HubSpot Loop Marketing EXPRESS STAGE Deep-Dive Part II

Here’s the point. Express is not theory. It is a build. In part one, we talked about what Express is and why it matters. Today, we get tactical. You will see how to teach your brand voice to AI, wire it into HubSpot, and keep your team creating content that actually sounds like you.

Skip this step, and you start Amplify by turning up the volume on a message that does not fit.

That is a hard no.

The simple HYBRID/HUMAN/AI frameWORK (EXPRESS)

Express turns into action when you lock three things:

• Voice and vibe

• Point of view

• ICP clarity

Then you package those choices, teach them to your AI tools, and make them easy for your humans to use every day.

Think of AI as the fastest typist on your team. Your job is to make that typist write like you on purpose.

Build your “voice pile”

Start by gathering the best of you. Not everything. Only the pieces that already sound like your brand.

Create a tight set of source material:

• 12 to 20 assets across formats. Emails, blog posts, landing pages, and a few short social posts.

• Transcripts or clips where your leaders speak off the cuff. Your real voice lives here.

• 10 to 30 direct customer quotes. Reviews, call notes, support tickets. Their language shapes how you should show up.

Why this matters: AI mirrors patterns. Feed it your best patterns and you get better drafts from the start.

Pro tip: Do not limit yourself to blogs. Include emails and transcripts because cadence and word choice show up more naturally there.

Write a one-page Voice Card

This is your brand’s cheat sheet for humans and AI.

Keep it to one page, skimmable, and concrete:

• Who we are in three lines. Plain language. No fluff.

• Voice traits with dials. Warm 8 out of 10. Direct 9 out of 10. Playful 3 out of 10. Short 8 out of 10.

• Do and Don’t rules. Do use short sentences and active verbs. Do say “humans.” Do say “flourish.” Don’t use clichés. Don’t say “thrive.”

• Signature phrases. A few lines you love to repeat. These become anchors.

• Proof rules. Cite claims. Avoid vague superlatives. Ask for sources when uncertain.

Make it something a new writer can read in five minutes and start producing drafts that feel right.

Turn beliefs into a point of view

Your POV stops you from sounding like a copycat. List your Top 10 beliefs, Top 10 mindsets, and Top 10 core values. That is your raw clay.

Now carve three clear stances you will champion this quarter. Example:

• AI assists, not replaces. Trust before transaction.

• Clarity beats volume. Express before Amplify.

• Humans first. Tools last. Systems support both.

These stances fuel headlines, intros, CTAs, and sales talk tracks. Put them in the Voice Card.

Tighten your ICP

Pick one primary ICP and up to two secondary ICPs. Keep each to a short grid:

• Jobs to be done

• Top frustrations

• Desired outcomes

• Buying triggers

• Words they use that you should mirror

• A Feeling Statement you aim to deliver

Example Feeling Statement: “After working with us, they feel confident and organized, not overwhelmed and behind.”

Add this grid to your Voice Card.

Teach your AI

You have two tracks. Use both.

Track A: Your general AI assistant

• Upload your Voice Card.

• Paste or attach your voice pile.

• Give three calibration prompts that combine voice, POV, and ICP.
  Example: “Use our Voice Card. Write a 150 word intro for our primary ICP about why Express comes before Tailor. Anchor on stance two. Keep sentences under 18 words.”

Save these as reusable starters your team can copy.

Track B: Inside HubSpot

Head to Content and Brand. Complete the foundation.

• Brand voice. Upload your Voice Card as a file. If needed, paste a 500-plus-word sample that screams your voice.

• AI data sources. Fill out:

  • Company profile with a clean, non-fluffy summary.

  • Ideal Customer Profile with pains, outcomes, and sample language.

  • Products and services with benefits and proof points.

• Campaign-level nuance. For each campaign, add one or two voice tweaks that fit the exact audience and offer while staying inside your core rules.

This provides HubSpot’s AI with the same context that your human team uses.

Create a “golden set”

As you generate content, you will get a few home runs that feel perfect. Save them.

Your golden set should include:

• One email that sounds exactly like you

• One short social post with strong rhythm

• One landing page intro that balances clarity and energy

• One educational paragraph that shows your POV

Use these as live references in prompts. “Match the tone of Golden Email 02” is faster than re-explaining rules.

Build a prompt stack your team will actually use

Give your humans copy and paste starters. Keep them short.

• Blog intro
  “Use our Voice Card and stance one. Target the Primary ICP. Draft a 150-word intro. Keep it warm and direct. Ask one reflective question. Under 18 words per sentence.”

• Landing page hero
  “Use our Voice Card and stance two. Target the Primary ICP. Write a headline under seven words and a subhead under 18 words. Cut jargon. End with a clear action.”

• Sales email
  “Use our Voice Card. Reference Golden Email 02. Write 120 words to [ICP]. One problem, one promise, one next step. No fluff.”

Store these in a shared doc or snippets. The easier you make it, the more consistent your team will be.

Quality control that sticks

Good Express work shows up in consistency. Make it measurable.

• Voice check. Does this draft match the dials on the Voice Card? If not, nudge them. “More direct. Less playful.”

• POV check. Which stance shows up? If none, add it or cut the piece.

• ICP check. Does this mirror their words and fears? If not, swap phrases until it does.

• Proof check. Cite claims. Kill vague words like “best,” “leading,” and “innovative.”

Make this a short checklist at the end of every brief.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Aspirational voice with no proof. If you say “bold,” show bold choices in examples.

• Personas by title only. Capture feelings, not just functions.

• Dumping everything into AI at once. Start with the Voice Card and three champions from your voice pile. Add more as you go.

• Setting rules once and never revisiting. Recheck quarterly. Tune the dials. Update the golden set.

Where HubSpot helps most

• Centralizing Brand Voice, ICP, and Product context in one place

• Letting AI inside HubSpot pull from those sources during content creation

• Campaign-level nuance that holds the line while fitting the moment

• Keeping outside partners inside your lane because they start drafts in your workspace

The goal is simple. Wherever a human touches your brand, the message feels the same.

Final word

Express is not a one time ceremony. It is a living playbook. You will tune it as your market shifts and your team grows. Do not move on to Tailor until Express produces drafts that feel like you with minimal edits. That is the signal you are ready.

When you take this seriously, your humans create with confidence. Your AI becomes a helpful teammate. Your customers feel seen. That is how your content helps people flourish.

TRANSCRIPT

Max Cohen: George, I gotta, I gotta ask you, is the person who reached out to you, Lord Loop

George B. Thomas: No, it's not Lord Lube. It wasn't even, it wasn't even, Lord lack

Liz Moorehead: Where's the sad trombone? Where is that?

George B. Thomas: The the SAD trombone. Hang on, hang on,

Liz Moorehead: Yeah. There we go guys. How's everybody doing this morning?

Max Cohen: Oh, just amazing. How are you, Liz? That's the most important question.

Liz Moorehead: I am so glad asked. It was my birthday yesterday

Max Cohen: Oh,

Liz Moorehead: and next to me. I have the coolest birthday gift I have ever received in my life. Can I show

George B. Thomas: Uh oh. Yep.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. What is it?

Liz Moorehead: A Val Kilmer autographed picture of him playing Jim Morrison. And my favorite part is the way he signed it. He just put Jim in quotation.

Max Cohen: Wow.

George B. Thomas: Nice.

Max Cohen: Wow,

George B. Thomas: That is, I'm, I'm without words.

Liz Moorehead: I know it's for, it's a gift for a niche audience, and the niche is the size of just me, but I'm very happy.

George B. Thomas: that's cool. That's cool though, that, by

Max Cohen: like that

George B. Thomas: I know I texted you, but, but since we're on the show, happy birthday Liz.

Max Cohen: Happy. Can we sing? Happy

Chad Hohn: happy birthday.

Liz Moorehead: we

Max Cohen: Happy

George B. Thomas: said, no. Do

Chad Hohn: birthday to you.

Max Cohen: Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Liz.

Chad Hohn: Liz.

Max Cohen: Happy birthday to you.

Chad Hohn: 35.

George B. Thomas: We, we should start a boy band. That was dope. Nola's

Max Cohen: Yeah,

Chad Hohn: I think that 35 millisecond delay was killing

Max Cohen: we were in sync,

Chad Hohn: outta sync.

Max Cohen: We were in sync, bruh.

Liz Moorehead: say is to the women out there listening, ladies, step back. They're all mine. Get in line.

Max Cohen: correct.

Liz Moorehead: Calm down, but let's move on to what I know is going to be Max's favorite topic today.

Max Cohen: God

Liz Moorehead: But are you ready?

Max Cohen: angry email.

Liz Moorehead: Loop Marketing Express part two, electric Boogaloo. We are back, right? So if you miss last week's episode, I'm gonna have to tell you to go and listen to that one first because, so.

Max Cohen: You gonna have to go get it.

Liz Moorehead: There's an irony to all of this guys, because Express is all about clarity,

George B. Thomas: Hmm.

Liz Moorehead: voice, and tone, and we only got through two questions of our outline last week. Right? Today we're gonna be getting into the how's the tactics, the tools, the HubSpot technology of how you actually employ express using HubSpot tools.

But I've gotta be honest, okay?

Max Cohen: Be honest.

Liz Moorehead: I'm just gonna say the conversations we've been having over the past couple of weeks about loop marketing have been fascinating, like gym air quotes, fascinating. I mentioned this in the last episode, but this is the first time I've seen a product rollout from HubSpot where we are struggling to move through the what and the why behind it.

So I wanna start off today's conversation, and this is where we're gonna get all of our feelings out before we get into the actual tactics. Gentlemen, how are you all feeling about last week's episode? Oh,

Max Cohen: I feel like I needed to get that out for a while. Um, it felt cathartic. It felt cathartic. Um, and you know, I, I feel excited. To figure it out because like what I've learned is, uh, over the years, especially with HubSpot, uh, I tend to not learn something until I get super frustrated with not understanding it, and I'm looking at this as the next thing I'd like to overcome in that regard.

George B. Thomas: Interesting.

Liz Moorehead: a part of your process.

George B. Thomas: No, it's, my brain immediately goes to, is that where inbound physics came from? Because Max, at one point you were like,

Max Cohen: Uh, yes.

George B. Thomas: You know, so,

Max Cohen: inbound physics was my, my way of understanding it in a very simple, uh, manner that works with the way my mental model is set up right.

George B. Thomas: And if you're, if you're listening to this or watching this and you're like, inbound physics, just, just Google Hub Heroes podcast, inbound physics. There's, there's an episode for that. Chad, I'm gonna wait. I want you to go first, uh, as far as how you're, you're feeling about last week's episode.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Um, I think this. This week we have a real opportunity, I think, to unpack some of some of the specifics in like how HubSpot intends you to do this. Right? And I think that's gonna help bring a lot of clarity. It's not the only place that you can do this kind of stuff, but they've like tailored it to making this a playbook for how to really succeed with HubSpot.

And in the context of HubSpot. This can make a lot of sense. I think so. I think that we can really pull a lot of things together.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. So Liz, how did you feel about last week's episode?

Liz Moorehead: I'll be honest, pretty much what I said during last week's episode is that. I have seen heated debates, I have seen friction, and I have seen disagreements about the funnel versus the flywheel about shifting dynamics and how the inbound methodology is deployed. And I think this friction, it's not that we're seeing with these conversations, it's not fatal by any means, but it is telling, because one of the things that we talked about last week is that this isn't about.

Humans informing this is a product informed strategy move. And I don't necessarily feel badly about it, but again, it brings me back to what problem were we really trying to solve with Loop Marketing? Because it's presented as a methodology, like this Human First framework, but it's about getting people to use the product,

George B. Thomas: Well, they

Liz Moorehead: which is not inherently.

Yeah, it's not inherently bad. Um, but, and I'm not saying it's, you know, but that's kind of how I feel about it, is that this rollout has felt weirder and it reminds me of what happened when the content hub rolled out. Where I said they really need to do a better job of messaging with their partners or their messaging in general, because there's just a lot of confusion.

Like, I had a couple folks reach out, uh, reach out to me on LinkedIn after listening to last week's episode. No one said that you made them sad, max. You'd be very happy about that. But they did say, wow, thank you. I thought I was going crazy.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, see and see, this is where I'll jump in because I loved last week's episode. I loved last week's episode because I feel like we reached a place where a lot of humans were or are and are afraid to say that they are actually at right or, or they're just not saying it out loud, or they don't have the place to say it out loud.

And again, this is why I dug into like, guys, I wanna talk about this at a deeper level. Everybody's trying to do it in one video. Everybody's trying to do a broad brushstroke, and there's so much granularity to the conversation that needs to happen. Um, and, and what I love about last week is it is a foundational piece to get us into what we're gonna dive in today and what we're gonna dive in in the future on some of these other stages or places of what is this playbook that is loop marketing.

And, and we're gonna be able to do our best to try to figure it out, to try to simplify it, to try to help others, at least take some. Tactical real world. Here's what that means. And maybe even as Liz, you alluded last week what it has meant for years before somebody tried to put a different word on it.

Like so, so I'm excited and, and I loved last week. Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: Well, let's find new ways to love this week. It's a new week. It's a new day. It's a new adventure. So George. I want you, you are now in the position of power of keeping the cats herded because I want us to get to the tools and tactics, not the what and the why, but the how. So I wanna turn to you and ask you, how do you actually teach your brand's voice to AI tools and HubSpot so they don't spit out that generic content?

Right. What are the practical tools or processes that you've seen work for yourself or with clients?

George B. Thomas: Yeah, so a couple things. I'm gonna try to do this in steps and I may even ask if there's any like feedback or thoughts during the steps. But like, some things that I wanna make sure we talk about is like one gathering, like a small, um, collection of your best work that sounds like you, a voice, a pile of, of content, if you will.

Like, this might be 12 to 20 pieces that are the most you, uh, historically that you've created. Um, so we'll, we'll come, we'll swing back to this. So that's like gather, gather. You did the digital you. There's also this idea that I wanna talk about of making like a one pager. Think of this as like your ultimate voice card.

Something that you could hand to a human or something you could hand to any LLM and immediately they would understand the context of who you are, where you work, the way that you want. Uh, we'll, we'll circle back around on, on that as well. 'cause there's some specificity, specificities. I also want to think that we. Could talk about how there's this, um, golden set. Like after you've kind of used, uh, AI for a while and you get a really good output or outputs, capturing those and using those as like I examples, you could use the word examples, but I want them to be like this. The other thing that has helped for us as an organization while we've gone through this whole process, um, and, and, and again.

Um, HubSpot mentioned hybrid teams creating a, like a prompt stack or a, a prompt library that you can hand to other humans in your organization when you build something that you know works based on the foundation that you've put into place. Um, because again, a big piece of this is keeping humans in the loop.

Okay. All right. Yeah, I did it. I did it. So, so, so let's, let's circle back, uh, around to step, like kind of step one or, or whatever. Yeah. Let's call it step one a gathering, uh, the content. And now here's the thing. HubSpot gives you the ability when you go to set up your brand voice. To upload information or to co to connect to information that you may have already been creating in HubSpot.

So I want everybody to kind of think about, um, how their mind might go. It's, you know, 12, 15, 20 pieces. Of content that feels most like you. By the way we're talking in the context of HubSpot, but you could totally use this with like, uh, perplexity or chat GPT or like any other LLM if you wanted to. So just know that this is, uh, RINs and reusable outside of Breeze and HubSpot's voice and tone tools and things like that. But I want you to think, I've watched people go through this process and usually they immediately go to blogs and only blogs. And what I would suggest is that you think about emails, you think about blog articles, you think about pages, um, think even think about unstructured data. And what I mean by that is like, think about transcripts of calls that maybe you've had or interviews that you've done.

And this could be internal interviews, like a mix of different content types. Is good to kind of get that voice pile or, or the, the things that you want to use. Um, I would even suggest, uh, and Liz, when we went through the original workshop, um, you kept asking me questions like, well, what, what are the, what are the humans that you're helping?

Saying? Like, what? And so I would even suggest like 10, 20, 30, 50, depending on how many you have, real customer quotes. Reviews, um, calls, uh, support, tick, whatever. Um, we want their words, not just our words. Here's, here's the fun part, is when we start to talk about voice and tone, we, we immediately go to like, well, how do we wanna sound? How do we wanna communicate with people who wanna hear from us? Like, and so their words in

Liz Moorehead: It's also how do they need

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: How do you need to show up for them?

George B. Thomas: So, so that's like, gather this information that has been historically just kind of floating around out there so they can use it to start to build. Um, I'll shut up there.

And Liz, I, I know you probably have thoughts, but Max and Chad, like, let's just, let's use that to start the conversation.

Liz Moorehead: You know, this is one of my personal favorite topics. One of the things I always really encourage people to do, and George, you really dialed into this nicely. You have to remember the tools are in HubSpot are actually quite simple and intuitive to use. The challenge and where they become ineffective is how dialed in your instructions are.

And how effective the choices you are are making about your voice, right? So for example, right, like you can have HubSpot, but if your content strategy sucks, there's nothing wrong with the platform. Your content strategy sucks. If you have a bad voice and tone strategy or documentation, HubSpot cannot help you.

It's not going to work. So the the biggest piece of advice I would say is you have to look at. The instructions you develop for your voice and tone. This is not a vanity exercise. This is not about your aspirations, hopes, goals, and dreams. It's about the humans you serve, what they are feeling, and how you need to show up.

Like I remember I used to hear from folks, they would say, well, the way we develop our voice and tone is we basically picked like what celebrity we wanted to sound like. Right? Okay. People need empathy. Sounding like pit bull isn't going to help you.

Max Cohen: Well, hold on.

George B. Thomas: Uh oh.

Liz Moorehead: I do love pit bull though. I do love pit bull though.

Max Cohen: Imagine if every single one of your blog posts just started with Mr. Worldwide. Let's talk about,

George B. Thomas: That's funny.

Liz Moorehead: Maybe it

Max Cohen: I'd read that. I, I might actually read if that was the case. Yeah.

Chad Hohn: There's a snare in my headphones.

George B. Thomas: That's funny.

Max Cohen: Um, you know what, like, it kind of like, feels to me as like the.

I, I remember always reaching this, this point, um, onboarding marketing hub customers that in my head I was like, alright, now comes the hard work, right? And it would generally be after you get everything set up and like your ripe, your, your HubSpot account is ripe for just like starting to pump out and create content and everything.

And, um. The, the burden then shifted to the marketers or copywriters or whoever, you know, whatever sort of resources you had to say, okay, now we have to make content. Right. And what it almost kind of sounds to me in this, uh, sort of stage of express, right, this first one is that a lot of that hard work has kind of shifted way, way, way more into the beginning.

So it's less, oh, it's difficult for me to write blog posts. Right. And that was like the human output that was needed inside of HubSpot. Right. Well now that that part of the equation is handled to different, you know, varying extents, I think it's probably a spectrum how much people like rely on AI to put fingers to keyboard.

Right. But it sounds like there's still. This one thing that AI is not gonna help you do. And it's this,

Chad Hohn: It's set up the ai.

Max Cohen: it's, yeah. Like give it what it needs to go on. Right? And like that to me still is, I think the fundamentally hard thing for people to get over. It's like, oh yeah, you got this, um, you know, you got this, these wonderful tools that will actually create and generate content for you so you don't have to spend time.

Writing and, and, and doing all this kind of stuff, or at least makes it easier for you. But before that even happens, you need to actually still do a whole bunch of, like legwork, which includes a lot of thinking, a lot of writing, a lot of, uh, you know, uh, human led creation of stuff that this AI is actually gonna go off of.

Right. So like, and, and what I'm wondering, right, as. Uh, strategists that work at partner agencies or customer success specialists at HubSpot, or inbound consultants or like any of the people that are still like helping customers with strategy, right? This is going to be the new blog post hurdle, right?

Where it's like, oh yeah, we've got these wonderful AI tools that can like write all this stuff for you and like help you create content better, but you still are gonna hit this wall. Where there's this like big, intellectual, intellectual exercise you need to do at the beginning for any of this to work properly.

Right. And before we were talking about, oh, the hard part was like, or I mean, depending on who you are, the hard part was getting your blog set up, getting your domains all hooked up and like all that kind of stuff. And that was like. The barrier to get into this, right? But now the barrier for the AI to go do its job is still a whole bunch of intellectual work that you have to do in order for it to do it in any meaningful way.

George B. Thomas: I dive into that for a second? Because I think there's something that happened to me like two years ago that was a fundamental mindset or shift that allowed me to focus on, and I agree, max, this is the new hard thing. And, and let me explain why. So like when I got my fingers on ai and Liz was there at the beginning of this and I was like, I'm testing this and I'm trying this and let's hone this and let's tweak this.

There was a mindset for me that I didn't need AI to write the blogs. I wasn't looking for a air quotes writer. I, when I saw AI in the output, I said, oh my God, this is the fastest typist on the planet.

Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: weakness was typing. I should have paid attention in typing class. I didn't. I'm a two to three finger guy at best. And so I was like, okay, so if that's the fastest typist, how do I make this typist me? So what I started to do was give it all of the things that I could give it of like, here's how I feel about this and that and the world and like, and so when I talk about like surface level of like 12 to 20 pieces that are you, there's a layer even before that where like my ai a. I was able to go through a process where I was able to give it my mindset, my beliefs, my core values. Now, for you as an organization, it would be your mission, it would be your vision, it would be your company's core values, your culture code. Like there's so much stuff that um, we have laying around. If we make sure it's exactly what we wanted it to be in the first place, that we, we can create this brain.

And again, you're talking to a dude who literally cloned himself with delphi.ai and went through this whole process. And there are some similarities to what you as a human or what you as an organization should be doing. Cloning yourself to thinking about what you're building from a brand voice tone standpoint in, in HubSpot.

And so as soon as I realized I could make this typist type basically what I wanted to say, or close to what I wanted to say, and then I could iterate that and say, make it more heartfelt, make it more emotional, make it more in your face. I don't like this, but can we say that this way? Now retype the whole thing.

Like as soon as that was the mindset. I was literally creating a version of sidekick strategy, a version of George B. Thomas that could just type really fast. It just made sense for what I should get into the machine, how I should train the machine.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Um. We use the word train, we use the word assistant, we use the word agent.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Max Cohen: These are all words that describe people. Okay. And I think there's this very, uh, like walking on eggshells type of mentality that a lot of the folks that are really pushing a lot of this AI stuff. Or this tight rope that they're walking saying like, this is not a person that is replacing anybody.

George B. Thomas: is Max going there?

Max Cohen: Right. Well, here, I don't think it has to be a person that replaces

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Cohen: Right. But I think this strategy starts to make a lot more sense when you think of it as if you're onboarding a new team member. 'cause when I hear all of this express stuff. Again, and I like for me, like just again the word express.

Like again, I don't know why I keep playing Express yourself by Dr. Dre every single time I hear Express. Right. Um, to me express makes a lot more sense when I replace it with the word onboard. Because here's the thing, the AI is something that kind of exists just like a new employee would. Right. And until you train it.

On like until you onboard them onto your company, right? And teach them what your company's all about, how to do their job, your company's values, your company's voice, how to talk to customers, all these things, right? The word onboard makes a lot more sense to me than express, right?

George B. Thomas: here's, I don't disagree with you, and here's the thing. I wanna back up 50. Because while we're talking about AI today, HubSpot was talking about hybrid teams, which means it is kind of like onboarding humans and onboarding AI and getting them to be able to work together. Now, Liz, you just made a like a fungi, fungi face.

I need to know what's going on in your brain. Like talk. Talk to me.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. It's like a semantic argument that I'm hearing here, but, and I don't, I'm so nervous to say this because we have not done a great job of staying on track with these conversations,

Max Cohen: Aren't we talking about express?

George B. Thomas: Yeah, we are.

Liz Moorehead: Express to me is exactly what it says, like I actually think it's beautifully named. It's about how you express yourself. It is your voice, it is your tone. It is the fully realized expression of your brand. What, what I will say that I do like about what you said, max, is that the function that express completes is that onboarding aspect.

So I could see it there. I do like the name. I have a lot of issues with Loop marketing, but at least this one, I was like, well, it says what it is.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Max Cohen: think that's fair. I think you express your company's values and what you're all about to your employees when you're onboarding them. So I totally agree with you there. Yeah.

Chad Hohn: I think the, the way I think about it, you know, is, um, it's, it's like. The, you're hiring somebody to assist you in writing and they could have all the best practices in the world, best punctuation, everything you know, as far as being a typist and helping you make content. But unless they know who you are, they're gonna write generic as as the dickens.

Right. And that's the whole thing we're trying to ideate through. So I guess my question here is like, you know. How do we set that up? Right? So like previously it seemed like it used to be a thing where it, you know, like Max was talking about the pain point used to be, well, hey, we're gonna show everybody how to use the forms tool, how to make a website page, how to add a theme, landing pages, how to campaign, how to connect all this stuff, all the.

Shenanigans inside a HubSpot was, and then the hard part was really getting an outside agency if some of your content was done by outside people to use HubSpot so that you had the attribution and information and data inside your HubSpot portal. But now it's like we're frontloading that, like Max said, into HubSpot, so that the hard part is getting the data.

Now I'm wondering. And correct me if I'm wrong here, but like it sounds like anybody's practical first step to getting HubSpot to help you with Express is probably actually starting outside of HubSpot and talking to whatever your preferred AI assistant is, if you don't already have some sort of. Voice, brand tone, documentation and giving it everything that you possibly can about who you are.

Like George was saying, give it all of that information. Right? And, um, once you've done that, you talk, talk to it and say, Hey, give me my, you know, a first stab at who I am, my brand, my tone, my tone, all that sort of stuff, right?

George B. Thomas: Yes and no. Uh, Liz, I'm gonna hopefully make you smile. Uh, you have two paths you can journey. You can call somebody like Liz. Who has walked organizations and organizations and organizations through understanding what their voice and tone is and how they should show up to the world and levers they should pull and when they should pull them.

Like literally, this is one of the things that I did when I started George B. Thomas, LLC, before it even became psychic strategies. I was like, Hey. Liz, I wanna, I wanna roadmap to how I'm supposed to show up or how I wanna show up from a voice and tone standpoint. And we literally went through like this, like two, three session workshop, which I got a presentation deck and then I feel like, again, I was cheating 'cause I used that presentation deck to like, like super, uh, vent my chat GPT assistant of like, look at this presentation deck and know everything that you should know about me.

Now

Liz Moorehead: Oh yeah, I've even restructured how I build those presentations now so they can be input for those things.

George B. Thomas: Now Chad, path number two. If you've been using perplexity chat, GPT, uh, you know, clawed for a while, you could literally say, Hey, we've been working together for a while. If you had to describe my voice and tone. So yes, there is a step one where it's like working with a human. Could be an internal human, could be somebody like Liz or working with your, uh, LLM of choice for the last six months, one year, two years, however long you've been doing it, and trying to get at least a starting point.

Because then what you can do, and while I'm showing my screen is you can take that information and you can start to, uh, and I'm, this is like, I've already gone through a couple of the setup pieces and I don't wanna remove this to like show the setup process. Maybe in another episode or like a, we'll find a tutorial or something, but at the end of the day, you wanna be able to have your brand voice and you wanna be able to have things like personality and default tone.

And you've got advanced settings where you can say, uh, these things. And, and here's what I'm, what I'm gonna kick back to at the beginning of this, I literally said there was a step two, which is like, make a one pager, a, a voice card, if you will. Basically you're looking at HubSpot's version of a voice card, but I want you to think about this as you get tactical with it.

Um, and you gotta be clear, and you gotta be concrete with this, but like, who we are in three lines and what we stand against, um, the tone dial or like levers from like one to 10, warm, playful, direct, short. Use these phrases. Don't use these phrases. Use these words. Don't use these words like my assistant, anywhere I go knows to use the word Ready for it.

Ready for it, not people. Right? You will, you'll be hard pressed to find, unless I purposely do it. The word people, 'cause it'll use humans. It also knows to use flourish instead of thrive like so there. So you can literally, it also knows to say, by the way, if you go talk to my clone, it says automagical, which is a made up fricking word.

Right? And so then like some proof rules like. Uh, you can literally be like, uh, we need to proof this. We need to see the, you know, where did you get this information? Uh, make sure you don't lie to me, don't hallucinate. Like, um, make sure you always include this. Uh, always exclude that. And so like you can create a card of these rules.

These ideas and then you can literally take it to any LLM and of course HubSpot. This would help you with like getting to this point in HubSpot where now you can literally have this thing. And Chad, I wanna circle back on one thing that you said. Hey, the fight used to be getting the outward agency to actually use HubSpot so we can measure. Ladies and gentlemen, we're at the uh, level now where we want agencies to actually start the creation process inside of HubSpot because it'll be using our voice, it'll be using our tone. And so one of the things that we used to say, and, and by the way, I was right alongside with Marcus when we used to say it was like, it's hard for somebody to sound like you if they're in an agency.

Your thought leader should be in your organization. I still agree that the thought leaders should be in your organization, and they should probably have the precipice of the beginning ideas or verticals that would help create the content. But it is really easy once this is set up for anybody to sound like you. As long as they're creating the content, starting in HubSpot for most people

Chad Hohn: I have the. I have the brand voice or the brand identity page pulled up in the Hub Hero's Sandbox, and it's completely unset up. Do you want me to pull that up so we can take a peek at it real

George B. Thomas: If you want to.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, I think that could be helpful. Let me snag that. It's just 'cause like when you want to see it, yeah.

George B. Thomas: People, it'll help people understand like. Here's why we're saying gather these things. Here's why we're saying understand these things. Here's why we're saying, start with a, Ooh, how do we, let me see if I can, there we go. Change that layout.

There we go. Okay.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, so this is content and brand, and I think I noticed a little message in your settings, George, that said, content brand is where this is going now, but it won't let you do some of the stuff until you get your booty over here and start putting in your brand voice. Now you could upload files and if they're, they're trying to give you the light version.

Of what, uh, we are talking about by being able to paste in a writing sample of at least 500 words so that you can help it figure out what your kind of tone is. Right. You can paste in that and then, uh, otherwise you can upload files, right? And then you go through the setup.

George B. Thomas: Think about that, right? I just said create a one page voice card. Imagine the difference of uploading a one page voice card, or like I'd mentioned Liz's PowerPoint presentation as a document. Imagine uploading that as your starting line versus like trying to like type, you know, 2, 300, 400 words.

It's gonna be huge difference.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. And there's a little bit of like, who moved my cheese going on here? Or whatever, because like they're trying to bring together, uh, you know, your brand kit, your overview, your AI data sources for company profile, ICP and products and services and how you would like any of your AI to do marketing goals along with.

Additional context where you can kind of. Tag your industries. Tag customer sentiment. Uh, tag a brand associations for both positive and negative. All this stuff helps it have a little bit more data points to be able to help put the content in a place that lead needs less refining, where you can, uh, you know, it's already kind of going down the right direction.

Like tactically. This is a great way to start going down that. AI assisted express functionality,

George B. Thomas: I would say AI assisted, human powered level of expression. Okay. Uh, I wanna shut up 'cause I wanna know where Liz and Max's brains are.

Max Cohen: you know, I think trying to, uh, I don't wanna say I'm fully on board yet, but I feel like I'm feeling a lot better about this whole express thing and I can get over the fact that I don't like. The name, and I think the name is a bit more woo woo. 'cause I like to be very, uh, intentional with the names of things.

Just 'cause like, I'd hate to have to explain this to someone saying like, Hey, this express stage, yeah, you're gonna express yourself as a company, but what you're really doing is you're onboarding this new employee that you have, that's this AI thing, right? Um, you know, it it because it, again, it's just like, I'd like to think of the stages as something as like, what are you literally doing?

Right. Um, just because I think, you know, fancier names for stuff, just confuse things for people. Um, which is why I love attract, engage, delight so much, even though engage is probably breaks that rule a little bit. Um,

Chad Hohn: once. Once the onboarding is done though, then what does express mean to you? Because it's a one time thing with the onboarding. Right? Once

Max Cohen: mean, maybe if I use this sentence, express yourself to the ai, like, then it, it, you know. It makes sense like you're expressing who you are so that AI understands you know what to do. Right. Um.

George B. Thomas: see, we're getting stuck in the fact that we're training AI to help us express ourself. We're training AI to help AI assist us in expressing the organization. 'cause really, express is the foundation of like, you need to know how you wanna show up for who you wanna show up.

Because then when you go to create the content and get into like Amplify, you're not amplifying a turd. So like.

Max Cohen: Yeah, see the, but yeah, see the thing is, is like I, when was the, like, I don't think I've ever bought something being like, wow, they really showed up for me. Like I, I bought something because they

George B. Thomas: Well,

Max Cohen: created content that convinced me that, well, no, no. I created con I bought something. 'cause they created good enough content to convince me that I needed the thing right after I was searching for it.

Liz Moorehead: I am gonna interject here and

Max Cohen: sitting there like they expressed themselves to me. It's just not like,

George B. Thomas: Well, no, of course not. But they did or else you wouldn't buy. Liz, I, I put, put, put, put, put your

Liz Moorehead: I gotta throw this out there. Max, you and I could have a much more in-depth conversation about this, but as someone where, like, this is my domain, you will never look at it and go like, wow, they must have sat down and really had a great voice and tone workshop, but you will be damn sure to notice. When they don't have it, it is the thing you think you don't need until you don't have it.

And that's how you end up with website pages where it sounds like four different people wrote them, where there's zero alignment amongst your team members about who you serve, how you serve them, and how you say it like it. I think we have this assumption that great content just appears. There is no wizard.

Thank God I would be out of a job. Right? But here's the thing, this type of stuff, it's like an iceberg, right? The power of an iceberg is what is below the surface. You only see the tip when it comes to content. You only see. Everything that is above the surface, but all of the effort was below the surface.

It is intentional choices. We're gonna say this. We're gonna not say that we are for these people. We are not for these people. This is how they need us to show up. The good news is, is honestly, if you were sitting there going, man, they expressed themselves so great, then I screwed up. It's supposed to appear effortless.

It's supposed to appear organic. So the fact that you can't see the matrix behind the content, that's kind of on purpose

Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. It's, um, it's, it's so good. Like, it's funny because Liz, I can create, let me give you a real world example, and I know we're running outta time. I have written the first three chapters of the Beyond Your Default book. I did it in a real crazy way. Uh, and these first three chapters, it's like the tip of the iceberg.

'cause you can't see. All the instructions, you can't see all of the memory. You can't see all of the base of like every beyond your default episode going into a project or the custom instructions, or you can't see the process of me making my assistant ask me questions along the way to drag context of like 30 years ago in my life onto the page. I've had people who have read it and literally said, listen, I cried after chapter one. It was written by AI typist. It was created by human George B. Thomas. Nobody will ever look at that and go, oh, he's doing a great job at using AI to type this to express himself. But they had an emotional moment. Yeah.

Anyway.

Liz Moorehead: love that. All right, I'm gonna bring this conversation to a close today, George. I'm actually gonna ask you a specific question as opposed to a one thing question. I would like to know, for folks who may have listened to us talk about Express for the past two episodes, why can't they skip this te this step before going to Taylor?

George B. Thomas: Yeah, because you'll literally be creating a turd. Um, you will, you will confuse your audience. You won't know the road that you're trying to travel and be able to help them travel down the road like this. This is so vitally important to like how you show up as. By the way, there has to be some level of self-awareness there has like, listen, the only reason I can do what I can do in the way that I do it is because I've put the work in

Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: and what I mean by that is I've sat in my own air quotes, uh, personal therapy chair. For a year and a half with Liz on the Beyond Your Default podcast, to be able to extract like at fun fundamental levels.

Beliefs, core values, mindsets. I did a workshop with Liz to like, understand voice and tone. Uh, I, I've taken the time to understand who I am, what I, and, and so like you as an organization, you as the individuals who lead the charge for the tailor and amplify and evolve moving forward. There's gotta be a high level of self-awareness.

To the organization and the people and the emotions, and, and if you don't take to do that here in express, nothing else moves forward in the way that it should. Yes, max.

Max Cohen: I think, I think also the thing that would add to that, 'cause I'm, I'm really starting to understand this express thing is like. This is sort of like putting a customer success person, you know, day one in the job without any training. They're not gonna know anything about your company. They're not gonna know what you do.

They're not gonna know what you stand for. They're not gonna know how we talk to customers. They're not gonna go,

Chad Hohn: they're

Max Cohen: they're not gonna know like how to answer questions. They're not gonna understand any nuance, none of that stuff. Right. So like if you had an employee, would you make 'em customer facing with zero training whatsoever?

Probably not. Right. And same thing goes for a content writer, a marketer, or this, that, the other thing.

Chad Hohn: Exactly.

George B. Thomas: It's And, and now Human, or should I say human

Liz Moorehead: Oh yeah.

George B. Thomas: out to me before? I would expect you to reach out to me and say, max has officially made me happy.