The HubHeroes Podcast

George B. Thomas: Oh yeah, activate those powers, Hub Heroes, 'cause- I'm, I'm telling you today we're talking about one of those updates that it might look small on the surface, but, uh, man, might quickly change how RevOps, how humans, how HubSpot users think about the quoting tool or quotes forever, especially inside of HubSpot.
HubSpot has opened up custom-coded modules for quotes, and yeah, that means your quotes are no longer stuck being static pricing documents or where they were a week or two weeks ago. They have become, let's use the word maybe interactive. Uh, they can be data-rich, they can be, um, pulled from the CRM, pulled from outside systems, capture buyer information, change based on properties.
Like, the list goes on and on and on, and today this is what we're gonna talk about because I think it's where it gets interesting in this world we live in of human-powered and AI-assisted with tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini. Shoot, I-- Don't, don't make me start listing the, the actual, like, l-local, uh, the local models like Ge- I don't know.
Anyway, like this, so this is an admin conversation. This is a RevOps conversation, and this is a, uh, maybe a little bit of, and by the way, in the green room, I was literally talking about this with, uh, Breeze, but this is a little bit of a, "Wait, we can actually build the buying experience we have always wanted" conversation.
Like, I feel like that's what we're gonna have today.
Max Cohen: Oh.
George B. Thomas: and so y-yes,
Max Cohen: talking about quote templates?
George B. Thomas: we, we are. Well, custom
Max Cohen: I-- Hold on, hold on. I-- Just a little, just a little, uh, plug here for a former product of Happly. Uh, now Quotivity out in the world being grown up doing its own thing. Uh, this past week, I got a look at their new, uh, HubSpot quote builder,
George B. Thomas: Yep, yep.
Max Cohen: is completely drag and drop in HubSpot CMS, and it is insane.
Oh, you saw it?
George B. Thomas: Yeah, I've seen
Max Cohen: a p- Yeah, it's pretty, pretty crazy. Um, yeah, just since we're on the topic. I don't know if you had a chance to gander at it yet, but
George B. Thomas: did. I did. I had a
Max Cohen: rad, dude. It's what I wish we always did when it was quote Happily, and I'm glad they finally got around to it.
George B. Thomas: Which is beautiful. So, so as, so as a HubSpot user, here's the question that you might be asking after that intro is, did HubSpot just turn quotes into a customizable buyer experience platform? Well, maybe. We'll see. Let's get into it. Chad, this is gonna be for you because let's talk about what kind of changed.
And by the way, at any point in time, if you want to or can share your screen, feel free. Or if we're just gonna talk through this, we can do that as well. Um,
Chad Hohn: some examples. Yep.
George B. Thomas: the, for the humans hearing custom-coded modules for quotes for the first time- Uh, what did, what did HubSpot actually release here? Like...
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Uh, yeah. Well, I wanna be clear on two things. One is like legacy quotes, so if you haven't taken a Look at HubSpot in a while for Commerce Hub specifically. To do these new quotes, you need Commerce Hub, the new Commerce Hub, and to, like, create and manage all of the quotes and modules and, like, to use them for buying purposes, you not only need a sales seat, but you also need a commerce seat.
So that is just a heads-up, like, to actually deal with the new quote builder. Legacy quotes are their own thing. They still are like what they were, extremely difficult to work on, more or less. Um, it's better now with AI, but, you know, it's, uh, still difficult and, like, their development path is moving towards this new quote experience, um, and continuing to open that up more and more on the HubSpot CMS.
Now, quote, custom quote modules, like the new quote experience has baked-in modules. Um, but with the custom modules, you can create as many as you want. You can not only arrange them only in a vertical stacked fashion, but, like, side by side if you wanted to. Uh, you can, you know, properly skin and theme the quotes in general with these static modules a little bit easier.
Um, and you can build in with all of the HubSpot project/cms/hubble, you know, type stuff and use React as well, uh, for all of those different frameworks where you can turn this quote into an interactive thing. It's, um... There are some gotchas that if you enroll in the beta, they'll send you to some help docs, uh, for the custom quoted modules.
Um, I had gotten them in, like, an alpha stage in a Google Doc and, you know, s- an email, and basically what I did is fed all that to my AI assistant and came up with something, you know, suggestions of what to build and ended up building kind of an ROI calculator into, uh, quotes for RAD AI.
Max Cohen: Yeah. Can I ask a question? 'Cause I mean, like, I feel like especially with legacy quotes, the, the only custom quote modules you could build were always custom coded ones, right? And so it sounds like with Commerce Hub, it's-- you couldn't even do that yet, right? And they're kind of opening it up now for everybody if like, if you do wanna go build something custom and not use sort of like the stock on rail stuff that, you know, it launched with, right?
You can finally do that, which is
Chad Hohn: That's exactly right. Yeah. It's pretty slick. I mean, um, you have a lot more parity with s- with web pages and CMS than you did before
Max Cohen: There is kind of like a beautiful irony of us just being like, "Man, it really sucks that all we can do is custom code temp- like quote templates." And then the second we get to, you know, custom coding quote templates in, in Commerce Hub, we're all stoked about it again. But yeah.
George B. Thomas: think it's, I think there's a different layer, which we're gonna see, um, 'cause again, been there, done that on the legacy ones, and man, talk about a little bit of a pain point. I'll just say that. But Max, it's interesting because we've danced this word a couple times, and you even referenced it about Quotivity.
And so I wanna kinda get into the why does it matter question, and this is gonna be directed towards you because, um, I think it's in the update, HubSpot says something like, "Quotes should be more than a document. They should be buyer-accessible web pages." And you even mentioned with Quotivity about how, like, it's a CMS, content management system, drag and drop.
Like, why do you think the distinction of it being more like a buyer-accessible web page than, like, a, a static doc, why do you think that's important moving forward?
Max Cohen: I, I mean, uh, just like with anything, as we're becoming more and more digital, I mean, I feel like we did this forever ago, right? I mean, your, your, your, your quotes don't just have to be some, you know... Like what? We, we were sharing them in PDFs before, right? They could be interactive. They can-- I think Chad's example of an ROI calculator is great.
Like, you know, we think about all the requests that we used to get about folks who wanted, you know, people to be able to like, uh, you know, choose optional line items and, and all these other fun things. I mean, if like you look at any modern quoting experience today, you know, outside of HubSpot, um, I c- I remember I got a, uh, what is it?
A sump pump installed, uh, in my garage and like they sent me a quote, but it was like a page, and then I could go in there and change around, you know, the options I did and did not want, and it was more of like, again, an interactable, uh, sort of experience. And I didn't have to say, "Oh, send me the new quote.
Send me the new quote. Give me-- Send me it with three different options," or whatever, right? You know, it like, th-that all, that stuff all, you know, takes a lot of time. You reduce a lot of back and forth, uh, you know, when someone's able to kind of change the quote without a salesperson's intervention, right?
But also do it in a way that, you know, is not gonna yield some kind of quote you can't, uh, honor, right? Um, you know, and I think that's kind of the ex-expectation that most people have today, you know, versus just getting like a physical piece of paper with a
George B. Thomas: so the words I, the words I hear th- in my own brain is like, uh, self-serve, so the customer can self-serve. I hear you saying experience, but most of all, I hear you saying making, uh, lives better for the humans that you're serving, right?
Max Cohen: That's true, and I think there's also just like a speed component to it as well. Like, you know, like s- like, like what do they say? Speed kills deals or something like that? Or like, I don't know what the terminology is. And like you gotta like even think about, you know, uh, s- asking for revisin- re-revisions and changes back and forth on like simple things like adds a lot of time 'cause you gotta wait for someone to go and rebuild a quote in their old clunky system and get it to you in a PDF and like do all these different things.
Like it's, you know, when, when you're, when you're working in a world where you got so much competition that like these, you know, minutes and hours matter, like them just being able to make any changes to the quote on their end that they need without a, you know, human on your end trying to do something is pretty important.
Yeah.
George B. Thomas: Anytime, Chad, I'm coming back to you by the way, but anytime it's funny, I, I think about quotes, I'll never forget how excited, and obviously because it has like cemented this moment in time in my brain, uh, I think I was, maybe it was at Salesline or it might've been at Impulse Creative, I don't remember, but, uh, we were using Panedocs, right?
Which is a word that I haven't said in a long time. But to tell you how excited I was, the fact that I could even just put a video in a quote was like, "Man, this is, this is amazing!" Well, I think we're past, uh, putting a video in a quote at this point, by the way. So, so Chad,
Max Cohen: y- you gotta, you gotta think about how it even helps with like, you know, the, the sales to service handoff type thing, right? Like think about, you know, how many times, you know, you've had people that wanna set up systems where it's like, "Oh, as soon as the deal closes, I want to send them a form that'll have them collect a whole bunch of information so we have it, so we can send it over to the other team so they can get in touch with them," and ba, ba, ba, ba.
It's like, yo, like your forms can be infor-- uh, sorry, your quotes can not only be, uh, you know, devices that communicate the cost of something, but also like collect information necessary and move on to the next step before they sign on the dotted line. You know what I mean? Like, it's a good opportunity to streamline a lot of stuff in a place where maybe like you otherwise wouldn't look because we're so locked into the idea that it serves this one purpose of showing someone how much something costs, right?
George B. Thomas: I like that, rethinking what your quote actually should be and do. Chad, walk us, uh, let's, let's get into maybe the, I don't know what, five, six foot, maybe it's not the 12-foot side of the pool, but the, you know, little bit of the
Max Cohen: and a half, you
George B. Thomas: yeah, something like that. Walk us through some real possibilities here.
Like what, what can these modules access, display, change, capture? Like where do, where does your brain go on ways that like HubSpot super admins might immediately just gain a metric butt ton of value out of this?
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, there's some pretty interesting stuff. Um, like imagine that you're in B2B and you have maybe the quote for a primary company, but you use association labels to show all their locations or subsidiaries. You could build a quote module that shows all of the locations that you'll be servicing if they match those, uh, you know, associated, uh, labels beneath for-- And then all of their addresses so that it's all in the quote, but nobody has to type in all that crap.
You just have to get it updated in your HubSpot so that it's accurate for your engagement with that customer and for customer success. So you make people fix it where it matters in your clean CRM data. Um, you know, what I built was an ROI calculator for the different product lines. Um, and when I go to end up show that later, I like threw in some bogus numbers just 'cause we're, we don't really share our pricing or whatever, um, out there for our company.
So I just threw in some crazy numbers. Um, but I wanted to at least show how that could be interactive. You could even do with something like what I built for an ROI calculator, further extend it to, "Oh, you know what? If I increase the count of units that I'm buying, the ROI is better, and I wanna update the quote."
And then it would wait a few seconds for the quote to, you know, update the line items. You could give a button to update the quote, and it would refresh the page for them or whatever. The cool thing is it's all-- Everything is like, uh, created and like rendered kind of server side on the fly for the customer-facing quote.
So it's all secure even though it has access to your CRM data, right?
George B. Thomas: yeah.
Max Cohen: Chad, are you there?
Chad Hohn: slick. Yeah, I'm here. I'm
Max Cohen: Oh, we-- you glitched in the matrix for a
George B. Thomas: so you said something about server side. Start, start like server side and then do whatever you were saying there, buddy.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, yeah, sorry about that. I don't know what happened. But anyway, um, it was-- Yeah, it's all rendered server side, so it's secure, right? Uh, meaning like it has access to your CRM data, but it's never exposing endpoints or tokens or anything, so you're only showing the relevant stuff. Um, like you could use, you know, GraphQL executor to grab a bunch of associated data in one API call, which is a pretty cool mechanism for being able to like pull in a bunch of associated records without having to make a bunch of calls,
George B. Thomas: Yeah, so I gotta hit the parachute. I gotta hit the parachute here because what, what I wanna do is I, I personally am getting excited with all the words that are coming out of your mouth, Chad. But I know that there's the human who I was before I would get excited about those words that are going, um, push a button and it automatically refreshes in server side AP.
I can't do that So I'm gonna ask another question that I would like Max, maybe your, uh, thoughts, but Chad, for sure your thoughts on it. I know I have some thoughts as well that we can dive into. And then maybe after this question, maybe we actually show, like, the thing so that, so, so what I wanna do is, because I, I love to talk about human-powered AI-assisted.
And any time that you fall into like, "Man, I don't know if I can do the things that they just..." all the words that came out of their mouth, I want you to think about this is where AI assistant, uh, falls in. So like, where does artificial intelligence in 2026 and beyond change the game? And so even in the update, HubSpot directly mentions artificial intelligence coding agents lowering the barrier to entry for this conversation we're having.
So what should HubSpot admins and RevOps humans believe about that, Chad? And what should they be careful not to believe? Like, I think there's like a, a, a part that can get them activated and then potentially a part that can get them in trouble. But like, where does your, where does your brain go with like how you used AI and coding assistants to maybe even get somewhere where you weren't sure you could get to?
Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have been able to, like, completely do this on my own by any stretch of the imagination. Like, I know enough about how the stuff should be arc- like, built and architected to be dangerous, but I'm like, I'm not, you know, writing all this code by myself, you know? I need my AI assistant to do it.
I'm, like, completely helpless if it was otherwise, right? Like, I could-- It would take me just so much longer that it wouldn't be worth it to, like, the barrier to entry would be so high. Um, so before I did this or, like, when I did this, there wasn't a public page, but now you can go enroll in the beta and look at the documentation, and literally point your AI assistant at the documentation and tell it to look for all the gotchas in the quotes.
Because what this is, is it's basically a HubSpot project. Like, the p- not, not the HubSpot project object, but a developer project. And what's really cool about that is it means that it aligns with the framework of user interface extensions. So if you nail this down, you'll start to be able to build any custom modules inside of the HubSpot user interface in general, which is pretty slick.
Meaning, like, oh, I could do middle cards, right-hand cards for any custom thing that I want. Um, so I basically don't do this development on my own. What I did is just pointed it towards the documentation and made it big, I, I asked it to build a project plan, uh, and scour our knowledge base in our company, 'cause I'm connected to...
I, I literally, I just gave it a link to the email, actually. I'm like, "Hey, here's this email in Gmail. Can you read it and tell me what it's about?" And then it just read the email and, you know, then read the Google Drive files in the email and all of that, right? But you just point it towards the webpage to, to kinda get started.
And then at that point, it uses the normal developer, it's called a CLI, and your AI assistant will tell you all the things that you need to know. Like it, it'll say, "Hey, okay, go here," and then maybe it'll ask you to authorize it for the first time so that it can use it without you having to put your password or credentials in there.
And so you just, it'll say, "Oh, open up your terminal if you're on Mac or your command prompt or whatever, your PowerShell on Windows." Yep, and then you just authorize it, and then it has the ability to push the updates. So I can show you the updates that it made. I can even show you the beginning of my ideation with my Claude Cowork session, which we later handed off to Claude Code, which could execute.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, so let's get ready to do that. I do have a question for Max, though. Um, 'cause by the way, l- actually before I ask Max the question and while you're getting ready to share your screen, Chad, and take us down this wonderful, uh, Alice in Wonderland, uh, journey of custom-coded modules for quotes. it's interesting the thing that you did is you said, "Hey, I gave it context and content to the job that I was about to do."
In other words, I need to make it really smart and onboard it so it can actually
help me. I hope, I hope everybody, like, does not just skip past that step because the, um, s- potential successful outcome on the one side that you're trying to get to is directly related to the context and content you give it at the beginning of the process that you're starting.
Uh, but Max, a quick question. By the way, this is pure curiosity. Um, you might be like, "I hate AI and it's the d-" No, I doubt if you're gonna say that. But like, what is, what is your, what is your AI, like, coding journey look like to Max Cohen? 'Cause I know me, I'm
Max Cohen: Oh,
George B. Thomas: deep in the trenches, and Chad, I know, like, kind of...
But where, where are you at, brother, with this?
Max Cohen: who, me? Um, I, so I, I, I've used it
George B. Thomas: Yeah.
Max Cohen: out of like necessity, but I don't think I've ever spent time being like, "How can I get better at it?" You know what I mean? It's very-- It's been very haphazard and, um, inefficient, I would say. For example, I'm, I'm building my game, right? Like, and, and, and-- But, but am I using like Cog- CloudCode and like, you
Chad Hohn: Codex is what you should
Max Cohen: Codex or, or... I mean, yeah, dude. I mean, every other week someone's telling me it's a different thing I should be using. But I, I hear you.
George B. Thomas: 'Cause until two weeks ago it was
Max Cohen: yeah, you wanna know what I'm doing? I'm doing, I'm doing copy-paste the code into ChatGPT and just being like, "Hey, this is what it's doing, and I don't think it's working right.
Here are some videos and screenshots." And like it's, it works. Don't get me wrong. But like, you know, I'm, I think I'm getting context rot or whatever when it just like, you know, it's dealing with like really long, you know, pastes that I've been doing of like
Chad Hohn: UI. That's the problem with chat. It can't leave itself notes, right?
Max Cohen: what?
Maybe you guys, one episode, you guys just teach me how I can, you
George B. Thomas: Yeah, brother. So, like, we, we, we need to do that. We need to do, like, a HubSpot super admins, uh, journey into the terminal/CLI/nerdy side. It, it's funny 'cause I'm literally teaching an AI content systems four-week, uh, training right now. We got, like, 14 or 15 people that signed up for it. It's super dope.
We're on week two. But in week one, I literally had to, like, shift a mindset of terminal used to be, uh, nerdy. Terminal is now conversational. Like, it's just in how you use it and what you're trying to do. Anyway, not why we're here. Um, but I wanted to-- Max, I wanted to know where you're at on this journey because I think it's...
Well, it's a, but it's a good context for us, the h- the, the humans, to understand that not everybody's a Chad, not everybody's a George, not everybody's a... You know what I mean? And so we gotta meet them there.
Max Cohen: chat or a giga George?
George B. Thomas: uh, no, I don't... Ooh, Giga Chad. We haven't done that in so long. Oh, let, let's get it. All right. So Chad, why don't you share your screen and, uh, and walk people through, like, a little bit of the journey and show them kind of where you ended up with this bad boy.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. So first of all here, ooh, we're getting that infinity window, baby. Let's take a look at this. Basically, I just wanna come in and show what I started out with. I literally gave it a link to an email in a Google Doc that somebody from Commerce Hub sent me, and then I said, "Tell me about this thing." And it-- I said, "I wanna build custom quote modules."
And it's like, "All right, well, you're gonna need to do this. Find something you wanna build, and then build one template section first, iterate, and then roll out controls. And then here's the gotchas." So it write, writes down the gotchas, right? And then I said, "All right, awesome. Look through all of our, uh, stuff."
Well, I, I told it to Um, you know, go through the, any other documentation that they had, any other things, and then I said, "All right." Uh, I, oh, I told it I wanted it to go read my meeting that I had with the team, and then I said, "All right, let's look through anything in our Google Drive that some of our team built that I would, that would be really cool to build," right?
And then I ultimately landed on building an ROI calculator. It gave me, like, persona guide, a few things that it thought might be useful. And then ultimately I said, "All right. I want to now take this and make, make it... I want it to look like our website,"
George B. Thomas: Oh,
Chad Hohn: So I told it to go look at our website and then grab all of, you know, the color palette from there so that it looked good.
Yeah, so use the right font, make it, you know, not look like garbage. And then I said, "All right, awesome." And then I, uh, ended up giving it a transcript from another Loom video just to, like, educate it on all the things. And so giving it all that context is really what's important. And here's the key thing that I wanna call out for, like, people around where they're at in, like, the Max journey, is, like, if you do this in chat, like in a chat session, that sucker's gonna be like, "off, my brain's full."
Like, "I have no more
George B. Thomas: Whoopsie. Yeah. Yeah.
Chad Hohn: know, like, like Max is talking about. And when you do it like this, it starts to write files to remember the things so that it can free up its brain space, right? And then ultimately I said, "All right, let's take this and, you know, go ahead and put it into Claude Code," right?
Um, and then so I literally went into Claude Code, and the first thing I told it is, "Yo, dog, can you take a look at this folder?" And that's all I told it, because Cowork gave it all of the instructions in the folder for it to execute. And then it just went and did all the development-y stuff. 'Cause, like, I'm more conversational and able to work with it from a conversational perspective, and I'm not al...
And you can do this with the plan mode inside of Claude Code if you want. Like, that's totally doable. Um, but anyway, I just wanted to, like, point out that I mostly did it in a chat framework and then dropped it into some local files on my computer and just said, "Yo, Claude Code, can you do this thing?" And it already had a project plan.
George B. Thomas: but back up so we don't confuse people. You did it in a chat, uh, scenario in CoWork, not in Chad,
Chad Hohn: Cowork, not in
George B. Thomas: was giving you a folder directory to then give Co- CloudCode the folder directory. So just people don't get skipped on that. Because I agree, like I use chat as a little bit of a guide along the way, but I'm, I'm more in, me personally, I'm more in, uh, terminal s- right, than I am anywhere else.
And by the way, I'll say this because you mentioned plan mode, and during our first week of training for the AI content systems, when I told somebody... Well, I told the whole crew, but I was like: Listen, I live in plan mode 65% to 70%
Chad Hohn: Yeah.
George B. Thomas: the time, and then I execute. And literally, uh, this person said that that was worth the cost of the entire training.
Like that right there. Like they hadn't been doing that. Uh, but I love what you just
Chad Hohn: wants to build stuff.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, and I love what you showed, Chad, is... 'Cause the first part was setting up yourself for success in the second part, and we really gotta think about that as humans in the loop.
Chad Hohn: Well, because you're the architect, but you no longer necessarily need, like, a developer to do some of these smaller projects. Now, when it comes to, like, really big infrastructure, I mean, you're gonna want somebody who's really been around the block. You know, like AI could lead you down who knows how many places, right?
George B. Thomas: Don't jump in and build a HubSpot theme for your first project. Like,
Chad Hohn: Yeah, or don't even-- Yeah, don't build a full web app that you're gonna try and deploy on your own Azure services, you know, like by yourself for the first time ever. Like, do small little chunkies like this, right? This is one module inside of a quote. You know, this is totally a bite-sized piece of something that you can take off, uh, take and get into actually building modules.
And this is the module. It's the Rad AI quote module. And so there's been 14 builds over time. It has a React module project. It didn't even bother to take the time to, like, rename it from the template project that they created, so I probably should've caught that and asked them, but I just noticed it when I was looking at it today.
But it gets the job done, right? This is the project component. When I go back to Claude Code, these are the files that it wrote in my folder structure. So Claude Code in the desktop version kinda gives you a few things. I mean, what's nice is it gives you access to terminal, access to your folders, b- the ability to look at any given file, um, you know, that kinda stuff, and, uh, like all the different things like that.
Like, "Oh, what's my HS project JSON file?" Or any of the node modules, or these are all the assets that it's writing, right? Um, and so, like, it will show you the different files that it's creating inside of here. You don't necessarily even have to know what any of those things are, but you, it just letting you know you have the capacity to almost use it like a little bit of a mini developer portal.
It's not a full-fat what they would call an IDE for development.
George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah. Max.
Chad Hohn: before we move on...
George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah, Chad, go ahead.
Max Cohen: As opposed to a 2% skim
Chad Hohn: a 2% skim IDE. That would be like Cursor. Um-
Max Cohen: Shots
Chad Hohn: Okay. So do you guys-- Before we move on to what it looks like, like what the actual quote looks like, do you have any questions or anything you guys wanna touch on?
George B. Thomas: Well, my, my question was where's Max's brain? But let's hold on that, and let's go ahead and let's keep diving into this and sh- and show people
Max Cohen: just so-- I'm soaking this
George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Chad Hohn: Yeah. Cool. So here is the quote builder. Basically, what I got here is this ROI calculator module. So I can drag and drop this sucker in anywhere.
George B. Thomas: So what people are seeing right now, Chad, the cover letter, the rad AI, th- that's just, that's there no matter what.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, cover letter. You can hide it, you can show it, but that's what this is. This is your nor- this is the normal thing, except I themed it to match our website colors, which was a lot harder to do on the older quote builder, I felt like. This literally, I just flipped some switches, brother. Like, all I did was go to the theme settings, and I made sure that it's on, you know, our domain, so it looks nice and whatever.
Um, but all of these modules are the ones that they build, right? The standard ones. This is the line items module, which is now customizable. You can show different columns and rows, which is great. Um, and it has different settings for totals, blah, blah, blah, and we'll skip over that part because that's a thing.
And then terms and the signature. You know, all of these are your normal things. But this ROI calculator,
George B. Thomas: on. Big, big, big, big, b- before you do the big reveal. By the way, if you're looking at this and you're like, "This don't, this don't, this is, this is HubSpot Quotes?" Uh, yep. You- if you haven't checked it out in a while, you might wanna check it out. Okay, big reveal. Sh- go ahead,
Chad Hohn: Yeah, big reveal. So this is the, uh... I gave, like, our sales reps the ability to have some functions. What can they do for ROI assumptions? There's defaults that go in here, but if it's different for any given company, like what's the number of average radiology reports your company reads per day? Well, let's call it 100 'cause we have some pretty fast rads.
And what do we think that they're gonna save per report?
Max Cohen: that's what the rad stands for. Okay.
Chad Hohn: radiologists, right?
Max Cohen: Just thought it was like radical, dude.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, it's radical. No, we make AI-powered software for radiologists,
Max Cohen: Nice. Okay.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, and then, okay, what's your error rate reduction? These are all the switches and toggles that it gave us, right? Um, the-- to, to be able to use. And then we could say, "Do we wanna show combined impact summary if there's two sections visible?"
I made it work with our different product lines. Um, and, you know, automatic, do I wanna manually hide any one of these sections for any reason, for example? Uh, if I only wanted to show, uh, the reporting ROI instead of impressions ROI, something like that, right? Which is our, again, our different product lines.
And then we also have these different, uh, this is themed to our colors, but it's able to be re-skinned and re-themed on the fly with different colors as well if you wanted, which is pretty cool. So this is a dark theme quote that very much matches the RAD AI website, which is pretty slick. Um, and this is what it starts to look like.
Projected impact for variable of the company name you're selling to. See how-- And this is, like, our company, so I just did it. I didn't wanna, like, expose any company or whatever, right? So there's a little bit of redundancy there. But then this is an interactive-- This is one of the gotchas about the quote modules.
When you're working on it, it's not interactive. When it's published for the customer, it's interactive, if that makes
George B. Thomas: So you need like a fake... It's like you need a fake version to be like messing around with to
make any tweaks on the other side to like get it how you want it to be or whatnot.
Chad Hohn: No, I mean, if, it basically, you can, like, you, you can't properly, like, move these. Like, the bar, the bar doesn't move up and down. The number doesn't recalculate. But it is exactly like this. It looks like this. It's just these numbers, if you move the bar, it doesn't lock in your new count of radiologists or
George B. Thomas: what it is, is don't get to this point and feel like you built something broken. Go actually preview an actual live quote to see how it works for real. That's what you're s- Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah,
Chad Hohn: Exactly, 100%. And so I can go ahead and do that for you real quick if you wanna take a peek at that, right? So let's share it,
Max Cohen: I'd love to peek it.
George B. Thomas: You, uh, you wanna
Chad Hohn: yeah, a
George B. Thomas: at it, Max?
Max Cohen: I'd love to peek it. Let's
Chad Hohn: Yeah, a little... Don't you dare
George B. Thomas: There's probably a Pikachu j- Pikachu joke in there, but I'm just gonna like let it be.
Chad Hohn: Okay, so here is... Oh, it's still publishing. It takes a second to publish. It gives you the URL before it's actually ready, believe it or not.
George B. Thomas: Come on, HubSpot.
Chad Hohn: So here it is. It's showing this. It's showing... Oh, I put you as the
George B. Thomas: All right. Nice.
Chad Hohn: Uh, you'll also notice, like, this is interactive here, and you can link- Maybe I have 150 rads that are using reporting, but only 100 that are gonna use impressions for some reason, which wouldn't really necessarily happen, but it's there as an option.
Uh, average reports, if the average reports goes up, your ROI goes up. You could show or hide this table, uh, you know, all of this stuff. So, like, it allows you to really make it look and feel great, like your business, right? Uh,
George B. Thomas: I, I'm sitting here
Chad Hohn: none of this code myself.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, I'm, I'm watching that going, man, you could make any experience that you wanted. Like...
Chad Hohn: And these don't have to be in the strict vertical stacker. You can do side-by-side modules. I would just double-check the code on the mobile preview before you do.
George B. Thomas: Oh, yep, yep.
Always,
Chad Hohn: But, yeah. Yeah, and this looks great on mobile as well. I mean, uh, that was one of the check-ins is like, "Yo, it-- mobile looks like garbage diarrhea."
Um, it was bad.
George B. Thomas: So couple things. One, if you're still with us here on this one, uh, Commerce Hub Professional or Enterprise, so if you haven't enabled that yet, that's definitely a thing that you need to do to get the new quote and CPQ experience. Um, Max, I'm gonna come back to you here in a second, but Chad, you mentioned the word gotchas, like, a couple times in this episode.
Like, what are the one to two things, and you kinda mentioned the one of, like, hey, when you get to this point, don't realize it's broke, like preview. Like, what was another one or two gotchas that we should warn people about if they're gonna start journeying out on this kind of, uh, custom coded module journey?
Chad Hohn: I would say the gotchas are, like, all around the specifics on, on the actual, uh, mod- the builder, right? So it's, it's all the stuff that's in the documentation. And I would say the gotchas for us as well were things like... Here, let me stop share. Um, they would all be things like,
you know, making sure that, uh, you prep it enough with-- prep your AI assistant enough with what you want. Otherwise, you're gonna get mixed results, right? So yeah. I, I feel like that's, that's really the gotchas. Like, making sure that it reads the documentation well enough and thoroughly enough, 'cause, like, not only does it need to know the quote module documentation, but it needs to understand how you would deploy a HubSpot project, right?
And so you just need to make sure that it understands the HubSpot project framework, you know, 'cause not every AI model's always fully aware of that, right?
George B. Thomas: Yep. Yep, yep, yep, yep. So, uh, let's do this real quick, and while I'm doing this, um, Max, uh, let me see. What screen am I actually looking at? I think I want screen two. Uh, Max, while I'm showing this, um, where is your brain at? I'm gonna come to you in, like, 1.7 seconds. But ladies and gentlemen, the next thing I would say is actually go over to this product update.
You can copy and paste this into your assistant. But look at this deep dive documentation example project on GitHub, and then watching this demo. This is the video that, uh, Chad was talking about building custom modules for CPQ quotes. This will be helpful. And then again, the idea of
Chad Hohn: the transcript I gave my assistant, by the way. I literally went there, grabbed the transcript, passed it to my assistant and said, "Hey, this is a professional developing, you know, the, the actually building the tools. Uh, so look for any more gotchas that might be in here."
George B. Thomas: I love it. And then grab this. Literally grabbing a URL or copying and pasting however you want to give it. I just grab URLs at this point, give it to the assistant, and now all of a sudden it's got the update, it's got the, you know, deal here. Any, any of these links, if you wanted to give it to the example project, by the way, uh, that's gonna make it super exciting or easier to get success.
Max, where the heck is your brain right now, brother, with all of
Max Cohen: in the age of You don't always need to default to like, "Oh, we have to go hire a developer to do
something." Like, and it-- And I'm not saying you don't need to. There's plenty of things where you're gonna still have to, right? Um, but maybe it shouldn't be your first thought, right?
One, uh, 'cause I think any, any time that like, you know, customers will be like, "Well, we need some sort of like custom, you know, design or whatever for like our, even, you know, just for our quotes," like that's immediately kind of where you run to, run through after becoming extremely frustrated with the experience of trying to do it on your own, right?
But I, I think now you can kind of put this layer in like, "Hey, uh, could be something we could build on our own if someone knows their way around, you know, uh, an AI platform just a little bit," right? Um, but two, bringing it, it, the conversation back to quotes is like I'm wondering if this is sort of like a, a first step towards like more declarative, not code-based, uh, custom quote modules at all, right?
Like, I'm wondering if there's any room for them to be able to like, uh, build in ways that like you can, I don't know, just use settings
Chad Hohn: or natural
Max Cohen: yeah. Like yeah, like I think w- like is the next step here that they build Breeze into like some sort of like custom code builder? 'Cause they're already doing it with rules, right?
Isn't that something they're doing with the rules, right? So I mean like why not the actual content
itself?
Chad Hohn: in the, quote editor that it'll enforce your rules,
Max Cohen: we've been doing it with HubSpot CMS already for like a while now, right? And like this can't be that different except for the fact it's dealing with like, you know, the products API and like all this other stuff, right?
So there's that extra layer of like complexity on top of it, you know what I mean? But it's exciting.
George B. Thomas: It's interesting when you say that, Max, is like this extra layer of complexity, and I used to think that APIs were complexity, but I'm really closely getting in or quickly getting in this world where AI is like removing complexities for a lot of the things that I've been trying to do lately. So Chad, before we, before I close this bad boy out, um, give me like any last thoughts that you'd wanna share with the Hub Heroes, um, uh, audience, community, humans, uh, before we, we get out of here.
Chad Hohn: Yeah, I would say, like, the world's your oyster when it comes to building things. Um, if you have any kind of an inclination for exploring, learning, and building, get in and give it a whirl. And whether it's Codex or it's Claude Code or it-- or Claude Desktop specifically, um, or any other platform that can work on your local computer with your local files, that's what will be the big unlock.
Not living-- Don't live with your AI assistant in the browser anymore. It can companion with your computer to ungate so much and increase your productivity and the ease that you have to interact with HubSpot, with the world, with, like, all of your tooling for your business. Don't live in the browser. No more copypasta for you.
You know, jump into the desktop interfaces because they're such a big unlock.
George B. Thomas: Yeah, and even the Claude, uh, code interface just got a big update, like, I think it was maybe two, three weeks ago. You can drag and drop different sessions in, like, three, four blocks. Anyway, anyway, again, I live in terminal, but listen, Hub Heroes, here's the real takeaway. This update, this conversation this morning is not just about custom-coded modules, by the way.
It's about control. It's about creativity. It's about giving you, the HubSpot admins, the RevOps humans, uh, HubSpot builders, the ability to turn a quote or turn anything into something more than a final document with a number on it, more than just what your record customization might look like now, more than what you, you can just do more.
And while you're doing more, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and we'll see you on the next episode of Hub Heroes next week.