The HubHeroes Podcast

[00:00:00] Liz Moorehead: Welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes and George. I know before we hit record earlier, you were saying, Liz is not hurting anything. Liz is not keeping anybody in line. Well, post theme song, this is Liz's house. This is Liz's house, and we're here, and it's you, and me, and Devin, my guy. How you doing this week?
[00:00:20] Devyn Bellamy: Feels like I haven't seen you guys in forever.
[00:00:23] George B. Thomas: It was nuts. That's what vacation does. That's what vacation does.
[00:00:28] Liz Moorehead: I missed you guys.
[00:00:29] Devyn Bellamy: been crazy, George.
[00:00:31] George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's been, uh, it, listen, um, I miss you guys too. And the fact that I was gone 13 days out of the first 20 days of October, uh, is just kinda redonkulous, by the
[00:00:45] Liz Moorehead: That's insane. You also need to fill in our listeners on the insane thing you did over a four day period. Because you made me tired just talking
[00:00:55] George B. Thomas: yeah. Yeah. Well, so what's fun is I actually, we, the family went down to Florida. I actually, um, I married some people, which was the first time that I had actually done that. And then after that we went from, I think it's new Samina, Florida. We went to Orlando and we did Disney. Um, but we did it in a very unique way.
We did four parks in four days, which sounds really cool, uh, when you're thinking about doing it until you get into about day two and a half, AKA 45, 000 steps and your dogs are like, they're literally barking. They're like, what is going on right now? And you realize you still have another day and a half left now.
Um, I don't know if it's the happiest place, they now say it's the most magical place, Um, but it is the place where my feet were pushed to the limits. Um, but, but my brain and my spirit were filled with Avatar, and Star Wars, and Tron, and
[00:01:58] Liz Moorehead: Those Star Wars photos, man. Oh my gosh. They looked amazing. Although looking at the chat pane here for our live audience joining us for today's recording, Saleem, my guy, I love you. His one word response to what you just explained, George, is why, why? You know what else is, I freaking love it. You know what else is a good why question to answer? Why are we here today? Why are we here? Why are we congregating? Not just to talk
[00:02:31] George B. Thomas: of us on the planet?
[00:02:32] Liz Moorehead: Okay, we're, no, no, no. It is Friday afternoon as we're recording this. We are not getting philosophical this late in the day. My brain is done.
[00:02:39] George B. Thomas: Yeah, that's for Monday mornings at like 7 45 and beyond your default. That's when that's for
[00:02:45] Liz Moorehead: That's when we break people's brains open and talk about why and what and how and all of the lovely things. But today, today, we are actually talking about a topic where... I'm going to be honest, I feel very much like I am the target audience for this episode. I am the sales people, I'm the marketing pros, I am the service folks, because you said we need to talk about HubSpot's unified conversations inbox.
And it took you two videos. To explain and unpack with screen shares. And I sat there going, So I am aware an inbox exists. I see all of the things that you are showing me. And I am excited and panicked and confused. And if I, an active HubSpot user, who has been using HubSpot for almost 10 years, am looking at something and going, I don't even know how to introduce this topic because it looks like a hornet's nest of opportunity and confusion.
I knew this was the exact conversation we had to be coming to the table with today. I knew exactly, like, I don't have any pre baked remarks. I'm coming in here like a member of our audience. I'm like Elliot Page in Inception, whose character only existed to ask questions that were dumb so the audience would understand.
Why the skyline was folding on itself, and what it means to go and set a dream within a dream within a dream. So, listeners, if you've never heard of the HubSpot Unified Inbox before, or the Conversations Inbox, or anything that we're talking about, I am right there with you. I know what the words unified and conversations and inbox mean independently.
I have seen the tool and it scares me. And that is why we are here today. We are going to go in the HubSpot version of inception and inbox within an inbox within an inbox within an inbox, because Again, that tool, George, has a lot of opportunity, but let's go back to the conversation you and I were having earlier this week, right?
You were talking about how many questions you get about this from the people that you work with and how there is so much confusion about
[00:04:55] George B. Thomas: yeah, um, by the way, in the chat pane, Uh,
[00:05:00] Liz Moorehead: Hubception. Welcome.
[00:05:01] George B. Thomas: that. So here's the thing. And it's funny because I had received an email earlier in the week and it was from somebody that I know has been using HubSpot for years. Now, when I say using HubSpot for years, what everybody needs to realize is there's different ways you can use HubSpot for years.
You could use HubSpot as your CMS. And so you're just focused on like your website or like your sales process, but you might not be thinking about like communication from an inbox standpoint. And this question in my email was, um, should I connect my email to this? And I was like, man, I've gotten this like a hundred times.
How come people just don't inherently know that the answer to that is no, I would never in a million years attach unless again, if there's somebody out there that has done this and figure out a reason why. In a place where maybe there's no team that people don't see your email. I don't know, but in a hundred million years, I would never attach George at georgebthomas.
com to a unified inbox, but I keep getting that question. And the answer is no, this, this is created for something like. Sales at or support at where historically you've felt the pain points of two, three, five, 17 reps, whether service reps or sales reps going into an outlook inbox, not understanding who's taking what, who's doing what, who's answered what, taking that confusion in that convoluted process.
And actually giving it a place to live where you can streamline the communication in so many ways you can assign the person who should be carrying on the conversation. Moving forward. I literally feel like the unified inbox is the quarterback able to call the plays to the rest of the team.
[00:06:53] Liz Moorehead: Can we get a little tactical for a second? Can you talk to me really quickly? So, we're talking a lot about here already getting into like, these are the ways we can think about it, right? The mindsets, that's one of the things we love to talk about. But first, for those of us who may or may not, we're going to talk about why the skyline is folding in on itself.
So where is this tool? Is it in all hubs? Is it in one hub? Where are people going to find this inbox and whether or not they have access
[00:07:19] George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's in all hubs, like inbox. Yeah. Inbox is in free. It's in starter. It's in pro. Um, it's just basically, uh, fundamentally or whatever word you want to use there. Uh, part of what I'll call the baseline CRM communication threat, you know, like. No matter what portal you open, you're going to have like five templates, five snippets, and possibility to do an inbox.
You'll see contacts, companies, deals, tickets. It's, it's just like part of that lower thread. So you could be paying 0 and fixing thousands of problems with a shared inbox.
[00:07:56] Liz Moorehead: Devin, when you think about what confuses most folks about Inbox, what are you seeing and what are some of the mindsets you want people to be thinking about with Inbox, if we're thinking high level?
[00:08:08] Devyn Bellamy: I'll be frank, I've never met anyone who's been confused by Inbox. every, everyone who I've met, like, if, if you're in a situation where there is More than one person that may need, or like, I'll give an example. There was this, uh, company that I was working with onboarding and they had a centralized, you know, contact at email.
And they had one person who would go through those messages, hundreds of them and send them to the appropriate people.
And technically that person did have another job, but. This was a significant portion of it, and my first thought was why, um, like, the thing is, is that not only can everyone see the messages that are in there, but messages can be assigned to people.
It's like, it's the way it appears. It's like a chat thread, and you can follow the entire conversation, and if at some point, the conversation needs to pivot to another. Uh, person who has, um, expertise in whatever the issue is. It's a seamless process. It's, it's simple as assigning people. And you can have conversations about the conversations internally.
Like, there, there, it's, to me it's kind of a no brainer. When it comes to using conversations. There's no reason why you should have a catch all email address. Um, or a generic email address and not be routing it through conversations. Um, one for transparency, uh, two, so you can bounce it around to your individual team members.
There's not even a three that that's it though. That's that's it
[00:09:54] George B. Thomas: Yeah, now there is something happening and yes to everything that you said, Devin, but there's something happening in the chat that just has to be said because here's the thing, the unified inbox or the inbox and HubSpot can be multiple things. It can be different things. So for instance, Chad put conversations and then arrows and tickets.
Now, if it's a channel that you've created for support, it's going to make sense to tie in a support form. It's going to make sense to make it a ticketing system. It's going to make sense for it to be like this helpful engine that is tickets and ticket pipeline and all of that. But it doesn't have to be that it literally can just be like for sales.
You probably don't want sales threads Uh creating tickets, right? It just there's no place for that in there And so what we have to realize is it there is a baseline That might not be confusing I hook up a chat flow and all sudden I can see all the chats of anybody who's ever chatted me But when you start to add in this layer of, it can now be email or now, which by the way, I'm going to go into a whole conversation as soon as you let me, Liz talk about the updates and betas for the inbox.
you want to switch from chat to email. Uh, or now calling, right? So Devin talked about if you want to switch it over to a different person, which we'll talk about, like not only a different person, but a different inbox. But now if you need to communicate in a different channel, that's also available in there, right?
So. So the idea of understanding that it's like everything else in HubSpot, you should come to the inbox with a strategy of what makes sense for this team versus what makes sense for this team versus this outlying, uh, inbox that has been a cesspool in your personal hell for the last two years of working at the organization that maybe you are that individual and you needed to set it up a certain way.
[00:11:54] Devyn Bellamy: and it attaches to the CRM record.
[00:11:56] George B. Thomas: yes, yes. So you have all your insights there anyway. Where are we going, Liz? Where are we headed?
[00:12:02] Liz Moorehead: George, George, I was actually just ready to give you runway because the next thing I actually want to hear about are what are some of our favorite features, functionalities, use cases that we've seen out in the wild. So whether we're talking about features and functionalities that already exist, or as you just alluded to, there's some beta stuff that's been coming out as well.
Talk about it. What's going
[00:12:22] George B. Thomas: let's, so let's wait to get into the actual tool and the functionality of the tool in, in a little bit because I do want to take time to, if, and it's funny because I was doing the HubSpot super admin, um, bootcamp week four. Uh, this thursday and one of the questions we got in the after hours was, Hey, as a super admin, do you have things that you do first thing in the morning that all super admins should do?
And that was a very interesting question, which, by the way, I answered the first thing you should do is meditate because you have to deal with humans all day. But, um, the second thing I said is what I do every day. When I wake up as who I am a super admin, I go to what are the latest updates and what are the latest betas.
So if you're listening to this and you haven't gone to the right hand side of your HubSpot, uh, hub and gone to where you see the name of your organization and done that right hand sidebar and gone to. Where it says product updates. That's the first thing I'm going to beg you to do is go to product updates.
Now, taking that and going back to inboxes, you can literally search like control F and then type in inbox. And you're going to see things like this. The fact that there's a public beta. For content assistant inside of the conversations inbox that you can turn that beta on and what that means is you get the AI content assistant that will help you not have bad spelling, help you simplify the message that you're trying to do in chat, help you write the response that you may may need to do inside of your internal communication, whatever it is, You've now got this content assistant in the conversations inbox.
If you turn that beta on the other thing that is more recent than that, that you need to look at as far as a beta is there's now a public beta for calling as a channel in inbox, which means now you're literally like. Uh, email, chat, or phone that you can, uh, communicate with humans. So you, we pretty much got all of our bases covered, uh, at this point with that.
Now if we go past the betas, something that is kind of short, easy, but holy crap powerful is that, um, and this is as of Today, ladies and gentlemen, as we're recording this live, sharing a link to messages in the conversations inbox and help desk. And so you might be like, George, what is that? Well, no, no more wasted time scrolling through a long conversation to find a specific message that happened in that conversation.
Because now introducing message, deep linking. First of all, that just sounds cool as hell. I'm just going to throw that out there. Message deep linking. You can now copy and paste the link to any message in the conversations inbox or help desk and share it with your team for easy reference. Why does it matter?
Currently you can only copy and paste specific thread. Or conversation in the inbox and help desk. However, you cannot do the same with a specific message. We want to promote better collaboration between teams by enabling an easier path to find specific message with a conversation. And literally, if you go to that, it'll tell you, um, how you do it.
There's like three little dots and there's a message action and you literally, literally can copy that message and then share it with the rest of your team. So talk about like, The, the alternate universe of 20 people in one inbox in Outlook versus like, here's this very specific thing that this human told me that means we're going to be able to close the deal for 50, 000. Okay. Anyway, so you got to check out updates. You got to check out betas. It's, it's just a must. Again, I do that every morning. Now, Liz, I'm going to pause. I'm gonna pause because there's like, people in the chat like, that's dope, it's a beautiful thing. Devin, like, what are your thoughts, and where does your mind go?
Or Liz, when you think about, if you had the, the, the ability to be that specific or that granular, um, inside of the communication, and especially with teams, like, where does your guys brain go?
[00:16:35] Liz Moorehead: Immediately, where my brain goes, because I'm a process person, I'm a infrastructure person, I immediately think, this sounds amazing. And it makes me want to hear from Devin about best practices on If we are suddenly giving all of the people in your organization the ability to have this type of granular level type of conversations, the ability to dissect, connect, do all these different things, that means you have the potential for a hundred different people in your organization doing a hundred different things a hundred different ways.
And that gives me anxiety. So I think about things like, So how do you ensure everybody in your organization is on the same page doing the same thing? How do you processize things? How do you do it efficiently and effectively? So that's where my brain goes is that. You know, we've talked a lot in, in episodes past about the importance of once you have a complex enough organization relying on HubSpot, you may want to have someone who's an owner of it.
That's the kind of thing where it's like, when you start introducing these new tools into your organization, you genuinely need to start thinking about, so what are the best practices? What does the process actually look like? What is, what is the right way to use it for us? But Devin, I'd love to get your two cents on that because.
You're, you're my process king, buddy. You get it. You understand. You understand why I dry heave when I start hearing, New toy, great, who's gonna break it? Like...
[00:18:04] Devyn Bellamy: Or you hit it right on the head, uh, you think about how it's going to get broken, you, you have to, at the, at the risk of sounding offensive in order to idiot proof something, you got to think like an idiot and, um, you, you have to, that, that for me, I think about best practices and then I think about, okay, so how's someone going to screw this up and no matter how often, how much time you spend thinking about it, people are still going to surprise you, people are still going to amaze you with their ability To break things, but at the same time, conversations, um, and referencing conversation is, is. It's, it's pretty easy. Like, you think about, I think about how we use Slack at HubSpot. Like, how I can start, um, just referencing conversations that I had with someone else and share a link to the conversation. Like, uh, yeah, here, here's what happened. I don't have to do screenshots of a specific point.
Then I have to go back and search for it later. Um, but as far as, uh, implementing the tool at large, Um, one of the biggest things I think about is who is and isn't allowed to talk. Uh, because I like the idea of everyone being able to utilize the tool, but not everybody needs to be able to say things. and it's, again, uh, we have something similar with Slack with permissions.
There are certain channels, um, where not everyone can talk. Everyone can see what's going on, but not everyone can talk. If you set those rules ahead of time, but that's one of the great things about conversations is assigning conversation. If I see this conversations, uh, been assigned to Liz, then if I jump in and start trying to get in on it, then, you know.
I'm the bad guy. And while some things you would think of as intuitive, intuitive, like this is Liz's conversation, Devin, shut up. Um, and if there's anything I think should be contributed, I can just reach out to Liz instead of, Oh, let me get my message in. You know, that's, that's silly. But like, again, that's one of those things where you're, you're thinking like an idiot, you'd think like, Oh, I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm going to go ahead and document it.
Anyway, for the one guy who just doesn't really think things through.
[00:20:06] Liz Moorehead: We got to go to the chat pane on this because Salim really just hit it out of the park here with this. Murphy's Law Corollaries. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool. Followed up by, this made me laugh so hard. If you make something idiot proof, someone will just make a better idiot.
[00:20:22] George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's, and it's, but it's, what's fun, first of all, I did laugh to it and that, and I was like, you know, but here's what's fun is you, you have abilities. To make it less than what it might be, unless I want to kind of piggyback on something you said, like you give this tool to the whole organization.
First of all, I think that's step 1 to think about, conversations is built for certain individuals to be in the game. Like you have an entire football team, but not everybody shows up on offense and only defense shows up on defense. And some people are in that stadium and they never hit the field.
Right. And so you got to think of this as the coach and then you got to think of it as the players. And so you can have certain teams, certain individuals from an organization that are then in that inbox. And that takes down kind of the idiot proofing portion of like, now we've got these four or five people who are our front line of defense.
We've got the quarterback, which is like the SVP or whoever it might be. And now we're just passing the ball to players that actually know what in God's name they're doing. So that's like part of what we need to kind of think about in here is who should be the players. Based on their knowledge of our products and services, based on great communication with humans, based on availability around a global economy and where they can be at their desk and when they can actually be answering these questions.
But then also going with the football or sports analogy, Devin, it might not be your conversation to jump into because it's Liz's, but dang gone. Thank God you can be up in the top booth. And Liz can do an internal comment and ask Devin his thoughts to then give a better response, if she's lost, on the topic at hand.
So that, like, I love how it can kind of go both ways when you're thinking about it in the right direction. Yes, Devin?
[00:22:19] Devyn Bellamy: the thing, uh, to, to go along with that same analogy, not everybody even needs to be in the stadium. So like we have, I'm sure tons of inboxes. I have no idea because I only have access to one of them and even that is barely. So the thing is, is that like if something comes into an inbox and I'm not a part of that, uh, that inbox, they can just forward me the email and say, Hey, this is it.
I don't even need to be a part of it. And then that's the way you can get people who are peripheral to the team of core conversations users. To get that information. But the thing is, is that, like, the only person who should, the only people that should have access, in my opinion, to an inbox are the people who literally it's their job to use the inbox.
Everybody else can stay informed, um, but like, like, SVPs, stay out of my inbox, bro. This has nothing to do with you. I don't need if I want you to answer something, I'll forward it to you and then you can respond through your personal email as the SVP and we can still track it using the HubSpot connection and just it'll tie in either whether using Gmail Outlook, whatever, and it'll still tie into the CRM and so it'll still notate on that CRM record without it being in the conversations inbox.
But To me, the only, the only person that should have access to all of the inboxes is the HubSpot Super Admin. Outside of that,
[00:23:53] George B. Thomas: yeah, yeah,
[00:23:55] Liz Moorehead: Yeah. Is that our official quote for the, for
[00:23:57] George B. Thomas: I think that's the official quote. We'll tweet that or we'll exit. I
[00:24:01] Liz Moorehead: Can we also talk about the other Salim, my guy. So if you, for listeners, by the way, you are always welcome to join us live when we were, do you see what I'm about to read? Because this is the funniest Salim you were spitting fire.
[00:24:12] George B. Thomas: stage with a mic right now, he's got like a half a cup of whiskey and a, and a stool and a mic and he's like on stage right now in the
[00:24:20] Liz Moorehead: any machine is a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough. I love that so much. Um, I want to, it makes me want to ask what are some of the things we're seeing wrong with HubSpot Inbox, but I'm not quite ready to go there
[00:24:35] George B. Thomas: Yeah,
[00:24:35] Liz Moorehead: I actually want to talk a little,
[00:24:37] George B. Thomas: but using the machine right maybe.
[00:24:39] Liz Moorehead: yeah, I want to talk a little bit first though about integrations.
And what we, because we've started touching upon some of the different betas that are available, but George, I'd love to hear from you a bit more about, Maximizing integrations when it comes to the inbox and also the guardrails you want to see people put up because again, this is one of those kids in a candy shop kind of thing, right?
Get two Snickers bars. Don't get 75. You will get sick and your teeth will rot out of your head. So like, how do people, what are the great integrations for it? And how do people make smart decisions about the integrations they're using in an
[00:25:13] George B. Thomas: Well, here's the thing. I've, I've never even searched for an integration within box other than
[00:25:19] Liz Moorehead: What?
[00:25:20] George B. Thomas: that like, yeah. Um, the fact that it integrates with my, my inbox, my real inbox, my like email channel, um, I've never like. I don't even know if there is, to be honest with you, like a third party integration of anything that you'd pipe in there or what you'd want to add to it.
If there's somebody listening and they're like, oh my god, guy, yeah, like you want to do this and it makes your unified inbox, like, way better, um, then that'd be super dope. But I honestly don't know if there's anything that we would, we would integrate to make it different or better.
[00:25:53] Liz Moorehead: It almost makes me wish that Max were here so he could hear the feedback we're getting in the chat, which is Chad says here. There are very few good integrations with inboxes because external integrators do not really understand the difference between a conversation and a ticket. There are a lot of integrations with tickets, but few with conversations.
So, what I've, I actually did, this is one part I did do a little bit of research
[00:26:16] George B. Thomas: Ah, there you go!
[00:26:18] Liz Moorehead: to, I know, I did, I did a thing today, I'm so proud of me, and then I got confused and immediately was like, where's George? But, when I was taking a look, I kind of ran into a similar situation, and I almost wish Max repping and shilling for Big Popsicle was here.
He's our other, uh, host for those of you who are listening for the first
[00:26:37] George B. Thomas: Is it Popsicle or Paleta? Does he say Paleta? Is that the word that he uses?
[00:26:42] Liz Moorehead: I have no
[00:26:42] George B. Thomas: Yeah, I don't know.
[00:26:43] Liz Moorehead: Max, we love
[00:26:44] George B. Thomas: should be here, Max. It's your fault.
[00:26:46] Liz Moorehead: You should be here correcting us, but that's fine. No, but I think there's a really big opportunity there. So let's, let's take it a different way, then. If integrations is an area... Where, and this is what's so fascinating, HubSpot, when it comes to integrations, is usually like, you know, it's chef's kiss, top notch, and there's not much happening there.
Is it because there really isn't a need for
[00:27:07] George B. Thomas: Well, actually, so let
[00:27:09] Liz Moorehead: wish list in your
[00:27:10] George B. Thomas: Well, so let me back up because I don't necessarily think of him as an integration, but Salim again, instead of just being funny, he's like, let me show you how intelligent I am. Um, Facebook and WhatsApp are actually integrations. So the fact that you can do WhatsApp and Facebook inside of your HubSpot inbox, those are two of the integrations.
That you should pay attention to. The other thing that I have in passing heard Max speak about now that you mentioned his name was this idea. And I can't dang gone it. Remember the name of the app. So when we have him on the next episode, I'll have to bring it up again, but there's something about, cause you can do SLAs by the way in HubSpot inbox, but there's something about something happily timer, man.
Thank you, Chad. Timerman allows you to do better. Um, God, I love having a live audience. Can I just say that anyway, especially a smart live audience. Um, Timerman allows you to do a little bit, uh, deeper level or better SLAs. Um, then what is kind of under the, so if we think about this, right. Facebook, WhatsApp, Timerman, those are three integrations that if you're not leveraging.
And they feel like they're things where you would need to be communicating or things that you need more depth into. You might pay attention to those as for integrations.
[00:28:29] Liz Moorehead: That's freaking
[00:28:30] George B. Thomas: I feel like Devin's like doing research or watching Netflix. One of the two,
[00:28:34] Devyn Bellamy: No, I'm looking up, I'm looking up conversations, because honestly, before I looked at the outline, I did not know they were conversation integrations at all. So this is, this is all very new to me.
[00:28:47] George B. Thomas: Yeah.
[00:28:48] Liz Moorehead: We're all learning together like a family. All right, so
[00:28:51] George B. Thomas: the thing, but here's the thing, Liz, I got it. I got to unpack a little bit. Some for the listeners.
[00:28:56] Liz Moorehead: Yes.
[00:28:57] George B. Thomas: I, I looked at this conversation and I said, really? Like, who wants to hear about inboxes? And the only reason I pushed this forward is because I kept getting this same one dumb answer.
But as you went on this journey, you saw and learned things. As we're bringing up the conversation, Devin, who by the way is not new to HubSpot Or as being a HubSpot user, is like now diving into things that he may not have thought about or knew before. I started to learn things that I didn't know before and was like, holy crap, why is nobody talking about these things?
And so this, this is what happens when HubSpot, the platform, gets as big as it is, is there are certain rooms that people forget to enter. And there are certain books and utensils in the drawers and on the shelves that they don't know how to use. And so somebody who wants to talk about those things, aka us, Hub Heroes, has to enter all the rooms, has to have all the conversations to enable these things that are even happening for us as we're doing the episode.
[00:30:07] Devyn Bellamy: Here's one that I completely forgot about, that I've actually used quite a bit in the past. What's the Facebook messenger integration? It's native. I completely forgot about that. That is so helpful with people who reach out to your Facebook page about questions. Cause the thing is, it's so important to have people access to your service team through any channel or your sales team or your, well, your support team, whatever it is.
Through through any channel because people are going to ask questions wherever they feel comfortable be it on the phone email or in your facebook messenger inbox and this the native integration like I I run a uh, Facebook fan page, uh, we got like 73 000 listeners or 73 000 fans
[00:30:56] Liz Moorehead: What?!
[00:30:57] Devyn Bellamy: the sheer number.
Oh, yeah, that was that was one of the first Uh, social media experiment, uh, experiments that I did on a large scale was seeing if I could beat out everybody else who had fan pages for this particular, his name's Maynard Ferguson, he's a trumpet player. and, and the thing is he, he passed away like, what, like 15 years ago, and we're still getting, oh yeah, where do you perform, can I buy some of your stuff?
It's like, yeah dude, that's not gonna happen. Uh, not without a lot of candles. And like, so
[00:31:30] Liz Moorehead: a Ouija
[00:31:30] Devyn Bellamy: we exactly,
[00:31:32] George B. Thomas: Turn around, U turn, U turn, bad conversation.
[00:31:35] Devyn Bellamy: but the thing is, is that like being able to navigate those messages, I don't use HubSpot to do it anymore, but when we were at the peak of just our inbox being flooded, um, when we first transitioned over to the page being the official page of his estate, um, we, we used to get flooded with messages. And oh, yeah, small flex.
That's the thing, too. Um, so, uh, being able to navigate those messages now, we mostly just get spam. Um, but, uh, yeah, there was a time when that was highly necessary. And the other one that I didn't know, I didn't know about this at all, was the whatsapp business integration, the fact that you can start managing whatsapp conversations, Uh, with marketing hub or service hub pro or enterprise,
[00:32:22] Liz Moorehead: That's
[00:32:22] George B. Thomas: and I'm, I'm literally looking at, um, because I think it was Chad, maybe in the live chat mentioned, Hey, market SMS integration, and I'm literally trying to see if, um, it says something about the, uh, unified inbox and we've got, Ch, Yeah. Inbox. Hey, market inboxes sync with HubSpot conversations. So now if you think about what HubSpot does by default, chat, email, messenger, WhatsApp, calling.
If you turn on the beta and the ability to bring it in with SMS as well. Now, now you truly do have all your channels covered.
[00:33:03] Devyn Bellamy: and there's an API. So you can build your own. It's nuts.
[00:33:07] Liz Moorehead: god, I wish people were watching, like, so the people who are in our audience right now throwing down and killing the game with their amazing comments are seeing this, but I wish everybody else out there in the audience could see this who's listening because this is literally like watching George and Devin go like, and I got an Xbox and I got a bike!
Like, this is like Christmas morning. It's adorable. I am loving this so much.
[00:33:32] Devyn Bellamy: There's more than one SMS app part. It's that's wild
[00:33:35] Liz Moorehead: We're all learning something new today, but George you brought up a really valid point that I want to underscore here And I think this may be a conversation We need to explore a bit more deeply because it used to be when I first started with HubSpot, right? There was only One or two hubs, right? There were, there were a finite number of tools.
Everybody became experts in the platform very easily. And now, it's like, there are so many tools, there are so many opportunities, that there's no way for HubSpot in many ways to give each tool the breathing room, the spotlight, the clarity it deserves. So I think we're going to start seeing an increased need for two things.
One, how do we start simplifying a monster that is becoming much more complex every single day? And then also, Are we going to see a need rise for HubSpot super admins? Because think, because think about the organizations. I find it interesting that a lot of companies are so hesitant to invest in a HubSpot super admin, but they would drop like money like no other on a Salesforce architect.
I'm like, guys, same thing. This rhymes.
[00:34:49] George B. Thomas: Well, first of all, so we're already
[00:34:53] Liz Moorehead: Separate
[00:34:54] George B. Thomas: we're well, no, we're already there. First of all, um, and what's what this episode has proven to me, there needs to be a conversations inbox part two, because we haven't talked about one fricking. feature basically like at that level. Um, but let me, let me just kick into, you brought up the super admin and I'll tell you the mindset where I'm at.
And I've been there for a while. Um, I've done, I think it's now four super admin bootcamps where people are signing up to go through six weeks of how to be a dope HubSpot super admin. With each one, we've had 150, 200, and even 300 plus humans in each one of those cohorts come in and try to learn how to be a super admin HubSpot super admin.
This is so needed in organizations. Now, moving forward, you're going to see a rise of it. It's going to be a job title that people are going to be putting out on LinkedIn and all the places that you can hire people. And, and here's the thing, like when you think about this, there are going to be very few people who have been around long enough to understand every single one of the hubs.
To truly do what a true super admin is gonna do. So, what does that mean? It means that the days of being able to take somebody who was this in life and put him in as your HubSpot person are gone. It means this human... Full time job is to pay attention to HubSpot Academy, to pay attention to HubSpot Updates, to pay attention to Kyle Jepson, to pay attention to the internal teams, to have internal conversations and understand what's working, what's broken, what can we add, to understand integrations.
Like, there's so many pieces and directions that this HubSpot Super Admin Has to be that I would even beg that we'll probably get to the point where there's organizations that might have two or three of these humans, because here's the problem. Here's the problem is that you leaned into, like, why don't companies want to do this? I don't know, because it's literally like having an indie car. You've paid like a million frickin dollars to have the car. It's sitting on the track, but you're like, Eh, we don't need a driver. Who needs a driver?
[00:37:09] Devyn Bellamy: Let me, let me push back on that. Just a smidge, just a skosh,
[00:37:12] Liz Moorehead: Ooh,
[00:37:13] George B. Thomas: bit, or a lot a
[00:37:14] Devyn Bellamy: little bit. No, just a little bit. So here's the thing for me, um, my entire career since 2015 has revolved around the HubSpot product. Every job I've gotten since 2015 is because I am a HubSpot product expert. But the thing is, is that I didn't search for HubSpot Administrator as a job title. I just searched for HubSpot. And job listings and what it turned out is more often than not quite a few times they were looking for a HubSpot super admin, but they titled it marketing director or they titled it, uh, a marketing, uh, I got one job.
It was director of marketing automation. And what, yeah, right. But it's like. I was the HubSpot guy. I've been the HubSpot guy since 2015. And the thing is, is that people are looking for it. They're asking for it. They're just not saying, it's like, hey, I need you to be a platform expert. They're leaving it with the job title of the person they think whose job it is to solve this problem.
And then they said, oh yeah, towards the end, uh, proficiency in HubSpot or uh, CMS is, uh, or CRM is, you know. Uh, ideal. Um, but the thing is, is that it's not just ideal. It's a necessity in order to solve the problem, especially if you have an existing tech stack with HubSpot at the center of it, you need a HubSpot product expert to come in and solve your problem.
[00:38:48] George B. Thomas: yeah, Liz, we should probably write an article on GBT about Uh, the job title you didn't know you were looking for, for every HubSpot company using HubSpot.
[00:38:58] Liz Moorehead: I also want to tease the listeners that probably before the end of this year, we're actually going to be having a dedicated episode on this topic. You know what? Spoiler alert. I'll let the cat out of the bag. We are having a full conversation about, do you need a marketer or do you need a hub spotter?
[00:39:13] George B. Thomas: Yeah, huge difference.
[00:39:15] Liz Moorehead: Huge
[00:39:16] George B. Thomas: frickin difference, by the way. Didn't always used to be that way, but huge difference. Anyway, we have completely gone sideways.
[00:39:22] Liz Moorehead: No, no, no, no. But here's the thing. Here's the thing I want to say, George, I, I was joking at the very beginning of this. That George said I wasn't doing a very good job of herding, but that was before we hit record and he knows I'm a good job at herding because otherwise I wouldn't be in this seat on this microphone.
However, what I
[00:39:39] Devyn Bellamy: Look at this good. Cause you got plans.
[00:39:42] George B. Thomas: your
[00:39:45] Liz Moorehead: as heck. Um, but one of the things I really want to emphasize is that I think we're having the conversation today that we needed to have, because like I said at the start of this conversation, this is the first time in what, over 50 episodes where I sat down and said, The only story I know to tell is that I am as confused and as baffled as the people who are emailing George and I am pretty smart inside a HubSpot portal.
Like I, because I watched your two videos. I had my head in my hands going, all right, my dude, this looks like a lot of promise and a lot of potential for explosions. So we are definitely going to be having a conversations part. To podcast, this was the conversation we needed to have because here's what I want to ask you guys as we start wrapping this up
[00:40:36] George B. Thomas: Yeah.
[00:40:36] Liz Moorehead: what is the most common myth or misconception and George, you can give more than one since you always the break the rules, you never just do one, you always do multiple, I'm just going to let you have this now, what is the most common myth or misconception you want somebody walking away from the part one of this conversation having corrected about the inbox.
Same for you, Devin.
[00:40:58] Devyn Bellamy: It's tough to use. That's easy for me. It's like, it is so easy. Convert there's it is once you get it set up. It's super intuitive. The hardest part about it is setting up and that's not that hard either. It's, it's invaluable and super easy to use.
[00:41:17] George B. Thomas: Yeah, and it's funny because I think it goes, I try to pay attention to how people talk about things and how they think about things, with everybody that I get to talk to around a HubSpot. And I think they, they lump it up into two things. One inbox. Oh, that's that chat flow chat bot thing. And we don't need to do chat flow or chat bot.
And it's, it's not, it's part of it, but it's not like it could literally be just a form or it could just an email or it could be just like, so it is, but it isn't. And people categorize that and immediately go, Oh no, we've got drift for that. We don't need chat bots. So we don't need the inbox. Wrong. the other piece of this that I would say. Is that they'll just look at the word conversations and be like, I'm a marketer. I'm going to go to the marketing tab. I'm a sales rep. I'm going to go to the sales tab. I'm a service rep. I'm going to go to the service tab. There's, there's no, there's no conversations department SVP. So it's just really weird that it lives in this thing called conversations.
And there's this weird tool called snippets. That people are like, what's that? Like the amount of people that aren't leveraging snippets to make their life easier. And especially if you tie that into responses in the conversation, in the box. It's mind boggling to me. So just like this kind of misunderstanding of what it is, like Devin said, the misunderstanding of how difficult it is, or this just blatant, um, I bought HubSpot for an email tool.
Why would I use that? And they think about marketing email and workflows and automation and not even the other side of the. You know, simplifying, specificity, one to one, um, hard communication that actually produces more fruit many times. If you do what's hard in life, life becomes easy. If you do what's easy, life becomes hard.
I'm just throwing that out there. Wrong podcast. Anyway, Liz, that's, that's where I'm gonna stop. I'm gonna stop right there. and I'm just super glad that we're gonna have a part two because, you know, the fact that I didn't even get to talk about... That one of the, uh, tools that I would love more people to use inside of HubSpot is views, views for contacts, views for deals, views, like there's view, how, heck, ooh, jeez, I got a little passionate there for a second.
There's, there's views in workflows now, but the fact that you have views in the inbox and what does that mean and what can you see and how does that streamline the people's day that we've already kind of been talking about? Like. Like there's so much that we just need to talk about.
[00:43:49] Liz Moorehead: I know. I'm really excited for us to get to that too. What I will say as a sneak preview for those who hang around the GBT universe, by the time, actually no, it'll be next week that it's going to drop out. You are going to have, don't you have something you're publishing about views next week as a tutorial?
[00:44:08] George B. Thomas: I mean, I might, I might, yeah, I might be
[00:44:10] Liz Moorehead: you might be creating something. You might be publishing an article about that. You might be. Just dabbling. Just dabbling.
[00:44:18] George B. Thomas: Yeah, there might be a lot more coming actually, but we'll see, you know.
[00:44:21] Liz Moorehead: We'll see. We never know. Uh, for me, my parting word of wisdom is the dry heaving that I did earlier. I'm just going to circle back around to that, is that to Devin's point, it is easy.
And we talked about making better idiots when you try to make things idiot proof. The thing I will always go back to that George has told me a thousand times that I believe has always stood me in good stead is that HubSpot is only ever as smart as you are. So you can scale. You can see what it will do is automate dumb things so you can be dumber faster.
So if you don't sit down and you take a look at, so we have these tools at our disposal. How are we actually going to use them effectively? Like, have the conversations. Yes, it's easy. It is so easy to get started. It is criminally easy to get started. But have the conversation. How is our service team going to use this?
How is our sales team going to use this? Particularly in sales. Particularly in sales. Because we're going to be having a conversation with a special guest coming up in a couple of weeks. But when you think about those sales organizations that you are dragging out of the stone ages into the inbound age where we have to...
All work together as a revenue team. What do they all have? Individual undocumented processes where each salesperson is doing their own darn thing. And if you don't address that, you're just going to scale that. So that is my parting word of wisdom for today. I brought it home considering I had no idea what we were talking
[00:45:58] Devyn Bellamy: that was amazing. That was
[00:46:00] George B. Thomas: feel like, I feel like you're on a soapbox and just like,
[00:46:03] Devyn Bellamy: Yes. The tool is only as good as the plan you use to implement it. I love it.
[00:46:09] Liz Moorehead: You know what? I bet it's because I straightened my hair today. I'm feeling more powerful. That's what it
[00:46:15] George B. Thomas: what
[00:46:15] Devyn Bellamy: You look powerful
[00:46:16] Liz Moorehead: you.
[00:46:17] George B. Thomas: be powerful. Everybody, all the hub hero listeners be powerful. But it's funny. I have to say at least one more thing out of the chat pane because, um, when I first said the word auto magical, like, Nine years ago, I didn't realize that automagical was going to become a thing that people actually associated, or even I have now heard people use that are in the circles with me, but the fact that we have in the chat pane automagical stupidity.
[00:46:46] Liz Moorehead: Oh my gosh. Guys, we've ascended. I'm just so happy to be here. I'm so, I love our audience so much. And it, it bummed, I don't know how we got here, but guys, we're at the end of our episode. We did it. We've completed conversations part one.
[00:47:03] George B. Thomas: Yeah,
[00:47:04] Liz Moorehead: How do y'all, how do you feel? Feel
[00:47:05] George B. Thomas: first chapter of
[00:47:06] Liz Moorehead: I feel great.
[00:47:07] George B. Thomas: I'm just kidding. Yeah, I feel great. I feel
[00:47:08] Liz Moorehead: Right.
Right. I feel good. I feel great. I feel wonderful. But for all of our listeners, thank you once again for joining us this week. Uh, if you love the pod, please do not forget to leave us a review on your favorite podcast provider, whether that's Spotify, Apple, Stitcher, Google play, every review helps us get in front of more amazing HubSpotting humans just like you.
And with that gentlemen, I hope you have a great week. I'm so glad we're back in the saddle.
[00:47:34] George B. Thomas: Your favorite podcast app should be Pocket Cast, by the way, but anyway.