HubSpot Operations Hub Deep-Dive with Chad (Pros, Cons, Use Cases + More)

Quick question: When was the last time you looked at your HubSpot portal and thought, “This could be so much cleaner and more efficient”? Or maybe you’ve just accepted that dealing with scattered data and clunky workflows is “just the way it is.” Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be, and the answer might be hiding in plain sight—HubSpot’s Operations Hub.

In this episode, George, Chad, Max, and I dig into why HubSpot Operations Hub deserves your full attention. Have we talked about it before? Yes, but never like this. 

Most folks know HubSpot for its marketing and sales tools, but Ops Hub is where the real magic happens for teams who want their systems to work smarter, not harder. If you’re tired of fighting with inconsistent data, struggling with integration issues, or feeling like your CRM is just a series of disconnected pieces, Ops Hub is the tool that stitches it all together.

🚀 Learn More: Check Out Our 10-Week HubSpot Super Admin Training Program

Our newest HubHeroes host, Chad Hohn (now officially part of our crew!), cracks open is incredible nerd and HubSpot operations brain to help us cover the Ops Hub features that are pure gold for anyone managing complex data: custom-coded workflows, programmable automation, and webhooks that let you connect data from across platforms with zero friction.

What did I learn? The Ops Hub is an absolutely lifeline for anyone who’s spent one too many afternoons sorting through duplicate entries or wrestling with bad reporting. Think of it as the part of HubSpot that quietly keeps your data pristine, your processes aligned, and your team focused on real work instead of cleanup duty. Does everyone need Ops Hub? No. But more people do than you likely realize.

This is even more true if you’re constantly running into data silos, messy handoffs, or hours lost to patching together reports, it could be the backbone you didn’t know your HubSpot setup was missing.

So, if you’re wondering whether Ops Hub is worth the investment or you’re ready to take your data from passable to powerful, this episode breaks it all down. This isn’t just about making HubSpot work for you; it’s about making it thrive as the operational core of everything you do.

Keywords

HubSpot Operations Hub, data automation in HubSpot, HubSpot super admin tips, Ops Hub workflows, webhooks in HubSpot, Ops Hub features, HubSpot data quality, custom workflows, scheduled workflows, improving HubSpot reporting

What We Cover

• Why Ops Hub Isn’t Just for Data Nerds: We kick things off by addressing the common misconception that Operations Hub is only for the data-obsessed. Spoiler: It’s not. Whether you’re dealing with messy lists, struggling with duplicate contacts, or just tired of fixing the same data issues over and over, Ops Hub can make your life a whole lot easier. George explains why this “behind-the-scenes” hub could be the real MVP of your tech stack.

• The Superpowers of Custom-Coded Workflows and Webhooks: Custom-coded workflows and webhooks might sound like tech-speak, but they’re game-changers once you see what they can actually do. We break down real-world examples of how these features make Ops Hub so powerful, from syncing data across platforms to automating the tedious stuff that eats up hours every week. If your team is ready to go beyond basic automations, this is the deep dive you need.

• Keeping Your Data Pristine—Without Losing Your Mind: Imagine a world where your data actually stays clean and consistent without constant manual cleanup. We talk about Ops Hub’s data formatting tools and why they’re a lifesaver for anyone who’s had to spend hours tracking down rogue data. Chad shares his favorite Ops Hub hacks for automating those details that keep your system running smoothly (and keep you from tearing your hair out).

• When to Add Ops Hub to Your Setup (And When You Don’t Need It): Not every team needs Ops Hub, but if you’re dealing with data silos, manual data entry nightmares, or hours lost to patching together reports, it might be time to consider it. We walk through the signs that your team could benefit from Ops Hub, so you know exactly when the investment is worth it—and when it’s not.

• The Common Mistakes Teams Make with Ops Hub: Buying Ops Hub is one thing; actually using it effectively is another. We dig into some of the common mistakes teams make when they add Ops Hub to their setup and how to avoid them. Max jumps in with tips on setting up workflows, building data consistency, and making sure you’re not just adding another tool to your stack without a clear strategy.

• Getting Buy-In: How to Sell Ops Hub’s Value to Your Team: Let’s face it—getting buy-in for new tech isn’t always easy, especially when Ops Hub doesn’t have the flash of other HubSpot tools. We share practical ways to demonstrate Ops Hub’s ROI, so you can build a business case for bringing it into your operations. This isn’t just about selling a tool; it’s about showing how Ops Hub can drive real results across teams.

And so much more ... 

Episode Transcript

George B. Thomas: Yeah, activate those powers. And you know what? I want to talk about the League for a second, because I don't know if anybody's been paying attention, Liz, but the league has kind of changed a little bit

Liz Moorehead: Well, bet

George B. Thomas: want to, I just a little bit, I want to take a moment to address the fact that one, uh, Devin, uh, we love you so much.

We miss you and we hope that you are doing well. And getting better and working on you and, uh, you have a golden ticket. Anytime you want to come and do a hub heroes episode, because the mad value that is in your brain and you bring to the table, um, but obviously we can't just keep going and not say why we're super excited, uh, to also make the change and that is the last couple of episodes you've been on, we're going to make it official.

We're getting you cartooned.

Liz Moorehead: Hi Chad

George B. Thomas: oh yes, we have Chad, uh, is going to be rolling with Liz, Max, myself on the Hub Heroes podcast moving forward. Let me, let me talk about Chad. You might have to find the air valve. To like, you know, decompress, uh, as, as we go here, but let me talk about, um, why we love Chad.

It, listen, I love to get HubSpot nerdy. I have for years, like even back in the day when it was Marcus Sheridan and myself and we were doing the HubCast, it was like, let's get nerdy. I was the nerdy dude. I don't feel so nerdy when I'm hanging out with Chad and I love that. I love that he is the type of guy that is like pushing me to be better at HubSpot, pushing

Liz Moorehead: and nerdier

George B. Thomas: nerdier than me at HubSpot, um, making me want to up my game.

And, and here's the thing. As soon as I realized this dude is super smart. This dude is challenging me. I thought to myself, you know, what? Maybe he could challenge the rest of the community. Maybe he could get the rest of the hub heroes to want to learn more impact, like, and so I'm like, man, I look, plus, let's just say this, Chad is an awesome guy.

Like, we're hanging out at Inbound, and we've hung out in meetings. And he just has a very similar happy, helpful, humble human heart that I have been bringing to the table since 2012. Anyway, Chad, we love you. I'm excited that you're here. I'm excited that you said yes. Uh, to being part of the shenanigans, uh,

Chad Hohn: Oh, I love the shenanigans.

George B. Thomas: Um, hope that you're happy that you said yes.

Chad Hohn: yeah. So happy to be here. I mean, um. You know, I will second that, um, definitely miss Devin. Like I got to meet him for the first time in person at inbound this year. And, uh, yeah, I just ran over and gave the dude a hug because he's awesome. He's excited to see me. I was excited to see him, you know?

So, um, but also I'm just really excited, you know, I mean, I've been in the live audience most weeks for like the last year, right? Um, so. And

Liz Moorehead: drop in truth

Chad Hohn: are talking about Yeah, I like what you guys are talking about and you know, it's uh, it's glad to be able to contribute at least my hyper technical brand of nerdiness and hub spot specific type, you know love for the Operational side the implementational side of things and hub spot and I like to be able to you know Bring that to the table.

Um, and i'm really really really glad to be here. So thanks for having me on

George B. Thomas: Yeah, of

Liz Moorehead: what I'm really excited about.

George B. Thomas: on and on and on. I don't, I mean, I don't know when these episodes ever end. So, um, welcome to our Hub Hero version of goodness. You, you could have inserted a different word there, but go ahead, Liz. Sorry.

Liz Moorehead: No, it's okay. I just wanted to say one of the things I'm actually most excited about with with Chad coming on is that we've always had a very interdisciplinary approach. To the people who are part of this show, right? You know, George, you are, you are deeply in the tactical and in the weeds, but your superpowers begin with understanding the humans.

Can you give me a good human?

George B. Thomas: well, yes. Yes. I can say,

Liz Moorehead: Right. The, Oh yeah, that was great. So we have the human side of it, the strategic, the mindsets. We have Max, who has been inside Big Orange Sprocket, has done a lot of work with them, which is really exciting. I come here, not only do I wrangle, but I'm here with the content nerdery side of things. So it's really neat, I think, particularly, you know, we've discussed over the past few episodes, actually over the past, I'd say maybe eight episodes, guys, HubSpot is getting way more complex.

It's way more technical. That means the decision making around it that we need to have Is much more complex, which actually leads us into today's discussion, which I am very excited. We're doing a HubSpot operations hub deep dive, and we are doing this with Chad and we have talked about the HubSpot operations hub before, but it's also probably one of the most criminally Underrated and under discussed hubs in the hub swap ecosystem, because when we think about operations within a business, we're not immediately thinking revenue glitz glam, you know, like, that's not where you got.

It's a spreadsheet. It's someone telling me to do my job. But like, if we think about it. Operations is how you take visionary stuff that a CEO wants to do all the things that teams want to be doing and makes it real, right? Like, otherwise it's just like wishing and dreaming and nothing is actually getting done, built, executed, measured, managed.

It does not happen without operations. Nothing gets done in a company without operations. Thankfully, Chad, light of my life, you are here to save the day and I want to start this conversation. With a very simple question, what do you see folks still getting wrong about the HubSpot Operations Hub in terms of what it is and who it's for?

Because I still hear a lot of kind of like wishy washy ambiguity around like, what is it? I don't, people don't understand what problems it's designed to solve. So talk me through this.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, yeah, I mean, um, there's a lot of nice to haves in it, to be honest, like, so if you're at a place in your business where you want some of the nice to haves, like the data quality control center, uh, which is just, you know, orange sprocket language for stuff that automates like trimming white space from first and last names, capitalizing first and last names, there's Recommending edits on some of the standard, like contact or company properties.

Um, that's just a really nice to have, right? So if you're at a size of organization where, you know, you want clean emails to go out, like, I mean, you know, like, Hey, the first name should be capitalized. So, and it looks, so it looks right. There shouldn't be a last name in the first name when I'm sending a marketing email.

Boom. Ops hub takes care of that for you. You're good to go. Like you just turn on seven automations that are pre baked in there and it's done. And it just does it all for you just like that. Right? Um, and then like,

George B. Thomas: I love that part, by the way. Like, because here's, and then I want you to jump back in. But one of the things that I want to throw in here is, I feel like there's this thought that Operations Hub is for the nerds. Yeah. And that it's difficult and, and the more you look at it, that's kind of a no and a yes at the same

Chad Hohn: It's, yeah. It's both.

George B. Thomas: the things that you just mentioned, no nerds needed, no nerds needed. If you can click a mouse seven times, your data will look better and you will not have those, Oh God, did that just happen moments. When you're communicating with prospects, leads, and customers. All right, go ahead. Chat.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah. Um, no, that's, I mean, that's exactly right. Like it's, it's the thing. And that's one of the things that I think people get wrong about it is like, do I have to have a hyper nerd to use it? Well, no, but like, if you can follow. Simple business logic of a workflow, then you can do more with that workflow, with operations hub, with data formatting or with, you know, other things you also get like more calculated property fields and things like that, that's also helpful.

If you're leveraging those. Um, and yeah, I mean, I, I would say like it's really just designed to make your data better and give you tools to like truly allow you to supercharge your data if you know how to use those, if you have some of those nerds on, on hand,

George B. Thomas: So can I ask you a question? Uh, because you know, you're

Chad Hohn: I mean, you're, you're going to,

George B. Thomas: and I'm, and I'm going to, um, why, why do, why do sometimes they make things seem more difficult than they have to be? Like, you know, Normal human beings, when we hear the word formula,

we're like, I don't even know what that is. And

Liz Moorehead: not here to do math. I'm not

George B. Thomas: there's like, bracket, exclamation mark, A, bracket, bracket.

Like, is that like, do I need to know that? Is it a good to know that? If I do need to know that, is there a cheat sheet? Chad, please tell me there's a cheat sheet for the users. Okay,

Chad Hohn: I mean, um, honestly, you know, good old, uh, Mr. Hub helper, Harry is really great at giving you a lot of like, how would I do custom formulas? Right. And really, I think I actually use improper terminology. Cause I believe by design HubSpot is named it calculated fields. and data formatting actions in workflows.

So it's like a lot less nerd blaster than I communicated it. Right. Um, that's just how I know it. Cause I know behind the scenes what it's doing is it's performing transformations on your data. Right. Um, so anyway, all that to say, like, yeah, hub helper, Harry's great. I mean, but HubSpot's done a really good job of the standard UI. giving you the ability to do simple step by step things so that it just gives you the necessary fields to perform math operations or to add two things together or to strip data or whatever just by picking a drop down. Putting the field in that you want to do some sort of manipulation on and then saying what you want to do to that field if you're not comfortable using the custom section.

Now, I just always go straight to Mr. Custom and just plug away because, you know, I like to do really, really fancy things like with my string values. You know, with like the ability to create like a link, a hyperlink to something. And if the necessary information for the link is not there, I like to tell the end user that this has not yet synced from the external system, but if the ID that is part of that URL is there, then it shows the URL right that way for the human using the system that you're trying to put a link in there for.

They get a nice experience like, oh, it hasn't come over from that other system yet, or I can click on it and it takes me into say, QuickBooks Online or whatever, right? But that's why I like the custom, right? Because I can do things that I can kind of like plan ahead for, for the person on the other side of the screen.

George B. Thomas: so I want to jump in there because I think you mentioned two things and first of all, the fact that you jump right into the custom code, uh, does not surprise me because it sounds like you're very much a card carrying member of the nerd blaster 2000, uh, that you kind of gave us a little bit ago, but, but, but, but here's the thing you mentioned experience.

And you mentioned, I think ahead,

Chad Hohn: hmm.

George B. Thomas: can you just dive into how important, especially with operations hub? And then I swear, Liz, I'm done asking questions and you can continue to roll. But can you, can you tell me like how important the thinking ahead with operations hub and the building and experience is in your mind?

Chad Hohn: Yeah. So two really, really, really important things there. Um, When I am adding a new shiny button to the system ever, and I just consider a shiny button a feature, some sort of functionality for the end user to accomplish. A goal and that could be to send an email to somebody that could be to create a deal and other external things with automation, uh, like automagically, you know, behind the scenes, it's going to make some external assets when you do this thing and then create a deal afterwards so that everything's properly linked together, you know, anything like that.

Um, there's two things that you need to really think about and that's, that's exactly what you said, but where my brain goes is reporting. If I cannot report on it because I haven't logged the information in the system that I need to, then how can we even measure whether or not the shiny button I just created is valuable or not, right?

I mean, sometimes you just need it to be a means to an end to accomplish a goal, but reporting has to be in your mind when you're building something in the system. And then I have to sit there and think like, well, I'm the guy who built the thing. And so I know every lever switch nut bolt widget in the thing, right?

I'm, I'm intimately familiar with what's happening, but any other human who comes along has no clue how it's built, what other systems it's talking to, if any, and where that data even comes from, or how it got there in the first place. And they probably don't even know that you can hover over the property, hit the details button and look at the property history.

Right? I mean, you have to think like, if I'm going to get a new hire in here. I need that person to just really simply be able to see the UI and then click the thing to do what I need them to, basically, right? And so if you can give them real time feedback on whether or not the link that they're going to click is just basically going to break, so, you know, you don't want to put it there, or it's there if it's able to work, right?

That kind of a thing, right? Um, I think that's extra helpful when thinking about the person who has to do the job.

Liz Moorehead: So speaking about the people who actually have to do the job, this is really what I want to get into. Because I think. When we talk about the problems that HubSpot Operations Hub is designed to solve, like that's pretty clear to me. But when I think about the other hubs in the ecosystem, marketing is for marketers, sales is for sales.

When we think about Operations Hub, I get a little bit like fuzzy wuzzy around the edges of who it's actually for. And who it's not for, or when do you need it and when do you not need it? So I'd love to get some thoughts around that for you.

Chad Hohn: yeah, I mean, for my opinion in it is like, if you can have it, then you should probably get it, but I mean, that's just me, because like, I'm going to use it, right? And

Max Cohen: agree.

Chad Hohn: yeah, if you can swing it, then just get it. So you're not going to be limited and have to put in back job workarounds, because you can't use one of those features, if that makes sense.

George B. Thomas: and when

Max Cohen: you can, if you can afford it, you should onboard it.

George B. Thomas: that's what that was going to be my question. When you say, if you can swing

Liz Moorehead: Nicely done, Max.

George B. Thomas: budgetary

Chad Hohn: Yeah. From a budgetary standpoint, right? Even if you don't fully know how to use it just yet, you will learn. Especially if you're an admin or, you know, if you're a HubSpot admin type persona. Um, and I think the Who is for is truly everybody, like literally everyone. Yeah. I mean, if you're working out of marketing hub and marketing heads or marketers, right.

You know, um, well actually operations hub is going to help you make better personalized emails because you can transform and format data better before you feed it to your customer. Right. I mean, it's going to allow you to. I mean, if you're getting fancy query external systems prior to sending an email and retrieve data from your billing segment.

Um, you know, if you're not using HubSpot payments or whatever, like you can actually use the webhook functionality, you can use the, the format data functionality, you can use, um, the custom coded action functionality if you want to dive even that deep, um, but it's truly for all hubs, like, and I think one of the things that I really latched onto when a couple years ago, George did the super admin bootcamp, and I was, you know, a part of it.

Uh, for HubSpot, um, was that it's, you know, one tool, no hubs. I mean, it's truly one tool and you don't want to think about it in like, yeah, the hubs are like a way to talk about the feature sets and sell it, but like it all works together. That's why they call the darn thing, a customer platform. Right. I mean, that's what they're going for.

George B. Thomas: so here's a question for you, Max, you too, Chad, because again, you're speaking my language of like, hashtag no hubs,

Chad Hohn: Mm.

George B. Thomas: especially with operations hub. Do you feel it's more layers? Less hub.

Chad Hohn: Yeah. It's another layer, another layer of functionality on top for sure. It just basically, for me, it supercharges the functionality of all other hubs.

Max Cohen: I agree with that. Um, it is one of those things where it's very, while it is its own hub, it is hub agnostic in the way that it can have an impact. Right. Um, I think the thing I'd, I forget, I don't know what the original question was, cause I just came, I just came from the bus stop. Um,

George B. Thomas: So the original question was like, when do you need

Max Cohen: oh, when do you need it?

Cool.

George B. Thomas: when do you not need it? When do you need it? Was the original

Max Cohen: Yeah, absolutely. So if you're a HubSpot admin and you get slacks every single day saying, Hey, can you build a report that does this? Hey, you can build, you build a report that does this. Can you build a report that does this? I think like the most basic, amazing use of, of data sets is not. All the cool things you can do with like the, you know, custom formulas and like all this crazy stuff, the best thing you can do with it right off the bat is use it to enable those around you to be able to be, to make reporting more accessible to them.

Right? Like think about a scenario where you've got multiple teams inside of HubSpot, right? Well, If you haven't done a good job of managing things, um, you know, there's probably a really, really good chance that there's a billion properties across all different records that are relevant to some people and not relevant to others, right?

There's a million different nuances in the data on how things are labeled and how they're associated and what stages meet need mean what and what business units belong to what records and all these different things, right? And when you start to have a lot of teams doing a lot of different shit in HubSpot.

That starts, it makes it that much tougher for everyone else to build reports because they can't make sense of any of the data that's in there, right? What properties am I supposed to use? What's all the nuances around the way I should be filtering the data? So I'm only getting stuff that's, you know, uh, relevant to me, right?

Um, you know, and the coolest part about data sets Is that instead of just being like, don't worry, I'll build the reports because I understand the nuances of all the data and I know all the different properties that you use and this, that and the other thing, right? You can literally make it so when your team, exactly, you're the bottleneck, right?

You can, you can literally make it so that like people, when they go and build reports, they have their own data set they can work out of. That's going to pre filter the data, right? So they don't have to worry about filtering because no one's just going to understand that right off the bat. Right. And you can only give them access to the properties that are actually relevant to them.

So everything they see on that left hand side is stuff that makes sense. Right. Um, and yeah, and like, it just makes reporting so much more accessible to people around the organization. You can enable them to do reporting on their own because you're giving them Only the properties that they need, only the data that they need, you're filtering it in the right way.

And they don't have to think what's a primary versus a secondary data source. What's a, like, when should I be filtering on create date? Like, you know, you can just build a forum, right? And make it easy. And then so everyone can go in there and access their data and build reports. So I think that's one of the, like, if you're that, sorry, roundabout way of saying, like, if you're the admin, that's constantly getting like, you can't get through your day because people keep asking you how to build a report on XYZ.

Bro, get yourself some data sets immediately.

George B. Thomas: so Chad, I, I know I might get in trouble with Liz. Cause you know, there's, there's questions that we want to make sure we get through in the amount of time, but I saw you smiling and I, behind the scenes, I know that you're a data sets.

Chad Hohn: Love em.

George B. Thomas: So, so I'm giving you permission, uh, to take a couple of minutes to dive into the really deep end of where your brain goes and why you were smiling when Max was talking about data sets.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, well, I mean the first thing off the hop is that at Inbound this year, and I think I mentioned it before, but they brought it down to Ops Hub Pro. So what used to be, uh, base price, $2,800 a month add-on is now in Ops Pro for $800 a month. So you literally just saved two grand to have this now accessible feature that is fully customizable data sets, right?

Um, wow. And like, what is a data set? Well, a data set is, you know, for those who aren't super familiar with it, who maybe haven't bought OpsPro because do I need it? I don't know, right? Um, well, a data set is the ability to configure properties that you would like somebody to use and filters for that data only in that data set.

So you can create a data set that's designed for revenue reporting and a data set that's designed for lead source tracking. And your teams then can use that information accordingly, and if they need a new property, they have to reach out to you so you can add a new property to the data set if they're like missing something that they want.

But that's a whole lot easier than like having to build every single report. And I've seen people with their portals. Like people completely locked down their portals because their team can't figure out their like no joke, like multiple thousand deal properties, multiple thousand deal properties that people have had because they're trying to track so many data points.

And so they lock everybody out because even though they may have an enterprise portal, they haven't taken the time to segment the streams of data. To empower those end users to take a stab at reporting and reach out to you with questions if they have them right data sets allows you to empower your team to be able to answer these questions for themselves because you never ever want to be the bottleneck even working at a solutions agency like a partner agency.

I never worry about working myself out of a job where somebody is going to need me because there's always more I can teach them and then there's always more I can train them on how to do and empower them to be able to manage and handle their own portal, but then we get to focus on, you know, more of the cool stuff, right?

Is my thought.

George B. Thomas: I love how you just went about that because I think one, and then Liz, I promise I'll be quiet and you can go with the next question. Um, one, it's like, Hey, do this. To disable any chaos that may occur in your HubSpot portal based on X, Y, Z data reporting about things. The other thing is, Max was waxing poetic on a very, what felt like, complex thing. then in your response was like, but you can simplify said complex thing so that And here's the thing, when you don't have chaos, And you simplify the complex, guess what you get buy in and buy in is what everybody's looking for as far as the people in your organization and the way that you use this.

All right. So I'm actually going to jump in and I'm going to ask the next question so we can keep moving forward. Like. Over the last year, let's say, what are the, um, biggest improvements? What are, what are some of the biggest improvements you've seen in the last year, feature wise, uh, and usability wise around operations Hub,

Max Cohen: Oh, dude. Scheduled workflows. I know that wasn't in the last year, but I know it was,

Chad Hohn: It's amazing. That's amazing. Being able to run something once a day that all the deals that meet the criteria, all the contacts, yeah. That's that's

Max Cohen: That alone, that alone makes operations so pro worth it, in my personal opinion.

Chad Hohn: Oh, what? I mean, I've loved the webhooks in general. I mean, that's also far before this year, but being able to utilize webhooks, if you don't know what they are, just

Liz Moorehead: Yeah, because that's what I was going to ask, because I'm, I'm, I like, I got to be honest, I've been on multiple episodes with you jokers, and I love you all so much. And you're like, webhooks, webhooks. I'm like, yes, I know what web and hooks are. So for the five year olds in the audience, what does that

Max Cohen: Oh, wait, I have a good, I have a good analogy,

Chad Hohn: Okay. Yeah.

Max Cohen: Um, and then Chad, you can give yours. So.

George B. Thomas: of all, is it, is your analogy G rated?

Max Cohen: Oh, yeah, no,

George B. Thomas: Okay. Okay.

Max Cohen: I can make it R rated if you

Liz Moorehead: realize he said, yeah, no, totally. He said,

Max Cohen: I could make it.

Liz Moorehead: is not an

Max Cohen: I could make it NC 17 if I

Liz Moorehead: the producer, listen closely.

George B. Thomas: Ah,

Max Cohen: it's like, so Liz, so there is, sometimes it's, it's easier to understand, um, when you also like compare it to like what like an API is, right?

So like, when you're thinking about how, um, Like softwares connect to each other. I'm gonna tell you, right.

George B. Thomas: Wait, we used one, one nerd word to, to explain another nerd word, but I'll

Liz Moorehead: I know what an API is, at least. I at least know what an API is. I

Max Cohen: okay. All right. All right. So, so you've got an API, right? And API is something that a, a program makes available for other programs to go and request data from it. Yes, correct. Yep. It's the American Panda Institute, right? So, um, think of like using an API to like get data from another system.

Like you have to make a request where you have to go, Hey, is something happening? And then when you, when it comes back, like, you know, whether or not it did. So a good example of it, like an API request would be, let's say I was having a party. And Liz, stop, stop f ing laughing and listening to me. Liz,

Liz Moorehead: think I'm laughing?

Max Cohen: like, oh, because of what Chad's doing.

So think of it as like a party. So like an example of an API would be You have to call me every 10 minutes and ask if you're invited to the party, right? Um, and so if you want to know if you're invited to the party, well, you're gonna have to ask me in 10 minutes. So if you want to know, you're gonna have to keep asking me like, Max, am I invited to the party yet?

No. Max, am I invited to the party yet? No. Max, am I invited to the party yet? No. That's like an API call, right? Um, where like you request information, you get back a response, right? A webhook, sorry, a webhook would be what if you didn't have to ask for it? What if it could just tell you when you were invited?

Right? So like a webhook will basically, you know, shoot data out to another system, right? And the way they kind of explain it, and I'm not like a developer, right? So I might be speaking bullshit here in chat and catch me the way like apps, uh, use webhooks. They like subscribe to webhooks, right? It's like when you use.

HubSpot's webhooks API, right? You're basically subscribing to listen to things happening, right? So like you could say HubSpot, tell me every time a contact changes a certain property or tell me every time a deal gets created or tell me every time a company record gets created, right? Instead of. Yep, instead of asking HubSpot every single time, Hey, are there any more companies that got created?

Or I'll check in 10 minutes. Hey, are there any more companies created? It's more so HubSpot telling you. So HubSpot sending you a webhook when something happens versus you having to reach out and grab information. So in, in, in workflows, it allows you to. I think they call it send a webhook or trigger a webhook.

I can't remember

Chad Hohn: a webhook or you can make get requests as well. So you can retrieve data and you can send data.

Max Cohen: Yep. Um, so basically what it allows you to do is like, let's say you've got a bunch of data in HubSpot, right? And you want to send that data out to some other system, right? You can fire it off via a webhook and a workflow. And so it's really neat about that versus HubSpot's API.

Um, When you subscribe to webhooks and HubSpot, if you're some other app and you want to like, listen for certain things to happen, tell me every time a contact gets created, tell me every time a deal gets created, tell me every time a contact property changes, right? There's only certain types of events you can listen to happen, right?

It's like, most of the time, Chad, correct me if I'm wrong, it's like, create, delete, and um, And property change for most of

Chad Hohn: It's called CRUD operations. So create a read, update, delete, and in HubSpot, you also get merge, which is very helpful.

Max Cohen: it can listen for these, like, certain very specific things to happen to records. The cool thing about being able to trigger that through a workflow is in HubSpot, you can build a workflow that triggers off of frickin anything happening, right?

Any sort of unique Event thing that took place, whatever you can do to trigger a workflow, you can then make it fire off a webhook somewhere, right? So it's, it's like a more surgical way of, of being able to listen to webhooks from HubSpot. If you're sending data into like a different system.

George B. Thomas: So,

Max Cohen: I do an okay job at explaining that for?

Chad Hohn: Yeah, I think that was really good. And I think there's

Liz Moorehead: I actually get it. Yes.

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

Max Cohen: Sick.

Chad Hohn: It's event based. I think is.

George B. Thomas: is, Maxim, am I invited to the party yet? Oh,

Max Cohen: I'll tell you what you are though.

Chad Hohn: in 10 minutes. Yes.

Max Cohen: to the party. Actually. No, I just web hooked you. You're invited to the party. Yeah. Yeah.

Chad Hohn: how it is.

George B. Thomas: and I learned what crud is. Um, so,

Chad Hohn: Yep, you thought. Right. There you go. Yeah, I think, um, It's like a push notification on your phone. Just think of it like that. It's literally like, hi, this thing happened. There you go. It happened right now.

Max Cohen: That's actually a really good example. Instead of you having to go check Facebook, Facebook is just like sending you the information.

Chad Hohn: to bring you back to the platform.

Max Cohen: though the algorithm

Liz Moorehead: let me know that somebody in a Facebook group

George B. Thomas: Oh, here we go.

Max Cohen: Yeah,

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

Max Cohen: yeah,

Chad Hohn: So here's the other distinction and Max, I don't know if you, I don't know if you know this yet, buddy. All

George B. Thomas: Uh oh.

Chad Hohn: Do you know, did you know that private app webhooks now support every object including custom objects, okay, you did a

Max Cohen: but except for public apps.

Chad Hohn: yeah. Except for, well, I thought public apps were going to get that.

Max Cohen: I didn't get it yet.

Chad Hohn: They didn't get it. Okay. So this it's on the roadmap,

Max Cohen: did, I would have been losing my mind about it on LinkedIn. They said they were gonna. We don't know what it is though.

Chad Hohn: At least I heard that could be a thing

Max Cohen: no, I'm sure. Yeah, it's always going to start in. It's always going to start in private, private apps. Um,

Chad Hohn: here's the other thing about a web hook and just, we can get off this topic after this, but like be like when a private app and a HubSpot private app is like your ability to create either an API connection to your HubSpot or a web subscription.

Just to a HubSpot portal that gives you special keys that you can, you know, access that data with, um, it allows you to be notified of what object ID and what thing happened. Okay. But with a HubSpot workflow webhook, you can create your own custom set of information. Including, and this is one that actually getting back to one of the biggest improvements that I've seen in the last year is the associated data panel.

So like in a workflow, you could say, I am on a deal, but I want to retrieve the most recently updated company. From this deal and grab some properties from there and bring it into this deal workflow. Okay, so you get associated object information in your workflow, and then you can create a webhook payload.

From multiple data sources and send that off to provide an event based trigger to another system. That's particularly helpful.

Liz Moorehead: I just have a cute collection of nerds here and you're all so happy. And that makes me happy. But moving on. Okay. I have to know though. I love this like big nerd love fest we're having over OpsHub, right? And I think we're bringing a lot of clarity to who it's for, who it's not for the fact that it's criminally underused.

Like you should have it. However, however, I need to know from you, are there any current downsides or anywhere where you see currently HubSpot is. Either failing to deliver on its promise or we're just not quite there yet.

Chad Hohn: I have one.

George B. Thomas: Is that what you're asking on this one or just,

Liz Moorehead: That's the optimistic way of looking at it. It also could be like, Hey guys, we have a problem here.

George B. Thomas: Okay. All right.

Chad Hohn: like for me, I mean, things that push me out of workflows into external automation platforms is things like being able to search. Or information either as the start of a workflow to trigger it or in a workflow to search for information because what you get right now is like the most recently associated thingy.

Or the most recently updated contact or the first created, whatever, right? You get that. You get one thing with it's one set of properties. But what if I wanted to grab the most recently, you know, the most recently updated meeting and then all of its contacts and then send an email to every single one of the contacts.

Well, you need what's called a loop or a for loop or in programming and basically like this would be like Iterating through like an array In programming world, right? And so like basically an array all it is is like here's my contact Except this is one thingy where I have ten contacts in the thingy and I just loop through all ten of them until I run Out, right?

That's what you would need to be able to do in a HubSpot workflow. Uh, otherwise it's going to push you into other systems like make. com or Zapier or trade. io or something that can support looping of data.

George B. Thomas: Do you, do you, do you ever see that? Do you think that's a thing that HubSpot might be paying attention to or not paying attention to at all? I

Chad Hohn: I think that it hasn't been super, super D high on their priority list. Um, but. It is something that they know that they're lacking. Like I've spoken with people in like workflows and ops land before. And they know that they need some of that, but I don't think that particular thing is super high on the priority list.

Cause I think a lot of people, even the nerds would, unless they're particularly familiar with how to write code would really dive into that. Right. Or at least how code works. Like I'm, I am no developer, right. But I understand code, if that makes sense. And so

Max Cohen: you're a

Chad Hohn: a lot, no, I'm a wannabe developer, dude.

Like, definitely a wannabe. With ChatGPT, I can get some stuff done, you know, but

George B. Thomas: like I'm a wannabe developer. I think you're more than a wannabe developer just, but

Chad Hohn: Maybe, maybe entry level then, if we're, you know, if we're gonna be

Max Cohen: sorry. Hold on. This dude whipped out a Wi Fi analyzer over at inbound when we were walking around and telling me about the

Liz Moorehead: Are you for real?

Max Cohen: And yeah Listen, this guy's saying he can't this guy's saying I'm not a developer, but he's definitely building apps in his free time I guarantee

George B. Thomas: So this is why I go back to the first thing that we talked about. This is why I love chat. This is why chat is on the show. Anybody who has a wifi detector at an event and is getting that nerdy. I say yes,

Max Cohen: a star link in his backpack.

Chad Hohn: Yeah, my wife likes to make fun of me for this one. I got rejected from being able to go to Disneyland one time, because I had an iFixit toolkit in my backpack, and they wouldn't let me through, because it had like, pokey things.

George B. Thomas: Oh,

Max Cohen: weird.

Liz Moorehead: just reiterate once again his spooky printer?

Chad Hohn: Yes

George B. Thomas: Yeah.

Liz Moorehead: to put it in the show notes because we've talked about it now in like three different episodes and the people deserve to see what is happening.

Max Cohen: can spooky printer get a hub heroes character

Chad Hohn: Spooky

George B. Thomas: would be, that would be

Max Cohen: just like printer, man?

George B. Thomas: the rock or printer man or something.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Let me find it.

Chad Hohn: So good,

Max Cohen: Um,

Chad Hohn: yeah

Liz Moorehead: I love the copy scan, man. I love it.

Max Cohen: you know,

Liz Moorehead: your favorite feature though? What do we like? What makes us happy? What, what sparks joy in Ops Hub?

Max Cohen: I love, I love the, uh, well, besides, I mean, besides, uh, the scheduled workflows thing, uh, just the format data is so sick.

Chad Hohn: It's so useful.

Max Cohen: I mean, lately I've been seeing it a lot with like event happily.

Chad Hohn: Mm hmm.

Max Cohen: things that are complicated when it comes to things like, um, like how companies display, uh, time in like emails, right?

So like we have, Oh, I was working on this with, uh, and over there a while

Chad Hohn: Yeah.

Max Cohen: Um, whereas like, you know, HubSpot has this, you know, fun thing on, in terms of like the way they store, Uh, dates and times in fields and stuff like that. And when you, when you start to think about, oh, if I'm like sending out emails or like displaying a time somewhere, uh, things get really weird and freaky when it comes to things like time zones.

Right? Because it's like, oh, yeah, especially when it's like the event stuff. Right. And so like, I love it because, you know, we can take whatever time code that like HubSpot stores a time in. Right. And then we're able to. Turn that into, um, you know, a, like reformat it into like a different way to, yeah, different time zone, different time format.

Right. Which is really neat. But the reason I bring this one up is because there's a really recent update that actually, um, is very, very exciting that I think. I don't think this is, this is not necessarily an operations hub thing, right? But it, it, it plays really well into that. So I don't know if any of you guys caught the update recently where marketing emails can now leverage custom properties that aren't just properties from your objects. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Yeah.

Max Cohen: So for anyone who doesn't know this, um, this all goes back to transactional email in HubSpot, right? And so if you guys know what transactional email is, transactional email is. When you want to send an email that's not of a marketing nature, but it's more of like a legal update, an account update, a something like a

Chad Hohn: they can't unsubscribe,

Max Cohen: Yeah, you can't unsubscribe and you can send it to people who aren't subscribed to you, right? And the thing is, is like legally there's only certain types of emails you can do that without having any repercussions, right? So in transactional email and HubSpot has had this for a while. They had this thing called the single send API.

It was one of the methods in which you could send a transactional email. And what the single send API was basically, you could build an email in HubSpot, but some outside system Could tell HubSpot to send said email. But the other really neat, tricky thing that it did is in that same request that your outside system would send to HubSpot to trigger that email to be sent.

It could also pass through. Some key value pairs of like properties and values that would

Chad Hohn: Some non

Max Cohen: into the meat. Yep.

Chad Hohn: HubSpot data from an external source

Max Cohen: Yep. So like, let's pretend you had data that you didn't want to store as HubSpot properties, right? Like maybe it was something more sensitive, like a receipt, um, or like some kind of a sensitive account number or something like that, right?

Information you didn't want to

Chad Hohn: sensitive data whatnots. Right.

Max Cohen: Yes. Yes. But even though with sensitive data, if you're not going to use that data in HubSpot, why store

Chad Hohn: need to store it

Max Cohen: right? And so your outside system, maybe it's your app, maybe it's your POS system, maybe it's your whatever, could use this API to basically say, Hey, HubSpot, send this specific email that you have stored inside you.

To this specific email address. Oh, and also here's a bunch of properties. I want you to dump into the email, right? And the way that you would do this is you'd write double bracket custom dot name of whatever the property is that the API would send over. And just like a personalization token. From a property in HubSpot, it would change those values.

Now, Marketing Hub recently, recently, I don't know, maybe it was a year ago, did single send API for marketing emails, which was really, really big. But now what you can do is you can still do that same like custom dot name of property thing, but you can use those in workflows and suck data. Out of something like a format data action to then dump into an email.

So here's the roundabout example I'm giving, right? Let's use the example of like, okay. Um, when we send out our emails to people, um, we want to make sure we tell them the time of the event. In whatever their time zone is, right? Whatever. So what you can do, you, what would you, you would usually have to do is like, you'd have to take the date time that it's stored in, and then you'd have to build a separate like single line text field property to hold whatever the converted like time format, like end result would be right.

And then what you'd have to do is you'd have to format data, stuff it into this other action. And then use that, or there's not an action, this other field, and then use that field in an email. Whereas now you can just have these custom like properties that don't exist in HubSpot, like as a field or anything, and it can literally use actions from like format data, workflow actions, or.

Custom coded workflow actions, both operations hub thing and inject those values into emails that the workflow is sending. Right? So you eliminate all these other steps of having to like unnecessarily store this data. And that gets especially tricky if I want to like Reformat the data into four or five different time zones, right?

Cause then I'm making four or five different properties and then four or five different emails that have the different properties in it. And that's like asinine. Whereas I could just literally just do it within actions inside of HubSpot or in a workflow and just shove it into these custom fields. It's so sick.

Chad Hohn: Yeah,

George B. Thomas: is an interesting thing because I bumped into the thing that you're talking about earlier this morning. And I hadn't seen it before. Like I was, I was in marketing email and I was in the actions dropdown, which, you know, usually you see like convert to regular email, convert to automated email. Uh, now, now I have, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Now I happen to be testing the new, by the way, uh, Email responsive design beta.

Chad Hohn: yeah.

George B. Thomas: Okay. When I was like, I need to check this out because now I can do responsive emails based on mobile or desktop. Holy crap. That means a lot. And it's probably a whole nother episode, but in a dropdown it's there's literally now convert to single send API.

Instead of just convert to automated email or convert to regular email. So it's interesting that to me, that's a sign of what you guys are talking about on the nerdy side is coming mainstream to an email tool called HubSpot like now, or in the very near

Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, because what was always traditionally difficult, like Max was talking about, is even if you have OpsHub, formatting that date time to the prospect or the attendee's time zone. Is difficult. Because you need to know where they're from, right? And if that's unknown, you need to set up some like default logic to say, this is the time that it's in if we don't know your time zone and to format the text of the email differently.

So anyway, all that to say, uh, yeah, it is, it's super, super helpful to be able to handle any kind of stuff like that. Like, if you want to make your own reminder emails in HubSpot, Um, rather than just using HubSpot's meeting reminder emails, which are pretty limited. They've gotten way better, actually. I don't know if you guys know, you can go customize those and include like a Zoom meeting link in them now.

If you go out there, it's a meeting location. And then, you know, so those never used to be customizable. They were just what they were, and that was it, right?

George B. Thomas: good

Liz Moorehead: Okay. Nerds. Nerds. All right. Time to land the plane.

George B. Thomas: Yeah,

Liz Moorehead: George,

Chad Hohn: keep going at this for a long time.

George B. Thomas: I know.

Liz Moorehead: I had no idea. I, I too have been a champion of webhooks for all time. I've loved them forever. Big fan.

Chad Hohn: I'm sure you have, yeah. Hey,

Liz Moorehead: think, yep, at the, and the American Panda Institute. Absolutely.

Chad Hohn: Since we're landing the

Max Cohen: wifi dude? How's your wifi right now? How's your

Chad Hohn: so good.

Max Cohen: Yeah, dude, it

Chad Hohn: just upgraded to symmetrical two gigabit hard

Max Cohen: Yeah. Me too, dude. Me too.

Liz Moorehead: my god. So George, hi. Hi.

Max Cohen: What is this guy talking about?

George B. Thomas: know, you know what

Liz Moorehead: have one question for

George B. Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Max Cohen: Did you, did you also upgrade to isometric two way gigabit or whatever? That's my

Chad Hohn: Yeah. I have symmetric. Oh,

George B. Thomas: I have not upgraded to any

Max Cohen: two gigabit. Yeah,

George B. Thomas: pseudo cubicle Wi

Chad Hohn: we got a two, 2.5 gig. Hard line

Max Cohen: no, come on, man. What's Liz's actual question?

Liz Moorehead: so George, speaking of which, so glad you brought that up.

George B. Thomas: yeah,

Liz Moorehead: All right, guys, George, I actually want you to land the plane and bring us home with one question because we have talked a lot today about who this is for, who this isn't for the fact that people should have it. There are use cases where it's like, hey, maybe this isn't the right time.

So I'd love for you to speak directly to our audience. Those were operations is either top of mind or it should be. What is the one thing you want them walking away from this episode with?

George B. Thomas: yeah. Um, no amount of money should stop you from efficiency.

it's funny because I, I go back to where we talked in this, this episode about like, if you can afford it, sometimes there's things in life where it's like, you, you Can't not afford it. Right. And I think operations quickly falls into one of those.

It's funny. I was doing a super admin training today on data hygiene, and we started to talk about the mathematics of dirty data when it comes to a sales team and like the average sales rep making 60, 000 a year. And if they spend 10 percent of their day in dirt dealing with dirty data, that's, you know, 6, 000 and times 10 reps.

And all of a sudden now two things are true. One operations hub doesn't look that expensive and also breeze credits don't look that expensive when you're talking about making sure that you have clean data and a efficient system. Right. So, so if you start to think about that, no amount of money should stop you from creating an efficient system inside a hub spot.

That's what I would hope that you would take away. And also, uh, the second piece of that is you don't have to be a nerd to get immediate benefit. Out of it, but it may lean you into becoming or wanting to bring on a nerd to help you get even more out of it.

Liz Moorehead: Chad, any final words for our, for our beautiful listeners at home? Do you, or do we want to scan, print or copy scan man to see how he's doing?

Chad Hohn: Should we

Max Cohen: I'm doing great. I'm a printer.

George B. Thomas: bop boop.

Chad Hohn: Sorry, I was moved, for those listening, I was moving my mic over to the glowy printer.

Max Cohen: I want to, HubSpot reps listening to this.

George B. Thomas: Uh oh.

Liz Moorehead: Uh oh.

George B. Thomas: Should I stop it now?

Max Cohen: No, don't. Cause they all need to hear it. Uh, guys, when you, when you, here's, here's what you don't do, right? When, when, when, when a customer asks, do you integrate with something or I need, can it integrate with my XYZ? The answer is not. Yeah, you just need Operations Hub.

That is not the

Chad Hohn: no, you don't even need that at all!

Max Cohen: that is not the answer. Okay? Um, so, stop doing that. Stop doing that. Don't do that.