HubSpot Loop Marketing Tailor STAGE Deep-Dive Part II

From “Where do I even start?” to “We built a Tailor play”! If Part 1 of the Tailor stage was the deep breath, Part 2 is where we get our hands dirty. Last time, we talked about what Tailor actually is. Not first name tokens. Not cute “Dear human” intros. Tailor is that juicy middle between the signal and the experience, where you decide what should happen next for a specific person.

This time, the crew shifts gears. The conversation moves from “why” and “what” to “okay, which data, which tools, and how do we actually wire this in HubSpot without losing our minds?”

Along the way, a few big truths land hard:

• There is no Tailor template.

• You cannot clone someone else’s Tailor system.

• You will have to do real work once, so future loops get easier.

Let’s walk through how to think about Tailor data, how to map it to HubSpot tools, and how to build something your team can actually maintain.

The one thing: Tailor must be customized to you

George anchors this whole episode with one simple idea.

You cannot Tailor from a copy-and-paste mindset.

You can clone emails. You can clone workflows. You can copy landing pages. You cannot clone a Tailor strategy, because Tailor is about your specific:

• Organization

• HubSpot hub and data model

• Personas and ICPs

• Offers and journeys

• Brand voice and customer experience

If you came into this episode hoping for a magical “Tailor template,” this is your moment of truth. The playbook is reusable. The thinking is reusable. The exact rules and properties are not.

That sounds heavy at first. The good news is you are not rebuilding it every time you run the Loop. You design the Tailor foundation once, then each pass through the Loop lets you tweak, refine, and expand instead of reinventing.

Tailor starts with data, not dashboards

Before you touch workflows or smart content, you need to decide which data points matter.

George breaks this into simple buckets so your brain does not melt. Instead of staring at 300 properties in HubSpot, you group what you care about.

First, think about who they are. That often means role, responsibility, company size, industry, whether they are on a buying team, and whether they look like a target account. Some of that comes from HubSpot defaults. Some will come from the custom fields you create over time.

Next, think about where they are. That can include lifecycle stage, deal stage, trial status, product plan, or even whether they are a new visitor or a returning one. These fields tell you where they sit inside your relationship, not just who they are on paper.

Then, look at what they just did. This is where Tailor gets interesting. High intent pages, recency and frequency of visits, feature usage, in-app events, search terms, downloads, and recent conversations all fall into this bucket. This is motion, not static profile data.

After that, think about consent and trust. Which subscription types did they opt into? What objections, use cases, or outcomes have they mentioned in sales, service, or forms? Have they given you permission to talk with them in specific ways?

Finally, you have value and risk. Lead scores, “fit vs non-fit” flags, pipeline influence, past revenue, potential revenue, unsubscribe history, and spam complaints all live here.

Once you have these buckets, you are no longer staring at random fields. You are building a Tailor map for your CRM.

A smart move here is to ask an AI assistant trained on HubSpot to list which default properties fit each bucket. Then review your custom properties and drop them into the same buckets. You now have the raw material that Tailor will work with.

Big database or tiny list: you can still Tailor

Max raises a great concern in the episode. What if you do not have a giant database yet? Is Tailor only for portals with massive contact lists and years of history?

Short answer: no.

If you are a larger org with a mature portal, your Tailor work will start with an audit. You will need to understand what is already there, what is dirty, and what you want to keep, fix, or replace. That can feel painful, but it is often necessary. You cannot Tailor on top of chaos.

If you are new, the work looks different. You get to design your Tailor data model before contacts flood in. You decide which questions to ask, which properties to create, and which signals will matter on day one. Your early segments might start with a handful of people. That is fine. A segment of one can grow to five, then fifty, then five thousand. The key is that you planned for it.

In both cases, the same truth holds. It is better to be intentional early than to reverse engineer meaning from random fields later.

Four jobs Tailor must do inside HubSpot

Once the team agrees on data, the conversation shifts to tools. George frames this as four big jobs Tailor has to do in your portal:

1. Capture signals

2. Decide and route

3. Change the experience

4. Measure, learn, and govern

Everything else nests inside these.

1. Capture signals: context you can trust

The first job is to capture signals in a way you can trust. If your data is garbage, your Tailor rules will be garbage.

In HubSpot, that means you lean on:

• CRM properties for contacts, companies, deals, tickets, meetings, and more. Default and custom.

• Active lists and segments that group people based on those properties and behaviors.

• Behavioral events that track key actions in your product or on your site.

• Conversation intelligence to pull insight out of calls.

• Forms that ask smart, second-level questions based on persona or stage.

• Data quality and custom code (through Ops Hub) to keep everything clean.

• Consent tools that store the right communication preferences.

• Buyer intent, which surfaces companies showing high interest, even if they are not fully in your CRM yet.

All of this rolls up into context you can actually act on. You move from “I think their role is X” to “we know their role, we know what they read, we know what they did last week, and we have their permission to talk about it.”

Max points out that this can feel like “just building lists.” That is a fair instinct. The shift comes when you view lists and properties as raw inputs, not the final destination.

2. Decide and route: your Tailor logic layer

Once you capture signals, Tailor needs a brain.

This is where decisions and routes are made. You translate what you know into “if this, then that” logic.

In HubSpot, that shows up through workflows first. You build sequences of conditions, branches, delays, and actions that move people into different paths based on behavior or profile. You use lead scoring, both manual and predictive, to separate high intent and low intent contacts. You lean on ABM tools like target accounts, buying roles, and company tiers to shape how you treat different companies.

You might also use calculated and formula properties to capture thresholds and recency in a more sophisticated way. For example, you might store “pricing page views in the last 7 days” as a number you can evaluate against. That allows you to create very specific rules, such as “three views in seven days equals an outreach signal, one view does not.”

Chad’s description helps here. You define buckets of humans and where they belong. You use AI-assisted segmentation if you want. You then decide how to route them into one-time sends or longer multi-step experiences.

The heavy lift used to be writing different messages for dozens of lists. With Tailor plus AI, the routing is still a real job, but personalization at scale feels more reachable.

3. Change the experience: what buyers actually see

The third job is what your buyers can actually feel.

You have captured signals. You have decided what should happen. Now you need to change the experience in ways that matter.

In HubSpot, that touches almost every front-facing tool:

Your CMS becomes a personalization engine through smart rules. You can serve different page variants, modules, or messages based on segments, lifecycle stage, or IP. Your CTAs adapt to who is on the page and what they have already done. Your marketing emails use smart content, personalization tokens, and even AI-powered generation to adjust what is said and how it is said.

You also start to think about chat as part of Tailor. Chatflows and bots, including customer agents and prospecting agents, become routes to deliver the next best step in context, not just generic “how can we help?” messages. Sales sequences, ad audiences, playbooks, and snippets all fall under the “change the experience” umbrella as well.

There is also a new layer emerging with HubSpot’s personalization tools. The personalization beta lets you point at an existing asset, pick a segment, describe that segment, and have AI rebuild the asset for that audience. This makes “same idea, different landing page for accountants, churches, or SaaS companies” far more realistic.

Underneath all of this, agents in Breeze Studio can now interact with core tools. You can imagine advanced setups where an agent creates or edits forms, updates properties, or pulls text from documents, all to support better Tailor experiences. That is its own future rabbit hole.

The core idea is simple. Tailor changes what people see, hear, and experience, based on the signals and rules you defined earlier.

4. Measure, learn, and govern: the Tailor feedback loop

None of this matters if you cannot see what works.

The fourth job is to measure, learn, and govern. Tailor is not a one-way pipe. It is a loop that depends on honest feedback.

Here, you rely on A/B tests and adaptive tests on emails, pages, and CTAs to see which versions actually perform. Journey analytics and funnels help you understand how different tailored paths perform across steps, not just at individual touchpoints. Attribution and conversion reports show how Tailor plays influence deals and revenue.

Campaigns and Marketing Hub’s newer orchestration tools help you track goals and performance at a campaign level. Dashboards bring key KPIs and segmented views together. Even something as simple as property history becomes a powerful Tailor tool. Watching how important fields change over time for certain groups tells you whether your rules and experiences are moving people in the right direction.

Governance sits over all of that. You are not just looking at numbers. You are deciding which rules to keep, which to adjust, and which to kill. You are checking whether Tailor is still aligned with your values and your Express identity.

That is how you keep Tailor from drifting into creepy or chaotic territory.

More than “just lists” and more than “just content”

At one point, Max wrestles with a core question: is Tailor just a fancy way to say “make better lists” and “do content strategy”?

It is a healthy challenge.

Yes, Tailor touches lists. Yes, Tailor has a huge impact on content. You cannot run Loop Marketing without creating content. But George pushes on a key distinction. Loop Marketing, and the Tailor stage inside it, sits deeper than a content strategy.

Content strategy lives on the surface. What topics, what formats, what channels?

Loop sits in the guts. It shapes how your systems treat people, regardless of whether the output is a blog, a sales email, a success playbook, or an in-app message. Tailor is the connective tissue between your data model, your automations, your AI assistants, and the lived experience of your buyers.

Inbound is still the larger philosophy. Loop is a modern execution playbook inside an AI-heavy world where content is everywhere and AI slop is real. Tailor is how you stop adding to the slop and start building real, contextual experiences again.

The pain and the payoff: personalization at scale

Chad drops a line that is worth underlining. Vision gives pain a purpose.

The up-front work to design Tailor is real. You will need to:

• Decide which data buckets matter.

• Clean and standardize your properties.

• Build and refine workflows, rules, and segments.

• Wire tools together so signals flow the way they should.

If that is not naturally your thing, it can feel like a slog.

The payoff is enormous, though. Personalization at scale, across many segments, used to require a small army of marketers and ops specialists. Now, once Tailor is set up, a small team can manage and improve a system that delivers different, context-aware experiences for thousands of people.

AI does not remove the need for vision. It rewards the teams that do the hard thinking first.

How to start your own Tailor build without burning out

All of this can sound big. The key is to break Tailor down the way George models in the episode.

Instead of trying to “implement Tailor” in one go, do this:

Pick one customer journey or offer that matters. Define one or two signals that would show intent or fit. Decide on a clear rule based on those signals. Wire one workflow or smart content rule that changes one part of the experience. Measure it. Learn from it. Adjust.

You are not building the entire Loop in a weekend. You are running your first Tailor loop with intention.

Once that feels solid, you layer in new signals, new segments, and new experiences. You reuse your pattern. You evolve your system instead of reinventing it.

That is how real teams actually build this.

Tailor Stage, Part 2: Quick Answers

Here are a few simple answers you can use or repurpose when people ask about this episode.

What is Tailor Stage Part 2 about?
Part 2 focuses on the data, tools, and workflows you use in HubSpot to execute Tailor. It takes the strategy from Part 1 and maps it to properties, segments, workflows, smart content, and reports.

Which data matters most for Tailor?
You want to focus on five buckets: who they are, where they are in the journey, what they just did, their consent and trust signals, and their value and risk profile.

What HubSpot tools power the Tailor stage?
Core tools include CRM properties, segments, behavioral events, workflows, lead scoring, ABM tools, CMS smart rules, CTAs, smart emails, chatflows, agents, reports, and dashboards.

Is Tailor only for big portals with lots of contacts?
No. Larger portals start with an audit. Smaller or newer portals can design their Tailor model from day one and let segments grow over time.

What is the biggest implementation mistake with Tailor?
The biggest mistake is trying to clone someone else’s setup or treating Tailor as a template. Tailor must be customized to your organization and your data if you want it to work.

If you want the full flavor, jokes, and nerdy tangents, queue up Tailor Stage Part 2 of the HubHeroes podcast. Then grab a notebook, open your HubSpot portal, and design one small Tailor loop. You can refine and expand from there.

TRANSCRIPT

Liz Moorehead: Max. How's your sandwich?

George B. Thomas: Hmm.

Max Cohen: It is. You know what? You know how I've been coming along to loot marketing.

Liz Moorehead: Uhhuh?

George B. Thomas: yeah,

Max Cohen: I might be coming around to like dairy products and eggs.

George B. Thomas: yeah. There we go. Let's

Max Cohen: it's not just milk.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Max Cohen: Like I did heavy cream the other day and oh my God,

George B. Thomas: Well, yeah. Yeah.

Max Cohen: But you know what, I get it. I get the fluffiness thing

George B. Thomas: There you go.

Max Cohen: right. See, I'm not so set in my waist.

I can, I can come around on things.

George B. Thomas: Two years? Maybe.

Max Cohen: Hmm

Chad Hohn: and some, uh, cottage cheese.

Max Cohen: hmm.

George B. Thomas: Wait, wait.

Liz Moorehead: I love cottage cheese. It took me a while.

Max Cohen: is what I want to do.

George B. Thomas: Hold up, hit

Liz Moorehead: I've done that. It's so good. I learned that from my, from my grandma.

Max Cohen: A ricotta scramble is crazy.

Chad Hohn: George is broken.

George B. Thomas: Are you saying cottage cheese in scrambled eggs?

Max Cohen: actually, yes. No ricotta, but whoever just said cottage cheese and eggs, that is

Liz Moorehead: Yeah, Rico

George B. Thomas: Quiet the noise. Ladies and gentlemen. Chad, did you say cottage cheese in scrambled eggs?

Chad Hohn: yeah.

Max Cohen: Yeah.

Chad Hohn: some jalapenos, diced.

Max Cohen: that? Any different from Milk George?

George B. Thomas: bro. Wait,

Max Cohen: What do

George B. Thomas: it's your, your,

Max Cohen: No, you

George B. Thomas: is your milk curdled? Are you kidding me?

Max Cohen: mix it dude. Egg. Hey eggs. Curdle dude. Eggs. Curdle. You're scrambled. Eggs is a curdle. Curle my guy.

George B. Thomas: you know what? We'll all tailor our eggs to the way we want

Chad Hohn: Ooh. Like this was a

Max Cohen: you know, listen, Chad's just out here trying to express himself. Okay?

George B. Thomas: there you go,

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

George B. Thomas: We're we're

Chad Hohn: do want to amplify this message.

Max Cohen: Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Oh,

Liz Moorehead: you expressed yourself yet in Taylor or did.

George B. Thomas: listen, I'm gonna measure the results of this bad boy once I hang up.

Max Cohen: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: says marketers

Max Cohen: evolve these eggs later.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Evolve.

Liz Moorehead: Okay, we're not evolving. We're tailoring gentlemen, because we are back for our second episode about Taylor.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: The second stage in loop marketing, and this is about using AI to make your interactions personal, contextual, and relevant. If you are just joining us, sure. You can pick up with this episode.

We're talking about the tools and tactics to execute the Taylor stage, but if you want more of a peek into the strategy, the what? The why. The deep dive into what makes the Taylor stage tick. Hit up the last episode, but for now, let's get into it. Are we ready?

George B. Thomas: Sure.

Liz Moorehead: Yes. No.

Max Cohen: I am ready.

Liz Moorehead: So Max, actually, I wanna start with you again.

So you said you're coming around again, more and more to this loop marketing concept, and we've been watching you go through this journey. Of,

Max Cohen: of grief? Is that what it

Liz Moorehead: yeah.

Chad Hohn: Visibly,

Liz Moorehead: Are we at bargaining or denial? Where are we at?

Max Cohen: We're, we're, we're knocking on the door of acceptance, I

Liz Moorehead: Really?

Max Cohen: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: What's holding you back from full acceptance, bud?

Max Cohen: I don't know. It's still, it's, I mean, it's still complex. I think. I don't like that. I have to do a lot of legwork to explain it. I had to do less legwork to explain the inbound methodology, but I need to keep reminding myself that those things aren't one's, not replacing the other

George B. Thomas: yeah.

Max Cohen: and. Uh, marketing in an AI era is complex already, inherently, and I think I need to accept that maybe a strategy that gets people to understand it is also inherently going to be a little bit complex.

Um, yeah.

George B. Thomas: So it's interesting that your brain goes there, uh, max because we come to loop marketing because of ai. But I actually think that also AI can help us with loop marketing. And, and what I mean by that is I literally have created a complete assistant that is a loop marketing assistant. Meaning I have pumped everything that I can find on the internet.

Had it done research and like created this brain around, uh, this entire concept, which by the way, if you're listening to this or viewing this and you're like, Hey, I'd like access to something like that where I could start to ask a question specific to my own loop marketing, uh, journey. Then hit me up.

'cause I might be able to share it somehow, some way or build it in a way that I can share it. Right now it's like internal team only project, but man, um, we have these tools at our fingertips, right? To do this, to really understand it and then once we really understand it, we'll be able to simplify the way that we actually talk about it.

I think moving forward. So it's kind of a AI on both sides of this conversation for me at this point.

Liz Moorehead: George, I actually want you to root our discussion before we get started today, and I'm actually gonna switch things up and have you start with the one thing.

What is the one thing from last week's conversation that you want people to keep in mind about Taylor as we go through the tactics?

George B. Thomas: Oh man. I guess I would say that it has to be, so sometimes I historically have seen people looking for the easy button, the template, the, you know, let me clone this, which I, I love to clone me some stuff in HubSpot, but. In this case, the one thing that I want them to be on their mind from last week and going into this week is, um, this is all gonna have to be customized to you, to your organization, to your HubSpot tools, to your personas, to your ICPs, to like, to the way that you're going to express yourself to through to the customer experience that you're thinking about creating.

And that's where you're starting from to. Like there's no template, there's no cloning it, there's no easy button. Like you're gonna have to do the work to tailor to, to your stuff.

Liz Moorehead: Love

Chad Hohn: I like tech? Tag along on maybe that little one thing there. Real quick, I just wanna make sure that people are aware, like you don't have to do that every time you go through the loop. That's the precursor to the first loop travel, and then every subsequent loop travel, you could maybe tweak some stuff if you wanted, if it didn't hit just right.

But outside of that, like every time you go down the loop, next, you're starting with your content idea. And then going through the loop and it will help you kind of begin, uh, from that base of knowledge. But you gotta start there.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Love it.

Liz Moorehead: Fabulous. All right, let's dig in. So at the beginning of any great use of HubSpot, when we are building out strategies, when we are using the AI tools, it begins with the data. You will be using to execute the strategy. So I'm gonna throw this out to the crowd to see who has a thought on this. First, what are the data points you should be considering or bringing into this strategic discussion about Taylor within HubSpot?

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Uh, max, Chad, you, you guys want to go? You want me to go like what?

Max Cohen: Well, is it, I mean, isn't this where like you kind of, you've already, um,

Chad Hohn: You've already trained it and

Max Cohen: already taught the ai, you've already taught the AI to sound like you. Know what you're about and be like you. Um, but when I think Taylor, this is like, where it kind of, I think ties directly into, you know, kind of classically what we refer to with Inbound is thinking about your buyer personas, right?

Like, it's like, cool, AI knows how to make content that sounds like you. Now it's like who are you making it for? Tailoring it for your audience, right? And I know there's a lot of, um. They bring up, uh, what is it on their main, uh,

Liz Moorehead: Because they call, they talk about unified data. At this stage. They talk about transcripts, web behaviors,

Max Cohen: yeah, yeah. And like, I don't want people to like, like when they talk about tailor, uh, express tailor, what is it? Yeah. Enrich your data, build your audience segments. Make your content personal and shoot like this one. Again, if we, if we go back to like, this is the whole, you know, product driving the strategy.

I mean, like, they're telling people to use tools here, but it's, it's, they say make your content personal. Which really translates back to like the ultimate rule of inbound is that create content that people are actually looking for. Right? Just because your AI knows how to sound like you, that doesn't necessarily mean that like. It knows it's creating this specific piece of content for this specific persona. I think now they use the word ICP, right? 'cause they wanna sound like all the other, you know, folks that talk about that when it's really still just your buyer persona, but you know,

George B. Thomas: So, so Liz, the original question was data that matters, right? So like, when I think of Taylor data points that matter, uh, let's break it down into buckets. So, uh, who they are and let's use some, uh, words that will resonate with HubSpot users. Role responsibility, company size, industry buying team, uh, end user account tier target account.

I want you to start to think about the data that's collected in, 'cause Your brain, when I say some of these words, you might literally go to like the target account tool, but I'm literally just talking about like who, who, who they are and what data you capture around who they are. Some, by the way, it could be custom from the things that I'm just throwing out here.

Like I like to talk about second smart questions based on like the persona and stuff like that. Okay. Uh, the next group that I want you to think about is where they are. So what's their lifecycle stage? What's their deal stage? Are they in some type of trial status or do they have like a product plan?

Are they new or versus returning visitor? Like where are they in these actual like journey that they're gonna be part of with your organization? The next bucket that I think we need to think about is what they just did because in this fast-paced world, one of the things that we can use AI for is to keep up.

And, and HubSpot is, and HubSpot tools are getting really good at just. Keeping up. So think about high intent pages viewed, um, recency frequency, things like that. Uh, maybe it's maybe even app in-app events or, uh, some feature usage or things like that. Session depth scroll. Like, so think about like your heat maps and different things like search terms that they're using on your actual, like in a app or website, um, downloads that they've downloaded.

So what did, what did they just do? What con what conversion, what conversation, uh, has just happened? Then I think there's the consent and trust. So like what email subscription types, uh, are they in? What, what objections, what use cases, what outcomes have they mentioned? Like, and, and are you asking questions like that in the sales process, service process or marketing forms or marketing process?

Um, like these are, these are value and risk is another bucket that you might think about. So lead scoring or fit non fit. Pipeline influencer influenced revenue, past revenue, future revenue, like unsubscribe, spams like complaint history. Like these are, these are like value and risk, and then signal quality checklists.

Like, uh, is this earned? Is this like, you know, like these are, these are like the major buckets. Hopefully you've had like a notepad as I was kind of. Writing those down because this is why I said the first thing I said about, you've gotta tailor it to your organization, your data modeling like your, your people.

Because if you take those major buckets and you, and you reverse engineer what HubSpot default property, by the way, take those major buckets. Go to your AI assistant, tell it to know everything about HubSpot and ask it what HubSpot default properties fit in these buckets. Then ask your own organization or your own brain and what custom properties that have we created fit in those larger buckets.

Like that's, when I think about data, that's where our brain should go. Around the Taylor stage.

Max Cohen: I think that heavily assumes that you already have a huge number of contacts to do that kind of analysis on,

George B. Thomas: No, it assumes that you would wanna have this laid out before you even convert your first contact. Like that's the thing. Oh. ahead. I'll shut up.

Max Cohen: No, no, I, I, I kind of agree with you there. I mean, in the same way that I say this assumes that like you already have this like big database of people and all these data points and stuff that you can. Build these sort of like prebuilt segments on, you know, who it is that you're gonna target. I can understand that.

Uh, if it, you know it, for some people that's gonna mean doing a big audit of what you currently have. For smaller companies that haven't built up that large database or audience yet, I'm wondering what that looks like.

George B. Thomas: I feel like if I, I can tell you where my brain goes. One, if you're a larger organization and you're trying to map this to what you've historically been done. Yes. An audit and then a discovery session. And a deployment session. If, if you're an, if you're new to this and you're just getting started, it's literally like a strategy session.

Create it before they actually show up with the best of like your knowledge of the strategy and what you're trying to do with what we're talking about, and then deploy it. Because there's nothing wrong with having a segment of one, which becomes a segment of five, which becomes a segment of 5,000 because you had it in place as you were getting started.

So many of us have had to almost do this for years where we're like

Chad Hohn: backwards from a big fat database. Yeah. And that's a big pain because then you're like, I have no clue what properties mean. What about these humans? And I have to go validate the data that's already in there rather than I was planning on them to have landing spots from the beginning.

George B. Thomas: I was planning to ask these questions. I, I understood. I needed to know this data,

Chad Hohn: Right. Or at least this is the what I thought. And I can change tact as I go, right? Yeah.

George B. Thomas: we can evolve as we go, right? Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: We love good branding, phenomenal.

Max Cohen: the, so what's the, so I mean, is this a. Essentially, so far, as far as we're into Taylor, I mean, I hear everything we're saying and then my brain's going, well, it's creating, we're creating lists of people

Chad Hohn: Well, yeah, that's the, I mean, part of it is that

Max Cohen: what am I missing? What am I missing there? Is what I'm trying to figure out.

George B. Thomas: So that data falls into, and it's hard for me to talk about that data without my brain immediately going to some tools, which Liz hasn't asked the actual tool question yet. Um, but all of those, all of those pieces of data that I listed in those major buckets end up being, um, captured, created, or stored or leveraged by different HubSpot tools

Max Cohen: Sure.

Chad Hohn: Right.

George B. Thomas: and segments is definitely a, a one of them, but it's.

Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: it's not a list for everything or that's not where it stops is just with lists.

Max Cohen: Where does it go though? That's what I'm trying to figure out because like I'm trying to feel like when all this stuff that we say,

Liz Moorehead: It seems like a great time for that question. Your. Hoping for George, isn't it?

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: Yep. Alright, so George, we're gonna just have you answer this one first. So what is it that we need to understand? So we talked about the data that matters. Now let's talk about the tools that matter inside of HubSpot for Taylor.

Are we dealing with the same tools that we're used to? Are these new things? What have we got going on?

George B. Thomas: no. Yeah. Tools that you're used to. So the first thing that if you're, again, writing this down in a notebook, or if you're literally typing this into like your LLM of, of choice, perplexity, Gemini, whatever, um, I want you to list in your brain or capture four things, uh, one capture signals. Two, decide and route three, change the experience.

And four, measure and govern. Okay, and I'm gonna take one of these at a time, give us time to talk about it, and then we'll move on to the, the second, third, and fourth one. So the first one, when we think about HubSpot tools and capturing signals, um, by the way, this is like context that you trust. How many of us have heard, like people say, why can't trust HubSpot?

That's a, that's been a historical issue because it's like garbage in, garbage out, right? So when we think about capture signals and we think about the tools, it's like CRM properties, uh, default and custom properties. So contacts, companies, deals, tickets, projects, appointments, meet meetings. Now, by the way, the meetings beta that it's an object and it's like custom properties and meetings.

Oh my God. Anyway, um, so past that.

Chad Hohn: yeah.

George B. Thomas: Segments,

Chad Hohn: great.

George B. Thomas: right? So active lists, I mean, I literally did a, I digress for a second, but I did a sink property, ideal sink property, two meetings so that we could trigger something when somebody set a meeting and it hit that sink property that we could do some special stuff and anyway, okay, so CM properties and custom properties, um, active lists or segments as we're now calling them, um, HubSpot's behavioral events.

Conversation intelligence forms, um, ops hub, data quality and custom code and consent tools, like those are the bucket of tools in HubSpot that go around this idea or strategy or philosophy of capturing signal and having data that you trust. So that's,

Chad Hohn: buyer intent?

George B. Thomas: um, I did not mention buyer intent, but it probably should be in there.

Chad Hohn: Buyer intent if you haven't seen it,

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Chad Hohn: wild. Like, I mean, oh, that's a wild tool that they built. Like seeing companies hitting your website that might not even be in your CRM yet and like all sorts of stuff. It's wild. Like, I mean, what they're doing with that, showing you signal, it's like they're giving you everything you need to make an engagement score.

It's pretty wild. Yeah.

George B. Thomas: I was literally talking, I was talking, uh, about 20 minutes ago on the customer platform podcast that we do every, uh, weekday. Um, literally Casey and um, Chris about buyer intent and lead scoring and the kind of hand in hand relationship that is starting to occur.

Chad Hohn: That's, that was the, I think, the intent behind how they built that buyer intent. By the way, when are we gonna get meeting based workflows and call based workflows? We still have like contact, uh, we have contact like activities, but if three people are related to one meeting based workflow where a meeting is scheduled or booked, it fires the contact based workflow three times, which sucks.

George B. Thomas: now that the.

Max Cohen: I, I'll tell you when we're gonna get it before, we're gonna get it before GTA six. A hundred percent.

Chad Hohn: We're

Max Cohen: A hundred

Liz Moorehead: Big if true, big if

Max Cohen: yeah. Um

George B. Thomas: Okay, so, so Max, when I say capturing signals as the first part of this and, and those tools, like where does your brain go?

Max Cohen: Um, yeah, I mean, it, it, it, it sounds like you're talking about, uh, I mean, to me it feels like you're setting up the things that can, uh, you know, catch when people are doing certain things that would help you segment them further. Right. Um, do I think that helps you create a piece of content that solves for someone's goals and challenges?

No.

George B. Thomas: Well, not all this is about content though. Like that's the thing. Loop marketing isn't a content strategy. Like, is content alone for the ride? Yes, but Loop Marketing is not a content strategy. Loop marketing is something deeper that you're putting into place to help the content or, or help the organization get what it needs to get to.

Like, yeah, we can't just say Loop Marketing is a content strategy.

Max Cohen: I, I feel like it definitely is.

George B. Thomas: It's part.

Max Cohen: I.

Liz Moorehead: I wish everybody could have just seen that. That was beautiful.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Cohen: like it definitely is. Like, if it wasn't, why would we care about making, like why would we be dedicating an entire stage to teach an AI how to talk like us, right? How would, like, why would we be, you know, like when we say tailor, what are we tailoring?

George B. Thomas: Well, so here's the thing. Brand voice goes into other tools than just the blog tool.

Max Cohen: I get it, but there's more than I, I, but there big thing is, is there's more content than just the blog. There's,

George B. Thomas: Okay. Okay, so, so now, okay, so it is a, if we say content outside of the historical marketing content standpoint, I'll agree with you. Like sales content, service content, like, okay, yes.

Chad Hohn: it's

Max Cohen: I don't think there's a version of LU Marketing. Yeah. I don't think there's a version of LU marketing where you don't execute content.

George B. Thomas: Sure, but there's a difference between executing content and calling it a content strategy Loop marketing is deeper than a content strategy. Content strategy is content marketing. Content strategy is almost even kind of inbound marketing. I know I'm gonna get hate mail. Send it to Max, not me anyway. Loop marketing.

Everybody needs to understand that loop marketing is something deeper than just a simple content strategy for your organization.

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

Max Cohen: I think it's, yeah, I think it's deeper than that. Right. But I also think like that's the core output of why you're doing all this stuff so you can.

Chad Hohn: content strategy

Max Cohen: Create trash

Chad Hohn: marketing

Max Cohen: ai.

Chad Hohn: Right? But, but the loop marketing banner is bigger than just content strategy, is what the sound sounds like,

Max Cohen: And I guess like when I think, like even when I think of like amplifying, I know we're not there yet. What are we amplifying content.

Liz Moorehead: We'll get there. But here's the thing, uh, Chad, I love what you said there, but honestly what you said there is not new. There has always been this weird conflation between content marketing and inbound marketing. Content strategy, content marketing, that is part of the inbound marketing mix. But I think that's where, you know, George, you and I have talked about this quite a bit, and as much as I am, obviously the mouth breathing content strategist, like people forget, inbound is more holistic than that.

So it's always been a bigger tent. So the fact that it's a bigger tent here also makes sense.

George B. Thomas: Yep. Yep. Okay, so moving on number two. Uh, this is the decide and route section. So if we think about HubSpot tools for decide and route, this is literally your workflows, right? Think if, then think delays, think web hooks, think all the like. Um, nerdy ways that you wanna split people into different routes based on this is literally in forms where if you have, I think it's like sales enterprise, that you have an extra couple buttons you can press and, and move it on to like, uh, a different landing pages based on like a way that they answered a que, right?

So like workflows, uh, lead scoring manual or, or predictive lead scoring. Whatever you're doing there, again, it's a way that you can decide. Quality, not quality, whatever, depending on how you're using it and then how you're gonna route them. Uh, a BM tools, target, target accounts, buying roles, company tiers.

This is all like, hey, who, who deciding who they are, uh, what we're gonna do with them, what direction they should go into, down to the nerdiness of like, I think about Chad when I think about this one, but like, calculated in, uh, formula properties, right? Thresholds, recency, frequency. Like all of that is like how do we decide.

Based on the stuff that we've, uh, captured, uh, where we're going to route it to. So that's step two is decide and route, uh, it's, it's your logic if you will.

Chad Hohn: So let me go through this from like a tools perspective and, and correct me if I'm wrong here in this, but my understanding is the, I. Ideas, like obviously the previous step, we, one time we train the brain bott, then we bring some fresh juicy ideas in and we say, Hey, brain bot, we want to hit, uh, this topic.

And then in this step, if we haven't already, we're gonna be utilizing segments and data with a strategy that we're gonna build one time. So like there's the one time and then there's the recurring, right? So our strategy about. Buckets of humans and where they belong, and the types of people that we would like to reach out to, we're going to have here.

And within that, um, you know, we will use either AI powered segmentation or we'll have our, maybe that will help us do what we're trying to do. And then from there. We're gonna take that content from the last step, or that idea from the last step or whatever we're trying to discuss from the last step, and use the segments as part of our distribution mechanism.

We're going to be at a certain time routing it to these. Now that could be one time email, or one one-time content, or it could be a series of interactions via a workflow, right?

George B. Thomas: And

Chad Hohn: And then.

George B. Thomas: go ahead. Go ahead.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. And then I think part of the thing that people are maybe, maybe are, you know, th th that was traditionally really difficult to do and took a lot of labor before, was doing many different segments or lists, because you had to then think about a message.

For each of those lists that would resonate with each of those people. However, with personalization agent and AI powered email, hopefully that's where we can really have personalization at scale. That really feels more than high first name, and that's the intent about Taylor, right?

George B. Thomas: Yes, and, and I think I would add like a little side piece to what you just added. So yes to everything that you added, but also that juicy idea or piece of content or strategy from before. It's, it's also like capturing some of the new stuff. There's going to be, like, back when I, um, worked at Impulse Creative, we had this like full funnel idea where it was like three offers, awareness, consideration, decision, and we knew what we were gonna capture along the way.

Well, if you have something like that in play. Your idea gets broken into three phases, which then you have three different areas to be able to capture, which then gives you the information to decide and route in the tools that we actually have been talking about. That's, so I'd only add that piece into it. Max, how's your brain doing?

Liz Moorehead: That was my good question.

Max Cohen: It is doing good. It's doing good.

Liz Moorehead: You know when you say it's doing good while you're rubbing your face as if it's a cry for help, you really sell that.

Max Cohen: No, no, no, no, no. This is not a cry for help from the conversation. Cry. Cry for help from a distraction I don't wanna deal with right now.

George B. Thomas: oh, gotcha.

Max Cohen: Yeah. We're we're good? We're good. We're good. We're good.

George B. Thomas: So, so

Max Cohen: We're good. Just put out fires. It's okay. Put on fires. It's fires.

George B. Thomas: I mean, as the director of product, that is what one does, uh, at, uh, a company,

Chad Hohn: Word.

Max Cohen: It's not a even a product fire. It's a fire I shouldn't have to deal with, but it's all good.

George B. Thomas: well, yeah.

Chad Hohn: Those are my favorite fires.

George B. Thomas: to life. Yeah. Okay.

Liz Moorehead: usually cause those.

George B. Thomas: Oh,

Liz Moorehead: here.

George B. Thomas: chat's fired.

Liz Moorehead: No, he's spicy.

George B. Thomas: Ah, what? Yeah. Okay. It has been a while since we had giga chat, but let's move on. Uh, number,

Liz Moorehead: I haven't had any fat beats recently, but thanks. Yeah.

George B. Thomas: Yeah,

Chad Hohn: Product fires.

George B. Thomas: Number three. Uh, let's go into it. So again, this is where I, I love, um, I love all of it, but I, I love, this is like the experience.

What does the buyer see? That's what I want you to think about. Right? And, and how do you change the experience? How do you evolve the experience over time? Now that you literally have captured information, you've made decisions, and you're routing them through your system? Well, now it's tools like. CMS, uh, right, and more in lines, uh, CMS smart rules.

So think about pages, modules, like, uh, the, the variance that you can create based on segments and, uh, life cycle and, uh, IP and all, all that good stuff. Think of the CTAs tool and like what's, what call to actions do they see? And um, if you're AB testing those, think about marketing emails and smart content in marketing emails.

Think about personalization tokens. Think about, um, customizable, send times. Think about what Chad just said, where it's like AI actually writing the email for you. Um, you gotta start to think about chat flows and bots. Customer agents, prospecting agents, like all of those pieces, sales sequences, ads, audiences, playbooks, snippets, like these are, these are all ways that we change the experience in how we interact or what we say. Or how we do the thing that we're trying to do based on what we've captured, what we've decided, what we've routed into one of these tools for a sales experience, a service experience, a marketing experience, a, a experience. Okay. So that's, that's three. Change the experience. Uh, where, where's your brains?

What thoughts do you guys have?

Chad Hohn: Well, I was thinking, I was just looking at the personalization experience in one or, uh, personalization, uh, section in under marketing. One thing that I think is pretty interesting about that is basically it's designed so that you select an an existing CTA pick a segment type, and then, uh, add a segment and give it a prompt about who those humans are in that segment.

I'd love it if they let you fill that in with snippets. That'd be nice, you know, um, and then a name for the personalized content, and it'll either rebuild. An existing page or CTA with that segment in mind. Right? Which is pretty cool. Like that's a great starting place. 'cause one of the most intensive things about like creating at least a flow for people to go through is creating like landing pages.

And if you're using HubSpot CMS, this really speeds up that process where you can then go tweak and define that. And I'm sure more and more stuff is coming to that personalization section, right?

George B. Thomas: I hope so. 'cause by the way, this personalization beta, um, I got egg on my face. I was on the. The, uh, Friday podcast that we do, which is like the HubSpot call in show again with Casey, Chris, Rob, uh, and Kyle, Kyle Jepson's on that show. And we got a question about HubSpot personalization. I went on a whole diatribe because the question was like, why can't we use it for website pages?

And I went old school, like, what do you mean I can go to website pages and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Then, uh, all of a sudden we realized, oh, no, no, they're talking about the personalization beta, which you can only do right now, landing pages and CTAs. Yeah. Which like to back to your thing, like hopefully HubSpot will add like regular website pages or other things inside of here.

Um, and if you're listening this and you haven't gone to marketing, gone to personalization and looked at the beta for that, uh, you should do so.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Take a

Max Cohen: What's the name of this one again?

George B. Thomas: Say that, say that again Max.

Max Cohen: the name of this beta you guys are talking about again?

George B. Thomas: it's just go marketing and then go personalization. It should be in your, uh, navigation.

Max Cohen: I don't have it. Let me look. I gotta find it because this seems very interesting.

George B. Thomas: it is. It is quite interesting. Um,

Chad Hohn: I mean, it's really cool to think about just coming in and that's like the whole purpose of, of, you know, the first step, right? Is. We're gonna build this brain box, and then we're gonna say, these are the humans and what they do, and now let's get a landing page stood up and we'll go from there. Right?

Really, really cool. Have you guys,

George B. Thomas: it's literally like I've got this main concept idea. Now make this landing page for accountants. Now make this landing page for churches. Now make this landing page for like, whatever.

Max Cohen: Mm-hmm.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, yeah. Totally. Have you guys been into. The Breeze Studio agents and checked out the personalization agent or any of the other agents that you can add or created any of your own custom agents.

George B. Thomas: I have created my own custom agent, uh, for a client, which

Chad Hohn: Uhhuh.

George B. Thomas: been fun, um, and messed around with a few of those agents, but not a ton of them.

Chad Hohn: Have you seen like all the tools they give you access to in the agents? Like it's kind of mind blowing.

Max Cohen: I haven't

Chad Hohn: single

Max Cohen: with it yet.

Chad Hohn: create a form, create associations, but there's also extract document, texts, transcribe an audio file, like, I mean, there's so much cool

George B. Thomas: jot down, can you jot down when we're done with Loop Marketing that the immediate next, uh, episode we should do is let Chad get nerdy with, uh, agents

Chad Hohn: I mean, man, they give you access to like, create or edit a form, like an agent that would let you modify. HubSpot forms is kind of cool.

Max Cohen: It's pretty wild.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. That's cool.

Chad Hohn: I mean like, yeah, there's some crazy stuff in there. Anyway.

George B. Thomas: We're almost there. Number four.

Liz Moorehead: I hope so.

George B. Thomas: yeah, number four, uh, measure, learn, and govern, right? Like, that's the thing that I want you to write down and think about. And so this, this is simple. It's like ab test, adaptive tests, uh, think email page CTA. Like how can you look and learn across the way, uh, journey analytics and funnels, um, so that you can see tailored paths of, of what people are using.

Attribution conversion reports. Um, I even go to campaigns or marketing studio and like now you can kind of set those goals inside of your marketing studio campaigns and you can see the, um, anyway, I don't want to get, uh, dashboards obviously. So like certain KPIs or segmented KPIs, activity logs, property history.

By the way, I, I love spending a good amount of time in like property history on certain properties that are important and seeing how it's changed over time for certain humans in, in certain organizations that we help. But like, but what, what has been captured and how has it changed? Um, what experience have they gone through and which one has actually optimized to the best results for conversations or what most mere oral humans call conversions?

Like that's what we need to start thinking when it comes to tools. In HubSpot for that measure, learn, and then govern section.

Liz Moorehead: I love it. Well, guys, if you can believe it, we're almost at the end of our episode.

Max Cohen: Oh my.

Liz Moorehead: I know we've talked about a lot of tools and stuff today. George Land the plane. You started with one thing. Let's end with one thing. What's the one thing you want people to remember from today's conversations with tools and Taylor?

George B. Thomas: Actually, I'm gonna flip this and I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask Max, Chad and Liz. What's the one thing that you heard today, uh, or thread that you would be like, oh, I kind of wanna pull on that a little bit now that we've had this conversation.

Liz Moorehead: No, I

Max Cohen: make it active. Oh, go. No, no, Liz, go ahead.

Liz Moorehead: Okay.

Max Cohen: go.

Liz Moorehead: I'm actually gonna go back to something that Max said earlier because I think I've been in a similar boat that he has been in with Loop marketing on the hole, which is that we're kind of dragging our feet a little bit. Took a little while to catch the vision. I still have some feelings about it, but I think it is particularly relevant to this conversation as we continue to think about the implementation of this playbook, and that is, this is not meant to replace the inbound methodology. It is meant to be a compliment to it and, and execution playbook, if you will, of how the inbound methodology gets done. And I think that's something that's really important to keep in mind as we keep going through these stages, that this is about just the execution of inbound has become more complex

Chad Hohn: Mm-hmm.

George B. Thomas: Oh

Liz Moorehead: and you, and you can't just look to a methodology anymore.

So anyway, that's mine.

Max Cohen: Um. the way that I'm kind of like framing my, well, oh, I was about to say, I'm gonna try to make it a commitment to be content brained about this when I look at it. Um, even though I still think a lot of this comes down content, um, it's, I, I, I try to like make the parallel of like, why was like inbound so good. About marketing specifically the marketing piece of it. Right. And the, the sort of leverage that that strategy was giving a company was you should be creating content 'cause no one else really is. Right? Like, that was the, the kind of like big differentiator, right? I think the way that people should start to look at this is everyone's creating content in this AI generated world.

Or AI run world, right? But they're doing it in a really shitty way. So here's how you can do it well, right? In a way that stays human and personalized and effective, right? Uh, because we're just plagued with slop, you know, and the AI slop has replaced the no content at all sort of competition that you have.

And I think people should kind of look at this as a pretty good strategy on how you can kind of rise above all that stuff, right? And, and stand out in a very distracting, slop filled era that we're all experiencing together. So yeah.

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Chad Hohn: I think, um, the one thing that would be a huge takeaway from this, um, 'cause like. Here's the thing, and then I'll just preface it with this is like vision gives pain a purpose. If you don't see why it's important to go through some level of pain, then you're never gonna do it, right? And so the vision that I want to paint for people is that what used to be traditionally excruciatingly difficult in terms of labor hours.

Personalization at scale for many segments is now possible with so much less like labor hours and some human oversight once this tool is set up and put in motion. But the pain will be going through if, if it's not your natural thing. Some people just absolutely love setting up this kind of stuff. Uh, but you know, like.

Once it's set up, you know, so the going through that pain of setting it up or what might feel like a lot of work to get it configured, boom. Personalization at scale and tweaking this model, tweaking these input prompts that help shape the outcomes is gonna be able to be managed by a couple of people probably.

You know, like, I mean, it's pretty wild to think about that. So personalization at scale is at your fingertips. That's the vision I wanna put out there. So that we'll get some people to go set this up.

George B. Thomas: Yeah, absolutely love all of your guys' answers. So I did something very, uh, intentional during this episode. If you notice, I broke it down into buckets. things that I talked about. I broke it down into buckets, whether it was like the things that we were capturing or with the tools that we're using.

Because here's the thing, people are looking at the, uh, whole, uh, loop and going, oh my, and then they get into a stage and they go, oh, gee, what you need to do is you need to break this down. It's right. It's almost like the book Atomic Habits, where it's like you break it down. Here's your goal. Here's your, here's your behaviors, here's your.

Um, you wanna break down these stages into your buckets, the things that you need to pay attention to, and then it literally is just creating these, or steps, whatever you wanna call it, but it's taking these one steps at a time to complete these stages, to eventually have this entire playbook. In a way where now you're just running around the track and you're tweaking a little thing or you're, now you're adding a new offer and you're just layering it in the stuff that you already have.

And so don't get, my one thing is don't get overwhelmed. Break it down into smaller buckets or smaller steps and just build a playbook that, like Max was leaning into, uh, allows you to elevate you and your brand past. Anything that that. Most organizations are doing inside the space.