The HubHeroes Podcast

Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack? Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge.

Never fear, hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording.

This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.

Yeah. Sadly, we do not need all that legal language this week. Devin is out. He has left us to our own devices, Max and George. Can we handle it?

Do we think we can handle it?

No. Yeah. Yeah. We're ready to rock him out.

Okay. I'm gonna be perfectly honest. Both of you are way too calm and chill right now, which usually means things are about to become chaotic.

It might get that way.

Okay. Alright. Well, ladies and gentlemen, HubSpotters of all stripes, welcome back to another episode of Hub Heroes. And, George, I wanna start off today's conversation by giving you a pretty big shout out. You rolled out probably one of the most epic why go HubSpot guides for growing businesses I have ever seen.

It's pretty dope.

And your goal was to make the business case for HubSpot overall, but also give a thorough overview of each platform. And this is gonna lead us nicely into our discussion. But just for the listeners at home, why was it important for you to make this guide specifically?

Yeah. I mean, listen. There's a lot of well, I I should be ready with the button. There's a lot of Like, humans. Out there who, either aren't using HubSpot in general or aren't using all of the hubs that they could potentially be using to gain the growth, the streamline processes, the, just ability to do business in a better way and create a better experience.

And, also, I think what this guide does really good because it's why go HubSpot? HubSpot? It's not why go HubSpot marketing. Why go HubSpot sales? Like, separate pieces.

It's one piece that is looking at it as, like, a holistic, dare I say, like, customer platform view of what HubSpot is actually building. And so, you know, it's, a, let's be honest, attract new folks who aren't using HubSpot, b, educate those who are using parts of HubSpot that maybe should use more, and see just a really value packed piece of content around all the things that you could be thinking about and doing with HubSpot.

You know, what was fascinating to me about this guide as I was reading through it, because you and I talked about it earlier this week, which is what is leading us into today's discussion, Is that what answering the question why go HubSpot has radically changed over the years because HubSpot has challenged us all as businesses and organizations, marketers, leaders, whom to grow better. And I think we had a much more one dimensional understanding of what that was many, many moons ago. Growing better was through inbound marketing, and then it was inbound marketing and sales. But then they started going deeper into the what makes businesses run their operations. Right?

So you and I were talking about this earlier this week because we actually haven't, as a group, talked about the operations hub specifically since the beginning of last year. Wow. It's been a really long time. And the HubSpot operations hub, let's all be clear, has been around since 2021, which was first I had forgotten that. I thought it was much newer.

And, George, you and I were talking about this earlier this week because even though it's been around now for 3 years, it is something that still seems to confuse a lot of people. There's still a lot of confusion around, well, when we say operations, what does that mean? Who actually is this hub for? So we wanted to take today the some time today to revisit this hub and specifically talk about operations the way we talked about customer delight with Christina Garrett. Right?

Like, what actually is operations? Who is actually responsible for it? And since HubSpot operations hub is is different, I think, than a lot of the way, other hubs are constructed, It's created some some gray, some vague. So, George, to kick us off, can you give the folks at home a quick refresher on what HubSpot Operations Hub is? And when we say operations, what does that even mean?

Yeah. So the way that I like to look at this and kind of think about operations hub it, by the way, is dramatically different than any hub, and I think that's probably half the problem is, like, it's called a hub even though I wouldn't call it a hub. Like, marketing hub, it's marketing a set of marketing tools. Sales hub is a set of sales tools. Commerce hub is a set of tools for doing commerce and actually getting paid.

Operations hub is a set of tools that make all of those tools be more awesome. Right? Operations hub is about data hygiene. Operations hub is about extending what you can do with things like work flows or custom coded bots. It's about making certain things that right now, if you don't have Operations Hub, might feel very manual, making them very automagical.

When you start to think about, like, data quality and properties and automatic deduplication based on properties and some of these other things that we're gonna get into. It really does streamline the processes that are wrapped around, multiple hubs inside your portal. So that's how I think about operations hub. I think that's also why it might be somewhat confusing to people. And, also, let's be honest, it's one of the hubs, air quotes, that has kind of the less features than any other hub, but those less features might be more powerful.

Interesting. So let's dig into the second part of my question there, which is really kind of digging into how people to find the operations of their business. And I like what you said there just now about the fact that because it has fewer features, it it showcases fewer bells and whistles. Its power might be missed. Right?

And I think when we think about growth, we think about the shiny stuff. Right? It's kinda the way I like to think about it is when you think about your rebranding a business, right, you immediately wanna jump into, like, logos, fonts, colors, design, aesthetics, visuals, But that's not where you're supposed to start. Right? You start by having conversations about, well, who is your audience?

What are your goals? What are your core values? The things that inform those decisions. And I always notice people get kinda bogged. I don't know what you do.

I wanna look at the cut. Have you seen this pretty beep boop thing on the Internet? I wanna look like that. And I almost think about operations the same way. Right?

We want to have the efficient marketing, the efficient sales, the efficient service. But there is some core operational stuff we need to master as businesses in order to do that.

Yeah. Well Right? And and let me even go at like, I love your analogy, but it to me, it's even a little bit like this. So when you think about a house, you think about the house as being finished. You think about the house with the drywall and the paint and the wallpaper and all of that stuff.

But imagine if when you were building that house, somebody used the 2 by fours that actually already had termites in it, or they used a 2 by fours or 4 by fours that are already rotted. And the reason I'm bringing up termites or wood that is already rotted is because if you're not paying attention to your data and your data hygiene and the data quality that you have, if you're not monitoring that, if you're not paying attention to, like, the properties and formatting issues that lead into personal personalization and segmentation and, like, like, literally operations. A big piece of this, when you think about platform and process is the making sure your foundational pieces don't suck. So when you go to use some of these other bells and whistles tools, the the data actually makes sense and shows or acts in a way that it should versus being rotten, AKA dirty data formatted improperly, Just a bunch of, like and literally, I got off the phone with a person who wants us to do an audit, and their their words, not mine, our HubSpot portal is garbage. We need to know how to fix it.

Matt, I wanna ask you a question really quick. What's up? When hi, buddy. What's that? I also wanna hear from you.

Yeah. So you when you were at HubSpot, obviously, you spent a lot of time basically as an organizational and operational therapist for companies Yeah. Right before you went over to Happily. And I'd be curious to hear from you, from your perspective. How did you see most organizations struggle to wrap their brains around what operations within their business actually was?

Were there any themes or common misconceptions?

Well, being operations is such a, like, nebulous term. I mean, like, the the way that I understood or the the way that I kind of, like, came to terms with the whole word of revenue operations, like, entering the HubSpot space when I was trying to, like, figure out what it actually meant in to this day. I don't think anyone's really ever agreed on it. You know, for me, it's like revenue technology standpoint. Right?

Revenue operations is also from a technology standpoint. Right? Revenue operations is also strategic and all things that don't have to do with technology. Right? But, like, you know, a lot of the things that you're doing when you're using, like, a whole hub of of HubSpot tools is supporting a greater revenue operations strategy from a technology perspective.

So I think it's tough because everyone had different definitions of what operations actually meant. On top of that, you know, before the whole revenue operations thing really kinda came around, you saw a lot of the teams kinda siloed doing their own thing. There were sales ops, marketing ops, service ops, you know, and and nothing was really kind of, like, connected under, like, a single, you know, title or department or or methodology or practice or whatever you wanna call it. Right? Like, I don't wanna say this one right word for it.

Right? But, you know, there's certainly a lot of confusion businesses had evaluating operations hub because to put it quite as nice as they can, HubSpot sales reps didn't even know operations hub was great. So, yeah. Like, I can't tell you how many times I had to explain it to people. Right?

You know, so, again, it's just one of those words that, you know, everyone has a different definition for. Right? Yeah, Chris, in the chat and still don't you're correct. You know, any HubSpot sales reps that want an easy way to pitch operations up, hit me up.

We love you. We love you.

We love you so much. I do love you. No. I I do love you.

Yeah. Especially all of you folks out there who are like, oh, content hub is just AI.

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

We love how

that Anyway, yeah.

I mean, it's I'm sorry to bring up something so violent.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, everyone has their own different it's it's just like the word campaign. Everyone has a different definition for the word campaign. Everyone has

a different definition for the word

enablement also. Everyone have a has a different definition for the world or operations. Right? So I don't wanna necessarily think that, you know, customers were generally confused around it. Right?

It's more so it either, you know, wasn't something that was paid attention to. They had their own definitions for it. Sometimes they were doing it without knowing they were doing it, and sometimes they didn't have it at all. Right? You know, so it's in terms of the businesses themselves, I mean, it's just generally all over the place, and you see that a lot working at HubSpot because you're talking to businesses of all sorts of maturity levels and organization and size and scope and types and, you know, it's it's never the same conversation, I guess, is the easiest way to say it.

Do you

know what I'm hearing? And, George, I would be curious to get a pulse on what you think, on what I'm about to say. I'm I'm noticing globally, I made that as a joke. Right? Like, the ContentHUB AI comment.

If you're wondering what I'm talking about, go back to our first conversation about Content Hub AI in this feed because it was emotional and upsetting. But when I think about what you're saying there, Max, you know, these lack of shared definitions, I think for a long time, we didn't necessarily have to have them. I think as as growth and what it means to do business as a modern business in a digital world has changed, it's forcing organizations to become much more sophisticated in a scalable way that was maybe not necessarily as much of a requirement in a more analog or less digital dependent world. You know, I remember when I first started out in inbound when I was at Quintain Marketing, this is about 10 years ago. You know, we used to have to talk to our clients and say, you don't have a process.

A process is in a process if it's only in your head. A process is written down. And so I think for a long time, we were able to get away without having shared definitions. Because when you start adding technology and automation into the mix, if you don't have shared definitions, if you don't have clear processes, it scales your inefficiencies. It scales your problems, and it starts bringing a spotlight onto the problems or the things you haven't defined, like, into harsh relief.

And so I think that's part of what we're seeing. We make jokes about, you know, what can you do you know what enablement is, or can you just spell it? You know, I think we're seeing that across the board thematically as we're starting to automate and scale more parts of our business as we're being asked to do more with less because of all different factors. This is something that's, I think, becoming more noticeable. A problem that maybe has been there for a really long time, but it's been dormant until we started scaling different parts of our business.

I agree with all of that. The other thing that comes to mind that I think is very interesting is, and you've all kind of probably heard the saying of, like, we'll build the plane while it's flying or build the ship while we're sailing. Literally, since 2012, it's like we've been in this vehicle called HubSpot. And, let's just call it like a Volkswagen bug in 2012. Right?

And we're driving down the road, and we're trying to do better business, and we're trying to be more human. And all of a sudden, we get to, like, 2014, 2015. We're still driving the VW Bug. What we look around, and we realize, holy shit. I'm in a Mitsubishi cordial.

Like, how'd that happen? I thought I wasn't a Volkswagen bug. And we're driving down the road, and we're trying to do better business. All of a sudden, we realize it isn't an automatic anymore. A stick shift.

So now we now have to figure out what a freaking clutch is and how that works. And so then we're driving down the road a little bit further, and we get to, like, 2018, 2019, 2020, and we look around, and we're like, oh my god. Like, I'm I'm in a Lexus. I thought I was driving a Mitsubishi, but, originally, I was in a Volkswagen Bug. We haven't ever gotten out of the car.

We're still using the vehicle that is HubSpot, but it's literally changing around us. We haven't gone in to look at what has changed in the engine, the fact that we now have a turbo in there, the fact that it's a timing chain, not a timing belt, the fact that there's all these, we got a new CD player. It used to be a tape deck. Shit. When we started, there was an 8 track.

And here's the here's the, yeah, we're gonna get canceled. Here's that was a that was a little late, but we're still gonna get canceled. But, like, here's the thing Yes, George.

Because you always say the worst stuff.

This is literally what's happening in the HubSpot ecosystem is all of a sudden we're driving down the road, and it's a completely different vehicle. And so if we take this and we dive into this, conversation or specifically the operations hub, when all of a sudden we're driving a vehicle that has this additional part on it, at which by the way, if you were to ask people before operations hub came along, what are the 2 places that you have the most difficult time in with HubSpot? One would have been reporting. The second one would have been workflows. Well, holy crap.

What does operations hub actually leverage in a couple of its major pieces? HubSpot workflows with reoccurring of, you know, things that you can do in different custom coded workflows. And, like, all of a sudden, something that was already complex in the vehicle that they're driving, it becomes more complex or at least feels like it now has this level of complexity of features, which then going to your point, Liz, creates this thing of, like, not shared definitions or what we can easily say is lack of understanding. Like, we haven't gotten out. We haven't checked the oil.

We haven't checked the coolant. We don't understand what the engine is. We're not even sure how the seats changed right underneath us as we were driving down the road. So, of course, people are confused, and they need this, you know, terminology and new understanding, and and they need to, be able to be okay with what's happening in the ecosystem. We talked about it last week.

But this rapid development of this core called HubSpot that we're driving down the road is is somewhat insane at this point of trying to keep up with the right now today, you're in a freaking Lamborghini or a Bugatti. You you pick. It's up to you. But what vehicle are we gonna be driving in 3 months or 6 months? I have no clue because it's always changing.

Hopefully with bigger bucket seats.

Well, I don't Yeah. Big buckets. Big big bucket seats is good.

No. So, you know, George, when I hear you saying these things, you know, honestly, when you said that whole thing, you know, build the boat while we're sailing it, I had just, like, Vietnam level flashbacks to all the different start up cultures and agency cultures that I have been a part of. Yeah. Because whenever people say that, it's like, guys, you know, at some point, we do actually have to have a boat. We can't perpetually be in a state of building.

And what I think operations hub does nicely and what it throws a spotlight on is the fact that if you have, like, if you're telling everybody to build a boat, right, you're talking to your marketing team, you're talking to your sales team, you you're talking to your service team, they're all gonna focus on building a boat in a way that serves them. At some point, you need someone who's focusing on the entire boat, all the teams together to make sure none of us sink, and that's where holistic overall operations comes in. But I just wanna say this one more time through my agency pros who are listening right now. It is okay to keep saying we need to build a boat while we're sailing it, but once more with feeling at some point you need a boat.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a at some point, you actually need to get to boat status. Yeah. So okay. Tell them we're bringing the whole list. We talked a lot about Uh-huh.

So we've talked a lot about why folks are confused by the idea of operations and HubSpot operations have overall and its potential, but I wanna lob a potentially I don't know. Let's see what happens when I just ask this question. Who is actually responsible then for business operations? Who is it?

See, my brain goes in 2 different directions. Max, what's your thoughts before

I go? I mean, I I yeah. This is one of those things where I don't think there's one right answer for it. Right? And it also, I think, depends on, like I mean, ultimately, the answer is the COO.

Right? If you don't have a COO, I mean, whoever is in charge making sure people are setting up processes and and and things like that, you know, I if we're if we're looking at it through the through the lens of HubSpot, the product, I mean, that's falling on your admins. Right? The people who have the most line of sight to everything going on. Right?

You know, maybe you have a revenue operations team. Maybe you just have 1 or 2, you know, more siloed teams, things like that. It's gotta be somebody. Right? And I think it's not so much more like who's responsible for it is, like, why is it important to have someone responsible for it?

Right? Especially when you're using a tool like HubSpot. If you've got a whole bunch of different teams in there all doing their own different stuff. Right? And and it again, this is this is true for any system you're using, not just it's not just a HubSpot thing.

Right? If you've got, you know, multiple teams that are all using their own technology or or in charge of their piece of that same technology and no you know you know, team number 2 and what they're doing and the things that have they've set up for team number 3 and, like, all this kind of stuff. Like, you need someone to be responsible for how it's all tying together and how it's all working together because that's where you have, you know, bad customer handoffs, really shitty marketing communication, you know, really, you know, tough processes that customers have to go through that no one cares about fixing, things like that. Right? So it's not necessarily, I think, who is supposed to be.

It's just someone needs to be, right, in terms of making sure it's all working together and functioning properly. Right? And I think that's kind of, like, you know, where you start to think about revenue operations. It's like someone who's not just looking at, you know, the has the responsibility for operations within their own segment of the business, but someone who's actually saying how how are we, you know, orchestrating, if you will, the operations across all areas of the business so we're all working in the same direction and not, you know, fucking things up for each other. Oops.

Sorry. Shit. There we go. Anyway, got 2 in. Yeah.

But There we go. Anyway, got 2 in. Yeah. But, you know,

no Just as effective afterward. Just as effective. But,

you know, that's that's how I think about it.

So it's it's interesting because our our answers are gonna slightly rhyme. Here's the thing. I totally agree with you, Max, where it should be somebody because somebody's better than nobody, but be careful because it shouldn't be everybody. This is definitely a place where too many chefs in the kitchen is not gonna make a good soup. And and the place that I'll go, like, typically, when you think about operations Max, you're right.

It's like a chief operating officer. It might be an operations manager. It might be a business operations analyst. It might be even in some organizations, IT manager or director. Heck, it might even be a department head.

But here's where when I said my brain goes in 2 different directions, that's almost like, just getting started with HubSpot or pre HubSpot, maybe business mindset that might be in place. But when you talk specifically, people listening to this podcast, if you have HubSpot and you have multiple hubs, like, literally, this is the super admin, should be the person paying attention to operations and what the operations hub can do. And if you're sitting here listening to this, you're like, well, I don't have a super admin in your organization. Actually, you do.

You at least have one.

Yeah. You haven't defined them yet, and it might be you, by the way. Because if you're doing the thing and paying attention to multiple departments and multiple, hubs, you're a super admin. You just don't know it yet. And so when when the conversation comes to, should we upgrade to operations hub starter, pro, or enterprise, or who should be digging into these features and seeing if they're right for what we need to fix the potholes that we have.

Guess what? It's probably you with a slight conversation to whoever pays the bills to be able to actually buy the dang thing.

I am having way more thoughts and opinions during this episode than I thought I would. I'll be honest because, like, I'm the content nerd. Right? I didn't think I was gonna get as as hyped up about this, but I have a thing I need to throw out here to you, George and Max. Because when I think about the pa the organizations that I have worked with, some of the organizations that I do work with, and I think about the way most people hire and have historically hired HubSpot expertise into their into their company.

Usually, they're not hiring a HubSpot specialist specifically. Often, in many cases, they are hiring a marketer with some sort of marketing automation expertise where it is a delegated responsibility that falls under a much more focused discipline, a marketing person, a this, a that. And so I I love this idea of what we're talking about from the ideal state of you likely already have a HubSpot super admin in your care. That's true, but that also may look like for many of the people listening to this podcast, a an an inbound marketing or con specialist or marketing content marketing manager, where they that's part of what they do, but it's not all of what they do, and they were brought in as part of a specific team. So when we look at it through that lens, and I all like, George, you even when I said that when I said earlier when Max was talking about, you know, whomever is in charge of your operations, part of me want to go bold of you to assume that many of these organizations have someone in charge of operations.

Often, it's, like, delegated as weird responsibilities. You kinda own what you own, and I most of the organizations I talk to do not have that.

Yeah. They're

not that mature or sophisticated, not because they aren't mature or sophisticated organizations. Their sides just their sides just doesn't require a COO. Mhmm.

The other thing too is I don't know.

George, I see you

Yeah.

The only thing

you wanna, like, add in too is, like, I don't wanna draw a false, equivalency from, you know, saying operations hub is for operations team teams. Right? Like, if anything, operations hub should really be called data hub. Like, because it's it's really just, you know, it's the best way to get control of your data inside of HubSpot. Right?

And, like, you know, a a a marketing operations team or a revenue operations team or whatever, an operations operations team, whatever. It doesn't really matter. Right? Like, if they're using HubSpot, it's them using the sum of all the parts is doing operations at HubSpot. It's, like, how you set your stuff up, how you set your customer handoffs off, how do you build processes, like, how does the thing work.

Right? Like, operations hub can play a role in that. Right? But it's not like it's, like, the hub built for the operations team. Right?

It's really just the it's saying, hey, super duper admin. You wanna get hella control of your freaking data? Like, this is gonna give you some extra tools to be able to do that. Right? So data operations is probably, like, I guess, a better, more specific way to say it.

But, you know, I don't know. Operations hub, like, the name to me is, like, you know, it's it's a little too broad and a little

It's misleading. Yeah. It it it literally is misleading to, like, to be honest. Like and I think that is why it adds to the confusion. And I agree with you.

Like, if it was data operations and hygiene hub or something like that, it would make a lot more sense.

CMS hub went to content hub. Maybe you need the operations hubs, and you're gonna get that data hub re k.

That

would make so much more sense to people. Because, like, if you think about, like, all the core features across to operations hub has something to do with data. Right? Yep. You've to operations hub has something to do with data.

Right? Yep. You could argue you could argue scheduled workflows is not necessarily, like, a data specific thing, but, like, it's workflows. Bullcrap. I know workflows are about data.

So, like, I

Listen. Listen.

No. No.

I know. I know. I know. I know. I know.

I know. I know. I know.

I'm using to delete contacts out of different lists True. In which is cleaning up my data because it's people I shouldn't be talking to anymore. So, like, that's the thing. If you pull

a thumb up, George, is I I just think I think gating scheduled workflows behind operations hub is trash. I think everyone should just have it. Right? That's just me. I don't think you should have to buy because a lot of people need that.

Right? And oftentimes, that was, like it it would be super awkward for me as an SE when someone said, well, I wanna run I wanna be a or can I build a workflow that'll, you know, every day at 5, it'll do this thing? And I go, yeah. But you gotta buy a whole another hub for that. They're like, that's weird.

You don't have any other use case for it. Right? And so, like, that to me is, like, kinda goofy. Like, I could understand putting it at, like, maybe a enterprise level of any other hub. Right?

But having it be its own separate hub just for that seems like a, you know, weird way to just get people onto it for that one reason. Right? But Well Yeah.

Don't even get me started on that. We once had webhooks, and then we didn't have webhooks. Anyway, that's not what we're here for, so I'll be quiet.

George, do you need a hug?

No. I've I'm already part of HubSpot user group.

Oh. And here I like how it's a shots fired when I was trying to be nice to you, but we'll just go ahead and move along. Look at you carrying your heavyweight championship belt when I was just trying to be nice. Let this be remembered. Yep.

You know what I think is fascinating about this conversation that when we think about business operations and whether it's called Data Hub or Operations Hub, what I think as a part of this messaging that was missed and is an opportunity is that HubSpot with the introduction of Operations Hub, opportunity is that HubSpot with the introduction of Operations Hub is encouraging people to stop looking at your HubSpot data through the lens of a specific team. Don't just look at your marketing data and then look at your sales data and then look at your service data. It is encouraging them to put a human resource, a human perspective, somebody who looks at your data overall and says, how is it moving around my organization? How is it moving between teams? Is it moving as efficiently and effectively as possible?

Because, again, when you think about it, it's it's like the boat thing earlier. Right? If the marketing team is always gonna look at through the marketing lens, the sales team is always gonna look at it through the sales team, and that's what they should do. Those are like, they have KPIs. They have goals.

It is really this push toward your operations are now more sophisticated. You used to be able to have this as a decentralized set of responsibilities, maybe a delegated set of tasks that rolls up under somebody else on a specific team. It just doesn't work that way anymore. So I'd be curious to hear from both of you who HubSpot Operations Hub is actually right for. Because I think, to your point, George, earlier, when we were talking about the confusion around it, it makes it hard to understand who should be investing into it, particularly since it has powerful features, but fewer shinier ones.

Yeah. Max, you you want me to take this one? You wanna take this one first? Like, what what

yeah. I mean, I have a lot of thoughts on this. Like, a lot of the time, I think it's it's great for people who have a particular need that operations hub solves for. I know it's, like, a really boring answer. But, like, one of the biggest things that, like, made my blood boil, right, is when I would watch sales calls on Gong, and, you know, the salesperson would identify that somebody needs an integration to some tool that doesn't exist on the app marketplace, and they'd go, oh, you can do it with Operations Hub.

Right? And it's like, oh, no. Like, operation hub does not mean easy button integration with anything that doesn't have an existing integration. Right? What I will say it is is it's a great companion to integrations in that not all integrations are built the same.

There are probably, you know, there's an infinite amount of ways that integrations can push data into HubSpot. That data may not be clean. Right? It may be in a weird format. It might be coming through in strange ways.

Right? Operations Hub gives you a lot of really cool tools and workflows to clean it up and to format it in a correct way. Right? And sometimes HubSpot serves as a destination point for data to come in and then go land somewhere else in some other system. Right?

And oftentimes, you can use, yep, HubSpot or, like, your central point of truth or however you wanna kinda think of it as a place to cleanse that data before it makes it to its final destination. Right? So I think, you know, while operations hub doesn't let you just create integrations out of thin air, right, with tools that don't have native integrations. It serves as a great companion to integrations that you've either built or integrations that do exist on the HubSpot app marketplace that throw data into HubSpot in a really shitty way. Right?

So that's one thing. I think there's also, like, a lot of the, you know, if this is happening to you, you probably could benefit from operations hub. Right? So, like, for example, if you're planning on using any of HubSpot's data sync integrations, you at least want starter because that gives you the ability to do custom field mappings. Right?

If you wanna be able to run workflows on a schedule. Right? So every day, do this instead of dealing with, like, weird roundabout ways to do workflow reenrollments and stuff like that, then, yeah, operations hub makes sense. If you wanna be able to make workflows do almost anything, it makes sense because you could do custom coded workflow actions. Right?

What is the other one? So it's it's oh, yeah. It's triggering webhooks. Right? So if you gotta send data to systems outside of Hub Spot, and you just have, like, an API endpoint you can send stuff to.

Right? Triggering webhooks is great. But then I think also, like, a big one is if you're using up if you're using, business units and you have like multiple teams with multiple brands and a lot of different, like, teams working inside of HubSpot and they're all putting, like, their own properties and, like, all this stuff that's, like, relevant to one team but not another, datasets in Operations Hub Enterprise is gonna be your best friend because you can enable those teams to create reporting using data that's just relevant to them instead of going into the custom report builder and seeing everything in there and making it really confusing and adding a ton of friction to those different teams needing to report on stuff. Right? I guess also you could say, like, if your if your company uses Snowflake and you wanna dump your HubSpot data into there, right, enterprise is also great.

But I think also too, the the reason it's good as well is, like, for folks, like, stepping into a HubSpot portal for the first time and doing, like, an audit of, like, what the heck is going on in here. Right? You've got your data quality command centers. You've got your property analytics or, like, whatever it is that'll kinda show you how your properties and stuff are being used. Right?

You know, a lot of the duplicate management stuff is super sweet. So it's, like, if you have, like, specific problems, like, around data, there's likely something in operations hub that's gonna help you out. Right if you're if you're sinking a ton of data from other systems into HubSpot through either homegrown integrations or just third party tools, you're almost always gonna find a use case for it at least on, like, the data hygiene and formatting and cleanliness side of things. Right? So you can kind of get a handle on all that stuff.

Right? So yeah. Really and if any of those, like, use cases, like, you know, come up in someone's head as they're listening to this and you don't have operations hub, you should probably check it out. I think everyone should have pro at least just because the scheduled workflow's alone. Right?

Yeah. But yeah.

So I'm gonna go, I agree, believe with everything you said, Max. I'm gonna go at this a a little bit different. And I know, usually, I start with the humans, but this time, I'm not gonna start with the humans. I'm I'm not gonna start with the humans this time. Because if you if you're a company looking to streamline your processes and automate the operational needs in your organization.

Doesn't matter if you're small or enterprise. If you're a company trying to do those two things, then Operations Hub is probably a good fit for you. If you're, on operations team or a professional in a team that might not be called that but is focusing on managing data quality, integrations, and process automation, then the operations hub might be right for you. If if you are handling the system integrations and you require these deep dope custom automation solutions that will tie into, like Max kinda said, the partner, or the sidekick, if you will, to those, then, like, IT would be good technical, you know, teams. The these would be, reasons why they might be a good fit for operations.

If you start to think about, individual departments, all of the individual departments will, enjoy clean data, will enjoy automated workflows, will will enjoy integrated systems that are tightly integrated together with things like data sync to enhance their efficiency and effectiveness. So this could be marketing, sales, service, whoever. Heck, if your company is sitting here and you actually have a position that is a data analyst, you know, the individuals who have to focus on advanced reporting and data manipulation capabilities, Max mentioned datasets. But even just being able to report on freaking clean data is is beautiful. Right?

So any of those things that you need or if you're any of those types of people, humans, or companies, then you're probably heading in the right direction. And, Max, I would agree with you. Like, starter's cool. You can do data syncing custom fields. But when you get into pro, operations pro, now all of a sudden, you're really unlocking some sweet stuff.

And I think it's Yamini. She calls it, like, the secret sauce or the sweet sauce or something like that. The operations hub is, like, the sweet sauce sauce of HubSpot because, again, it's just helping everything be better than it potentially is, even though as it is, it's pretty dang cool. So there's my thoughts.

So, Max, I wanna come back to you for a second because a little birdie told me you've been doing some really cool and interesting stuff in HubSpot operations hub. What what what can you share with the rest of us in the class? Yeah.

I mean, the, you know, I'm not a coder by any means, except I've been going crazy building, custom CMS modules using a hub helper.

I wish you could see how happy he is, listeners.

Oh, god. Look at him. Been I literally just built a I I built a module today that, like, sends an email to someone who registered for an event and shows all the different sessions they signed up for, and I felt like a god. But, anyway, that's not operations hub stuff. I one of the more cooler use cases that I've I've kinda done in, like, this is great for any, HubSpot sellers out there, or solution engineers, whether you're at HubSpot or you're at a partner, agency.

Something that I really always struggled with, you know, when I was in a role selling HubSpot was, having, like, good demo data, to be able to, like, demo HubSpot with. Like, make it look like the portal is lived in and alive and breathing. Right? And so, like, things like contacts moving through life cycle stages, deals getting created, and, you know, being able to, like, move through different stages and and either close win or close lose and stuff like that. So, like, when I brought up reports, I wasn't bringing up a report that had, like, a bunch of data that was brought in, 2 years ago, and I had to, like, awkwardly filter it to make the reporting not look stupid.

Right? And so for a while, I got really obsessed with the idea of, like, you know, how can we make a HubSpot portal kinda go on autopilot and make it look like people are using it. Right? And things are happening, like deals are getting closed, contacts are getting created, like this and that.

And, Life cycle stages are being changed.

Life cycle stages Lead

status are being used.

Yeah. All this kind of stuff. Different records are getting created. All this kind of stuff. Right?

And, you know, I I sat there for a while, and I was just like, man, if there was, like, a, if there was, like, an app that you could just do a random number and then split a branching workflow based on that random number. Right? You know, and and be able to do a different outcome. Right? Either create a record or move a stage or do something.

You could simulate some pretty cool stuff. Right? And so, I was sitting around waiting for Happily to build, you know, this app that, you know, generates a random number. Right? You know, something simple.

Nice nice little easy utility app. And then I was talking to, I can't remember who I was talking to. I think it was Carter McKay. And, he's like, dude, it's really easy just to, like, generate a random number using a custom coded workflow action. I'm like, sick.

Show me how. He showed me or whoever it was showed me. And, you know, I ended up building this whole portal out that would take contacts that were, like, dumped into HubSpot and then run them through these workflows that would hit a custom coded workflow action that would simply just generate a random number. And then what I could do is I could build branching workflows that would look back and say, if that number from that action equals whatever. And I basically did it like a dice roll.

So I just said choose a number between 16. Right? And then I could build these branches that say, alright. If the number is 1, 2, or 3, do this. If it's not, do nothing.

Or, like, you know, if it's 1, do this. If it's 2, do this. If it's 3, do this. Like, whatever. And so it's like a, you know, a cute, like, little use case that, like, let me do, you know, some stuff like that.

But, like, the other thing too is, like, for us on, like, the Happily side, like, it's a really good way for us to, like, prototype, like, workflow actions that we build into our apps. Right? Like, we could easily build a proof of concept instead of, like, standing up a whole, you know, app and everything. We can be like, alright. Well, have one of our devs build the code that, you know, makes the workflow action do what we want it to do, and then we could test it and see how it works and all that stuff.

And then and then we could test it, see how it works and all that stuff. And then they can go build an app or build it a new app that does it using a workflow extension. Right? But, like, you know, there's cooler things you can do besides that. Right?

But, like, if you ever wish a workflow action could do something else, like, custom code workflow actions, like, are the way for that because you could literally code it to do almost anything with your HubSpot data. Right? Whether it's looping through something or or changing some properties in certain ways, if then statement things, like, within, you know, one single action and, like, just doing stuff that's hard to do just by, like, stringing actions together, like, individual ones. It's great. Right?

You can even reference data in, like, a outside source to make a decision about something that you do, like, inside HubSpot. There's it's literally if you can code it, you can do it. Right? You know, sure. I'm pretty sure there are, like, some limitations in terms of different things that, custom could've work flash this could do, but they're so way above my head and developer that I'm not even sure they're even worth talking about.

Right? But, yeah, I've been doing that, which is really cool. I do a lot of stuff with, like, scheduled workflows as well. So, like, you know, I built our whole partner payout system to run on, like, monthly, you know, workflows that will, you know, combine a bunch of data from, you know, stuff that we know about in terms of, like, which partners are associated to what app subscriptions and payments being made, like, all that stuff. There's just, like, an infinite amount of stuff you could do with it, really.

But what

I heard

is there is a demo data nerd. Yeah. Maxima's

a nerd. That's what I heard.

Nerd.

Nerd.

He's our happy little nerd.

Yes.

Happiest little nerd.

Yes.

George, okay. I need you to put on your simplifying the complex hat. Although, actually, I'm not sure you ever take it off. But we've had some pretty complex discussions today about what business operations actually means, who the HubSpot operations hub is actually for. We've covered a lot of ground.

So if our listeners today only walk away with a few takeaways from today's discussion, what do you want them to be?

Yeah. I think there's a couple things. Whether you can get operations hub or not, my hopes is that in the future by the way, this is not an upsell, but in the future, I hope that if you don't have it, you can get it. Fundamentally, data hygiene, deduping contacts, keeping a shiny clean HubSpot portal is one of what should be your main focuses on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. There's ways that you can do all of this manually, But, again, much of this becomes automagical if you have HubSpot Operations Pro.

The other thing that I would want people to think about is as fast as everything is changing, business, the way we sell, the way we service, the the the things that

humans

need from us, knowing that you can reach into your pocket, AKA HubSpot workflows and custom coded workflows, and you can extend what is already super powerful for all of your departments with a with a nicely strategized, optimized, and created custom coded workflow that when when it's in place, people just step back and go, holy crap. That feels like magic. So that's the 2 things is, 1, be hyper focused on how do you have the dopest, cleanest data hygiene, portal possible to man, and how can you enable yourself to extend the needed functionality for the teams to do the things that they need to do?

Fantastic.

Love it.

I think we got it.

Okay. Well, then bye, everybody. See, I miss the days where we used to have, like, a poem or, like, something weird. Or

Dude, the poems are probably crazy that we could make on chat GPT.

Roses are red. Violets are blue. We love HubSpot operations hub, and you should too. Okay,

hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will Lord Lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hub heroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes.

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