HubSpot Loop Marketing Tailor STAGE Deep-Dive Part I

Your CRM is complete with contacts. Your website is packed with content. Your team is full of good intentions. Yet your buyers still get generic experiences that feel more like "dear first name" than "how, how did they know I needed that next?"

That gap between what you know and what you actually do with it is where the Tailor stage of HubSpot Loop Marketing lives.

In this article, we will break down Tailor in plain language, connect it to Express, and show you how to transition from personalization theater to genuine, moment-based experiences within your HubSpot portal.

Cape optional. Clipboard required.

Quick refresher: Express vs Tailor

Before we discuss Tailor, we need to grasp Express in a single, straightforward idea.

Express is your identity. It captures who you are, what you believe, the tone you use, and the proof you bring to the table. It remains the same from email to email and channel to channel. Express is how you onboard every human and every AI assistant into your brand's personality.

Tailor is your context. It focuses on who this specific person is, where they are in their journey, what they have just done or said, and what the next best step should be for them. If Express answers the question, "How should our content sound?" then Tailor answers, "Given what just happened, what should we do next for this person?"

Express is how you show up in the world. Tailor is how you show up for one person in one moment.

What Tailor really means: paying attention at scale

Personalization is not new. Marketers have been saying "right person, right message, right time" for years.

The problem was never the slogan. The problem was scale.

Humans can pay deep attention to a handful of people. CRMs can store information on thousands or millions of people. The gap between those two limits has historically been filled with hacks. We dropped first-name tokens into emails. We inserted company names on landing pages. We sprinkled in a few smart rules to swap a headline or image for different personas and called it personalization.

Our buyers called it "fine."

Tailor changes the game because AI can help you actually pay attention to what people do and say, then adjust the experience based on that behavior. It is less about a clever variable and more about real awareness.

At its core, Tailor is simple. You notice a signal. You decide what that signal should mean. You deliver the next best experience. You measure what happened. You improve the rule.

That "juicy middle" between the signal and the experience is the Tailor stage.

Old personalization vs Tailor today

To really feel the difference, it helps to contrast the old world with the new Tailor mindset.

In the old world, we leaned on tokens. If we used a first name in an email, we called it personal. In Tailor, we care more about signals. A signal is a meaningful observation about a contact, account, deal, or ticket. It might be their role, lifecycle stage, industry, pricing page views, webinar attendance, survey answers, or words they used in a call transcript. Tokens are cosmetic. Signals are meaningful.

We also used to obsess over lists. We built segments and felt accomplished when a thousand people were added to the right smart list. Then we blasted those lists with static emails. Tailor shifts the focus from who is on a list to what just happened in a moment. Instead of asking, "Which list are they on?" you ask, "What did they just do, and what should that unlock next?"

Another big shift lies in how we treat the experience itself. Historically, smart content let us swap a block of copy or a hero image for Persona A versus Persona B. The rest of the journey stayed exactly the same. The tailor asks you to orchestrate the entire experience. That includes the message, the offer, the channel, and the timing, all tied back to meaningful signals.

Picture this. A CFO at an accounting firm downloads your tax planning checklist. You could drop them into your generic nurture, or you could tailor it in a Tailor world. That signal would trigger a CFO-specific email that uses their language, a relevant invitation to a live Q&A, and maybe a follow-up video created just for leaders in their role. Same core content. Completely different experience.

Tailor is not about sprinkling "you" language into a static journey. It is about allowing the journey to adapt as buyers move.

The mini loop inside the Tailor stage

Tailor is not a project that you set and forget. A mini loop is always running inside this stage.

That loop has five parts:

• Signals: What can you observe about this person or account? It might be behavior, fit, engagement, satisfaction, or usage.

• Decision rules: How do those signals combine into a simple "if this, then that" play?

• Experience: What does the human actually see, hear, or feel as a result of those rules?

• Results: What outcomes did that experience create?

• Improve: What needs to change so the next run through the loop works better?

You might start with signals like "viewed the pricing page three times in seven days" or "attended a key webinar and works in our ideal industry." You then define rules that respond to those behaviors. Those rules trigger an experience, such as a specific email sequence, a task for a rep, or a personalized page. You observe the results, learn from them, and refine your signals and rules.

That is your Tailor loop: signals, rules, experience, results, improvement, then back to signals again. If you only define your signals and rules once, Tailor becomes shelfware. If you treat this as a living loop, Tailor becomes a growth engine.

Hybrid teams: humans and AI in the Tailor stage

Now we get into the part that excites people and scares them at the same time.

AI is no longer just writing rough drafts for content; it is also creating polished pieces. It is being asked to generate entire experiences based on prompts and CRM data. You will see prompts inside tools like HubSpot that say, "Tell us about this email. What is the goal? What is the key information? We will use data in your portal to write it."

It is natural to feel uneasy about that. You might wonder how you will A/B test when you did not write the email yourself. You might feel nervous about not knowing exactly what copy goes out the door.

This is where the hybrid team idea comes in.

Humans still own the critical thinking. You define your identity, point of view, and tone in Express. You decide which signals matter and which are noise. You write example messages and offers that set the standard. You create rules that AI should follow, and you review its early outputs.

AI helps with the heavy lifting. It can watch more signals than any human ever could. It can generate content variants that align with your Express training. It can apply your rules consistently. It can surface patterns in performance that you might miss.

You are not handing the keys to your castle over to AI. You are giving it very specific marching orders and asking it to scale up your best thinking. That is Tailor with guardrails.

Practical Tailor plays in your HubSpot portal.

Theory is nice. Tailor needs to show up inside your portal, or it is just another nice idea.

Here are three Tailor plays you can run.

First, build a pricing page intent rule. Decide what pricing page behavior should signal buying intent. Maybe it is viewing the pricing page three times in seven days. When that happens, and when the person matches your ideal role and company size, enroll them in a pricing help workflow. The first email might be a clear, educational video that walks through how to think about your pricing. If they engage with it, create a task for a rep to send a short Loom video tailored to their industry. If they ignore it, send a simple check-in that asks if they still have questions. Now you are not just nurturing in general. You are responding to a real moment of interest.

Second, take one core asset and tailor it by persona with AI. Use your Tailor episode transcript as an example. Transcribe it. Ask AI to summarize the key points. Then prompt it to create three different article versions: one for accounting firms, one for nonprofits, and one for SaaS companies. Each version should keep your Express voice but adjust the examples and language to fit that segment. Use segmented sends or smart content to match visitors with the right version. Watch which stories and examples land best and feed that learning back into your Tailor rules.

Third, design a rescue play for at-risk customers. Identify signals that suggest potential churn. That might include a drop in product usage, a spike in support tickets, or low satisfaction scores. When two or more of those signals fire, trigger a retention workflow. The customer might receive a sincere email that acknowledges what you have noticed and offers assistance, rather than a generic NPS follow-up. Your success team might get a summary of recent issues with AI and suggested talking points for their next call. Renewal plays might change automatically for that account. Tailor is no longer just a marketing trick. It supports both revenue and retention.

Risks, guardrails, and what to watch out for

Powerful tools always come with risk. Tailor is no exception.

One risk is creepy personalization. Just because you can use a signal does not mean you should. Referencing obvious and expected behavior, like someone downloading a guide, usually feels fine. Calling out something that feels too behind the scenes or sensitive can break trust. Always ask how your message will be perceived from the buyer's perspective.

Another risk is dirty data. If your CRM is messy, Tailor will amplify that mess. You avoid this by starting small. Pick a few high-confidence signals. Clean them up. Standardize how you store them. Build your first Tailor rules on solid ground before you expand.

A third risk is AI hallucinations and off-brand messaging. If you do not train your AI tools with clear Express guidance, Tailor can generate content that sounds wrong, makes unproven claims, or confuses your audience. Guard against this by establishing a clear, concise one-page voice and brand rules document, along with well-defined claim policies, and an expectation that prompts must always include the necessary context. Then spot-check early outputs and correct them fast.

There is also a visibility risk. If AI generates so much of the experience that you never see what goes out, leadership cannot lead. The fix lives in logging and review. Log your prompts and key outputs. Set up approval steps for new Tailor plays. Review both the top-performing and the worst-performing Tailor outputs every month. Turn those reviews into decisions, not just observations.

A simple way to keep yourself honest is to ask a few hard questions. Under what conditions would this Tailor rule hurt trust instead of building it? What is the most miniature version of this play that we can test before rolling it out to everyone? If AI had written this entire sequence and you never saw it, would you still feel comfortable knowing it aligned with your values?

Those questions keep your Tailor work grounded in real human responsibility.

Tailor is not a new religion. It is better attention.

At the end of the day, Tailor is not HubSpot asking you to worship a new diagram. It is an invitation to pay better attention and act on what you see.

You stop pretending that a first-name token equals personalization. You start treating your CRM as a genuine source of actionable insights. You design rules that send real humans better experiences at the moment they need them. You use AI as a teammate that watches, suggests, and scales, while you stay responsible for the story and the strategy.

The flywheel did not disappear. Your buyer's journey did not turn into a figure eight. You simply added an internal loop that helps you design better moments.

If you want to hear the full, messy, funny, nerdy version of this conversation, listen to the Tailor episode of the HubHeroes podcast. Then open your portal, grab a notebook, and design your first Tailor loop. When you do, Lord Lack is going to lose some serious ground.

Tailor Stage: Quick Answers

• Q: What is the Tailor stage in HubSpot Loop Marketing?
  A: Tailor is the stage where you use unified data and AI to make interactions personal, contextual, and relevant based on real signals from your contacts and customers.

• Q: How is Tailor different from Express?
  A: Express defines your identity, voice, and point of view. Tailor applies that identity to individual people in specific moments, using signals like behavior, role, and lifecycle stage.

• Q: Is Tailor just about personalization tokens?
  A: No. Tokens are surface-level. Tailor focuses on meaningful signals, clear rules, and orchestrated experiences across channels, rather than simply dropping a first name into an email.

• Q: Do I need AI to use the Tailor stage?
  A: You can apply Tailor principles with human workflows alone, but AI helps you watch more signals, generate more tailored content, and scale your efforts faster.

• Q: Where does Tailor show up in HubSpot?
  A: Tailor shows up in CRM segments, workflows, journeys, smart content, AI-assisted emails, and any automation that reacts to contact behavior and properties.

• Q: What is the biggest risk with Tailor?
  A: The biggest risk is over-personalizing on bad, creepy, or inaccurate signals. You avoid that by cleaning your data, choosing signals carefully, setting guardrails, and keeping human QA in the loop.

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed apartments? 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.

George B. Thomas: Liz, before you get started, I actually have to ask Chad a question now that I've had a chance to like, I just was looking at the screen. Does your technology keep having babies? Like when we started the show, had a printer and now you've got a three d printer. And I don't remember there being a TV and a massive sound bar in your background historically. Like what's what's happening technology wise over at your house, Chad?

Chad Hohn: I just I you know, sometimes there's just I mean, I had a TV sitting in a closet. I'm like, why am I gonna leave that sucker sitting in a closet when I could just put it here?

George B. Thomas: Well, there you go.

Chad Hohn: You know?

George B. Thomas: Okay.

Max Cohen: Here you go.

George B. Thomas: You're you're kind of tailoring your room to to your needs and how go go ahead, Liz. Kick kick us off.

Liz Moorehead: George, can

Chad Hohn: I really wanted to express myself before that? There

George B. Thomas: you go. There you go.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. Alright. You know what? Guys, I already have the Washington commanders grinding any sense of hope or dreams I have into a fine powder. I don't need you guys helping with that.

Alright. We'll behave. Any assistance there.

George B. Thomas: We'll behave today. I don't know about that.

Liz Moorehead: Well, George, you our best. You've done with such subtlety and a deft grace integrating what we're going to be talking about today. So we've spent the past few episodes having some feelings about loop marketing, which is the new playbook that HubSpot has rolled out. Over the past couple of episodes, we talked about Express, the first step, the first stage in loop marketing. That's all about clarity.

That's about defining your brand identity and your tone and your values and the thing. Right? And today we are on to the next chapter. And that is Taylor.

Max Cohen: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: We are here. And I'm actually going to go ahead and have us dive right into my first question because Lord knows where this conversation is going to go. I want to make sure we maximize all the time we have. So George, I want to start with you. Let's dig into the definition of what Taylor is.

So HubSpot says this stage is all about using AI to make interactions personal, contextual, relevant. I even pulled this quote directly from the HubSpot Loop Marketing Playbook. The Taylor stage uses unified data, CRM, transcripts, web behavior to shape experiences that feel more like, how did they know? And a little less, dear first name goes here. Yeah.

But it's a lot of words. So can you just wave that magic wand of yours to simplify the complex and really distill down for our audience what it is that we're talking about here?

George B. Thomas: Yeah. So listen, sometimes, especially historically, paying attention at scale has been really hard. And therefore, we've done things, like we've hacked our way to try, trying to feel like we know using personalization tokens, first name, company name, add the property in HubSpot that you've historically thought was the most amazing thing because you could reverse engineer it and dump information into an email or landing page or whatever. AI, because of course we gotta mention hybrid teams here, AI has made it easier for us to be able to pay attention or it can pay attention and then do things. So when I think about Taylor, right?

And you know me, like helping people. I'm a helpful human, right? And I like to help the right humans, right, at the right time. Now I'm not making anything new here. We've heard this from 2012.

It's helping the right people with the right thing at the right time. So nothing's really changing as far as that goes, but it's at the scale at which we can actually do this. And so Liz, to answer your question, it's like, tailor means that we simply pay attention to what someone just did or what someone just said. And then we give them the next best thing that fits them, kind of like we do as like the Hub Hero podcast. We're teachers, but we got this loop marketing thrown in our lap as a community.

And so we're like, well, the next best good thing we can do is try to simplify this. And so think about your portal and we'll talk a little bit deeper about this, but think about your HubSpot hub, your portal. Think about all the humans in it. Think about all the things they could do or could say. By the way, inside and outside of the portal, I'll literally talk about prospecting agent and how that even helped kind of tailor something, but it's paying attention.

And then thinking about the experience that happens and what needs to happen, but what needs to happen in between what was done or said and the experience you provide, that juicy middle is Taylor.

Liz Moorehead: I love that. Now Max, I want to come back to you.

Chad Hohn: So you

Liz Moorehead: dropped something super sweet and super adorable, and depending on your answer, think we're going to find out where today's conversation goes. So last week when we teed up that we were going be talking about Taylor, you said at first glance, the line between Express and Taylor for you was very blurry in that it wasn't totally clear to you where one ended and the other began. It's just we're gonna we're gonna walk into this safely, guys. Chad, George, let's link arms. Max, do you still feel that way?

Okay.

Max Cohen: I think I'm starting to get

George B. Thomas: it. Okay. Yeah. Let him finish. Let him finish.

Max Cohen: I mean, if it's if it's simply if because again, I'm trying to I'm trying to, simplify this down for, the blue collar marketers such as myself, right, and and make it a little bit easier to understand. If I'm if I'm understanding, Express correct and kinda where we landed on that, it was it was really like onboarding your your your AI agent or whatever it is that's helping you, you know, create this content. Be able to create it as if it was one of your employees that had the context of your business, your customers, who you are, and all those kinds of things. Right? And, you know, we haven't gotten too deep into it yet, but, like, if we're looking at Taylor and saying, this is the part or the space or the the chunk in which you then, like, you know, are are thinking a little bit deeper about, I guess, what we would kind of colloquially refer to as buyer personas, like, you're actually making the content for and creating the content for them started to become a little clearer to me, which is good.

I think we made a breakthrough.

George B. Thomas: So so I love that we're making a breakthrough. And and let me just kind of add some additional stuff to what Max, what you just said, Express that we've covered. And by the way, if this is the first episode that you're listening to, I'm sorry. Go back and listen to like the multiple episodes that we've had about everything, but also just about the Express. But Express, it really comes down to it's our identity.

It's the point of view, the tone, the proof that never changes. This could be for AI, it could be for humans, it could be considered like onboarding the human or the AI to those things, but it's identity point of view tone. Taylor really is the context. I started out by saying paying attention. What I want you to do if I go marketing nerdiness here, it's like the signals, right?

So think of things like role or stage or behavior that has happened and then adjusting the message, adjusting the offer, adjusting the channel, adjusting the timing for delivering of the things based on the role, stage, or behavior. What we need to think about or talk about is what is the set of rules based on the signals that gets the experience that we want to be desired. I want to add that piece in. There's some things that people might have wanted to jot down in that section to kind of think about as we

Chad Hohn: move forward. That was a writer downer.

George B. Thomas: Chad, why

Liz Moorehead: don't you come down on all this?

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah. I think the thing that I'm like noticing is there's like, okay, imagine the first time through the loop, it's almost like CRM configuration in a way. Because you are going to be building the system for the hybrid team, and then every subsequent time through the loop will be a little easier. Right?

Because you've already done some of the heavy lifting at the beginning. And the purpose of the fact that it's in an infinity symbols because you're supposed to go through it a whole bunch of time. Right? Yeah. Every time you do campaign loop, you know, every time you're running through whatever it is you're doing loop.

Right? But with this one, you know, especially even just right off the website of loop marketing, they're talking about, okay, you're gonna need to enrich your data, you're going to need to build your audience segments, you're gonna need to make your content personal, which pulls from some of the previous configuration that you did in Express because it's, you know, the AI systems are more aware of who you are, what you're doing, and why you're doing it and who you're helping. And then, you know, ensure human quality checks. So you're gonna have to like work with more of these tools this first time to start working on your AI powered segments or hey, what in the world does the personalization agent inside of HubSpot do? Or how if I'm not using HubSpot, how am I going to kind of try to come up with some scalable personalization sort of system that will work with my process?

You know, it doesn't all have to be inside of HubSpot, but it's easier to use some of these things. But these things can be obviously recreated on our side of HubSpot with more work. You know, it is possible to do. So anyway, all that to say like this first time through the loop, well, if you wanna do express, you really gotta dive in deep and, know, do like the the the George b Thomas therapy couch and like really understand who your business is. Right?

Once you transmitted that, then next time you go through Express, the system's gonna know what you did last time and you'll either be able to build on it or you'll be able to use it. Same with this, set up the segments, enrich the bulk of your portal, work through some of these other pieces, get through the system. And then next time you go through, it'll be a little bit easier to tailor that message because you'll be able to fire things into these existing systems that you built.

George B. Thomas: It's interesting, Chad, because there's a couple of places where hopefully we get to either this episode or next episode. One, I think there's literally where we could talk about the tools in HubSpot that actually could be applied in this Taylor stage. But also, as you were talking, I started to think about this idea of maybe there's We have the gigantic loop, right? Have the loop playbook, the loop marketing playbook. But maybe there's these mini loops inside of each of these stages.

Because when I hear you talk about Express that we talked about, it's like maybe every three months, every six months, every year, you're doing an iterative loop inside of Express to see if that's still how you want to show up, that's if still how you want to sound. Yeah. As the world changes, And do we need to tweak it a little bit? And when I think about Taylor and I think about a tiny loop, a mini loop inside of this stage, it literally would be this. It would be signals, it would be decision rules, it would be the experience we provide, the results we got from the experience we provided, and then improve that over time.

Because now if you see like, well, okay, the experience that we did because of the rules that we set based on the signal that they gave us, it didn't quite work out right. But if we change that to they visited the pricing page four times instead of two times in seven days, now maybe that signal is actually more of the right signal for the experience that we're providing for a salesperson to reach out. Let's change that, measure it, and see if we need to improve. Or now this hits it out of the park from an experience standpoint based on the signals that they gave us.

Max Cohen: Yeah. I think another thing, like, in terms of thinking about how you you sort of travel along this sort of loop thing, I think, like, a pretty sort of like fatal interpretation that I had of it at the beginning when I was looking at it was, you know, when I looked at the flywheel, attract, engage, delight, it was really easy for me to look at that and say, these are the things you do. It was also really easy for me to look at that and sort of almost like match it to something sort of alongside the buyer's journey, even though those are totally, totally like completely separate concepts. But like, you know, I could still follow that sort of circular pattern as like what a customer's actually experiencing as they go through it, right? So like, I get attracted to something by finding and consuming the content and all that kind of stuff.

Then I engage with someone, then hopefully they delight me and then I'll go tell other people to do it. Right? It was really easy for me to say, you know, to match this to like, not only is this something you're doing on the back end internally, but it's also something that like I'm experiencing as a as a customer. Right? And I tried to take that same mental model and apply it to this, and I realized that was a mistake because customer doesn't go through this loop.

Right? A customer doesn't have any, you know, say into, like, how you're oh, I mean, maybe they do it in, a tangential way, but, like, it's not a journey they go on. They still go on that same journey of, you know, that buyer's journey that we talk about. They still get, like, you know, through this continent's getting created, they get attracted to you, somehow engage with you, and then hopefully get delighted by you. That still happens.

This is more of like internally, what are you doing behind the scenes versus something that, you know, someone's like experiencing in the same pattern that we are in the back end. Right? Like, sure, they're informing it a 100%. Right? Because you're gonna take feedback from your customers and you're gonna apply it to this.

Right? Yeah. But I think that was one of the big things that was really like confusing me that I didn't really realize until now thinking back on like how I was first interpreting it. Because the more we talk about this, the more it makes sense.

George B. Thomas: Can we dive into that a little bit more though? Because Max, what I would even say is yes to everything that you said. Like there's this us part of Taylor in the background, but then there's the buyer's journey part of the experience. And the experience, it's going to change. Like here's something that kind of freaks me out, but excites me a little bit about where we're heading.

When you think about the buyer's journey historically, and by the way, Liz, Chad, Max, I'm gonna say some things and you just tell me at the end of this if you agree. When you think about the buyer's journey historically, what we did as marketers, is we did our best to try to understand that journey. So we would create usually a full funnel. We'd have some blog articles. We'd have three different offers.

It might be a checklist. It might be a guide. It might be a webinar. Maybe there's a fourth one that hands off to a sales or a demo. But we're creating this content because we're trying to answer these questions.

We're creating these offers because we want to start conversations, AKA have conversions. And at the end of it, it's like we're trying to attract people, get them to go through this information, be helpful for them to the end where they book a sales call and they become a customer and we earn revenue. Would everybody agree that that's what we've done historically to create this content journey that people can go through?

Liz Moorehead: Yeah, I can get on that. There's some nuance like but words that's like, you know my nuances could take up a whole episode, but on its face, high level, yes.

George B. Thomas: Okay. And here's what's fun about that is you knew what the PDF, the ebook, the guide, the checklist had in it. Yes? And you knew exactly what was in the articles because they were written and that's what they were. Yes?

You knew what was in the emails because somebody like Liz wrote the emails and so you just knew this is the email that they got.

Max Cohen: Hopefully.

George B. Thomas: Yes? Okay. See, here's where it gets crazy because we're headed into a world where none of that actually is what's going to be happening. And what I mean by that is if you pay attention to this tailor phase and you pay attention to what HubSpot's doing, I want you to think about this right here, which is a private beta by the way, but it's AI email creation. Now, historically, we would write the email and so we would know what the email says and we would be like, okay, there's some confidence, reassurance, trust in that we wrote this thing.

I want you to realize what HubSpot is doing here, and by the way, it's starting with email, but I know that it will branch out to other places, is look at this, tell us about your email. The goal of this email is for HubSpot customers to join our yearly inbound. Here's the key information. HubSpot invites its customers to yearly inbound event, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it says, AI, go look at everything in this portal and build out the email.

And so now a human didn't write this, but a human created the words. And this is why I brought up earlier this idea of decision rules, Because we have to start to think about if AI is going to help us pay attention, if AI is going to help us tailor the messaging that we set in the Express, How comfortable can we get or should we get with prompts equaling the output for the thing that the people actually need or want to see? We got to understand we're entering or are already in a completely different world when it comes to what we as marketers do internally and what they see through the buyer's journey externally. I'll just Yeah.

Max Cohen: That feature scares the shit out of me.

Liz Moorehead: Like, I think it's

Max Cohen: stuff like AB testing. Right? Like, when you have no idea the content that's in there, how do you even know, like, what's performing well?

Chad Hohn: Well, this is like

Max Cohen: AB testing. To a world where we don't care about that is too much. I already think AB testing is kind of cringe and just not worth it. But like, you know, a lot of people don't think that way. Right?

And, you know, I think it does involve like a lot of people like sort of, you know, pick and choose in their battles, you know, in terms of like, does this make your life any easier versus like how much control do you have over like knowing what's successful and what's not. Right? So it scares me a lot. But yeah, it's an interesting feature.

Liz Moorehead: Okay. So let's dig in here for a moment Taylor from the perspective of right? So high level. We're getting personalized. That's kind of the thesis of Taylor.

Right? But this doesn't feel precisely like a brand new concept. No. Theoretically, personalization is something we've been attempting to do with varying degrees of tone deaf to big brother to sometimes getting it right. Right?

So what is different here between how we've been talking about personalization previously and how HubSpot is talking about it now? Because what I'm really trying to understand here with this question is like, is the theory still pretty much the same and we're just talking about more sophisticated execution? Or are we kind of redefining or reimagining how we look at personalization to begin with?

Max Cohen: Yeah. I mean, see, this is where it kind of like where I I kinda get back into my, like, mindset a little bit where it kind of, like, feels like, like, it feels like we're kind of encouraging the use of of tools here, right, which I think I need to get over one. But like, we've been doing this. Like, it's called building buyer personas and creating content people are actually looking for. Like, you you always we've always tailored the content we've been creating.

We didn't need to enrich contacts and build segments before in order to do that necessarily. Right? That is a process of thinking deeply about what are these people searching for and can you create what they're searching for and can the contents of that thing that they find change hearts and minds and get them to trust you? Right? We've been tailoring for a long time.

Liz Moorehead: Also with smart content and tokens as well.

Max Cohen: Sure. Right? And the thing is, is like, I feel like you can do that without enriching your data and building audience segments. And like, it's really just that third sort of thing you see inside of Taylor here, if I'm looking at the thing here, I can enrich my data all I want, but if I don't actually think about like who my buyer personas are and like creating content that actually resonates with them, I go get their job title through tokens or whatever in Breeze. And like, I don't think that's gonna help me that much.

Right?

Liz Moorehead: I think

Max Cohen: I think you could make an argument if you're if you're doing like a lot of ads based stuff and things like that and and really hyper focusing on it. But again, it's just like, this is kinda where I I I'm I'm stuck between this place where it's like, yeah, I get it. You want to tell your messaging, but like, we're kind of throwing in an unnecessary hint there to go spend some breeze credits. Right? Playing devil's advocate.

George B. Thomas: Go ahead, Chad. I'll I'll I'll bring up the rear on this bad voice.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah. I'm nervous. I've been watching George Pace now for about two minutes, but Chad, please go

Chad Hohn: Let's let it build. All right. I'm giving George

Max Cohen: Agita is what I'm doing right now.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, so like, I mean, imagine, okay, AB testing or trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work used to happen at the like email level. Like I have one email with two things or a couple pages that I'm testing and it's to one or more, you know, lists or segments of your audience. And now with AI's functional power, like it costs to use AI just period. So that just is a reality, right? And like when you want to, like, I mean, just from a tactical perspective, no defense or argument one way or the other, but from a tactical perspective, if you're throwing AI in and it costs inference compute on GPUs and you have to pay per token, Like, do you want to make your entire product more expensive across for everybody who doesn't want to use this?

Or do you want to let people derive value from it at the usage level? So that's one question. But then, like, think about your purse your your AB testing is more moving to the, configuration of the loop AB testing rather than the per email AB testing. So like the inputs I'm giving AI to assist are my AB test in because it's able to consider and hyper personalize that scale. Like you don't need to AB test because every person runs through, you know, the inputs of the model and comes out with an answer of something that's hopefully really personalized for that human at like an individual level or I mean, there's like obviously buckets there.

So between like your AI segments and what's coming out of the model, but really the AI, the AB testing is moving upstream to the configuration level. I feel like when you change the inputs on the model and what it does, everybody's gonna get a different output for all of the stuff that it touches. So that's like a whole different kind of AB testing that nobody, including what's in HubSpot, has considered at this time, I don't think.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. So I love this conversation. And there's two different places that I could take this. One, could take this totally like content, which I'm not gonna do. But if I was gonna take this to content, would tell you it is very easy now for me to use my AI assistant in HubSpot or AI assistant in ChatGPT to say, Hey, we did this episode of the Hub Heroes podcast.

It's general information. Please write me an article for accountants, then write me an article for churches, then write me an article for XYZ. And it'll personalize that content at scale based on the persona that I'm directing it at, with ease. I've tested it multiple times, and it's pretty fascinating. That's not where I wanna go though, we could totally have a whole conversation on that.

Here's where I wanna go historically, when we think about it, and Liz even mentioned tokens and smart rules. Historically, we talk about personalization or tailoring, it's what we want to do. I want to put these personalization tokens in an email. I need this segmented list because I need to be able to view as a marketer the amount of humans that have dropped into this list automagically. I want to create smart rules that swap out copy and images or forms based on, like, because they ended up in a certain persona segmented list.

Which to then, I'm gonna do some guesswork and hopefully this works the way that it should. And that's been like marketing. And by the way, it's it's worked. I'm not saying it didn't work, but where HubSpot is going, where with the use of hybrid teams with AI, it's different. And so like, instead of just purely thinking about tokens, I want people to start to think about signals.

What's actually happening around the humans that we're trying to help? So, tokens, signals. Instead of just segments, I want you to think about this less this is the list that I need to see, and what is actually happening in the buyer's journey, meaning moment based next steps. So again, less about segmentation, more about moment based next steps. What happened today at scale that makes us do the next thing?

Instead of like, well, we want to swap out some copy or an image. What is the experience that you're orchestrating? Right? And then it's like, what are these teachable rules that you can give your system, your CRM, your AI? I want you to think about buyer intent in the marketing dropdown.

I want you to think about journeys in the marketing dropdown. I want you to think about how it segments now instead of lists inside of the marketing dropdown. If we think about historically tokens, segments, swapping copy and guesswork, And we think in the future in hybrid teams, think signals, moment based next steps, experiences that we're orchestrating, testable rules and earned trust because we're building something that is better on the outward facing, less on what we historically needed to see. This is where my brain goes when we're talking about the Taylor stage. It's a totally different set of things that we should be thinking about, therefore tools that we're gonna be using, which is why HubSpot has been actively building out these tool sets and attaching them to AI to be faster, smarter, the $6,000,000 HubSpot tool, if you will.

Mhmm.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, correct me if I'm wrong here, but, like, Taylor traditionally would have been smart blocks in an email Yes. Or personalization tokens. And the rest of the email, unless it was in some sort of smart content that segmented out a chunk of it, large portions of the email would remain static. Yes.

Now what's terrifying to a lot of people at the beginning is wait. So you're telling me I have, like, some overall control with a prompt, but I don't get to say where the personalization tokens go and I don't you know, like you get to say what segments get something and a prompt for that segment basically. And then it you just let her rip brother and like she goes. Right? And that's terrifying for a lot of people.

George B. Thomas: That's the initial knee jerk reaction. And you're right. Because when I first if I circle back to the first time that we started to talk about this update on the customer platform show that I do with Chris and Casey, I got this gut wrenching, like, I think I need to go use the bathroom. I'm going to throw up moment. But you have to start to think about how good can you get, how good can the system get, and how better is the experience for the individual human on the other side of this, if it does, if, I'm using air quotes, it does what it's supposed to do in the way that it's supposed to do.

This is going to be something, Chad, like, I wanted to say this as you're talking, like, will there be a day where dumb, air quotes, emails don't exist? No, because there will be people who don't subscribe to Loop Marketing. There will be people who don't subscribe to HubSpot. So you'll still have everything all over the board. But does this become easier at some point than it historically was to create dope experiences along the way.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. That's why it's like, to me, anybody who's trying to generate those kinds of wonderful customer experiences on the output, your AB testing is going to move to model training.

George B. Thomas: Max, here's what's interesting is like, you can train a model, you can train an assistant, there's two variations of things that I want to do, or three variations of things that I want to do. Then it knows, like, here's the two or three different variations. Therefore, it goes to actually give the output, it knows that it should give the output in one of the three or two ways that you've actually trained it to do the thing in its simplest form. That's how I would explain that.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. It's basically just like giving it parameters and guardrails around whenever you give it a prompt, you prefer x y z to happen. And that's exactly what, you know, what you feel like onboarding the employee in Express is you're training the model. Like that's what you're doing. You're telling the model how to act, right?

And what you want the outputs to be. And I think that is ultimately where a b testing is gonna end up for us when we're using this platform

Liz Moorehead: Mhmm.

Chad Hohn: To do these things. Right?

Max Cohen: Yep. I I think I'm starting to, like, develop my, my easy way of explaining these four things the more that we talk about it. And and how about you guys help me figure out if I'm on the right track? Okay. Right?

Express and I think I'll evolve this more as we keep talking about it. But here's where I am right now in episode three. Yeah. Halfway through the steps we've gone through. Yeah.

Right? Express is like, teach your AI how to sound like you. Right? Tailor is, you know, think about who your actual customers are and, like, start creating the actual content. Amplify sounds like how you actually get it out there because there's so many different ways that you can do it.

And then evolve basically means learn from it and do better next time.

George B. Thomas: In the most simplest basic forms, yes. Now, would I add in it's not only AI, but it's humans? Yes. Hybrid teams, right? Yeah.

Max Cohen: I think like there is a I don't want people to like look at this because I feel like I was kind of falling victim to this a little bit. Again, I'm in a very reflective state as we have these conversations. So I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of someone who may have been thinking about it the same way that I do. I I think I'm I'm pulling myself out of the idea that we're just letting AI create everything. I think people watching this should should realize you could still have completely human generated content and go through this process.

Oh, for sure.

George B. Thomas: Without a doubt.

Max Cohen: The AI can assist you with that with all the parts that are really hard and really sticky and really difficult. Right? But you still can have complete control over your content through this strategy. Right? I think what it what it feels like to me is everyone I think is gonna kinda have their own way of harnessing this framework to figure out how much AI plays a role in that.

Right? Yes. And let it have as much of a role as you want it to. And then I think for some people where the content creation side of things is a little bit more difficult, you could dial up that AI involvement a little bit more. Right?

You know, for those folks that have very talent naturally talented, I mean, not naturally, but have access to talented writers that really understand their product, really understand their audience. That's great. Not everybody has that. Right? And so in those situations, you may dial up the AI generated content creation a little bit more.

But if you're not in that situation and you have the luxury of people who have the ability to create content that really resonates with folks, you could amplify those people's abilities more by reducing the amount of minutiae that they would have to go through without the assistance of AI as well.

George B. Thomas: Well, and

Max Cohen: I And maybe amplify their efforts a little bit more, not amplified in the in the stage amplify, but, like, you know, how much better could those already skilled content creators be when they have this AI framework sort of acting as like a teammate for them? Well, In whatever capacity it looks like.

George B. Thomas: I don't disagree with anything you're saying. I I agree with what you're saying. But where I would challenge people to push their minds to is RevOps AI, sales AI. What I'm talking about here is, yes, you're leaning, because you're very content brained, and so am I. Love using content.

But it can be way past just content. It's process. There's so much more that hybrid teams, AI, and I know we're just talking about loop marketing right now, which is probably maybe one of my biggest gripes is there's these loops in every department of your organization, by the way. In every hub of HubSpot, there could probably be a loop that you're

Max Cohen: Everything is a circle.

George B. Thomas: That you're putting Circle of life. Okay. Never mind. I'll shut up.

Max Cohen: Well, one. True. True. But it's not like a square. Square has corner.

Wow. It's a circle. Wow. You're really going

Chad Hohn: see from there.

Max Cohen: I can't remember. Liz, what's going through your head?

Liz Moorehead: What's going through my head is that I had a really adorable thought that maybe we get through Taylor in one episode and absolutely absolutely not because we haven't even gotten to

George B. Thomas: the strategy

Liz Moorehead: portion. We haven't gotten to the tools and technology. I think what is going through my head personally right now is that to your point last time, Max, and something I said at the beginning of this conversation, and maybe just have to be something that I accept. This is not where a group of people in HubSpot sat down and said, we need to build a new playbook based on the humans. It's they were solving a product problem.

And that's what has become even more clear to me as we go along. Right? Like, we're having these very big conversations. We're using lofty language about, you know, heard and understood. But when you hear Max simplify it down to what actually it is that they're trying to do, this is about getting to people to use the product properly.

That's what it comes down to. And I understand that. I understand also with the integration and introduction of more sophisticated tools, whether we're talking about HubSpot or other platforms, because HubSpot, you know, it's we love HubSpot. They are not the only ones innovating with these types of products in their platforms for marketing and sales automation. Right?

So I understand that as we move through inbound and as it continues to evolve from a definition standpoint, it does become more complex. We have to think about new and different variables, but it it's just interesting to me. I I can't believe I've I'd ever say this. I miss the flywheel. I miss the good old days.

Chad Hohn: It didn't go anywhere.

George B. Thomas: I don't think

Max Cohen: it went anywhere. But I

George B. Thomas: I hear what you're saying. The thing. The flywheel is still here. The we we could we next week, we could decide we're gonna just break down the flywheel for eight weeks.

Max Cohen: And and hold up. But here's the thing. I would love to hear HubSpot come out and say that and acknowledge that the flywheel is still there.

Liz Moorehead: Because right now we have two infinite loops.

Max Cohen: Mhmm.

Liz Moorehead: The flywheel was designed to be infinite, and the loop is designed to be infinite. Please tell me how all of my spinny objects work together. True.

George B. Thomas: Here's what I'll say, because I know that at the beginning of these

Liz Moorehead: Yeah, help us plan this plane, George.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. At the beginning of these conversations, I was like, well, this is the first time that felt like HubSpot was launching something that was product led instead of methodology or inbound religion led, right? I'm teetering on that because here's the thing, as I dig into this, I do see where if we change our focus on the things that we're actually able to focus on, how we can actually impact and change the experience that those around our business will be able to experience. And so part of me is teeter tottering on this of like, well, it just so happens that yes, HubSpot has been building these tools to do these things, to fix the pain points that they were feeling. Like, let's be honest, SEO is very difficult right now.

The hottest thing is trying to figure out how to get into LLMs. Journeys, buyer journeys have always been super crazy and difficult and hard. We would do our best to say they were a bowl of spaghetti, but not a straight line. But when you have something that doesn't have to create or talk in a straight line, hybrid AI team, does then the things that historically been hard because you have the tools to do it get easier? I don't know.

Tune in or

Liz Moorehead: Max has been dry.

George B. Thomas: Oh, I

Max Cohen: think this is how the loop goes together with the flywheel.

George B. Thomas: Oh, god. Look at that. Nice. It makes me seem sick looking If you're listening to this podcast we're gonna put a screenshot of this magnificent artwork. Go check it out on the show notes.

Liz Moorehead: Yeah.

George B. Thomas: And screenshot of it. And gentlemen, all I have to end us with is we'll see you in episode two.

Max Cohen: Two.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Of Taylor.

Max Cohen: Of Taylor. Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Of Taylor. Taylor two. Taylor two. Taylor gang

Liz Moorehead: gang. Electric. Okay,

George B. Thomas: 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 hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes.

FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to and use the hashtag hashtag hub heroes podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and of course, be looking for a way to be someone's hero.