending an email to someone. We have email templates and that gives you the subject line in the full body. If your email template is proposition value, number one goes here, proposition value number two goes here, you gotta have a whole library of value props in your snippets and you could just drop in the relevant ones there.

But it's not just in in that little communicator box where you can send emails and and leave notes and assign tasks and things. You can use it when you're generating a quote cuz that's another thing you'd do in HubSpot. And if you wanna drop in a standard terms of service or, or if you have, you could put comments to the buyer on your quotes inside of HubSpot. Now you could have your comments to the buyer, probably one of five things you say to every buyer, just have snippets for 'em, drop 'em in there, don't type that up every time. I think it's just so fun. It's like a little scavenger hunt inside of HubSpot to figure out all the different places that snippets can be used and it's a lot and you can just build a whole bunch of those and anytime you know you have that thing you, you type over and over, you can put it there and and I I think snippets is is great and can can save you so much time in so many different ways.

Using snippets in HubSpot Sales Hub is the best way to get started

Max Cohen (34:01):

Yeah, also if you don't have access to playbooks yet, maybe you're on starter a snippet is a great way to come up with just a notes taking format when you're logging calls. I think where my mind kind of goes with this is, and and maybe it's a little bit more nuanced but I don't think a lot a to, maybe I'm wrong but at least with the folks that I've had experience onboarding, a lot of people don't really look at the sales hub as like a coaching tool. Like if you think about it, there's a lot of ways that managers can coach reps with a lot of what you're seeing and logging and doing inside of the sales hub. If you look at things now, conversational intelligence for example where where you're putting the call recordings in HubSpot, you have that space to leave notes and comments and everything and give feedback around the calls people are having.

That's a really cool thing. When you think of something simple like comments in a chat, maybe you have sales reps that are working a chat and you're a manager and you want to come in and coach them in real time by leaving comments in the chat that the recipient on the other end can't see. That's a really cool way that you can kind of do that in real time and help someone like through a sales chat conversation. Again, playbooks is also like a, a really good way to help make sure your coaching reps, things like that, but also in the way that you set up your dashboards. If you have these dashboards that you're building that are like giving you information and sure maybe you're sharing those with like key stakeholders that like aren't going into HubSpot and stuff. Have you ever thought of building your dashboards in a way so that when you're sitting down having a one-on-one with your sales reps, you can filter it by the rep and then all of a sudden your data that you're, you're seeing is just for that rep And you can have a conversation around that.

You can do pipeline reviews by looking at your card view of deals and just filtering it by certain reps. There's so many ways that you can use the data and stuff that people are generally just looking at in HubSpot to do their job as aids for these different coaching conversations that you have with sales reps. But a lot of people just don't think to do that. Think a little bit more about if you're a manager, how are you using what's available to you to coach your reps in different creative

George B. Thomas (35:52):

Ways. So all plus one the snippets, I think it's one of the least talked about most flexible could be absolutely amazing in your sales process tools cuz it works in HubSpot and it works in Gmail and Outlook. Like it's just, anyway we'll get off of that because snippets they get love. I wanna throw in there by the way the activity feed under your contact menu because man, if you're not using that to actually look at the things you should be doing for that day to communicate around what's happening, that's not the one I'm gonna pick, but I at least wanna throw that in this episode because it's, it's some valuable information. But here's another tool that I just feel doesn't get enough love for the magic that it could actually provide your sales team. The big culprit is the visibility of things and when things are invisible we can't make smart decisions.

And the fact that you can actually use the documents tool and upload a document, a PDF or a PowerPoint or whatever and you can send it to somebody and you can see that they viewed page one, page three, page seven, but they didn't view page eight. Oh no Cuz on page eight we talk about pricing. Well that makes you know exactly what you're gonna talk about on the next call with them because you know that they're inept to the fact of the pricing that is actually important to them moving forward in the process or whatever it is. But the fact that we can see intelligence around what was once hidden, when you attach that PDF to your email and you didn't know if it was downloaded or viewed or thrown away or whatever, those days are gone. So please, if you're not using documents, check out that tool and figure out how to leverage it.

I was gonna skip the next question by the way cuz we're running out of time, but I saw the notes for this next question. I'm like I can't skip it so I'm gonna skip something else because I was like, ah, maybe I don't wanna talk about the things that are missing from the sales hub and then I saw, anyway, I won't even say it cuz I want you guys, I don't wanna steal your, your thunder here. Let's go into this and then we'll move quickly into action items that we want them to take from this episode. Although I do have one other special thing Max that I wanna share before we send Kyle away from this episode. I've been waiting to actually share this thing, but what is the biggest thing that you two feel is missing from HubSpot Sales Hub to date right now of the recording of this episode?

What is missing from HubSpot Sales Hub right now?

Kyle Jepson (38:01):

Really wish we had deal rooms. The idea of a deal room is you have this space that's unique to a sale and the prospects can come in, the sailor can come in, you can communicate with each other. We have integrations with tools that do this. This idea that the, the sales hub development team has been kicking around for a while. I was in conversations with with people a few years ago and we were kind of like whiteboarding and figuring out how it would work and then the project got moved from one team to another and you know, what we got is customer portal, which is awesome. Inside Service hub customers can now log in, they can see their tickets, they can ask for updates, they can give updates, they can close things. It's awesome. But it's just like tickets and deals. They're they're, they're their cousins.

They're practically twin brothers. Like can't we just have this on the sales side too? I hope we get there. I feel like with HubSpot you can sort of build one ad hoc, especially if you're really good at using object information in the cms, which is a HubSpot superpower. That way beyond me you could have embedded videos and a chat and your deal info and all kinds of things, but I really feel like this is a a just come standard in HubSpot, turn it on sort of solution we could have but we don't have it yet.

George B. Thomas (39:06):

Oh, I'm looking forward to that day. Oh my gosh. Like cuz I know how client portal in 2023 how important that's gonna be to the way I run my business. And to hear you say that for the, the sales process, I'm like, actually I might need to like wipe the saliva off the, like the side of my, my face max. What's missing out of HubSpot Sales Hub as of right now, we

Max Cohen (39:26):

Grew up on small medium businesses. Small to medium businesses don't always just sell in a B2B motion, which if you think about the deal object that's uniquely set up to be able to handle that. But small to medium businesses also sell online through e-commerce. And while there are great integrations that shove in e-commerce orders and things like that into HubSpot, a lot of times, you know, it, it takes a little bit of like, not mental gymnastics, but verbal gymnastics to get someone to understand that hey, a deal doesn't have to be something a sales rep works, it can just represent an online order for something. We shouldn't have to have that conversation with people. I think the sales hub could use like a little bit of almost retweaking to kind of account for the other ways people sell. Especially if you're thinking about maybe like integrations with point of sales systems at like brick and mortar stores or maybe instead of a deal's object, we have an online orders object that's easier for someone to wrap their head around that maybe it works kind of just like a deal's object, but it isn't called a deal.

Like it's an online order, it's something different instead of having to make like other pipelines for it. So I think just like accounting for some of those other ways on top of that, I think there is also, when we talk about small to medium businesses, an idea of appointments versus meetings, and I think I've probably like mentioned this like in previous episodes, if you think of something like a barbershop, some sort of place that sells training or, or any places that sell by people booking appointments for things. You see that a lot with small to medium businesses, service providers or, or things like that. I think that's something that's like really missing because you could build some sort of, we have all the pieces in HubSpot to be able to do something like that where you can say here are appointments that are available, here are users or employees that can work them.

You can book them, you can pay for them. Like with HubSpot payments, we have the guts to make this happen. And this I think is what's stopping a salon from using HubSpot or like, you know, some other like small to medium business that, you know, people paid to book appointments to come in. And you can't expect folks who aren't living and dying by a a Google calendar to understand the nuances of setting up everyone's individual calendar perfectly to make some sort of system that works this way. I would really love to see us kind of just recognize that not every small to medium business sells in this exact motion that a deal is really purpose built to support, make it a little bit more accessible for folks that sell in a different way.

George B. Thomas (41:45):

Yeah, the amount of hairdressers or salons that we could sell HubSpot, CMS and the CRM to, if they could do appointments and have a dope looking website at the same time that is intelligent would be absolutely amazing. Now, I'm not actually

Max Cohen (42:00):

That's, that's sweets. 45 bucks a month, everyone can get it, you

George B. Thomas (42:04):

Know, I'm telling you it's, it's just waiting for that feature. And then I'm, I'm gonna be the king of hairstyles and salons and all that barbers. I'm just gonna go rock the world and, and, and do that. Now I'm not gonna say what's missing because we're quickly running out of time here in a minute, Kyle Max, I'm gonna ask action items that people should take after listening to this episode. But before we do that, I feel like people that are listening to the podcast need to get to know Kyle json just a little bit better than they might know him now. Okay. Because something happened and Max, you know, usually I ask people on the episode, Hey, who's your favorite superhero? And you'll get a quick like Spiderman, Hulk, whatever, whoever it is. Eric was like, Green Arrow and Christina, you know, Scarlet Witch Kyle Jepson answers me back.

I say, Bro, I want to cartoon you for the episode. What's your favorite superhero? And this is a light into who Kyle Jepson is, ladies and gentlemen. His response says, Favorite superhero. Hmm, question mark. I added the hmm in there, it was just a question mark, but he says this Max and listeners, I like the grain lantern. I like it because it's a role that's bestowed upon you as opposed to a superpower. You're born with Superman, X-men, et cetera, or get from an accident Spiderman, et cetera, or experiment Captain America, et cetera. Or that you build with expensive technology and a huge budget. Batman, Ironman, et cetera. There are multiple green lanterns and they all get called to the work and they just have to do the best they can to fulfill their duty.

Max Cohen (43:45):

So remember when you asked me that, what my favorite superhero was and I said, Oh, I don't know Batman. Yep, I remember that. I do remember Yo

George B. Thomas (43:59):

<Laugh>. So that's Kyle Jeffson, ladies and gentlemen. But here we go back into the exit of this podcast episode of The Hub Heroes. What is an action item that the listeners should take after listening to this episode?

Here's your HubSpot Sales Hub homework for this episode, folks! 

Kyle Jepson (44:12):

I would love for everyone to, to check out HubSpot Academy if you haven't already. We've got lots of if, I mean we're talking about sales here. If you wanna learn how to use Sales Hub, HubSpot Academy is totally free. Don't have to be a HubSpot customer to use it. Just go to academy.hubspot.com, sign up, check out the catalog, take some courses.

Max Cohen (44:29):

Action item for me. Check out out the app marketplace. There's a lot of really, really, really, really cool sales specific integrations I'll mention too. Deal Hub CPQ is one that a lot of the solutions engineers are flipping out about. Sales commission by quota path is also a pretty cool to one, pretty cool one as well. Beyond all that, beyond like anything specific in the tool, I've, I've given similar advice for the service hub and I'll give similar advice for the sales hub. Stop looking at the sales hub as a way to just absolutely maximize your sales people. And, and I think it's okay to think about stuff from like efficiency standpoint, but also think it, think about what are you doing in the tool and what are you doing with your strategy and what are you doing with your culture to help your sales people put their freaking oxygen mask on first so they actually can help others.

Instead of just making it a tool that's gonna let you squeeze every last drop out of them. Think of it as something that's gonna help them just enjoy doing their job a little bit more. That is a very valid thing to do. Sales burnout is very real. Sales is a very, just buy its nature. A cutthroat profession that's very difficult. A lot of emotional ups and downs. You don't need your technology adding to that. You don't need additional stressors. So start thinking about ways you can remove that and a low hanging fruit is the technology that you use. But don't sep like, but you need to separate that also from like the strategies and the cultures and things like that too as well, right? Those are all individual things to kind of tackle, but you can bring 'em all together in certain level of harmony too.

George B. Thomas (45:55):

I love both of those. And ladies and gentlemen, I fully know that my advice is gonna sound weird at first, but please, please stick with me. My action item for you after this episode is to listen to yourself. Listen, we talked about a ton of stuff in this episode, and I want you to listen back to yourself. If you had a moment in this episode that you went, Hmm, or I wonder, I want you to go back to that point. Look at what we were talking about and learn about that. Test that. Try to add it to your process, see if it makes your sales process, your sales organization or your use of HubSpot better, and then move forward with the next thing that you heard us talk about, and we'll see you in the next episode.