HubSpot Loop Marketing Middle of the Journey with Chris Carolan

Loop marketing has been a whole lot of “wait, what are we even talking about” mixed with “okay, there is something real here.”

In this midway check-in, Liz Moorhead, Max Cohen, Chad Hohn, and George B. Thomas bring longtime friend Chris Carolan in to help everyone regroup. They zoom out from the labels and get back to the heartbeat of the framework: paying attention to the signals inside your business and outside in the market, using those signals to shape better conversations, and turning those conversations into stronger relationships. Not just for marketing, but for how the whole business learns and improves.

If you have felt confused, skeptical, or a little spicy about loop marketing, this one is for you.

What You Will Learn

1. Why the phrase “loop marketing” creates confusion in many organizations

2. How “signals” show up in real life, from email opens to social comments to internal meetings

3. Why the framework can be useful even if you do not love how it was introduced

4. How to think about express, tailor, amplify, and evolve as a loop of learning, not just a marketing checklist

5. Why getting teams into one shared system matters if you want to understand conversations at scale

6. The big mindset shift: you are already doing the work, now you need to capture it and learn from it

The word “marketing” becomes the problem, not the framework

Chris comes in with a clear stance: the ideas behind the framework make sense, but the label “marketing” can break the conversation in a lot of companies. Why? Because it can sound like leadership is saying, “Marketing, you go do this, and we will be over here waiting.”

That creates a disconnect. Loop work needs subject matter experts, sales conversations, customer support insights, internal team meetings, and real customer language. If it stays trapped inside a marketing box, the business loses the value.

What it means for you: If your company treats marketing like a lead factory, you will have to reframe this as a business learning system, not a campaign system.

Signals, conversations, relationships: the simple framing that makes it click

The crew keeps circling one idea that brings clarity fast: signals lead to conversations, and conversations build relationships.

Chris defines signals in plain language. Classic signals can be things like an email open or a web visit. Modern signals include social comments, mentions in online communities, and anything that shows engagement. Even internal meetings can produce signals if you capture what the team is learning.

Liz calls it out for what it is: social listening. The group expands it beyond social. It is really about paying attention everywhere.

What it means for you: Stop treating “data” like it only lives in reports. The real gold often starts in human conversations.

The framework wants scale, but scale breaks without shared adoption

A big tension shows up: you can understand signals and conversations in a small business by just talking. But the second you need scale, humans cannot keep up.

Chris lands a hard truth: if you keep doing everything manually, you will never catch up to the speed of what the market demands now. Chad points out the operational reality too. Bigger teams need “plumbing” across marketing, sales, customer success, and product. And if people will not put things like call transcripts into the system, you lose the ability to learn.

What it means for you: The bottleneck is rarely “strategy.” It is adoption, consistency, and capturing the right inputs.

Reclaiming the loop: the community takes the wheel

Max has a moment that feels like a turning point. He basically says: even if HubSpot positioned this as a marketing playbook, the community can take the core ideas and apply them more broadly.

He compares it to how inbound marketing started. Many people thought inbound meant “put an ebook behind a form.” Over time, practitioners expanded it into something deeper and more human. He suggests the same thing could happen here.

Chris agrees with the mission: either help HubSpot explain it better, or do it better on their behalf.

What it means for you: You do not have to wait for perfect packaging. You can take what works, apply it, and teach it through your own results.

Practical Next Steps

1. List five places signals already show up in your world (sales calls, support tickets, social comments, meeting notes, website behavior).

2. Pick one signal source and capture it consistently for one week, no exceptions.

3. Write down the top three questions your team debates every week, then treat them as signal prompts you want to track.

4. Choose one audience segment you already serve and create one tailored message for them, then commit to replying to every comment or response.

5. Set a weekly review where you ask: “What did we learn from signals this week, and what will we change next week?”

6. If call transcripts exist, make sure they land in your system every time so you can learn from them.

7. Share this framework with one teammate using this sentence: “This is a way to learn from our conversations at scale.”

Memorable Lines

• “I hated the word marketing.”

• “We lose the why.”

• “Signals, conversations, relationships.”

• “We need to be able to do these things with or without HubSpot.”

• “We need just ops.”

• “You are already having all of the conversations you need to be having.”

Who This Episode Is For

This episode is for marketers, sales leaders, customer success leaders, and operators who feel the tension between what the market demands and what humans can realistically produce alone. If your team struggles with silos, messy adoption, or endless pressure for “more leads,” this conversation will help you reframe what matters and where to start.

You do not need a brand-new playbook to start. You need to see the conversations you are already having, capture the signals inside them, and decide what you will improve next.

Pick one place to listen better this week.

Then act on what you hear.

TRANSCRIPT

Liz Moorehead: I love how we're starting off with such keen professionalism. This doesn't give me any sort of anxiety about the conversation we are about to walk into today. We are thriving

Max Cohen: I was just giving it a little pop.

Liz Moorehead: little razzle dazzle.

Chad Hohn: if you will.

Max Cohen: It needed a little bit of a pop today.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, it did.

Liz Moorehead: Well, we already have, well, it's fair. This is a very special episode and we're about to.

Max Cohen: I.

Liz Moorehead: Welcome back to yet another episode in our extensive series about loop marketing. If you are joining us for the first time on this journey, loop marketing from HubSpot is according to them, a new four stage approach that.

Combines AI efficiency and human authenticity to drive growth. So we've gone through the first two stages, right? We've gone through express and we've gone through tailor, but we've, before we move on to the final two stages of Amplify and Evolve, we wanted to take a breather at our midway point to unpack what we've discussed so far,

George B. Thomas: I.

Liz Moorehead: because I think, know we've had a lot of feelings.

I think that's a good way to put, we've had a lot of feelings over the past several episode. We've questioned things like, do we even need loop marketing? Why is it here? What are we doing, mom, I'm scared it's dark. I need an adult. Like there's been a lot going on, but we thought we would bring in a long time friend of the pod, Chris Carolan, to help us regroup and reframe the loop marketing conversation for our listeners.

Um. Yeah. Chris. Hi. How you doing, bud?

Chris Carolan: Hi,

Max Cohen: Hey, Chris. Hey.

Chris Carolan: doing all right. Thank you.

Liz Moorehead: How you feeling going into today's discussion?

Chris Carolan: Uh, hopeful. I,

Liz Moorehead: Hopeful. What are we hopeful for? That was the most trepidatious, concerned, hopeful. I.

Chad Hohn: it, it was a question more than a statement. I

Chris Carolan: I know, I know who we're dealing with here. So, I, I'm optimistic.

Chad Hohn: Oh, okay. Good.

Liz Moorehead: George, how you feeling going into this episode? Which of course I ask right as you're taking a sip of coffee.

George B. Thomas: No, I'm feeling great. I can't wait to get into it.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah.

Max Cohen: the dogs doing, George?

George B. Thomas: well I could leave it unmuted for a second. The dogs are freaking out. Just behind the scenes for the listeners, I'm muting a lot here at the beginning because, uh, we got a new fridge, uh, delivered this morning right about two minutes before we hit the record button.

So there's literally somebody in my house and my dogs do not like it.

Max Cohen: What's your dog's name? George.

George B. Thomas: Uh, which one of the eight?

Max Cohen: Uh, which, well, the one that's barking right now.

George B. Thomas: Uh, that's Maple and Hazel that are losing their mind right now. Sky's actually out in the backyard so you can't hear her and some are upstairs. Anyway, I digress.

Max Cohen: I got a quick, I got a quick question for Maple and Hazel. Uh, maple and Hazel. What do you guys think about, uh, the Taylor stage?

George B. Thomas: Oh, they love it. They said they love it.

Max Cohen: Well let 'em talk.

Liz Moorehead: stage are they in

Chad Hohn: really helping them get their, get their mess. They're, they're amplifying right now.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah.

Chad Hohn: getting ahead of us guys. I'm sorry. We gotta, yeah. They didn't wanna stop and have this halfway point.

Max Cohen: They're like, what do you mean the tailor's coming? I thought it was just the refrigerator delivery guy today. Put 'em, prank 'em, John.

Liz Moorehead: All right.

Max Cohen: Anyway, I'll be here all week.

Liz Moorehead: Oh, do you.

Max Cohen: Yeah, I'm gonna live in this Riverside

Chad Hohn: As long as he makes it through Thanksgiving.

Liz Moorehead: All right. All right, chuckleheads, let's get this

Chad Hohn: Okay.

Liz Moorehead: Are we ready? So Chris, I actually wanna start with you 'cause I would be so curious. When Loop Marketing first came out, what were your first impressions of this new playbook? And then has anything shifted since then?

Chris Carolan: Uh, I hated the word marketing. That was involved, um, as it was described on stage, like, I think George has mentioned in the past, everything behind the, the labels, uh, made sense in terms of helping people understand what they, what they're doing. Uh, should be trying to do right now to support, um, this this AI world we're living in. Uh, and I've only gone deeper in that direction. Um, and I wasn't surprised that HubSpot finally came out with something, uh, as the, the go to leader of marketing best practices. And, you know, they, they had to do something because we, you know, We're all having trouble keeping up and we knew the old ways were broken. So, uh, you know, HubSpot had to do something. Um, I just wish they wouldn't have attached that, that word marketing to it. Having said that, I think in organizations where. Marketing does own all of the communications with the customers everywhere. They're already doing most of this stuff. It makes more sense to them.

They crush it because they have the jurisdiction and the authority internally to move all the pieces in the way that they need to move them. In most organizations, uh, that's not how it's going.

Liz Moorehead: I would just love to hear a little bit more about what's your beef with the word marketing, because you are being so exceptionally diplomatic right now in how you framed that. I, Chris, you're not gonna get away with that with me. And it was very cute that you tried. So I want the real feels. I want the real feels holy field.

What's the deal with marketing? Why do you hate what I do? Why are you personally attacking at me at nine o'clock on a Monday morning of Thanksgiving week?

Chris Carolan: think it, it causes this disconnect for us to try and, Like, deal with the, uh, the symptom that is the, the label, the confusion that comes from applying marketing to this thing. now we're, we're. Like, when I've heard you guys talk about it. Cause that's where this is coming from. Like, every episode so far about Loop Marketing, like, I don't even get through the whole episode before I'm messaging George on Slack and I'm like, what the hell is going on?

Like, what? I don't understand these words. Right now. How are we so off track? It was really smart people talking about this and and have you ever had those conversations with AI, especially now, but probably with some humans to where you feel like, uh, the conversation, uh, maybe that initial prompt was clear and then you move through the conversation and it's never fully like.

resonating and you're not getting the responses you want and you just can never get it on track and then you look back at the prompt and you're like oh i understand that's how i the framing like we're not aligned on the framing of all this and that's why we've been having this disconnected conversation that's how it's feeling for me and the part that i struggle with is the why the why behind this This playbook and every time it's mentioned a HubSpot looks like they're trying to build a playbook to support the product.

That they're selling when for me, it very simply came from, the execution of inbound was no longer working with SEO and all their digital things that HubSpot had taught us to do and the speed like nobody could keep up with the speed. Right? So this is, in my opinion, HubSpot's strategic response. To those problems that their customers were having, right?

Of course, they've already built the product to support this, but I was doing stuff all weekend and Google's workspace alone that is going to help me execute this playbook, but that's where, if we could just adjust that framing and not like, the product driven focus of this conversation is where I've, where I've struggled.

Chad Hohn: I can totally see that. Yeah. I mean, um, you know, if I'll just jump in. Like I, if I put myself in HubSpot's shoes, and I think we even mentioned that even when it comes up to, it feels like they're trying to utilize 'cause like. Credits are a huge thing now. And that's like a big point of contention for a lot of people.

But I mean, I just go back to like, would I want to make the whole thing more expensive for truly everybody, even if somebody decides they just want to use CRM elements and that's it, or would I want to, you know, the amount of value that I'm deriving from it pay for that at a much reduced rate compared to solely human labor.

Right. Um, so I mean, there's like a lot of those things and, and I think if I was in HubSpot's shoes. Like my tool can do all these things to help people accomplish this faster, but it's just sometimes a little bit harder to get people on the same page of understanding how to use it to do this well and efficiently and fast.

I totally understand that. It feels very product focused 'cause it is. It's trying to get people to use their product or something else in each of these steps. To accelerate in a world where you have to do more to make better content with less right? Or better do better with, with the tools that are at your hands.

Not even content, but just in general. Right. To produce more with less. So I totally understand that. I dunno, does that sound like do, do you, is, are you jiving with that or does that make you wanna scream?

Chris Carolan: Um,

Liz Moorehead: Little column. A little column B.

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

Chris Carolan: think that's where like, I think in the last episode I took issue with the phrase like, this is a playbook that is designed to teach you how to use AI to, to, and well, no,

Max Cohen: that the, the, the, the playbook is, is driven by the product?

Chris Carolan: not at all.

Max Cohen: Not at all.

Chris Carolan: Not at all. Because I, I need to be able to do these things with or without HubSpot,

Max Cohen: Correct.

Chris Carolan: right? And to Chad's.

Chad Hohn: want you to use HubSpot though.

Max Cohen: And you could say that was true of the original inbound too as

Chris Carolan: Yeah. I mean, the presentation of it is largely... Like most of the problem and the confusing parts that everybody's having, right? Like the core of it, right? And, what I love about listening to you guys just and anybody really talk about this topic is it helps me think through like, okay, where are the pieces that are going wrong here?

And I started playing with, uh, last week, um, this framing of, Which still aligns with what HubSpot is, is saying, it's just the way that they're saying it makes you focus on their product instead of like the foundation where it's like signals, we have to, we have to get good at working with AI to do signal capture, signal recognition, signal understanding at just the scale that we've never seen before.

We could never achieve by ourselves as humans. Uh, HubSpot is giving us the tools to do that. Nobody knows they exist or, or how, what to use with them. Where the signals coming from, they're coming from conversations internally about when we figure things out as a business for ourselves and externally as we're, as we're interacting, you know, with the market and those things like lead to the relationships that drive the value of the business.

Right? And. If we could relate it to those things, I think we'll be in a much cleaner place to explain to people what's happening. Um, and that's just where kind of my latest effort to try and simplify without reducing the complexity, I think is the challenge in most HubSpot explainer cases. I

Liz Moorehead: Max, how do you feel about all of that?

Max Cohen: Um, I'm trying to, I, I, I can't understand if Chris has a overall net positive or net negative view of loop marketing, and I'm trying to discern that through his words, and I'm having a hard time understanding it. Um,

Liz Moorehead: ask him.

Max Cohen: I, yeah. Chris, wait,

Chris Carolan: it's a net,

Chad Hohn: here.

Max Cohen: Yeah.

Chris Carolan: so I think it's the first RevOps framework they've come out with,

Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.

Chris Carolan: right, if that helps, like, and so it's a net, like if it were loop growth playbook, which I've seen Dharmesh say in a LinkedIn post, call it those things. Those words, loop growth playbook, I think this would be landing much easier, uh, in a lot of cases, um, because it is an operational framework, right?

So, my net, it's a huge net positive in that this is a framework. If you were to forget about the words that HubSpot was saying about it, like, anybody could follow, uh, and, um, so my beef is with the way. Thank you. It's presented, which causes a lot of distracting conversation around it. Like in my opinion, and we lose the thread, we lose the why, like that the hack for me is you, if you decide to show up every day and create value, you are forced to innovate into the processes that are described in the loop marketing playbook.

Because no human, unless you have like five customers, can show up every day at this rate with value, with content, with distribution, with measurement, right? And then take the time to understand it all and evolve, right? So it's, it's a net, it's a huge net positive in that it is a playbook, right? Um, but when you assign it, I think it's, uh, last week was enlightening how.

The tailor phase, um, seem to be represented as all about how do you use like and like how do you get your lists together? How do you understand the segment so that you can tailor? I think it's too late at that point. Like, that's a part of express for me. Like, there's an internal expression and external expression in that the market is expressing to you how they feel.

you and your position and what the solution is you're solving. Right? And all of that starts to create signals and I need some structure here. Liz. Sorry. I'm gonna go. Just gonna go all over the place

Chad Hohn: think I remember that at least last week in Taylor we were kind of talking about one of the things you want to have is ahead of time set. Up and do your due diligence and know who these, these types of people are, you know, before you even start your message the first time. Right. But that if you've never done it before one time, you at least have to do it by here.

'cause you want to express who you are to certain people. Right. Would be the idea. At least that's like how I would envision it through the lens of. Utilizing the platform, like me being a, I want to do as much as I possibly can in HubSpot and branch out from HubSpot when I have to, um, just to like consolidate tech stack for the purposes of integration hell and tech debt.

Um, you know, I'm always trying to look at it from the lens of how do I do it inside a HubSpot first, right? So I think maybe that's where a lot of that comes up from, from me anyway. I'm always looking at it. How would I do this in HubSpot?

Max Cohen: Chris is your, is your, is so like, I think the, the thing, the, the thing that I've. Been saying this entire time is that it very much feels like loot marketing is a playbook. It's very isolated within marketing motion and not necessarily something that's all encompassing. Uh, you know, like the flywheel was right.

But it sounds like your position is that it is all encompassing. Or am I understanding you incorrectly? Okay. So I want to understand that better, uh, because it almost sounds like you're saying this is the evolution of the flywheel versus something that compliments it. No. Talk

Liz Moorehead: Oh, thank God. Okay.

Max Cohen: Talk to me.

Chris Carolan: No,

Liz Moorehead: Because we got through that, like

Chad Hohn: died.

Liz Moorehead: I'm like, we guys, we put that to bed. Three episodes. If Chris had said yes, I would've been like, well, uh.

Max Cohen: Because like the, the, the, the one thing you said is like, this is the very first like rev ops like playbook

Chad Hohn: Rev ops,

Max Cohen: I mean, I would, I would, I would say the, the flywheel kind of covered all that. I don't understand how this is more of rev sy than,

Chris Carolan: I think the flywheel so inbound as a strap is like strategy of like how to approach business like first and foremost like when I could give like leaders in an organization when they would agree to to take the inbound certification I I would start there every time because that is like a culture shift it's the highest level strategy right that you're going to apply uh the flywheel is still like more strategic in nature, but it starts to like, uh, guide what you actually have to do inside of the business and what you like want at each at these very high level three stages. is operational in nature, and it needs to operate at all three places of the flywheel. So, as an example, like if we can rally around the signals, conversations, and relationships. Right. And a lot of what I've been doing with with value first lately is trying to externally focus all the decisions that we're making the processes that we're building.

Right. So express stage. There is conversations that need to be had internally and externally to create signals to understand our current relationships.

Max Cohen: Can, can you define signals for

Chad Hohn: Yeah, I was gonna say

Max Cohen: don't know where I hear you. And George say signals a lot. I don't know what we mean by signals.

Chris Carolan: traditionally, it could be an email open or a web visit.

Max Cohen: So some sort of indication that someone is interested in something, not necessarily your

Chad Hohn: like contact activity of some point.

Max Cohen: They're doing something that tells you some kind of story or action or whatever things

Chad Hohn: an existing customer, it could be tied into your

Max Cohen: a shift towards a certain type of behavior, not necessarily buying.

Chris Carolan: Engagement on some level.

Max Cohen: Cool.

George B. Thomas: If you've been sleeping

Chris Carolan: so moder yeah.

George B. Thomas: there's been signals before that Max just saying,

Chris Carolan: So,

Max Cohen: Got it.

Chris Carolan: now, in a modern aspect, I think those are, like, mentions on Reddit. Uh, you know, social comments, right? All these things. This this new area that I can see in a

Liz Moorehead: Social listening.

Chris Carolan: could. Right? Yeah. And that's coming through and all the chats and the whole like perspective agenda is like, this is what's behind that.

I think. Um, and those signals with the same people change throughout the flywheel if we're gonna keep keep to that. But I think throughout the life cycle of a customer. Those those change, right? And in the so in the express stage, have the most control over that part of the loop in terms of, um, we're having conversations to figure out what who we want to be and what problems we're trying to solve and how we solve them.

We are pinging that off of the market. So, to make sure there's a fit, right? To even understand which words to use, but they are involved. It's not just us deciding, right? So that's, that's a conversation with ourselves. Let's say, uh, the next one, Taylor, is where we do all of these things and we understand relationships and the conversations on a one -to -one basis.

with individuals, right? Then we move to amplify

Max Cohen: Wait, can you gimme an example of like when you're, when you're saying like, when we tailor, we do all the things and have one-to-one conversations with people, like, I need, I want like a hard ex, not 'cause I don't believe you. I'm just trying to understand it better. Right? Like what would be examples of that?

Chris Carolan: conversations, um, uh, specific tailored, uh, social posts, like if we've done all the work and we know that, like, our LinkedIn audience is this and it's, like, these demographics now we're gonna try and fit a very tailored message to them and we're gonna have everybody prepared to respond to the comments.

Of individuals that, that come in there and those conversations like around that.

Max Cohen: So it's like putting a message out there. I'm not saying you're, you're saying that this is only just put out a link LinkedIn post and see what people say, but it's more so putting a message out there and then understanding the conversations that come from it when people. Spite, if you will, on the message.

Chad Hohn: And doing it at scale, would you say it'd be like having the ability to do multiple of those for multiple different either lines of business or types of buyer persona, if you will.

Chris Carolan: this is where the new segments and segmentation in HubSpot enables this. Right? Um, right. Then as you move to amplify, it's the same signals, conversations, relationships with the entire market, like a one to many approach. Like, is it being amplified through others? Like, it's not just us talking, having a specific conversation with individuals.

It's other people talking about us at scale. Are the right things being said? Are the signals what they thought we would be? If so, then our relationship with the market is great, and we're starting to get market share and drive more value. Right. lastly, Evolve is having that conversation with the data. What, what signals are going to come out of, like, when we sit down and start asking AI questions, and bouncing that off of our internal teams, is that, is that hitting or not? Is it surprising or not? And then us understanding, oh, it might be surprising and are we going to change our, our, try to adjust our product market fit, like, go back in the tank there?

Do we have to adjust our, our messaging? Like, was there execution at anywhere in the process? Like, the issue? Right, instead of relying on these very high level KPIs like we usually have, like AI enables this scale of, um, this conversation throughout to, to reveal these things and then like human and AI work together to, to move in some direction.

George B. Thomas: So, so this, first of all, this has been, hold that for one second Max. This has been like amazing to be able to sit here and listen to this and like Max and Chad kind of, uh, pseudo interview slash have, have thoughts. Chris, you said something that I wanna circle back around to is like, if it was not loop marketing, but it was like Loop Rev ops, which I hate that name too, but if we could name it something better.

Right. Um, so I went into, and you guys know from the last several episodes, I have my, literally my own project that I built to understand and think about loop marketing. Oh, I went in and asked it the question, Chris, that you were proposing, like, what if this was for rev ops instead of marketing? What's interesting is it, it, it says, uh, first of all, yes, 100% exclamation mark.

That's, that's how it started. To answer this question said, if you zoom out, loop marketing or, uh, if you zoom out, loop is not really marketing. It's the way for a business to learn in public, personalize at scale, distribute that work, and continuously improve. It literally goes into say how, how loop changes when it becomes loop.

Rev Ops express becomes, how does our entire revenue engine think, speak, and decide? Taylor becomes, how do we personalize every interaction across every team based on shared data and context? Amplify becomes how do we coordinate channels, humans, and systems. So the best stuff reaches more of the right people.

E evolve becomes how do we learn as one revenue system and fix the right things in the right order? Instead of loop marketing equaling content and campaigns. You get loop. Rev ops equals strategy systems and behaviors across marketing, sales, CS ops, finance, and, and product all tied to revenue and retention.

Liz Moorehead: I gotta be honest guys, I'm watching Max make so many faces right now and I need to know what's happening

Max Cohen: I mean, we can make it whatever we want it to be. Like the and, and you know what?

Chad Hohn: yeah.

Max Cohen: As someone who absolutely did that with inbound, I think I'm fine with it, right? Like I think you can interpret these however you want. The problem is that HubSpot put this out here as a marketing playbook to get you to use AI tools.

You know what I mean? And like we can't change that. Right. Um, and like is there an argument that maybe that's needed? Yes. Do marketers exist? Yes. Does AI exist as tools they can use? Yes. Is it super freaking confusing to like figure out how to make sense of all this stuff? Yes. Do we have to make every strategy cover every single part of the equation?

Like inbound does? No. But if we wanna interpret it that way, can we? Yeah, totally. It's a free country. We can do whatever we want. Right. Um, I. I do like this idea. I do like this idea of taking these ideas of express and tailor and amplify and evolve, and I think there's an argument in there that you could apply that to a lot more areas of your business and not just like marketing, right?

For example, I like to think in terms of the flywheel, right? And something that I always told people was like, listen. This is how you get it, right? People have to somehow find you because not everyone's gonna know you exist. That's just the nature of physics, right? They gotta find you somehow, and then at some point you gotta have a conversation with them, and then they become a customer and you gotta keep 'em happy, right?

You gotta do at least those three things, how you do those three things. Is, is where the magic is, right? And there's a lot of really good ways to do those things. There's a lot of really bad ways to do those things. Chris, I can see your argument that you could even like, you know, look at one of those chunks of the flywheel and, and, and, and take these three, these four words, express, tailor, amplify, and evolve.

Right? And apply it to any of those things I do. Right? And you know what? This. This is the reason I think this community is so great because we can take these ideas and frameworks and structures that HubSpot puts out there. We could look at what they think it is at phase value. Remember at the beginning, we all thought that Inbound was just getting an ebook, putting it behind a landing page, and then hopefully, and emailing people enough that they go and do it, and then we send 'em over to sales.

That's originally what they told us that it was, but as we all did that, we kinda realized that's. Pro, not really the thing that makes it really great. Right? The thing that makes it really great is really good content and educating people and like taking it to this whole different level, right? And like the flywheel never really reflected that.

The flywheel was just kind of like, oh hey, customer success and sales is kind of important or is kind of important too. So let's kind of loop it into the, not loop it, but let's bring it into the kind of the fold of like this entire business strategy, right? But then everyone had their own ways of doing like each one of those things. I think this is a cool way of looking at it personally, I like this approach, Chris.

Chad Hohn: It's an efficiency optimizer. It sounds like what Loop is is just like, let's look at something and try and bring in all the efficiencies that we possibly can and hyper-personalized, hyper, you know, like. Really make it the best that we could possibly make it and continually and iteratively improve over time.

Absolutely.

Chris Carolan: and, and the reason like the word marketing is the struggle is because I was brought into organizations as the person that's going to build out a great customer experience and a new digital marketing infrastructure that did not exist before. Uh, but I was always the marketing guy as I did that, uh, and I would try to force feed HubSpot into the organization because I knew if I could get HubSpot adoption, it would naturally solve for some, some de -siloing.

Of the organization. Uh, it didn't work out well. And at the time, I didn't have the language of RevOps. I also didn't have control over the CRM or the customer data or so it was this thing where, okay, marketing is going to go make digital transformation happen without any of the jurisdiction needed to change like this, this layer, right?

And so what I hear when I hear. Loop marketing playbook in most organizations. Okay, go, go ahead and do that marketing. We'll, we'll, we'll be here when it's ready. And it's like, no, we need all of our subject matter experts, all of the people involved in creating the signals from the conversations that they're already having, this is like signals.

Uh, in a, in a weekly meeting where we're talking to our team versus signals from the call transcript coming in and AI telling us what the signals are. Right? If we keep doing the weekly meetings, we're never going to keep up, right? And this is where I understand the need to, uh, align it with the HubSpot product.

Because you can do all this stuff with HubSpot, but we're still having trouble getting teams putting their call transcripts in HubSpot.

Chad Hohn: Well, I mean, I think a lot of times, and you know, maybe you guys have had different experiences with this, but like even just getting a whole team utilizing Marketing Hub like. At at the whole thing. Like people are like, I used forms and maybe I put the cookie on my WordPress website and maybe I made a list and a couple of things.

You know? And like

Liz Moorehead: with me kid. We'll launch

Chad Hohn: Yeah, yeah. Playing then that's like all they do, right? So, and then,

Chris Carolan: Because all we need is leads, Chad.

Chad Hohn: yeah. 'cause all you need is leads. You just lead me. You know, and, uh, lead me to the sale, right? That's all they want. But I, I think get so framing it as loop marketing and applying a framework to trying to get people to fully utilize Marketing Hub now that it really is much more extensive than it ever has been.

Um, I understand why. I think it's cool to look at it from the perspective of you could apply this to any kind of process.

Chris Carolan: And, um, That reminded me of the struggle internally was they didn't know what else to ask me for besides more leads,

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

Chris Carolan: right? Even though I was very clearly when I would come out of any conversation why I was brought in, I knew. The, the software, the tools, how all the digital worked to enable like the scale that was being asked for, right?

And nobody asked for, Hey, can you help us get more efficient with quotes? Because it takes three to four weeks, right? That's why I struggle with marketing ops and sales ops and rev ops. Like those three things, like we need just ops. We need ops behind all this. We need a customer team and we need a finance team.

And that's it.

Chad Hohn: It's, it's hard when your organization starts to get bigger, right? Because you need somebody to do the marketing plumbing and somebody to do the sales plumbing. And if you have a SaaS product, somebody to do the, like data infrastructure, plumbing back to the CRM to be able to like understand user intent and like that's a lot of technical work at a deep level.

At some points to really make that jive, but then somebody who understands the whole thing all the way through, because like when people, people just know they need more revenue, right? Like business leaders are like, I'm a business leader. I need revenue because I'm the CRO and that's like my job and I make sure we hit the number right.

And um, but. To like care about the customer through that journey, which is the inbound methodology and apply this efficiency multiplier to each of those segments while connecting the handoffs is the rev ops piece. And it's so important to get those handoffs and like define who owns all of those pieces and make it as painless as possible.

Right. And that's like, I think the hard part for a lot of organizations is. Having somebody who can keep that whole mega journey from, you know, like at RBP, they always used to say from lead to Google review, right? But like, basically from lead all the way to evangelist customer, right? Um, that's the whole journey where they're bringing you more people all the way around the flywheel and, you know, um, like the flywheel's not dead boys and girls,

Max Cohen: Yeah. Do you know what this reminds me of a lot. Remember when, um, attract, engage, and Delight came out and, you know, they were, they were kind of in that awkward place where they were struggling of like using that graphic that they also had kind of used to say marketing, sales, and service. And like CRM was like the.in the middle, right?

And they were, they were fighting this battle of like, oh, well we used this flywheel to. To illustrate this idea of attract, engage, and delight. And what happened is it made it sound like attract was marketing's jobs, sales job was engage, and then, um, you know, the, the, uh, service team's job was delight.

Right. And like, is there an argument to say that like maybe kind of like, that's like a little bit true. Sure. But the point that they made. Was that everybody, marketing, sales, service, all have a, um, all have a responsibility to attract, engage, and delight in their own way, right? Like, for example, you can create delightful marketing, right?

Like there's a, you know, you, you can, you know, just because someone becomes a customer doesn't mean marketing all of a sudden stops talking to them and they did their job. Right. Like marketing can continue to engage and delight those customers. They do it through a number of different ways, whether it's, you know, switching the messaging away from, you know, content that's trying to sell versus content that's trying to, you know, educate people to get the most out of this brand new, shiny toy that they have.

Right. Um, or, you know, delighting people by doing non shady things like when someone unsubscribes, actually unsubscribe, like, you know, things of that nature. And I think sales. It's the same way. Like you could delight people in sales by not having a scummy sales process and ensuring there's a really great handoff over to, you know, support and, and, and things like that.

Right. And, you know, um, what it almost kind of sounds like we're, we're birthing here, I think could be a community led movement of us reclaiming the loop. And basically is this the formation of loop inbound at this

Liz Moorehead: Oh.

Max Cohen: Right.

George B. Thomas: I, I might have something to say about that on the next episode. Um.

Max Cohen: listen. The community could take this and make it what it should have always been and say how do you loop?

I think loop and attract is very much like if we were to draw the loop around the attract phase, that's very much what this playbook is, right? But like how does sales apply the loop? How does service apply the loop? How do you engage with the loop? How do you delight with the loop? I think there is, you could, you could take these stages and I think we could come up with our own, you know, what are the steps in each one of these, like micro stages, right?

To basically really help you pump that flywheel using this four piece framework for each one of those stages, right? Um, and you could probably apply it. You know, across an entire business, I'm sure. Right. But this first version that HubSpot came out with, it's, it wasn't built for that. Right? It was built for marketing.

Right. Which is fine. 'cause let's not forget, inbound was originally built for marketing too. So

Liz Moorehead: I love

Max Cohen: repeating itself a little bit.

Liz Moorehead: I love how with one minute to go, max is like, I'm just gonna say like, let's start a revolution. No big deal.

Max Cohen: Maybe that might be what we need to do. We need to take all this anger and confusion and, and turn it and, and, and reclaim it.

Liz Moorehead: So typically speaking we end. Yes. Maximus. No, it's okay.

Max Cohen: Chris said mission accomplished and so I wanted to know if we agreed on this or if he thinks I'm crazy Pants.

Chris Carolan: We need to help HubSpot do this better or do it better on their behalf.

George B. Thomas: I mean, let's, let's be honest. And then Liz, you can, you can change the way that we're ending this because, uh, I, I got a couple things. One, um, this has been fascinating to sit here and listen to this conversation just. I'm kind of glad the refrigerator guy came when he did and I was able to be quiet and just listen to this.

Uh, Chris, will you come back after we do the next two stages and you get a chance to listen to the conversations we have during that?

Chris Carolan: I would love to.

George B. Thomas: Beautiful. We'll plan on that. So like, that's probably gonna be, let's see, let's, let's say we do what we've done before where it's like two episodes per actual stage to get through it.

Uh, so it's.

Liz Moorehead: you in late 2027.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, we'll see you in

George B. Thomas: in 2027. So let's just say, uh, maybe five weeks from now, right? Like, well, there's holidays and stuff, so it might be more weeks than that. So let's plan on you coming back and, and doing this again. 'cause I absolutely love this conversation. Um, but I love this idea of capturing this running and helping HubSpot with.

Like, listen, why have we done four episodes on the first two now, five episodes on the first two stages? 'cause HubSpot needs help because,

Liz Moorehead: It also took us two episodes. Just to talk about loop marketing.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Humans need help. Right? So, Liz, go ahead and kick us outta here and, and let's roll with this,

Liz Moorehead: So normally

Max Cohen: Let me share my screen.

Liz Moorehead: oh

Chad Hohn: wait, wait, wait.

Liz Moorehead: what

George B. Thomas: oh.

Max Cohen: Hold on.

Liz Moorehead: doing?

Max Cohen: Look at it. It's beautiful.

Liz Moorehead: Oh my god.

Chad Hohn: Ooh.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, no, no. That won't

Max Cohen: was beautiful. Look at it.

George B. Thomas: I'll tell

Max Cohen: Look at

Chad Hohn: Oh

Max Cohen: Look at that. We're looping at every stage. Baby is the Hydron Collider of Inval. Prank

Liz Moorehead: I love that. That's beautiful. Alright, has everyone said their piece or do we need to continue talking? Am I allowed to end the show?

Chad Hohn: I think we need to get put on hiatus.

Liz Moorehead: no. Goodbye.

Chad Hohn: Get us outta here. Get us outta here.

Liz Moorehead: Chris, normally I ask George to help us land the plane, but I wanna ask you to do that today.

If you wanna leave our listeners with one thing, they need to remember from today's conversation, what should it be, and.

Chris Carolan: You are already having all of the conversations you need to be having to support this playbook. You just have to apply what the playbook is suggesting to those things so that AI and HubSpot and whatever system you're using can help you understand what's actually happening in those conversations at scale.