The HubHeroes Podcast

[00:00:00] George B. Thomas: Yes, but at least he has an employer. Not everybody on the planet can say that right now. Uh,
[00:00:05] Devyn Bellamy: Ain't that the
[00:00:06] George B. Thomas: uh, environment. You know, here's the thing. I have to come out the gate and be like two weeks without Liz. I don't like it gentlemen. I don't like it. I like when I,
[00:00:17] Max Cohen: sucks. I want to go home.
[00:00:18] George B. Thomas: man, I just, I like when I can kind of sit in the pocket and be part of the conversation and just, you know, and plus she brings a little, she, she brings a little spice, a little, you know, cat hurting to, to the episode.
So I'll be glad she's, she's moving. so next week she should be back, which will be good. And we'll get back to our regularly scheduled shenanigans. But I am
[00:00:39] Max Cohen: One thing I want to say. Hold on. I just want to say, you know, her not being here makes me kind of afraid that we might fly off the rails a little bit and potentially get ourselves cancelled. But then I remember there have been plenty of times I She has almost gotten us cancelled off some crazy s t, she said.
So, we miss
[00:00:55] George B. Thomas: we miss you, both could be true cause I remember something about a restaurant and things that we had to like, maybe edit, I don't know, like, yeah, so we're good, we're gonna try to make this through and not get cancelled, but I am also kind of excited today because I feel like, I feel like Max, you and I might get in a fight.
We might get in an argument, uh, for this conversation, just maybe, maybe. And here's the thing. Today, listeners, viewers, what we're talking about is we're talking about HubSpot, we're talking about the prospects, the leads tool. We're talking about where HubSpot was historically strong in the sales process.
and we're going to talk about terminology that I used in a Slack channel. And I kid you not, I think Max. Cohen lost his fricking mind for a second, but we'll, we'll get there. We'll get there. So let's set the stage like been in HubSpot for years and years and years have talked to people about sales ever since it went from marketing to marketing and sales.
And historically, uh, HubSpot has been great at pipelines, stages, and being able to kind of customize a process around allowing teams to do that. Been great at giving you the records and the objects and the properties and custom properties to do that and report on what I have historically always called the sales process.
Now, in my personal opinion, where it was a little bit lacking is I felt, I always felt like we were hacking. A piece of the system, meaning I would talk about lead status with teams and I would say, well, that could be your first call, second call, first touch, you know, uh, whatever you want to do as far as what the, what the processes before you actually get to this, Hey, we're going to talk about money, dollar signs, let's create a deal.
Get it in the pipeline and to have a sales process, I always called that the pre sales and I'm glad you threw your hat on. I always called that the pre sales process because it's, it's the prospecting process. And so when, when I said, Hey, I want to talk about the prospecting tool in HubSpot. I want to talk about the leads object in the leads dashboard.
I said, you know, I want to let people know that now you can do the whole sales process, the pre sales process and the sales process. And then Max came through Slack, ripped my face off and started giving me this diatribe about you're stupid. That's not a pre sales. So, so Max, I want to just start by opening it up.
I want to start by opening up and being like can you please vent and air out this frustration to me saying that now you can, you don't have to hack with lead status the pre sales process, but you now have prospecting and the leads dashboard to do it.
[00:03:52] Max Cohen: I mean, my Devin, don't look at me like that. Listen, I spent the last two years of my life at HubSpot in pre sales. I was a pre sales solutions engineer. There are pre sales, you know, the sales engineers, they call them. There's pre sales solutions architects. Pre sales is like a definite for me, the way that I know the word, right. Is it's a definition or a category of, you know, people who support account executives and the people actually doing the selling, right.
So like, you know, uh, a solutions engineer doesn't. Run an entire sales process, but they're there to like support and enable the sales reps and be the person who actually knows what the product actually does right in those conversations, right? You know, so when I say pre sales, you know, pre sales to me has this very specific connotation.
Now I'll have you look at my hat,
[00:04:45] George B. Thomas: I'm looking. I'm looking.
[00:04:47] Max Cohen: And I am also going to acknowledge the fact that you put a dash between pre And sales, which I can, I can, I can, I can jive with, right? Uh, you know, because you're, you're saying you're saying before the sales process is what you're trying to say.
Whereas like pre sale solutions engineers, there are post sale solutions engineers too, as well at HubSpot. We have both right. Or they call them solutions architects. Right. But you know, they typically means like, you're the more technical resource working with folks as they go through that sales process before they buy.
But then after you're generally not working with them, right? That's usually what you see with like pre sales roles, but I understand what you mean by the pre sales process. I would normally call that like prospecting business development, right? Because oftentimes we think about people in these roles as SDRs, BDRs, right?
And I think the beautiful thing about this, is it's not just HubSpot getting a lead object like Salesforce, right? That's not what this is, right? What's happening is they're finally fixing that awkward space before the sales process. You could say
[00:05:53] George B. Thomas: oh, what comes before, what
[00:05:56] Max Cohen: I, yeah, I know. I get it.
[00:05:58] George B. Thomas: Wait a minute. Wait, wait a
[00:05:59] Max Cohen: I get it.
[00:06:00] George B. Thomas: my god. You proved my
[00:06:02] Max Cohen: I get it. I understand. Listen, we're we're, you know, we're doing, we're just playing with words. We used to do a podcast with someone who got really angry when we
[00:06:10] George B. Thomas: Oh, I remember that
[00:06:11] Max Cohen: right. Yeah, yeah, love that guy. We love you, Doug. Uh, anyway, so, So I'm just channeling a little bit of inner Doug here, right?
And saying words have meaning, but yeah. Anyway, but here's the thing. It's really, I, I was a huge fan of the lead object because of the way they deployed this. Right? It finally solved that weird problem of like, Me as like the meeting booker or the first person that has a call with someone to qualify them I'm, not the actual, you know Closing quota carrying closing sales rep, right?
Where the hell is my space to work inside a hub spot, right? Am I really living inside a contact properties of like leads to that shit was always so goofy to me right and then you saw people doing this like atrocious stuff where it's like, Oh, well, we have like a separate deal that like leads to like a different deal, but then it disappears out of that pipeline when we move it into the sales pipeline, or we just create two separate deals.
And then they're not like associated to each other. So we can't tell what what led to what led to what right. And then there was also that awkward thing where it's like, well, are your deals like are you just opening up deals for like, any odd You know, person who like raises their hands and wants to talk to sales.
That's weird, right? Cause then your reporting's all crazy. Cause your close losing 99 percent of everything. Cause deals are getting opened up when they shouldn't have. Right? So I think the, the lead object filled this gap that was really missing. And I liked the way they deployed it where it's just a baby deal.
Right? It evolves into a deal when you close it and qualify at the end, the idea is that it creates a deal because you qualify that lead to actually become a real deal versus opening up a bunch of deals that ever should have been deals in the first place, right? There's way more we can talk about the prospecting tool, but I was a big fan of it.
[00:07:57] George B. Thomas: so, okay, so, Devon, you've, you've sat there, you've heard me rant, you've heard Max rant, Are we both crazy? Are we both saying the same thing? Are we, like, what are your thoughts on just the idea, and by the way, Max, I want to dive back in after we hear from Devin, because I have some questions for you around what you said, but Devin, where's your brain at right now, brother?
[00:08:24] Devyn Bellamy: to be completely forthright, one, I was very amused by the back and forth. But I think the hyphen solves it. The hyphen makes it two completely different notions. So, um, but I love the idea of, like you said, Max, where You have the space for, you know, the BDR team and all those guys, um, as opposed to, you know, mocking something together based on, uh, you know, uh, your, your Limitations.
Um, I really liked the idea, uh, or just how you were just going down the pipe. Cause as you were talking about it, I'm thinking it's like, well, would this solution work? And then you say that solution. And it's like, yeah, separate pipeline. Not all your numbers are screwed. You suck. None of these should have been deal.
[00:09:15] Max Cohen: having flashbacks to plenty of portals you've been in. I don't like the fact that's been Yeah.
[00:09:20] Devyn Bellamy: But yeah, no, it's, uh, it's, I actually had a conversation about prospecting, uh, with a friend of mine. I went to high school with Seth. Seth, I'm making sure you hear this episode. Um, because, uh, one of the things he was talking about was, uh, cause he comes over from Salesforce and it's, uh, adopting, uh, his sales process.
To work with HubSpot the way he wants it to, and the prospecting tools now that are out. It's a, there's a bit of a disconnect and so hopefully there'll be some insight after this.
[00:09:52] Max Cohen: Yeah, the other thing too, that I think is like really important, like whenever we think about what needs to be in its own object in HubSpot, right, like, for me, and I was, I was going, I think me and, I think me and, uh, me and Doug's son, Drew, were actually going back and forth about this on a LinkedIn post, about like, my logic around like, when something should be an object is when there's many instances of it, and there's Describing characteristics of each one of those instances, right?
When you think of like, the reason I think the lead object in its form is good. Like in, in Salesforce, the lead represents a person and then it like turns into a contact. And then that lead like converts and it kind of like goes in and then it's a, it's a person, right? Whereas like HubSpot, a contact is a contact, it's always just a contact.
But me as a person. With my relationship to like a company, I can, me, Max, the contact, I can become a lead multiple times, right? I can show up and go, Oh, I'm kind of interested in your product. I want to learn more. And maybe I'm not a good fit, but that is like a point in time where I became elite. And there's information about that.
What was I interested in? How did I like, you know, get in touch with the sales team? Uh, why wasn't I a good fit at that time? Because I might come back a year later, and all of a sudden I'm a good fit, right? And that's another instance of me becoming a lead again, right? And so to me, instances of these things happening are much better represented in objects than they are properties.
Think about it. Even activities. are objects, right? Because you can have multiple phone calls, multiple meetings, those different phone calls can have different durations and different notes and different, you know, call dispositions, right? The act of me becoming a lead and doing a hand raise that can happen multiple times, right?
And that is impossible to represent in a frickin drop down that gives me five options called lead status. Right. I don't know when I did it. When, like what happened when I, why wasn't I a good fit? Right. It's like, for me, the lead object makes so much sense because each one of those times that I became a lead, I could have became a deal if I was qualified.
Right. But now it's great because when I'm now that I'm the BDR, you know, talking to this person after like the third time that they came back and now that they're actually like a good fit, I can look back at those old lead objects and be like, Oh, why did you get disqualified the first time? What changed?
And that's like really great context for me to have a conversation with this person about why is it going to be different now? Right? And I think there's so many people that are missing that point because they're just going, Oh, it's a Salesforce lead object. It's like, no, it's not.
[00:12:40] George B. Thomas: even
[00:12:41] Max Cohen: It's an instance of something happening.
Right? So
[00:12:44] George B. Thomas: this is why I wanted to have this conversation. And again, I still want to flip back to like questions that I have for you, because I don't feel like it has to be my way, but I feel like there has to be a way and I really want us to help define that here in a hot minute, since we have multiple brains on this podcast.
But in in episode after episode, you've heard every one of us at some point in time say, quit trying to make HubSpot, your historical system,
[00:13:14] Max Cohen: Mm
[00:13:15] George B. Thomas: I'm saying today when this happened and they created the prospecting dashboard and the leads object. I don't know how long you've been using HubSpot, but if you haven't gone to reporting and data management and data, um, uh, model.
In your portal lately and seeing that historically how we talked about HubSpot, you would say, yeah, companies is an object. Contacts is an object. Deals an object. Tickets is an object. And inside those objects you can have properties. Ladies and gentlemen, now when you look at the data model, CRM objects is companies, contacts and tickets. And then the conversation moves to sales objects.
[00:13:58] Max Cohen: hmm.
[00:13:59] George B. Thomas: This was never a divider before and sales objects is deals, leads, line items, and quotes. And Max, you even said, Hey, activities is an object. Yeah. That's why now in the data model, there's literally a freaking thing that says activities. And it's got calls, emails, LinkedIn messages, meetings, notes, postal mail, SMS, tasks, WhatsApp messages, like these activities are starting to be treated in the data model different than they were.
And so here's what I'm going to say on this episode. Quit using HubSpot like you used to use HubSpot because HubSpot is not historical HubSpot. HubSpot is a new HubSpot. There's new tools that mean we can have a new process that can be fleshed out. And there's still a bunch of organizations. I dare I say thousands.
Of organizations that are going to listen to this. Well, I hope thousands of them listen to this. They might not even listen to this, but they're still using lead status. Or worst case, they're doing something like I saw historically, where it was actually a ticket pipeline that led into a deal pipeline.
And I about lost my mind. I'm like, Oh my God, what universe have I entered?
[00:15:08] Max Cohen: Yeah.
[00:15:09] George B. Thomas: you have to stop and I would, if I could get in front of everybody that's using HubSpot, or if I could suggest that HubSpot would get in front of everybody that's using HubSpot, they would make the statement, quit using HubSpot like it's HubSpot, start using HubSpot like it's HubSpot, and I know that might be confusing, but you have to draw a line and understand that the tool in itself has fundamentally changed the foundational backbone of how it's thinking about itself and how it's built. So with that rant, holy crap, Max, I want to circle back around and Devin, I want to circle back around and I want to talk about like, when we think of general organizations, and I know that's going to be hard because there's. There's maybe HubSpot is like a general organization. Max, you were talking about pre sales, right?
It's a set of people that actually are technically advanced that can help the sales folks have conversations that they might not be able to have, or think about it in ways that they might've historically not thought about it. Then what I have been calling pre sales prospecting. Because it literally is prospecting and then we've got the like deal process like, so, so it's almost like if you start to think about how people got confused about buyers journey and customer journey and everybody wants to segment it away and like, and you're like, Oh, now I'm really confused.
Like, I want to, I want to flesh out. And you even mentioned post. Like Solutions Architects, right? Like, how should companies, when we think about this new object structure, when we think about these new tools, you know, what's, what's the somewhat sort of decent roadmap of like, there's this, and then there's this, and there's this, and there's this.
And as an organization, you should be thinking of these four boxes that would consist of your entire sales process. Where does your brain go?
[00:17:06] Max Cohen: I mean, for me, like it really, it really kind of like depends. I mean, there's every and I'm going to preface this by saying the one thing I learned about being in pre sales at HubSpot is that the role of like a solutions engineer In general is like completely different in every single company you go to.
There's like not a lot of consistency, right at HubSpot. It was very tightly defined. You work with customers in the pre sales, like before they buy, right? Like you're working with them in your sales process. You don't support them after there's plenty of sales engineers or solutions engineers, like the name is, you know, whatever, right.
That end up doing. Uh, you know, help during the sales process that run demos that end up like being support for customers that like build stuff out for customers after like they buy. So there's like not a lot of consistency in the pre sales world. Right. Um, but you know, if you're asking like, when would you need like, you know, uh, someone in a pre sales role?
Well, I mean, you gotta kind of balance that with like, how complex is your tool to sell? Like if you need to be able to just have your account executives, like focus on the sales process and driving that whole process and being good at selling and you know, it's really hard to get them also to be like experts in the product, right?
Which a lot of sales. Organizations do like, you know, suffer from, right. There can be people who just come in and have those more difficult conversations like about the product. Right. And again, there's some places where the sale, the sales engineers, they're the ones that run the entire demos, right. At HubSpot, I didn't run any demos, right.
I was more just like enabling sales reps. It's different everywhere. So like the only thing that I can kind of pull down from that, I don't want to say that I have like. Any sort of ultimate advice on like how to structure like a pre sales org or anything like that like at a at a company Um, but it really kind of depends on like Like look at your business look at the way you sell and like realistically deploy what you need I don't think there's a one size fits all for everything because You know, pre sales people are expensive.
That's an expensive resource to have like someone who's just like a product expert, right? Which is why you see them deployed in so many different ways, depending on it. Cause not every company's like HubSpot that can afford to have pre sales solutions, engineers, pre sales solutions, architects, and post sales solutions, engineers, and architects, and be able to like delineate it that much.
Cause they have more resources to do that. Right. So, you know, I think it's, it's, it's hard to say. Um, But yeah, I don't know. I think I'm going off on like a weird tangent around like building pre sales orgs. So I'm going to shut
[00:19:38] George B. Thomas: But I, but I like the tangent. That's literally where I was trying to get you to go. So, because I don't know if most organizations, A, think about this. B, need to think about it. But if we have the conversation, it'll spur in their mind. Shoot, am I actually missing a piece? We'll get back to the tool in a minute.
Devin, where's your brain at right now?
[00:19:59] Devyn Bellamy: So I was just thinking about, um, Brian Garvey's podcast, a good morning, uh, well, it's going to be relaunching the good morning ecosystem, but, uh, in the good morning pipelines, uh, I was, uh, listening to the recap and it was talking about how the, all these different, uh, elite partners, uh, had, uh, developed their sales teams.
And there was three stories and all three stories were completely different. And like one, they started out with in mind documentation, start out and we'll go, and then the other ones kind of fell into it and the first ones had something didn't work or, and then pivoted. And so it was like listening to how all of these orgs develop.
the one thing that was consistent is that they're constantly evolving.
well, I know we're going to be getting to the tool in a minute, but the thing is that with HubSpot for, for those who haven't been using it as long as we have, we've seen the evolution firsthand and have had the opportunity to, uh, grow with it and grow operations with it, uh, with whoever we're working with.
But the thing is, is that if you're starting now, you're still going to have to maintain that mindset in order to keep up in the future. Whatever process that you have now, whatever process you're developing now might be great now. Um, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's viable or scalable.
[00:21:22] George B. Thomas: Love it.
[00:21:23] Max Cohen: Yeah. And it's, you got to be able to like adapt like the way sales teams work too, because you know, it's, they, with, with The, the, the changing crazy landscapes, the economy and everything, and, you know, being able to deal with buyers that have different levels of education and then your product changes, right?
There's so many different things that can just screw up the way that you sell. You have to be able to like adapt your team to it, I guess. So. You know, uh, build it in a way that it can adjust, right. Versus just thinking everything's going to be going right all the time. But I don't know, again, I'm not super skilled at like building sales team, so I'm going to be careful how much like advice I actually
[00:21:58] George B. Thomas: But I, but I feel myself as a content creator. I now I'm like, Oh, and maybe this isn't as a content creator. Maybe this is just being a curious dude that realizes the end of me being
[00:22:10] Max Cohen: Curious, George.
[00:22:11] George B. Thomas: Yeah. That's my spirit animal, bro. Curious George is my spirit animal. Like, I feel like I want to map out something around this conversation of like.
When organizations need to think two levels before and two levels after and what the actual center journey of a modern CRM using a human, oh, oh, oh, focused company is actually thinking about. But, but let's dive into the tool because somebody might be watching this. They might've stumbled in and been like, uh, Hustler has a So like the prospecting tool and what we're talking about is literally in the sales navigation as it sits right now, where it'll be in the future. Maybe it might change. It's at the top of your screen. It might be on the left of your screen in the future. I don't know. HubSpot just be doing whatever HubSpot want to be doing, but there's a prospecting tool.
[00:23:06] Max Cohen: that nav
[00:23:07] George B. Thomas: that they have a summary. Which is the kind of the main prospecting page you get to when you get there, and this is things like tasks, sequences, um, your schedule, your feed, but it's all a snapshot of like, suggested activities you should do, potential leads that you have in your pipeline. And I'll just well it's not it's but it's your leads pipeline.
It's not your deals pipeline. So I got to be careful there. But it has a leads tab. It has a schedule. It has a feed. I'll ask what you guys love and hate about this here in a minute. Um, but just in general, like, if you're looking for those sales insights, you've got your feed. If you're looking for a snapshot of how busy your day is, or who is, or week, who is, who is in your calendar, like, yeah, there's just,
[00:24:01] Max Cohen: It's see, so, and what you'll notice is that they're putting this, if you see the new nav, right, they're putting this under this like workspaces. Thing, right. And like, I think this is going to be a big theme. Um, when you see HubSpot release, like a lot more of these like workspaces, like there's a reason it's like the top of the new nav, right.
Is it's clear that they're trying to make a lot more of these like home based places to work for like role specific job, like, you know, for specific roles, right. Cause you know, think about it. Like if you're a BDR or like an SDR, right. And you have your leads like automatically being given to you. Right?
Where else do you really need to go? Think about it, like your tasks are getting assigned to you automatically. You've got your Google Calendar or whatever hooked up to it. Um, you know, you've got your to do list, you've got, like, the leads getting routed to you, things like that. Like, all this stuff is in one space and you don't have to fumble around to all these different spots inside of HubSpot, right?
Um, so I mean, I think, I, I like to see HubSpot do this. You're seeing them do it with HelpDesk, right? HelpDesk is now turning into the Workspaces are like the prospecting tool for support or, you know, service reps, right? It's all right there. Everything you need, you've got all your incoming channels.
You've got ways to like go and address those tickets. You don't have to be fumbling around to 12 different places inside a HubSpot to do that, right? Um, so I really, really enjoy it. Um, you know, I think it's just, it's, it's It's, it's going to be really good. I think for like role specific adoption stuff where it's like, listen, you get in front of this thing, here's your screen with everything that you need go right.
And spend less time fumbling around and it'll make it, you know, HubSpot's easy to adopt because like the interface is great and everything. And like, there's a lot of good training around it and all this stuff, but man, if you just make it so like, I don't got to navigate anywhere to really get my job done and not seeing prospecting is all the way there yet.
Right. Um, but it's a really good step in that
[00:25:52] George B. Thomas: So here's the thing by the two things and then Devin, I'm coming to you brother. Two things. One. This is the worst it will ever be. And it's freaking awesome. Right. Like you got to think about that. Like, and I've, I've heard people, by the way, I, I didn't make that up. I've heard a bunch of people talking about AI tools.
And one of the things that I hear a lot of them saying is this is the worst it'll ever be because it gets better from here. Listen, the prospecting tool, this is the worst it'll ever be. Cause the only thing that HubSpot will do is continue to make it better. Now, now here's the other thing. If you heard Mac say workspaces.
Listen, there's a navigational beta that you can be part of. Make sure you've headed over to the right hand side, or it might be at the top of your, uh, it might be at the top of your screen and you've ignored it. Then it says, try the beta nav, click that, or go over to the sidebar and go to product updates and search for the nav beta.
Because it is a, it is a different experience and there is this thing called workspaces, not to get confusing, but just know that that's there. Max, give me, yeah, okay, yes,
[00:27:04] Max Cohen: I just, cause I just found, I literally didn't even notice this cause I was just like perusing the prospecting, uh, tab. One of the things that I hate more than anything in HubSpot.
[00:27:16] George B. Thomas: Are we gonna get cancelled? Oh,
[00:27:18] Max Cohen: Nope. Is going and finding meetings and calls that I did. N. Changing the outcome from scheduled to whatever it ended up
[00:27:30] George B. Thomas: Oh, yeah,
[00:27:30] Max Cohen: right?
So like, cause think about it. There's like a lot of reporting that we do. There's a lot of reporting that I do for my own metrics, right? That like, keep track of like, how many, how many partner calls am I doing? How many, um, uh, how many calls with HubSpotters am I doing? Am I, are, are we getting, or like, are we actually having them?
Are they showing up or whatever? And we're building reports on all this stuff. And I, there's so many times that I end up going to those reports being like, Oh my God, all this stuff is still scheduled. Or like, I didn't complete it, so it's not showing up in my activity or whatever. And so I'm like, Oh, I gotta go find the record.
I gotta go scroll through the timeline. I gotta go click whatever the meeting was. I've gotta then hit outcome. Select the outcome. And then I gotta hit save. And it's like, Wait, I had 8 calls today. I have to go do that 8 times. And it's a nightmare. I was literally just on the prospecting page. On the prospecting page, there's a tab that I can literally drag all the way up to the top of the screen that says Suggested Activities.
And you want to know what I just found when I uncollapsed this little sucker right here? A little tab that says Meetings Need Outcomes. And when I clicked it, it showed me all the meetings that I've had that I didn't select an outcome for. All the meetings that were scheduled that I needed to go and hit completed for it to properly track in my reporting for my own metrics, I was literally able to just select it, hit it, select it, hit it, and it automatically completed it for everything.
And I've literally have been begging for this in my brain silently, but not knowing how to say it. And the fact that I just found this on the prospecting page, I am losing my mind because I am never, ever, ever. I'm going to have to go dig through a mother f ing contact record. Stupid a activity feed to find a meeting, to click two more buttons, to then click completed.
And like that, this little stuff alone, knowing that I can do this right from here,
[00:29:21] George B. Thomas: So, so there's a couple things. One, Devin, I swear, I am coming over to you. And Max, you're in trouble. I told you we were gonna fight, you're in trouble, because the next question was gonna be like, what do you love? About the tool. We figured out what you love about the tool. You might have more, but we've got to unpack a couple of things.
By the way, that's what happens when you get together to do a Hub Heroes podcast. You find new ish in HubSpot. And then you're like, and this is what people should be thinking about. But Max, you said something that I don't think most people picked up on. Because by the way, I didn't freaking pick up on it.
You said dragged and dropped it to the top of the screen. And I was like. Wait, when did that become available that I could actually put the thing where I want it on the prospecting tool? And so yeah, when you hover over the little little grid of dots Shows up and you can collapse or expand and you can drag it to where you want it to be.
So that's super dope Okay, Devin, give us your thoughts. I want I want us to start to move into What do you love about the idea of this prospecting tool, the summary, the leads, the schedule, the feed, like, let's start brain dumping on that.
[00:30:32] Devyn Bellamy: the biggest thing that I love about it is the fact that it exists for 1, um, the fact that BDRs can spend more time building relationships than having to dig through the CRM, uh, in dealing with this stuff, Max, you look like you're in wonder and awe over there. Like, you're just looking.
[00:30:51] Max Cohen: It's, it's just a, I mean, it's just, it, I, I haven't been in it in a while and like the more I kind of click through it, the more stuff that I like find that is just like, damn, I wish that there was, anyway, I don't want to interrupt you Devin, go ahead.
[00:31:05] Devyn Bellamy: No worries. But, uh, yeah, that, and, uh, I think the feed idea is pretty dope. I'm curious as to, to see what that's going to be like. Um, but the fact that your entire day is on a dashboard is just, uh,
[00:31:20] Max Cohen: Like there's a proper calendar in there now. You know what I mean? And like, there's really, you know, it's funny. So I saw like a very early build of this like a while ago when I was still at HubSpot. And, um, they were showing. This like a calendar thing here. And it was like back when it was like just figma and they would like, you know, we're, we're mocking it all up and it wasn't like actually like in yet, but something that he said they wanted to do that the PM is no longer there anymore.
I still talk to him every once in a while. Something that I know that they wanted to do is like. Now that like they have access to the calendar and like, we're doing a lot of stuff with AI now, right? Like being able to like, give like smart suggestions of like, what to do with your time, right. Or to like, you know, what to do when it sees certain things on your calendar.
Like, so for example, they have a really cool opportunity here to think like, to say like, Hey, we can tell there's like call after call, after call, after call. Maybe if you see a string of calls. Suggest a break, like a little block, be like, click here to put a block on your calendar or something like that.
I think there's probably some really, really neat stuff that they could do with all the things that they're doing, like around AI, like on this too, as well, but like the other thing too, that I'm noticing is like, I can literally go and like click any of these things on the calendar and I can either launch the meeting right from there, or if I haven't updated the fricking completion or the, the.
The, what I was just saying before the outcome, it literally like shows the calendar events differently. And I can do it like right from there too, as well. So it's just, yeah, it's really neat.
[00:32:48] George B. Thomas: Alright, Devin. Devin, let's, let's dive back in here a little bit. Um, well actually, hang, hang on. Mmm.
[00:32:58] Max Cohen: because marketers actually need to start thinking about this too, right? Because you're no longer in a situation where you're just creating contacts for someone to work. Like you need to start thinking about how, like your marketing. Uh, or the, the, sorry, like what sort of like conversions people can take or what sort of things could happen that actually warrant creating lead objects for salespeople, right?
Because think about it, what were we doing in the past? We were marking freaking contacts as like MQL or SQL or something like that based on like a form they filled out. Right. But now you're in a world where it's like, Ooh, like, are we, we need to have a conversation of does a deal get created because of the nature of what this person's converting on?
Or does a lead object get created and go to someone else first for like a little bit of like, qualification, because you can create these lead objects in workflows, I'm pretty sure. Unless I'm crazy, or I think you have like settings that you turn on where it like says, if the life cycle stage hits something, create like a lead or something like that, I'll look into it while you guys kind of talk about marketing and implement.
Yeah,
[00:34:07] George B. Thomas: Devin, I'll let you go first, Max, you don't need to look into anything. I'm already on that page with the settings to talk about it. But Devin, I do want to know your marketing brain. And the fact that this is a, I'm saying think of HubSpot in a different way. And there's this new tool, where does your brain go pertaining to this from the marketing side, less sale side?
[00:34:32] Devyn Bellamy: Uh, from the marketing side, the very first thing I noticed when I was poking around the tool was, uh, the automation for the handoff. I love the idea of speeding up, smoothing out the, uh, the marketing sales handoff and using lead objects to do that, and then having predefined criteria that automates that process.
Uh, so you don't have to have a person be a bottleneck or just have some convoluted workflow. Uh, that's constantly processing things that, uh, that's the first place that my head goes as a marketer. Um, and then also, of course, HubSpot being the dope thing that it is, uh, is that it makes, uh, being able to track that customer journey in one system even easier.
[00:35:22] George B. Thomas: Yeah, oh,
[00:35:23] Max Cohen: I want to, I want to push this marketing thing a little bit more too, because I think there's also a, and George, let me know if you agree, I think there's also like a little bit of a, do we maybe start to look at reporting a little bit differently, right? Because. I think before, when we think about MQLs, we're thinking of how many unique people am I sending to you, which is very different than how many times have we gotten someone to do the hand raise.
And that may include a couple of the same people, right? Like, depending on how you're looking at leads, considering like I could become a lead multiple times, right? And then it's like, For a while, the big reason why, you know, people loved like the Salesforce integration, for instance, is because it brought in your opportunity records as deal records.
And then all of a sudden marketers could see, Hey, my leads are turning into deals and there's money and I can do attribution based on that. Right. But like, are we in a world now inside a HubSpot where marketers are going to start actually looking at lead objects at all in terms of like a metric, right?
Like You know what I mean? Because we talk about marketing qualified leads. Well, now you can make a lead object. Does that change your, your, your, the way you're thinking about reporting at all? Right? And I think a lot of that comes down to like, what does a lead actually mean to you? The organization? And how are you using that object?
Right? But it's interesting because ah, now you kind of have this new ob, this new in between object to kind of think about. It's not just contacts with certain statuses and deals. Right. There's like another thing that you're creating. Right. So it's like, do we get measured on how many of those deals that are leads actually get qualified and we're not even looking at the deal object or what?
Right. So it's interesting.
[00:37:09] George B. Thomas: Hey, hey, baby, hold my jacket. Why, why I go out and do this for a second? Like, like, listen, um, sure. Could we do what HubSpot is saying and go to the settings tool and say, create a lead based on the life cycle stage of sales qualified lead and realize at that point then the contact owner has been, uh, sales, Yeah.
You know, and now it's moving into the sales process. Yes, we could do that. Um, but could we imagine this as being the beginning of a world where we actually start to align marketing and sales? Is this actually the tool that starts to bridge the gap? Meaning, could this, because by the way, I have helped organizations, Max, where they have A leads and B leads.
And that gets fun. And where are you supposed to frickin store that? Guess what in a dumb HubSpot property historically is how they were doing it. But could you actually have a system where
[00:38:06] Max Cohen: Well,
[00:38:08] George B. Thomas: the contact owner up until a certain point, and therefore could you go into the lead stages tab of this tool and actually customize where you wanted the in progress stages to be for your system that were specifically based on marketing.
Thank you. Marketing and could then you have a workflow that when it got to a sales qualified lead, what it did is actually changed the contact owner so that now it's just goes into the sales reps prospecting dashboard instead of the marketing prospecting dashboard, because now marketing and sales are both doing prospecting.
They're both revenue generators. There's a new game in town. Like I said, don't use HubSpot like it's HubSpot. Use HubSpot like it's HubSpot rethink and customize what the frick you need to do based on what your team needs, man, I'm losing my brain. And listen, this is why I wanted to do this episode because this was such a gigantic change to HubSpot. And nobody's freaking talking about it. Nobody's thinking about it in the way of how it could just revolutionize the way marketing and sales is working together or even sales is doing their entire process. I don't even know where to go from here. Somebody pick up.
[00:39:33] Max Cohen: I mean, I, so, you know, Devin, you're a marketer by trade. Right. Um, like, so what? I mean, I'm sure you've done the whole, you know, marketing qualified leads is a, you know, is a, a metric that you're living and dying by at some point in your, in your, in your, in your, you know, I know things have probably changed now, right?
Where there's, we're not doing as much like putting shit behind the landing pages and passing it off to sales when someone gets an ebook and like all that kind of stuff. Right. But like knowing there's this in between object or like knowing how people have marketing teams, I guess, have like. You know, uh, uh, you know, done their metrics, I guess it's like the easiest way to say this broad question I'm asking, does this make you think a little bit differently about how you'd see people doing it there?
I mean, I don't know. I was never a marketer marketer, right? So like, it's hard for me to have like a super intelligent conversation around like how marketing teams are actually like, you know, performance. Based or what, like, what, like how those teams set up their metrics, I guess.
[00:40:36] Devyn Bellamy: Sure. Yeah. At the end of the day, um, the average marketing team is about vanity metrics, hopefully less than average. Um, like,
[00:40:45] Max Cohen: But you're past that vanity shit, man. Like you, like, you know, what's actually important to you, right? Like, do you think this is like helpful, like stuff to look at? Like, are we going to start seeing marketers be like, how many objects have we created? Or is it like not really going to be something that you think affects them too much in terms of their metrics?
[00:41:03] Devyn Bellamy: it depends on who's running the show. If it's important to the person at the top, then it'll be important to the people who are in it. Um, but like me personally, I would adjust my conversion rate. So I'm looking, uh, at, uh, any, uh, leads that I touch. Hopefully, uh, this new development will change, uh, how people do their reporting in marketing.
Um, because for us, we, we live and die by attribution. They ask us, how has your contribution, uh, to this organization raised the bottom line, uh, then you have to be able to say something
[00:41:40] George B. Thomas: Yeah.
[00:41:41] Max Cohen: And at least maybe now. Maybe have a, since you have this new object to add to reporting somehow, you can get a little bit more granular around like, here's like, you know, deals that have come from us. Yes. Here's also leads or the at bats that we're creating for those SDRs BDRs or whatever. Right. And like, you have that, it's almost as if like.
You know, for, for a lot of the times with like the sales folks, it's like, we're doing stuff to be able to generate deals that you can work. Right. But now it's like marketers have a thing that they can generate for the BDRs. And it's not just a, you know, a shitty contact property or like a deal that shouldn't be a deal yet or something like that.
Right. Like they have that product they can deliver right to those folks earlier in the sales cycle.
[00:42:29] George B. Thomas: So, In a minute, I'm going to ask a question so we can close this. But,
[00:42:34] Max Cohen: Wait, it's we're it's four.
[00:42:37] George B. Thomas: Like, so here's the deal. I'm, we're going to close this in a second, but I, I have to say I've been, you guys have been talking and I've been standing here for the last four minutes and like 46 seconds with my mouth open, like my jaw dropped and dude, if you go to schedule and you look at the left hand sidebar, it tells you, and this is, this wasn't excited me.
Yes. Great. It tells me who I'm going to meet with. That day and it gives me the ability to go into their contact record with ease And it gives me the ability to copy their email address if I need to go paste it somewhere else But I had never noticed the fact that there was a playbooks drop down Under the human that I'm actually going to meet with, meaning I go to my schedule, I see that I'm gonna meet with Max, and I can pick what playbook I need to run on the meeting that I'm actually going to be talking to Max on. Like
[00:43:35] Max Cohen: Wait, can you share your screen? Can you
[00:43:38] George B. Thomas: if I
[00:43:39] Max Cohen: I don't see it on my end but I might not have any playbooks in
[00:43:42] George B. Thomas: listening to this. And you're like, wait, what? Um, go to community. hubheroes. com. I haven't said that for a lot of episodes. We put the video versions in here. But I am going to share my screen. Because, Max, what I'm saying is, right here, if I'm having a meeting with Max Cohen, or Mark Killens, or Devin Bellamy, I can literally open up Playbook's dropdown, and run a playbook with that human, because I have a meeting with them on that
[00:44:12] Max Cohen: Yo, what the
[00:44:15] George B. Thomas: like, holy crap! Talk about giving them the tools that they need to do the thing that they're going to do when they're actually going to do it, if this schedule becomes the place that they live and die by. Meaning, we've, we've preached this for years. Hey, get everything in HubSpot. Get everything in HubSpot that you can.
Now my calendar, there's no need for me to go over to my Google calendar. There's no need for me to go to my Outlook calendar because I can literally see everything that's supposed to happen from a meetings and tasks perspective in HubSpot on my schedule page and run freaking playbooks too?
[00:44:53] Max Cohen: That's crazy. Does it like, is it like, it's suggesting playbooks too. Which is the wild thing. Like I wonder if there's any like, I wonder if they're going to build in any logic into playbooks that let you kind of say like, Oh, you know, depending on the call or the meeting type or something, like it pops a certain playbook.
Because imagine that, right? Where it's just like, you've got, uh,
[00:45:14] George B. Thomas: Okay, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. Let's, that's going to be our closing question. That's going to be our closing question. What do we hope? Why don't we pray if we had a magic wand, what would we want to see happen with this tool pertaining to sales or marketing or whatever direction you want to take it?
[00:45:33] Max Cohen: I, I, if we're talking about the prospecting, like, workspace, Because I could go on and on about the lead object and what it's missing and all that crap. Um, but I would say it would have to have been what I was saying earlier where it's like, use some AI on that calendar, right? Like, deploy some AI to help your, your, your sales reps not burn themselves out, right?
Like, hey, maybe put a call block here. Hey, take some time to take some, like, to make sure your notes are updated. Hey, uh, maybe call this person that you haven't called in a long time. Right? Or hey, here's a good suggested time for like, uh, you know, uh, follow up emails that you're sending, right? You've got these follow up email tasks.
Yo throw that on an empty spot in my calendar, link me to those follow up email tasks so I can go bang them out. Right? That would be pretty, that'd be pretty cool. Like you can talk about a cool way to use AI and HubSpot. This is like a really, I think, great opportunity to do that.
[00:46:30] George B. Thomas: Devon, what are your thoughts?
[00:46:32] Devyn Bellamy: that one kind of blew me away because I was thinking about AI and integrating it more, but I would have stopped there because I didn't have any specific use cases. And then Max comes out and then just like brain drops on all of us. So.
[00:46:45] Max Cohen: that's what they showed me a while ago, and that's what I wanted to be in it. And now I just want it to be real, because this thing is actually here, and that's missing. Sorry, I was just I'm gonna shut up.
[00:46:55] George B. Thomas: All right, so I'll, I'll jump in here. I have a, I have a wimpy one. And then I have a based off of what we've talked about one and then we'll close this bad boy out. My wimpy one is if I go to the summary dashboard, I wish I could adjust the width of my left column and my right column to where I wanted it to be, because I'd love to see that schedule and feed just a little bit bigger maybe than it is right now to really get access to it.
That's that's a wimpy one, by the way, what I'm talking about is with HubSpot dashboards, you can literally move stuff around and resize it how you want. I just like a little bit of resizing. Now, if I go into the leads object, and I piggyback off the conversation of prospecting does just isn't for sales.
But prospecting is literally for marketing and sales. Marketing is the one generating the leads. This is the one place in HubSpot that you have objects or an object. And you don't have views yet. Imagine if you had a marketing view. Imagine if you had a sales view. Imagine if you could start to segment these views in different ways that marketing and sales wanted to for the leads object, dependent upon how they were going to work with them.
So in the future, I'd love to see views inside of the leads object. All right. I don't know. You guys, here's what I'll say to the people to close this out. Are you using the prospecting tool? Are you using the leads object? Has your mind been blown today with this episode? If so, let us know. If not, let us know.
Also, if there's a topic that you want us to cover, we're all ears because it's all about creating great content for your growth. Ladies and gentlemen, adios and have a great day.
[00:48:42] Max Cohen: Tell him to bring out the whole ocean!
[00:48:43] George B. Thomas: Boil it!