HubSpot Operations Hub Deep-Dive with Chad (Pros, Cons, Use Cases + More)
Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge.
Intro:Never fear, hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Activate those powers. And you know what? I wanna talk about the league for a second because I don't know if anybody's been paying attention, Liz, but the league has kind of changed a little bit. And What bet?
George B. Thomas:I wanna just a little bit. I wanna take a moment to address, the fact of, one, Devin, we love you so much. We miss you, and we hope that you are doing well and getting better and working on you. And, you have a golden ticket anytime you want to come and do a Hub Heroes episode because the mad value that is in your brain and you bring to the table. But, obviously, we can't just keep going and not say why we're super excited, to also make the change.
George B. Thomas:And that is the last couple episodes you've been on. We're gonna make it official. We're getting you cartooned. Hi, Chad. Oh.
George B. Thomas:Oh, yes. We have Chad, is going to be rolling with Liz, Max, myself on the Hub Heroes podcast moving forward. Let me let me talk about, Chad. You might have to find the air valve to, like, you know, decompress, as as we go here. But let me talk about, why we love chat.
George B. Thomas:Listen. I love to get HubSpot nerdy. I have for years. Like, even back in the day when it was Marcus Sheridan and myself, we were doing the hub cast. It was like, let's get nerdy.
George B. Thomas:I was the nerdy dude. I don't feel so nerdy when I'm hanging out with Chad, and I love that. I love that he is the type of guy that is, like, pushing me to be better at HubSpot, pushing me to be a little more, nerdier than me and HubSpot, making me wanna up my game. And and here's the thing. As soon as I realized, this dude is super smart.
George B. Thomas:This dude is challenging me. I thought to myself, you know what? Maybe he could challenge the rest of the community. Maybe he could get the rest of the hub heroes to wanna learn more impact. Like and so I'm like, man, I plus, let's let's just say this.
George B. Thomas:Chad is an awesome guy. Like Thank you. We were hanging out at inbound, and we've hung out in meetings. And he just has a very similar happy, helpful, humble human heart that I have been bringing to the table since 02/2012. Anyway, Chad, we love you.
George B. Thomas:I'm excited that you're here. I'm excited that you said yes to being part of the shenanigans,
Max Cohen:that Oh, I love shenanigans.
George B. Thomas:I I hope that you're happy that you said yes.
Chad Hohn:So, yeah, so happy to be here. I mean, you know, I will second that, definitely miss Devin. But, like, I got to meet him for the first time in person at inbound this year. And, yeah, I just ran over and gave the dude a hug because he's awesome. He's excited to see me.
Chad Hohn:I was excited to see him, you know? So, but also, I'm just really excited. You know, I mean, I've been in the live audience most weeks for like the last year. Right? And I just like what you guys are talking about.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. I like what you guys are are talking about, and, you know, it's, it's glad to be able to contribute at least my hypertechnical brand of nerdiness and HubSpot specific type, you know, love for the operational side, the implementational side of things in HubSpot, and I like to be able to, you know, bring that to the table. And I'm really, really, really glad to be here. So thanks for having me on.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Of course. Excited about. And on and on and on. I don't I mean, I don't know when these episodes ever end.
George B. Thomas:So, welcome to our Hub Hero version of goodness. You you could have inserted a different word there, but go ahead, Liz. Sorry.
Liz Moorhead:No. It's okay. I just wanna say one of the things I'm actually most excited about with with Chad coming on is that we've always had a very interdisciplinary approach to the people who are part of this show. Right? You know, George, you are you are deeply in the tactical and in the weeds, but your superpowers begin with understanding the the humans.
Liz Moorhead:Can you give me a good human?
George B. Thomas:Well, yes. Yes. I I can say humans.
Liz Moorhead:Right? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That was great. So we have the human side of it, the strategic, the mindsets.
Liz Moorhead:We have Max who has been inside Big Orange Sprocket, has done a lot of work with them, which is really exciting. I come here not only do I wrangle, but I'm here with the content nerdery side of things. So it's really neat, I think, particularly you know, we've discussed over the past few episodes actually, over the past, I would say, maybe eight episodes. Guys, HubSpot is getting way more complex. It's way more technical.
Liz Moorhead:The that means the decision making around it that we need to have is much more complex, which actually leads us into today's discussion, which I am very excited about. We are doing a HubSpot operations hub deep dive, and we are doing this with Chad. And we have talked about the HubSpot operations hub before, but it's also probably one of the most criminally underrated and under discussed hubs in the HubSpot ecosystem. Because when we think about operations within a business, we're not immediately thinking revenue, glitz, glam. You know?
Liz Moorhead:Like, that's not where you got it's a spreadsheet. It's someone telling me to do my job. But, like, if we think about it, operations is how you take visionary stuff that a CEO wants to do, all the things that teams want to be doing, and makes it real. Right? Like, otherwise, it's just like wishing and dreaming, and nothing is actually getting done, built, executed, measured, managed.
Liz Moorhead:It does not happen without operations. Nothing gets done in a company without operations. But, thankfully, Chad, light of my life, you are here to save the day. And I want to start this conversation with a very simple question. What do you see folks still getting wrong about the HubSpot operations hub in terms of Mhmm.
Liz Moorhead:What it is and who it's for? Because I still hear
Max Cohen:Oh, yeah.
Liz Moorhead:A lot of kinda, like, wishy washy ambiguity around, like, what is I don't people don't understand what problems it's designed to solve.
Max Cohen:Right.
Liz Moorhead:So talk me through this.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of nice to haves in it, to be honest. Like, so if you're at a place in your business where you want some of the nice to haves, like the data quality control center, which is just, you know, orange sprocket language for stuff that automates, like, trimming white space from first and last names, capitalizing first and last names, recommending edits on some of the standard, like, contact or company properties. That's just a really nice to have.
Chad Hohn:Right? So if you're at a size of organization where, you know, you want clean emails to go out, like, I mean, you know, like, hey, the first name should be capitalized. So and it looks so it looks right. There shouldn't be a last name in the first name when I'm sending a marketing email. Boom.
Chad Hohn:OpsHub takes care of that for you. You're good to go. Like you just turn on seven automations that are pre baked in there and it's done. And it just does it all for you just like that. Right.
Chad Hohn:And then,
George B. Thomas:like I love that work, by the way. Like Yeah. Because here's and then I want you to jump back in. But one of the things that I wanna throw in here is I I feel like there's this thought that operations hub is for the nerds Mhmm. And that it's difficult.
George B. Thomas:Right. And and the more you look at it, that's kind of a no and a yes at the same time.
Chad Hohn:Is it Right?
Max Cohen:Yeah. But but some
George B. Thomas:of the things that you just mentioned, no nerds needed. No nerds needed. If you can click a mouse seven times, your data will look better. Yeah. And you will not have those.
George B. Thomas:Oh, God. Did that just happen? Moments when you're communicating with prospects, leads, and customers. Alright.
Max Cohen:Go
Chad Hohn:ahead, Chad. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Hohn:No. That's I mean, that's exactly right. Like, it's it's the thing, and that's one of the things that I think people get wrong about it is, like, do I have to have a hyper nerd to use it? Well, no. But, like, if you can follow simple business logic of a workflow then you can do more with that workflow with operations hub with data formatting or with you know other things you also get like more calculated property fields and things like that that's also helpful if you're leveraging those and yeah.
Chad Hohn:I mean, I I would say, like, it's really just designed to make your data better and give you tools to, like, truly allow you to supercharge your data if you know how to use those, if you have some of those nerds on on hand.
George B. Thomas:So can I ask you a question? Because, you know, you're here.
Chad Hohn:I mean, you're you're going to. So And
George B. Thomas:I'm and I'm going to. Why why do why do sometimes they make things seem more difficult than they have
Max Cohen:to be? Like, you know, normal human beings, when we hear the word formula, we're like,
George B. Thomas:I don't even know what that is. And, like I'm
Liz Moorhead:not here to do math. I'm not here to like Mhmm.
George B. Thomas:Bracket, exclamation mark, a bracket bracket. Like, is that, like, do I need to know that? Is it a good to know that? If I do need to know that, is there a cheat sheet? Chad, please tell me there's a cheat sheet for the users.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. I mean, honestly, you know, good old, mister hub helper Harry is really great at giving you a lot of like how would I do custom formulas right and really I think I actually use improper terminology because I believe by design HubSpot has named it calculated fields, and data formatting actions in workflows so it's like a lot less nerd blaster than I communicated it. Right? That's just how I know it because I know behind the scenes what it's doing is it's performing transformations on your data. Right?
Chad Hohn:So, anyway, all that to say, like, yeah, HubSpot's great. I mean but HubSpot's done a really good job of the standard UI and, giving you the ability to do simple step by step things so that it just gives you the necessary fields to perform math operations or to add two things together or to strip data or whatever just by picking a drop down, putting the field in that you want to do some sort of manipulation on, and then saying what you want to do to that field if you're not comfortable using the custom section. Now I just always go straight to Mr. Custom and just plug away because, you know, I like to do really, really fancy things, like, with my string values, you know, with, like, the ability to create, like, a link a hyperlink to something. And if the necessary information for the link is not there, I like to tell the end user that this has not yet synced from the external system.
Chad Hohn:But if the ID that is part of that URL is there, then it shows the URL. Right? That way, for the human using the system that you're trying to put a link in there for, they get a nice experience like, oh, it hasn't come over from that other system yet. Or I can click on it and it takes me into, say, QuickBooks online or whatever. Right?
Chad Hohn:So that's why I like the custom. Right? Because I can do things that I can kind of, like, plan ahead for for the person on the other side of the screen.
George B. Thomas:Okay. So I wanna jump in there because I think you mentioned two things. And and first of all, the fact that you jump right into the custom code, does not surprise me because it sounds like you're very much a card carrying member of the Nerd Blaster two thousand, that you kinda gave us a little bit ago. Yeah.
Max Cohen:For sure.
George B. Thomas:But but but here's the thing. You mentioned experience
Max Cohen:Mhmm.
George B. Thomas:And you mentioned I think ahead. Mhmm.
Chad Hohn:Can
George B. Thomas:you just dive into how important especially with Operations Hub? And then I swear, Liz, I'm done asking questions, and you can continue to roll. But can you can you tell me, like, how important the thinking ahead with Operations Hub and the building an experience is Yeah. In your mind.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. So two really, really, really important things there. When I am adding a new shiny button to the system ever, And I just consider a shiny button a feature, some sort of functionality for the end user to accomplish a goal. And that could be to send an email to somebody. That could be to create a deal and other external things with automation, like, automagically, you know, behind the scenes, it's gonna make some external assets when you do this thing and then create a deal afterwards so that everything's properly linked together, you know, anything like that.
Chad Hohn:There's two things that you need to really think about and that's that's exactly what you said but where my brain goes is reporting if I cannot report on it because I haven't logged the information in the system that I need to then how can we even measure whether or not the shiny button I just created is valuable or not? Right? Mhmm. I mean, sometimes you just need it to be a means to an end to accomplish a goal, but reporting has to be in your mind when you're building something in the system. And then I have to sit there and think like, well, I'm the guy who built the thing, and so I know every lever switch nut bolt widget in the thing.
Chad Hohn:Right? I'm I'm intimately familiar with what's happening. But any other human who comes along has no clue how it's built, what other systems it's talking to, if any, and where that data even comes from or how it got there in the first place. And they probably don't even know that you can hover over the property, hit the details button, and look at the property history. Right?
Chad Hohn:I mean, you have to think, like, if I'm gonna get a new hire in here, I need that person to just really simply be able to see the UI and then, like, the thing to do what I need them to, basically. Right? And so if you can give them real time feedback on whether or not the link that they're gonna click is just basically gonna break. So, you know, you don't wanna put it there or it's there if it's able to work. Right?
Chad Hohn:That kind of a thing. Right? I think that's extra helpful when thinking about the person who has to do the job.
Liz Moorhead:So speaking about the people who actually have to do the job, this is really I what I wanna get into because I think Mhmm. When we talk about the the problems that HubSpot operations hub is designed to solve, like, that's pretty clear to me. But when I think about the other hubs in the ecosystem, marketing is for marketers, sales is for sales. When we think about operations hub, I get a little bit, like, fuzzy wuzzy around the edges of who it's actually for and who it's not for, or when do you need it and when do you not need it.
Chad Hohn:Mhmm.
Liz Moorhead:So I'd love to get some thoughts around that for you.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for my opinion in it is, like, if you can have it, then you should probably get it. But, I mean, that's just me because, like, I'm gonna use it. Right?
Chad Hohn:And
Max Cohen:I agree.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. If you can swing it, then just get it. So you're not gonna be limited and have to put in act job workarounds because you can't use one of those features, if that makes sense.
George B. Thomas:And when you say
Max Cohen:If you can if you can afford it, you should onboard it.
George B. Thomas:That that's what that was gonna be my question. When you say if you can swing it, you're talking about it from a budgetary standpoint. Yeah.
Chad Hohn:From a budgetary standpoint. Right. Even if you don't fully know how to use it just yet, you will learn, especially if you're an admin or, you know, if you're a HubSpot admin type persona. And I think the the who is for is truly everybody. Like, literally everyone.
Chad Hohn:I mean, if you're working out of Marketing Hub and Marketing Hub through marketers. Right. You know? Well actually operations hub is going to help you make better personalized emails because you can transform and format data better before you feed it to your customer right I mean it's going to allow you to I mean if you're getting fancy query external systems prior to sending an email and retrieve data from your billing segment you know if you're not using HubSpot payments or whatever like you can actually use the webhook functionality You can use the the format data functionality. You can use, the custom coded action functionality if you want to dive even that deep.
Chad Hohn:But it's truly for all hubs. Like and I think one of the things that I really latched on to when a couple years ago, George did the super admin boot camp and I was, you know, a part of it, for HubSpot, was that it's, you know, one tool, no hubs. I mean, it's truly one tool, and you don't wanna think about it in like, yeah. The hubs are, like, a way to talk about the feature sets and sell it. But, like, it all works together.
Chad Hohn:That's why they call the darn thing a customer platform. Right? I mean, that's what they're going for.
George B. Thomas:So here's a question for you, Max. You too, Chad. Because, again, you're speaking my language of, like, hashtag no hubs.
Chad Hohn:Mhmm.
George B. Thomas:Especially with operations hub, do you feel it's more layers, less hub?
Chad Hohn:Yeah. It's another layer another layer functionality on top for sure. It just basically for me, it supercharges the functionality of all other hubs.
Max Cohen:I agree with that. It is one of those things where it's very while it is its own hub, it is hub agnostic in the way that it can have an impact. Right. I think the thing and I forget I don't know what the original question was because I just came I just came from the bus stop.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. So the original question was, like, when do you need HubSpot operations? Hub, like, when when do you not need it? When do you need it was the original question.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Absolutely. So if you're a HubSpot admin and you get in Slacks every single day saying, hey. Could you build a report that does this? Hey.
Max Cohen:Can you build a report that does this? Can you build a report that does this? Yeah. I think, like, the most basic amazing use of of datasets is not all the cool things you can do with, like, the, you know, custom formulas and, like, all this crazy stuff. The best thing you can do with it right off the bat is use it to enable those around you to be able to be to make reporting more accessible to them.
Max Cohen:Right? Like, think about a scenario where you've got multiple teams inside of HubSpot. Right? Well, if you haven't done a good job at managing things, you know, there's probably a really, really good chance that there's a billion properties across all different records that are relevant to some people and not relevant to others. Right?
Max Cohen:There's a million different nuances in the data on how things are labeled and how they're associated and what stages mean what and what business units belong to what records and all these different things. Right? And when you start to have a lot of teams doing a lot of different shit in HubSpot, that starts it makes it that much tougher for everyone else to build reports because they can't make sense to any of the data that's in there. Right? What properties am I supposed to use?
Max Cohen:What's all the nuances around the way I should be filtering the data? So I'm only getting stuff that's, you know, relevant to me. Right? You know, and the coolest part about datasets is that instead of just being like, don't worry. I'll build the reports because I understand the nuances of all the data, and I know all the different properties that you use and this, that, and the other thing.
Max Cohen:Right? You can literally make it so when you're exactly. You're the bottleneck. Right? You can you can literally make it so that, like, people, when they go and build reports, they have their own dataset they can work out of that's going to pre filter the data.
Max Cohen:Right? So they don't have to worry about filtering because no one's just gonna understand that right off the bat. Right? Yeah. And you can only give them access to the properties that are actually relevant to them.
Max Cohen:So everything they see in that left hand side is stuff that makes sense. Right? And yeah. And, like, it it just makes reporting so much more accessible to people around the organization. You can enable them to do reporting on their own because you're giving them only the properties that they need, only the data that they need.
Max Cohen:You're filtering it
Max Cohen:in the right way. And they don't have to think, what's a primary versus a secondary data source? What's a like, when should I be filtering on create date?
Max Cohen:Like, you know, you could just build a forum, right, and make it easy. And then so everyone can go in there and access their data and build reports. So Yeah. I think that's one of the like, if you're that sorry. Roundabout way of saying, like, if you're the admin that's constantly getting, like, you can't get through your day because people keep asking you how to build a report on x y z, bro, get yourself some datasets immediately.
George B. Thomas:So so, Chad, I I know I might get in trouble with Liz because, you know
Max Cohen:Oh, shit.
George B. Thomas:There's questions that we wanna make sure we get through in the amount of time. But I saw you smiling, and and I behind the scenes, I know that you're a datasets Oh, well nerd.
Max Cohen:So Oh, yeah.
George B. Thomas:So I'm giving you permission, to take a couple minutes to dive into the really deep end of where your brain goes and why you were smiling when Max was talking about datasets.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing off the hop is that at inbound this year, and I think I mentioned it before, but they brought it down to ops hub pro. So what used to be base price $2,800 a month add on is now in Ops Pro for $800 a month. So you literally just saved $2 to have this now accessible feature that is fully customizable datasets. Right?
Chad Hohn:Wow. And, like, what is a dataset? Well, a dataset is, you know, for those who aren't super familiar with it, who maybe haven't bought Ops Pro because do I need it? I don't know. Right?
Chad Hohn:Well, a dataset is the ability to configure properties that you would like somebody to use and filters for that data only in that dataset. So you can create a dataset that's designed for revenue reporting and a dataset that's designed for lead source tracking. And your teams then can use that information accordingly. And if they need a new property, they have to reach out to you so you can add a new property to the dataset if they're, like, missing something that they want. But that's a whole lot easier than, like, having to build every single report.
Chad Hohn:And I've seen people with their portals, like, people completely locked down their portals because their team can't figure out their, like, no joke, like, multiple thousand deal properties, multiple thousand deal properties that people have had because they're trying to track so many data points. And so they lock everybody out because even though they may have an enterprise portal, they haven't taken the time to segment the streams of data to empower those end users to take a stab at reporting and reach out to you with questions if they have them. Right? Datasets allows you to empower your team to be able to answer these questions for themselves because you never ever wanna be the bottleneck. Even working at a solutions agency, like a partner agency, I never worry about working myself out of a job where somebody's gonna need me because there's always more I can teach them, and then there's always more I can train them on how to do and empower them to be able to manage and handle their own portal.
Chad Hohn:But then we get to focus on, you know, more of the cool stuff. Right? It's Yeah. My thought.
George B. Thomas:I I I love how you just went about that because I think one and then, Liz, I promise I'll be quiet, and you can go with the next question. One, it's like, a, do this to disable any chaos that may occur in your HubSpot portal based on x y z data reporting about things. The other thing is Max was waxing poetic on a very what felt like complex thing.
Max Cohen:Mhmm.
George B. Thomas:And then in your response was like, but you can simplify said complex thing so that Yep. And here's the thing. When you don't have chaos and you simplify the complex, guess what you get? Buy in. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:And buy in is what everybody's looking for as far as
Chad Hohn:%.
George B. Thomas:People in your organization and the way that you use this. Alright. So I'm actually gonna jump in, and I'm gonna ask the next question so we can keep moving forward. Like, over the last year, let's say, what are the, biggest improvements? What are what are some of the biggest improvements you've seen in the last year feature wise, and usability wise around Operations Hub?
Max Cohen:Oh, dude. Scheduled workflows. I know that wasn't in the last year, but I know it was.
Chad Hohn:It's amazing. That's amazing. Being able to run something once a day that all the deals that meet the criteria, all the contacts yeah. That's that's operationally amazing.
Max Cohen:That alone makes Operations Hub Pro worth it, in my personal opinion.
Chad Hohn:Oh, what I mean, I've loved the webhooks in general. I mean, that's also far before this year, but being able to utilize webhooks if you don't know what they are, just ask.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah. Because that's what I was gonna ask because I'm I I like I gotta be honest. I've been on multiple episodes with you jokers, and I love you all so much. And you're like, webhooks, webhooks. I'm like, yes.
Liz Moorhead:I know what web and hooks are. So for the five year olds of the audience, what is that?
Max Cohen:Oh, wait. I have a good good I have a good analogy. Right? Okay. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Oh, no. And then, Chad, you can give your First
George B. Thomas:of all, is it is your analogy g rated?
Max Cohen:Oh, yeah. No. Totally.
George B. Thomas:Okay. Okay.
Max Cohen:I can make it r rated if you want. No. No. No.
Liz Moorhead:No. Said, yeah. No. Totally. He said, yeah.
Liz Moorhead:You can
Max Cohen:make it. That is
Liz Moorhead:not an answer.
Max Cohen:I could make it n c 17.
Liz Moorhead:No. With the producer. Listen closely.
Max Cohen:So it's like attention. So, Liz, so there sometimes it's it's easier to understand, when you also, like, compare to, like, what, like, an API is. Right? So, like, when you're thinking about how, like, softwares connect to each other well, I'm a tell you. Right?
Max Cohen:Wait. We use one one nerd word to to explain another nerd word.
George B. Thomas:But I'll sit down and wait for the API.
Liz Moorhead:Is at least I at least know what an API is. I know.
Max Cohen:Okay. Alright. Alright. So so you've got an API. Right?
Max Cohen:An API is something that a a program makes available for other programs to go and Yes.
Liz Moorhead:The American Panda Institute.
Max Cohen:Yes. Correct. Yep. The American Panion Institute. Right?
Max Cohen:So, think of, like, using an API to, like, get data from another system. Like, you have to make a request where you have to go, hey. Is something happening? And then when you when it comes back, like, you know whether or not it did. So a good example of it like, an API request would be, let's say I was having a party.
Max Cohen:And, Liz, stop stop laughing and listening to me. Yeah. I'm laughing. Like, oh, because of what Chad's doing. So think of it as like a party.
Max Cohen:So, like, an example of an API would be, you have to call me every ten minutes and ask if you're invited to the party. Right. Right? And so if you wanna know if you're invited to the party, well, you're gonna have to ask again in ten minutes.
George B. Thomas:Okay.
Max Cohen:So
Max Cohen:if you wanna know, you're gonna have to keep asking me. Like, Max, am I invited to the party yet? No. Max, am I invited to the party yet? No.
Max Cohen:Max, am I invited to the party yet? No. That's like an API call. Right? Where, like, you request information, you get back a response.
Max Cohen:Right?
Chad Hohn:Mhmm.
Max Cohen:A webhook sorry. A webhook would be, what if you didn't have to ask for it? What if it could just tell you when you were invited? Right? So, like, a webhook will basically, you know, shoot data out to another system.
Max Cohen:Right? And the way they kind of explain it and I'm not, like, a developer. Right? So I might be speaking bullshit here in chat and catch me. The way, like, apps use webhooks is they, like, subscribe to webhooks.
Max Cohen:Right? So, like, when you use HubSpot's webhooks API, right, you're basically subscribing to listen to things happening. Right? So, like, you could say, HubSpot, tell me every time a contact changes a certain property, or tell me every time a deal gets created, or tell me every time a company record gets created. Right?
Max Cohen:Instead of yep. Alright. Instead of asking HubSpot every single time, hey. Are there any more companies that got created? Or Or I'll check-in 10.
Max Cohen:Hey. Are there any more companies created? It's more so HubSpot telling you. So HubSpot sending you a webhook when something happens versus you having to reach out and grab information. So in in in workflows, it allows you to I I think they call it send a webhook or trigger a webhook.
Max Cohen:I can't remember.
Chad Hohn:Send a webhook or you can make get requests as well. So you can retrieve data and you can send data.
Max Cohen:Yep. So basically, what it allows you to do is, like, let's say you've got a bunch of data in HubSpot. Right? And you wanna send that data out to some other system. Right?
Max Cohen:You can fire it off via webhook in a workflow. And so what's really neat about that versus HubSpot's API, when you subscribe to webhooks in HubSpot, if you're some other app and you wanna, like, listen for certain things to happen. Tell me every time a contact gets created. Tell me every time a deal gets created. Tell me every time a contact property changes.
Max Cohen:Right? There's only certain types of events you can listen to happen. Right? It's like, most of the time Chad, correct me if I'm wrong. It's like create, delete, and, and property change for most
Chad Hohn:of the time. It's called CRUD operations. So create, read, update, delete. And in HubSpot, you also get merge, which is very helpful.
Max Cohen:So it can listen for these, like, certain very specific things to happen to records. The cool thing about being able to trigger that through a workflow is in HubSpot, you can build a workflow that triggers off of freaking anything happening. Right? Any sort of unique event thing that took place, whatever you can do to trigger a workflow, you can then make it fire off a webhook somewhere.
Chad Hohn:Mhmm.
Max Cohen:Right? So it's it's like a more surgical way Mhmm. Of of being able to listen to webhooks from HubSpot if you're sending data into, like, a different system.
George B. Thomas:Mhmm. So Did did
Max Cohen:I do an okay job at explaining that for? Yeah.
Chad Hohn:If you don't know that was really good. And I think there's
Liz Moorhead:I actually get it. Yes.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yes. Right.
Chad Hohn:It's event based.
George B. Thomas:I think it's My
Max Cohen:only question
George B. Thomas:my only question is, Max, am I invited the party yet? Oh, I'll tell you what
Chad Hohn:you are. Check-in ten minutes.
Max Cohen:You're invited to the party, actually. No. I just webhooked you. You're invited to the party. Oh, okay.
Chad Hohn:Okay. Yeah. That's awesome.
George B. Thomas:And I learned what crud is. Yeah. So it's that You thought right.
Chad Hohn:There you go. Yeah. I think, it's like a push notification on your phone. Just think of it like that. Yep.
Chad Hohn:It's literally like, hi. This thing happened. There you go. It happened right now.
Max Cohen:That's actually a really good example. Instead of you having to go check Facebook, Facebook is just, like, sending you the information
Chad Hohn:To bring it back to the platform. Even though the algorithm.
Liz Moorhead:So let me know if somebody in a Facebook group. Right. Here we go.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So here's the other distinction. And, Max, I don't know if you I don't know if you know this yet, buddy.
Chad Hohn:All right. Do you know did you know that private app webhooks now support every object including custom objects including okay you did good
Max Cohen:but except for public apps
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Except for well, Python public apps are gonna get that.
Max Cohen:They didn't get it yet.
Chad Hohn:They didn't get it. Okay.
Max Cohen:So this
Chad Hohn:it's on the road map.
George B. Thomas:If they
Max Cohen:did, I
George B. Thomas:would have been losing
Max Cohen:my mind about it on LinkedIn.
Chad Hohn:My understanding was that's coming. At least I heard that could be a thing for sure.
Max Cohen:Yeah. It's always gonna start in it's always gonna start in private private apps.
Chad Hohn:But, here's the other thing about a webhook and just we can get off this topic after this, but like be like when a private app in a HubSpot private app is like your ability to create either an API connection to your HubSpot or a webhook subscription just to a HubSpot portal that gives you special keys that you can you know access that data with, it allows you to be notified of what object ID and what thing happened, okay? But with a HubSpot workflow webhook you can create your own custom set of information including and this is one that actually getting back to one of the biggest improvements that I've seen in the last year is the associated data panel so like in a workflow you could say I am on a deal but I want to retrieve the most recently updated company from this deal and grab some properties from there and bring it into this deal workflow, okay? So you get associated object information in your workflow, and then you can create a webhook payload from multiple data sources and send that off to provide an event based trigger to another system. So that's particularly helpful.
Liz Moorhead:I just have a cute collection of nerds here, and you're all so happy, and that makes me happy. Yeah. But moving on. Okay. I have to know, though.
Liz Moorhead:I love this, like, big nerd love fest we're having over ops up. Right? And I think we're bringing a lot of clarity to who it's for, who it's not for. The fact that it's criminally underused, like, you should have it. Seriously.
Liz Moorhead:However, I need to know from you, are there any current downsides or anywhere where you see currently HubSpot is either failing to deliver on its promise or we're just not quite there yet.
Chad Hohn:Mhmm. I have one.
George B. Thomas:Like a wish list. Is that what you're asking on this one? Or just
Liz Moorhead:That's the optimistic way of looking at it. It also gives you like, hey, guys. We have a problem here.
Max Cohen:Okay. Alright.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Hohn:Like, for me, I mean, things that push me out of workflows into external automation platforms is things like being able to search for information either as the start of a workflow to trigger it or in a workflow to search for information because what you get right now is like the most recently associated thingy or the most recently updated contact or the first created whatever. Right? You get that. You get one thing with its one set of properties. But what if I wanted to grab the most recently, you know, the most recently updated meeting and then all of its contacts and then send an email to every single one of the contacts.
Chad Hohn:Well, you need what's called a loop or a for loop or in programming. And basically, like, this would be, like, iterating through, like, an array, in programming world. Right? And so, like, basically, an array, all it is is, like, here's my contact, except this is one thingy where I have 10 contacts in the thingy, and I just loop through all 10 of them until I run out. Right?
George B. Thomas:We love
Chad Hohn:That's what you would need to be able to do in a HubSpot workflow. Otherwise, it's gonna push you into other systems like make.com or Zapier or trade.io or something that can support looping of data.
George B. Thomas:Do do you do you ever see that do you think that's a thing that HubSpot might be paying attention to or not paying attention to at all?
Chad Hohn:I think that it hasn't been super, super high on their priority list. But it is something that they know that they're lacking. Like, I've spoken with people in, like, workflows and ops land before, and they know that they need some of that. But I don't think that particular thing is super high on the priority list because I think a lot of people, even the nerds, would unless they're particularly familiar with how to write code, would really dive into that. Right?
Chad Hohn:Or at least how code works. Like, I'm I am no developer. Right? But I understand code, if that makes sense. And so You're developer.
Chad Hohn:No. I'm a wannabe developer, dude. Like, definitely a wannabe. Yeah. Like, chat GBT, I can get some stuff done, you know.
George B. Thomas:But I feel like I'm a wannabe developer. I think you're more than a wannabe developer. Just but
Chad Hohn:Maybe maybe entry level then if we're, you know, if we're gonna be generous.
Max Cohen:Hold on. This dude whipped out a Wi Fi analyzer over at inbound when we were walking around and telling me about the mega
Liz Moorhead:Are you for real?
Max Cohen:And and yeah. Listen. This guy's saying
Chad Hohn:you can't
Max Cohen:this guy's saying I'm not a developer, but he's definitely building apps in his free time. I guarantee it.
George B. Thomas:So this is why I go back to the first thing that we talked about. This is why I love Chad. This is why Chad is on the show. Anybody who has a Wi Fi detector at an event and is getting that nerdy, I say Well Yes,
Max Cohen:please. Starlink in his backpack.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. My wife likes to make fun of me for this one. I got rejected from being able to go to Disneyland 1 time because I had an iFixit toolkit in my backpack, and they wouldn't let me through because it had, like, pokey things.
Max Cohen:Oh, jeez. Weird.
Liz Moorhead:Also just reiterate once again his spooky printer. I just love it so much. Yeah. I'm gonna put it in the show notes because we've talked about it now in, like, three different episodes, and the people deserve to see what is happening.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Can spooky printer get a Hub Heroes character?
George B. Thomas:Oh, that would be that would be funny.
Max Cohen:Just like printer man.
George B. Thomas:The Rock or printer man or something.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. That'd be so good. Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:I love that. Copy scan man. I love it.
George B. Thomas:There you go.
Liz Moorhead:What's your favorite feature, though? What do we like? What makes us happy? What what sparks joy in ops hub?
Max Cohen:All of all of the, well, besides I mean, besides, the the scheduled workflows thing, just the format data is so sick. Right? Especially I mean, lately, I've been seeing it a lot with, like, Event Happily or things that are complicated when it comes to things like, like, how companies display, time in, like, emails. Right? So, like, we have oh, I was working on this with, Ann over there a while ago.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas, like, you know, HubSpot has this, you know, fun thing on in terms of, like, the way they store, dates and times in fields and stuff like that. And when you when you start to think about, oh, if I'm, like, sending out emails or, like, displaying a time somewhere, things get really weird and freaky when it comes to things like time zones.
Max Cohen:Right?
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Freaky dinky.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Especially when it's, like, the event stuff. Right? And so, like, I love it because, you know, we can take whatever time code that, like, HubSpot stores a time in. Right?
Max Cohen:And then we're able to turn that into, you know, a like, reformat it into, like, a different The time zone
Chad Hohn:of vision.
Max Cohen:Different time zone, different time format. Right? Yeah. Which is really neat. But the reason I bring this one up is because there's a really recent update that actually, is very, very exciting that I think I don't think this is this is not necessarily an operations hub thing.
Max Cohen:Right? But it it it plays really well into that. So I don't know if any of you guys caught the update recently where marketing emails can now leverage custom properties that aren't just properties from your objects. Mhmm. Do you know what I'm talking about?
Max Cohen:Yeah. So for anyone who doesn't know this, this all goes back to transactional email Oh, yeah. In HubSpot. Right? And so if you guys know what transactional email is, transactional email is when you wanna send an email that's not of a marketing nature, but it's more of, like, a legal update, an account update, a something like Like,
Chad Hohn:they can't unsubscribe.
Max Cohen:Yeah. You can't unsubscribe, and you can send it to people who aren't subscribed to you. Right? And the thing is is, like, legally, there's only certain types of emails you can do that without having any repercussions. Right?
Max Cohen:So in transactional email, and HubSpot has had this for a while, they had this thing called the single send API. It was one of the methods in which you could send a transactional email. And what the single send API was is basically you could build an email in HubSpot, but some outside system could tell HubSpot to send said email. But the other really neat tricky thing that it did is in that same request that your outside system would send to HubSpot to trigger that email to be sent, it could also pass through some key value pairs of like properties and values that would give
Chad Hohn:you some non HubSpot data. Yep. Yeah. Non HubSpot data from an external source.
Max Cohen:Yep. So like let's pretend you had data that you didn't wanna store as HubSpot properties. Right? Like, maybe it was something more sensitive like a receipt, or, like, some kind of a sensitive account number or something like that. Right?
Max Cohen:Especially before they have sensitive data, whatnot. Exactly. Yes. Yes. But even though with sensitive data, if you're not gonna use that data in HubSpot, why store it
Chad Hohn:there? There.
Max Cohen:Right? And so the your outside system, maybe it's your app, maybe it's your POS system, maybe it's your whatever, could use this API to basically say, hey, HubSpot. Send this specific email that you have stored inside you to this specific email address. Oh, and, also, here's a bunch of properties I want you to dump into the email. Right?
Max Cohen:And the way that you would do this, you do is you'd write double bracket custom dot name of whatever the property is that the API would send over. And just like a personalization token from a property in HubSpot, it would change those values. Now Marketing Hub recently oh, recently. I don't know. Maybe it was a year ago, did single send API for marketing emails, which is really, really big.
Max Cohen:But now what you can do is you can still do that same, like, custom dot name of property thing, but you can use those in workflows and suck data out of something like a format data action to then dump into an email. So here's the roundabout example I'm giving. Right? Let's use the example of, like, okay, when we send out our emails to people, we wanna make sure we tell them the time of the event in whatever their time zone is. Right?
Max Cohen:Whatever. So what you can do, you what would you you would usually have to do is, like, you'd have to take the date time that it's stored in, and then you'd have to build a separate, like, single line text field property to hold whatever the converted, like, time format, like, end result would be. Right? And then what you'd have to do is you'd have to format data, stuff it into this other action, and then use that or there's not an action, this other field, and then use that field in an email. Whereas now you can just have these custom, like, properties that don't exist in HubSpot, like, as a field or anything, And it can literally use actions from, like, format data workflow actions or custom coded workflow actions, both operations hub thing, and inject those values into emails that the workflow is sending.
Max Cohen:Right? So you eliminate all these other steps of having to, like, unnecessarily store this data, and that gets especially tricky if I wanna, like, reformat the data into four or five different time zones. Right? Because then I'm making four or five different properties and then four or five different emails that have the different properties in it. And that's like asinine, Whereas I could just literally just do it within actions inside of HubSpot or in a workflow and just shove it into these custom fields.
Max Cohen:It's so sick.
George B. Thomas:So this is an interesting, thing because I bumped into the thing that you're talking about earlier this morning, and I hadn't seen it before. Like, I was I was in marketing email, and I was in the actions dropdown, which, you know, usually you see, like, convert to regular email, convert to automated email. Copy. Now now I yeah. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Exactly. Now I happen to be testing the new, by the way, email responsive design beta.
Chad Hohn:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Okay. But when I I was like, I need to check this out because now I can do responsive emails based on mobile or desktop. Holy crap. That means a lot, and it's probably a whole another episode. But in a drop down, it's there's literally now convert to single send API Yep.
George B. Thomas:Yep. Instead of just convert to automated email or convert to regular email. So it's interesting that to me, that's a sign of what you guys are talking about on the nerdy side is coming mainstream to an email tool called HubSpot.
Chad Hohn:Right.
George B. Thomas:Like, now or in the very near future.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Well, because what was always traditionally difficult, like Max was talking about, is even if you have Opshub, formatting that date time to the prospect or the attendees time zone is difficult because you need to know where they're from. Right? And if that's unknown, you need to set up some, like, default logic to say, this is the time that it's in if we don't know your time zone and to format the text of the email differently. So, anyway, all that to say, yeah, it is it's super, super helpful to be able to handle any kind of stuff like that.
Chad Hohn:Like, if you wanna make your own reminder emails in HubSpot, rather than just using HubSpot's meeting reminder emails, which are pretty limited, They've they've gotten way better, actually. I don't know if you guys know. You can go customize those and include, like, a Zoom meeting link in them now. If you go out there, it's a meeting location. And then you know?
Chad Hohn:So those never used to be customizable. They were just what they were, and that was it. Right?
Liz Moorhead:Good spot. Okay, nerds. Nerds.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:Alright. Time to land the plane.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. George I can keep going with this for a long time. I know.
Liz Moorhead:I had no idea. I I too have been a champion of webhooks for all time. I've loved them forever. Big fan.
Chad Hohn:I'm sure
Max Cohen:you have. Yeah. I mean
Liz Moorhead:I think yep. But the and the American Panda Institute. Absolutely.
Chad Hohn:Since we're laying on
Max Cohen:your plane Wi Fi? Yeah. Dude, how's your Wi Fi right now? How's your
Chad Hohn:Wi Fi? Good. Well, I I just upgraded to symmetrical two gigabit. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Me too, dude. Me too.
Liz Moorhead:Oh my god. So George, try. Hi.
Max Cohen:What is this guy talking about?
George B. Thomas:You know do you know what I love? Question for you. Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yeah. Did you What do you love? Also upgrade to to isometric two way gigabit or whatever? That's my question.
Chad Hohn:Sorry. I'm sorry. Miss
Max Cohen:oh. Larry miss miss.
George B. Thomas:I I have not upgraded to any
Max Cohen:Symmetrical two gigabit. Symmetrical,
George B. Thomas:pseudo cubicle Wi Fi.
Chad Hohn:2.5 gig hardline
Max Cohen:Yeah. In the computer. What's Liz's actual question?
Liz Moorhead:George, speaking of which, so glad you brought that up.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:Alright, guys. George, I actually want you to land the plane and bring us home with one question. Because we have talked a lot today about who this is for, who this isn't for. The fact that people should have it, but there are use cases where it's like, hey. Maybe this isn't the right time.
Liz Moorhead:So I'd love for you to speak directly to our audience. Those where operations is either top of mind or it should be. What is the one thing you want them walking away from this episode with?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. No amount of money should stop you from efficiency. Like, it it's funny because I I go back to where we talked in this this episode about, like, if you can afford it. Mhmm. Sometimes there's things in life where it's like you can't not afford it.
George B. Thomas:Right? And I think operations quickly falls into one of those. It's funny. I was doing the super admin training today on data hygiene, And we started to talk about the mathematics of dirty data when it comes to a sales team and, like, the average sales rep making 60,000 a year. And if they spend 10% of their day in they're dealing with dirty data, that's, you know, 6,000 and times 10 reps and all of a sudden now two things are true.
George B. Thomas:One, Operations Hub doesn't look that expensive, and also Breeze credits don't look that expensive when you're talking about making sure that you have clean data and an efficient system. Right. So so if you start to think about that, no amount of money should stop you from creating an efficient system inside of HubSpot. That's what I would hope that you would take away. And, also, the second piece of that is you don't have to be a nerd to get immediate benefit out of it.
George B. Thomas:Mhmm. But Yeah. It may lean you into becoming or wanting to bring on a nerd to help you get even more out of it.
Liz Moorhead:Chad, any final words for our for our beautiful listeners at home? Do you or do we wanna scan printer copy scan man to see how he's doing?
Chad Hohn:Should we
Max Cohen:I'm doing great. I'm a printer.
Liz Moorhead:Beep, boop, boop.
Chad Hohn:Sorry. I I was moved for those listening, I was moving my mic over to the glowy printer.
Max Cohen:I wanna I wanna give a I wanna give a follow-up word to any HubSpot reps listening to this.
Liz Moorhead:Uh-oh. Uh-oh.
George B. Thomas:Should I stop it now?
Max Cohen:No. Don't. Because they all need to hear it. Guys,
George B. Thomas:when you when you I got the button ready.
Max Cohen:Here's what you don't do. Right? When when when when a customer asks, do you integrate with something? Or I need can it integrate with my x y z? The answer is not, yeah, you just need operations hub.
Chad Hohn:Yeah. Not the answer. No. You don't even need that
Max Cohen:at all. Hey. That is not the answer. Okay? So stop doing that.
Max Cohen:Stop doing that. Don't do that.
George B. Thomas:Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes.
George B. Thomas:FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag, hashtag hub euros podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and, of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.
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