Liz Moorehead
This week, HubHeroes welcomes back Bastien Paul, CEO of HubLead.io, for another no-nonsense conversation about the reality of sales teams using HubSpot. Last time, we hashed out the contentious SQL debate between marketing and sales, so you already know he has a strong perspective on how salespeople should be using technology—especially when it comes to automation, CRM adoption, and making LinkedIn a true sales channel.
But this time, Bastien and Chad dig into the gaps that still exist in HubSpot’s sales tools, the AI-driven future of prospecting, and the practical steps teams can take to close more deals with less friction.
🔎 Go Deeper: The Contentious SQL Debate Between Marketing + Sales (with Bastien Paul)
One of the biggest challenges sales teams face isn’t a lack of tools—it’s knowing which ones actually make them more effective. From missing sales data to automation that overwhelms instead of enables, Bastien and Chad unpack the common pitfalls that prevent teams from fully leveraging HubSpot’s CRM. They explore the disconnect between sales and marketing when it comes to lead handoffs, why manual data entry is still a massive hurdle, and how AI-powered solutions can bridge the gap (but only when used strategically).
The conversation also gets highly tactical, covering everything from best practices for integrating LinkedIn sales activity into HubSpot to how to evaluate which third-party sales tools are actually worth the investment. Bastien shares insights on how AI can improve sales prospecting without losing the human element, how teams can create cleaner data pipelines to fuel better automation, and why relying solely on AI for sales outreach can backfire.
If you’ve ever wondered how to cut through the noise and make your tech stack actually work for your sales team, this is the episode for you.
Keywords
sales automation, HubSpot, AI, CRM, integrations, email marketing, data management, sales tools, Hublead, data ownership, LinkedIn sales, sales processes, HubSpot integrations, CRM strategies
What We Cover
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Why Sales Teams Struggle with HubSpot Automation: Many sales teams are still spending too much time on manual data entry. Bastien and Chad break down why this happens and how to create automation that actually helps reps sell instead of just adding noise.
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AI and Sales: Where It Helps and Where It Doesn’t: AI is changing the game in sales, but it’s not a magic bullet. They discuss when AI-driven tools can be useful—like summarizing calls and automating follow-ups—and where human judgment is still critical.
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The Power of LinkedIn Sales Activity in HubSpot: Bastien shares why tracking LinkedIn conversations, invitations, and engagement inside HubSpot can be a game-changer for outbound sales and nurturing relationships over time.
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Choosing the Right Sales Tech Stack: With so many integrations and tools available, how do you know what’s worth the investment? They explore a simple framework for evaluating which HubSpot-native and third-party tools actually drive sales success.
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Where Sales Data Falls Apart (and How to Fix It): Bad data is one of the biggest roadblocks to effective automation. They discuss strategies for keeping CRM data clean, structured, and actionable—so your workflows and reports actually work.
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How to Get Sales Reps to Actually Use the Tools You Give Them: Sales adoption is one of the biggest hurdles when rolling out new technology. Bastien and Chad share practical tips for getting sales teams to embrace automation without feeling like they’re just being micromanaged.
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The Future of Sales Tech in HubSpot: What’s next for sales technology? From AI-driven personalization to deeper CRM integrations, they look ahead at what sales teams should be paying attention to this year.
And so much more ...
Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Liz Moorehead: Chad, it's just you and me.
[00:00:02] Chad Hohn: Yeah. Can we land the plane? That's the question.
[00:00:05] Liz Moorehead: I have the, I have the, I have the plane landing button this time.
[00:00:09] Chad Hohn: Okay, good.
[00:00:10] Liz Moorehead: So I know
[00:00:11] Chad Hohn: you have the plane lander, then we're good.
[00:00:13] Liz Moorehead: I'm very happy about that. But
[00:00:14] Chad Hohn: Yeah.
[00:00:15] Liz Moorehead: now that we've really done a deep dive into a case study of what it means to be a professional in podcasting, welcome back to another episode of the Hub Heroes podcast. Uh, what I am really excited about today is that we've got our guy, Bastian Paul back from hubly.
[00:00:34] io. How are you doing
[00:00:36] Chad Hohn: Yeah. Welcome back.
[00:00:38] Bastien Paul: Thanks. Thanks guys for having me to again. And this time I took my headset to have a better sound with the mic.
[00:00:46] Liz Moorehead: Ooh.
[00:00:47] Bastien Paul: It was for the PlayStation 5 at the beginning for the headset, but it works also on Mac. So, so that's perfect. I say
[00:00:54] Liz Moorehead: could like seamlessly transition after this? Yeah.
[00:00:58] Bastien Paul: kind of business expense, but for purpose. What? Sorry? Liz?
[00:01:02] Liz Moorehead: I said, is that what that crunching noise was? The crushing
[00:01:04] Chad Hohn: Yeah. I said it sounded like he's crushing noobs. Yeah.
[00:01:08] Bastien Paul: You're crushing noobs. I think I'm more crushed by boys 14 years old now than before, you know?
[00:01:17] Liz Moorehead: Oh, man.
[00:01:18] Bastien Paul: I don't want to hear their voice, you know?
[00:01:20] Chad Hohn: Yeah, well, you know, there is something about when you're just a teenager, how good you are at video games for no apparent reason.
[00:01:28] Liz Moorehead: Bastion, I'm hearing some trauma in your voice. Do you need hug or perhaps the consult of a
[00:01:33] Bastien Paul: yeah, when I will come back in the US, I will ask you for helping me, guys.
[00:01:39] Liz Moorehead: Oh my gosh. It's incredible. Well, Bastien, for those of you, for those of our audience members who may have missed you the first time around, can you tell us a little about yourself? Who you are? What you do? Other than crushing noobs and crying about 14 year olds.
[00:01:57] Bastien Paul: Obviously, the audience heard that I'm French. So, I live in France, Paris. It's pretty cold here. And, uh, CEO and co founder of HubLead. HubLead is, um, a Chrome extension to track, uh, sales activities from LinkedIn inside HubSpot. So we are doing, like, kind of HubSpot LinkedIn integration. And, uh, in a few words, you can import contacts, conversation, invitation, activities inside HubSpot and draw the, uh, incredible, I would say, incredible dashboard, report, list, whatever you want, uh, with LinkedIn activities inside HubSpot.
[00:02:34] Chad Hohn: hey, everybody. Uh, yeah. So. Uh, Liz's connections, uh, cutting out a little bit there.
[00:02:39] So, uh, she's turned off her camera, but she's still here for the episode. Uh, but just thanks so much Bastion for, uh, giving us a, you know, uh, intro, uh, to, you know, what it was that you talked about last time. Um, it's definitely really awesome to have that LinkedIn activity inside of your HubSpot. I mean, really having everything completely in HubSpot is the most important thing if you want to be able to truly report on your sales activities, like you guys, you know, do.
[00:03:06] So super important piece for people who are leveraging LinkedIn as a platform. Um, and we couldn't be more excited to have you back.
[00:03:14] Bastien Paul: Thanks, thanks for having me. Excited too. Last time it was a good talk, so I think we have, we have a good talk now.
[00:03:21] Chad Hohn: Yep. you want to move? Should we move on to the next one?
[00:03:24] Liz Moorehead: Yeah. Hi, can you hear me okay?
[00:03:26] Chad Hohn: Yep. Yeah. We can hear you. Great. Um, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, one of the things that we've heard a lot is, you know, from other sales teams is that they really struggle to happen to like HubSpot's automation and CRM functionality. Right. And, uh, to allow those automations to increase their selling time rather than just spending time manually managing their data.
[00:03:53] Um, you know, why do you think that is? And is this something that, you know, can be fixed in the, in the sales team land?
[00:04:00] Bastien Paul: I guess like you can bring a lot of data and since you have ai now you can do a lot of automation really easily, especially with ai. Like you can create your own charge, GPT, custom, GPT, or you can create now custom GPT by IPI. So you can create specialized GPT with your knowledge, press accessing some, some knowledge and performing API, uh, requests for you so you can really trigger some automation at the end.
[00:04:28] They access to the data online, but they can't access to your data. So you have to, uh, to have let them the opportunity to access to your data. And I think today, yeah, it's the major thing, the major problem. I think you will be with me on this one. But it's that, like, most of automation and workflows don't work because data is missing in the CRM or data is not up to date.
[00:04:52] Chad Hohn: Like missing from the front end, like data entry standpoint on the front end or just in general, right?
[00:04:58] Bastien Paul: yeah, I mean, like, as we spoke last time, like, for example, salespeople and marketing people don't speak the same language. Like, salespeople prefer to, when you, when you hire salespeople, what you want to maximize is time spent on the phone speaking with customers. You don't want to maximize, you don't want them to, to do the data entry.
[00:05:16] And of course, like, for example, when I'm doing sales call, I don't want to do data entry too. I just want to perform and say the best pitch, I don't say, or space pitch, as
[00:05:26] Chad Hohn: with the customer, right?
[00:05:27] Bastien Paul: Yeah, sure. Asking the best question, you know,
[00:05:30] Chad Hohn: Mm hmm.
[00:05:30] Bastien Paul: and so at the end, you, you, you, you might miss some data to, if you want to do automated follow up post demo, uh, task.
[00:05:39] And if you do. automation that doesn't work, that based on the wrong data, you might over task your salespeople with the wrong tasks or at the end, they don't like the tasks they get, you know, and they were like, Hey, HubSpot is working against me and not with me. And, and if you
[00:05:55] Chad Hohn: Yeah. We've all heard that before.
[00:05:57] Bastien Paul: yeah, yeah.
[00:05:58] You know, like the sales adoption is really hard, uh, when you have too much automation. So, and at the end, you will remove that kind of automation and you lose the benefit of having HubSpot. Going back to do everything manually.
[00:06:12] Chad Hohn: Mm hmm.
[00:06:12] Bastien Paul: So I think, yeah, from the front end, we do have a problem, but with AI, we're maybe more into like, using that just for mining the information from sales call, because you get more and more information now.
[00:06:27] And this is tolerable and this is more accessible. But before, you didn't know how to treat them, how to transform that. And now you have some possibilities. Like, last time, I wanted to, for every call I made Uh, create, get the transcript, of course, having to log inside the spot, but maybe having some properties feed automatically, or a next task created automatically, plus an email personalized, you know.
[00:06:55] Chad Hohn: hmm.
[00:06:56] Bastien Paul: But this was, again, a bit tricky to, to implement. Uh, didn't find, if you have any ideas, I'm, I'm all over it. But I didn't find any tool or simple way to do that, you know.
[00:07:09] Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, I think, uh, one of the, just to HubSpot tech thing, since I'm the HubSpot tech guy, uh, they just recently launched call based workflows, right. Which is actually a really, really cool thing. So like you can trigger a workflow. When call properties are updated, so let's say like when the recording URL is known or when the transcript is complete, you can start a workflow now and then you could theoretically run that through a GPT and identify pain points and then put that into a property and then run that same transcript through another GPT identifying something else, right?
[00:07:49] Um, but like that's a huge step in the right direction when it comes to being able to try and alleviate some of like the bulk data that just gets stored in your sales calls or in your meetings. Right,
[00:08:03] Bastien Paul: Yeah, and I think I think when, when, when you, when you're doing sales call or CSM kind of when you're speaking with clients as a client, you expect that person in front of you to have all this information and the next step, you know, uh, you don't want to spend your time to re explain what you're looking for, what is your use issue or so on.
[00:08:27] Normally CRM has been invented for that, you know, so I think, for example, this kind of automation should be one of the main thing to do right away because you will save a ton of time because every rep going back to the company, knowing like, okay, what did we do with this company? What was the last time we contacted and so on?
[00:08:50] And, um, you see some opportunities and these opportunities are easier to implement that before.
[00:08:56] Chad Hohn: Right.
[00:08:57] Bastien Paul: still hard to get the data, be sure the data is correct, and then transform it. It's
[00:09:02] Chad Hohn: Well, and to make sure it's in front of the right people at the right time, because just because it's in your activity timeline doesn't mean that somebody's going to go dig through it. Or even if it's in a couple of properties in your hub spot. That doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to benefit somebody unless, you know, you have really thorough training processes and things like that.
[00:09:24] But yeah, man, I think, uh, when, when you were saying like, oh yeah, even in customer success or when you're talking with clients, they expect you to know the last thing you talked about. Like, I mean, how frustrating is it to call, like, CenturyLink internet support, and then they have no clue who you are, you just got disconnected five seconds ago, you know, and then you have to call them back and re explain your whole life story about this thing that's going on.
[00:09:50] Good gravy, man. Is that just frustrating? You know, like, it's just so, cause like, it's just such an awful user experience on the customer side and like when it comes to support, but even sales, it's like, oh yeah, well, your buddy just called me if you have more than one sales rep working leads. Right. I mean, that's frustrating too.
[00:10:09] Right.
[00:10:10] Bastien Paul: yeah, sure. Like, uh, it's so funny we speak about that because last Friday for one week, I was still, I was trying to reopen an account, um, for a content tool that I closed like one month ago and I wanted to reopen, to reopen it. And I tried to reach out to the support team, no answer. It was really hard and so on.
[00:10:29] I, I, I, at the end, I got someone tell me like, yeah, someone will call back on Friday. Someone call back, explain all, everything. I know I have and he say, okay, you have to see with your content and so on. We cannot unlock that for you. Fair enough. And this morning I received a call at 10 a. m. by the same guy telling me like, uh, did I answer to you?
[00:10:54] I say, okay, man, no, no, no. Take your note, do something. You know, but after like the, um, The, the, the, the, the opinion you will have to the brand after you can, you, you speak to your friend and say, yeah, this brand is good, but that support is, is not good. And so, and this will affect the brand, you know? So, so I think like, uh, yeah, especially for sales, uh, of course, because this is the first touch point when you're, when you're prospecting, but, uh, of course for the customer service, it's really important.
[00:11:23] Chad Hohn: Yeah, a hundred percent. Well, when it comes to like HubSpot in general, one of the things that HubSpot really has a ton of is integrations, right? And because of their super robust API, as well as their integrations platform and how they support app partners. Um, I'm sure Max will have something to say about this.
[00:11:41] It's too bad that he's not here, but how they, they try to do their absolute best to support app partners as much as they can. I'm sure there's small gripes in there between we need this and we need that, you know, and I totally, totally understand that. Um, because roofing business partner also has like one public app that we support.
[00:11:59] Uh, so I get it, you know, but, um, they do have a, like compared to most, any other CRM, I mean, they're definitely industry leading, if not the leader, uh, when it comes to the like robust ecosystem of integrations, right. What are like. E tools or integrations that teams should prior to prioritize. And obviously I know hub lead is in there, but is there anything else you've seen?
[00:12:24] And then we absolutely, I think we should talk about a bleed in that, in that, uh, stack for people in that particular B2B space, right?
[00:12:32] Bastien Paul: Yeah, sure. Like, um, as you said, first of all, the integration is way easier than plenty of other CRMs. Of course, compared to Salesforce, there is no, uh, no talk about that. Like Salesforce is something horrible when you want to integrate, but
[00:12:50] Chad Hohn: Yeah. Well, it's cause they're like so many different chunks of softwares that make up the software. That's what makes it difficult. I think it's siloed.
[00:12:58] Bastien Paul: really hard. Yeah. Yeah. It's very siloed and, um, have split documentation. It's kind of accessible. It's really straightforward. Uh, so integration is way, way easier,
[00:13:11] Chad Hohn: Mhm. Right.
[00:13:12] Bastien Paul: tool. So first of all, before picking the tools, I think one of the most important things, sales people or sales team, rev up seems I want to implement new tools or.
[00:13:24] Um, going on, going to upset, for example, they need to redefine what are their needs. Uh, but also that's the strategy, you know, like for example, the sales tax, sales tax, sorry, won't be the same if you want to talk with 10, 000 customer a year or 1000, for example. And I think, I think the point of targeting how many people, how many companies, sorry, we want to speak with per year is something really interesting.
[00:13:52] Uh, because. Like, for example, you, you, if you say like, I have, uh, I want to have 10 clients for that. I have, I have to have 100 deals for that. I have to have 100 companies. So I need to speak with 1, 000 new companies per month. That's
[00:14:10] Chad Hohn: Right.
[00:14:11] Bastien Paul: because at the end in three or four months, you will speak with the same company.
[00:14:15] You spoke again, like in January, for example. So it's more about like how many companies you want to outreach on one year. And then you can select the right tools. Uh, so if you, if you aim for, like, I don't know, you have like two, three sales team top, maybe five top, uh, and your market is kind of big or so, uh, your time, total addressable market is kind of high.
[00:14:40] Uh, I think you can go for like Lameless or a gross machine for email, LinkedIn automation. You have also some LinkedIn automation, uh, tool. Doing only that, like Wallet scene, they have a good integration with, with HubSpot. Uh, you can like sync your emails, LinkedIn, uh, outcome and so on inside HubSpot.
[00:14:59] Actually, we, we are using your LameList, uh, with HubLead. And, um, so these automation are really good. And of course, uh, for finding phone numbers, of course you have HubLead, but you can use also Casper, Lucia. If you want to do cold calling, that's, that's. kind of mandatory, I guess.
[00:15:19] Chad Hohn: Mhm.
[00:15:20] Bastien Paul: for if you want to do some, if you're doing a lot of email automation, I will suggest to have an outbound, an email warmup, you know, this kind of tools
[00:15:29] Chad Hohn: Mhm.
[00:15:30] Bastien Paul: up your, your emails.
[00:15:31] Chad Hohn: Mhm. Like, I've heard of like, Mailgun or some different email warmup tools basically just trying to get Your email domain, and just for like people, and you know, who may never have heard of this before, but to make sure that your domain isn't immediately flagged as spam, because it just came out of nowhere.
[00:15:50] And then all of a sudden started sending a thousand emails and boom, insta spam. So you got to like kind of send a few emails and then a few emails and then a few emails and a little more emails. And then it warms up that so that all the servers don't just immediately flag you as spam. So just for, for people who've never had that.
[00:16:08] Bastien Paul: For, for HubLead we use MailRidge. So, but there are also others. It's really important. It's kind of a bit expensive when you, you're adding the cost, you know, when you have like four, five, six emails. But if you're sending emails, if you have one email, one domain that is in spam, you're at the end losing money.
[00:16:26] So, that's really important to have it. Um,
[00:16:31] Chad Hohn: you got to protect your main domain. I mean, I think that's something that people don't really think about as much
[00:16:36] Bastien Paul: this one don't
[00:16:37] Chad Hohn: using HubSpot. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, you can use your, um, you know, your HubSpot email health tool, and you really need to make sure that it's only your people that, you know, need to hear from you with your, you know, within your HubSpot.
[00:16:54] Right. Those are the people who are like, they're already buying things from you or, you know, stuff like that. And you're not bothering them too much. Right. Cause you really got to protect that main domain.
[00:17:05] Bastien Paul: Yeah, main domain, you shouldn't do like, uh, of course if you're, if you're starting, you can do some automation, but Not, not so much, but at the end, like for, for Hubliet. io, we don't do any automation on it. Uh, because if you're getting spam and you want to speak with your customer, you will be, uh, it will be a bummer if you have your tech team emails that were key internally, something like that.
[00:17:28] It will be, uh, you, you will have some people against you at the end of the day. So you have to be careful. And, and like, for me, the. Again, depending of your time and how many people you want to target a month on the yearly basis. If you want to source companies, of course, if you're going to like most of our clients and prospect are using LinkedIn and LinkedIn says available to find, uh, companies to target.
[00:17:56] No, but I'm not sure for, for these tools for, for this, um, sorry, step. I don't, I don't have any, uh. preference in terms of sales tag? Because I do have a preference for having something that is scrapping LinkedIn Sales Navigator on a daily basis. Why? Because for me, this is the primary database in the world and you cannot get, uh, closer to the truth with this platform, with another platform, but you can, of course, harder to scrap.
[00:18:30] So you can use Apollo, you can use Clay and so on, or AI agent, uh, to Create your companies and so on. So for the beginning, I do advise, uh, most of my customers, I do advise them to use clay or things like that. Uh, especially if your time is big and you don't have a lot, like for example, your time is, I don't know, 10 million companies and you want to switch only 10k companies per year.
[00:18:54] You don't care to have this kind of big database, you know. But for us, for example, we do have a target of 200k companies. clients of HubSpot. And we want to reach, I don't know, like 10K per year, for example. Um, so let's say you use an AI agent, you're asking for companies and at the end, uh, they give you like no more companies or fewer companies or companies with, uh, scoring that's not working or something like that.
[00:19:25] And at the end, you don't own the process, you know, you don't, you don't know. Because when you ask to a clay agent or something like that, you don't know where the data comes from. And, uh, you don't know if it's still up to date or something like that. So I prefer to go
[00:19:41] Chad Hohn: companies on LinkedIn, you know, some of the company records there are just orphaned. Right. So there's nobody there, right? It's just, Oh, Hey, we made a company on LinkedIn and we've never updated it. Cause you know, some people don't actually like do much with their LinkedIn company, right?
[00:19:56] Bastien Paul: so I prefer to own the process internally. And for that, uh, so funny because I'm I spoke to Liz like two weeks ago and we're still working on that on HubLead. You you this if you want to to have it internally it brings like a lot of pain and a lot of things you need to think about so for example
[00:20:16] Chad Hohn: Right.
[00:20:17] Bastien Paul: How do you scrap sales navigator?
[00:20:19] Uh, because you can use some phantom buster or tool like that. That is Using your cookie, uh, EvaBoot, tool like I like a lot. So using your cookie, you have Sales Navigator and it scrap the list for you and export as a CSV. These ones are really good, but sometimes if you want to go at scale, it can be harder because if you have the LinkedIn detection, you know.
[00:20:45] Uh, one thing I'm trying right now is, uh, I'm trying, it's working. Uh, you get, for example, the list, a list of company and your During a query on Google, and you're trying to scrap, uh, people from a certain company
[00:21:02] Chad Hohn: Sure. Trying to find associated contacts. Yeah.
[00:21:05] Bastien Paul: with a bullion search, that's what we do, uh, because it's easier to, it's cheaper and easier to scrap LinkedIn, but I prefer to have the list of full employees inside a company, especially the one you want to show targets because at the end you can use chat GPT, for example, by API, telling him like, for example, Hey, I have this list of people, Here's my decision makers, here's my target, can you pick one of them, craft a copywriting, and then send to him. and if you want to do something like, uh, really scalable for outbound, I do think sometimes you need to, uh, use BigQuery, kind of SQL database, uh, outside of HubSpot. Because there is one limitation I do, uh, from a source that is really, uh, sick, uh, really not good. Is when you're doing the search API to search contacts, uh, you have a limit, API request limit.
[00:22:11] Plus you have, you can, yeah.
[00:22:16] Chad Hohn: Curiously, have you attempted to use the GraphQL API?
[00:22:21] Bastien Paul: No, I
[00:22:21] Chad Hohn: be able to return more. I'm not sure if it can or not. I mean, I've found GraphQL particularly helpful for getting from one association to another association, all in one API
[00:22:33] Bastien Paul: Okay. Yeah,
[00:22:34] Chad Hohn: I wonder how many, how many, um, because there's a maximum weight.
[00:22:40] That you can have to your graph QL query. So like it gives you a certain number of points you can spend per call. And that may be more than the search API limit. So that might be worth.
[00:22:52] Bastien Paul: Yeah.
[00:22:52] Chad Hohn: Exploring briefly.
[00:22:54] Bastien Paul: Yeah. I need to explore because the second thing they had is that, but I think they raised up, but, uh, last year it was when you're doing the search API, you were limited to only three filters. Right.
[00:23:08] Chad Hohn: Right.
[00:23:09] Bastien Paul: but I think they, they now added up to five, but maybe it was
[00:23:13] Chad Hohn: graph QL, you can do a lot right in, in graph QL. Yeah, you can, you can really drill down into the very specific information you're looking for. From my understanding, often it's used for like CMS actually in web pages, so that like you're making less API calls on somebody's browser side, right. Or like to populate the data of a webpage.
[00:23:35] Um, because like often in a webpage, you need to know information about a company and a contact and their support tickets. Right. And, or something along those lines. Right. And so you need to be able to make those associated queries. GraphQL lets you just get right to what you're looking for. Um, by formulating the query in a certain way, when you're on a certain page, right.
[00:23:58] It could be possibly useful for what you're saying. Um, just. Throw in again, you know, since I'm in the driver's seat, we're doing, we're doing tech and sales today.
[00:24:08] Bastien Paul: Yeah, no, great, I, I did, I did so, I did see that, uh, that announcement, but I didn't, uh, I didn't try it, but now I'm reading the doc, it can be interesting, so, good thought.
[00:24:23] Chad Hohn: Yeah. If you go to the CRM development tab inside of your hub spot, there's a graph QL builder, so you can build your graph QL. You can just click through all your objects and. Go down further so you can build your graph QL query before actually having to, um, like try and do it in a development environment.
[00:24:43] And you can actually even test your calls and, uh, you just paste in your ID and the, the ID that you're looking for, or, or the filters you're looking for search or whatever. So, um, often though you start from an object. So like, you'll notice you're going to start from a specific contact. Uh, and then it'll give you all of its associated stuff, but it, it may be worth, you know, exploring, um, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, but I guess, um, you know, like as far as integrations, you know, I know hub lead is like very surrounding all of these different types of sales activities.
[00:25:17] Um, is there anything that you want to dive into specifically on that, that assists with. That, uh, you know, streamlining of the process. Right. I know it's like the extension and all that, right.
[00:25:29] Bastien Paul: Yeah, sure, so As we spoke, like, for example, when you're, when you're scrapping a ton of lists, when you're doing this amount of work, when you're, I don't know, you have a new market, you're opening your company, you marketed blank, you, you did nothing. You can easily do a lot of automation, like scrapping, injecting set of spots.
[00:25:47] I'm sorry. But when you're When you're on companies, you're already, uh, called qualified. If they were interesting for you, but not interested right now. And you want to go back in three or four months for, for this kind of nurturing part, when you need to follow your account, when you need to go for the dream 100 customers, for example, really the biggest customers for me, there was no real tool for that.
[00:26:15] And this task was not for the marketing team, but for the sales team. And that's why we
[00:26:20] Chad Hohn: it's prospecting is nurturing, right? Like it's somebody, you know, who's already like the right kind of business, but you need to get them across the finish line,
[00:26:30] Bastien Paul: Yeah. And for me, this was more for the salespeople and most of the tools we saw in the market was really marketing oriented because marketing and salespeople do not have, do not have the same skills plus the same, uh, processes when they are working. So we created HubLead to be on top of LinkedIn or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to import contacts, conversation also to track the activities, invitation sent and accepted inside of Spot.
[00:26:59] And with all the time inside of Spot. So you have like, for example, uh, the, the last invitation send date, last invitation, uh, accepted date, things like that. And one, it's saving time for salespeople. Second. You can really stay organized inside linked, uh, inside of spot from LinkedIn, so inside LinkedIn at the end.
[00:27:22] And the other thing was people and salespeople, I mean, they need to, uh, be more into the networking system. Uh, like for example, when we, when we develop more and more SaaS, you know, or B2B consulting online and so on, we were. Okay, there are plenty of people we can we can email everyone we can you can do plenty of things automatically and get leads But at the end if you want to grab, uh, If you want to get like a high value company high value high ticket company something It's all about networking.
[00:27:59] It's all about knowing people getting a referral and so on And linkedin is the place for that. It's a place like or and of course in person in person events But LinkedIn is really the place for that and that's why we, we, uh, I did the contact messaging capabilities to import conversation and also seeing your invitation because how do you How do you, uh, pilot your network and how do you, uh, handle your network as a salespeople or salesperson, sorry, or a founder?
[00:28:32] It's really hard in LinkedIn, but within HubSpot, it's easy because in HubSpot, you know all your ICP, your targets, you have everything, your calls and notes. So we bring back the data from LinkedIn inside HubSpot for salespeople to be really the owner and so they can work on their network. Because at the end, uh, for me, that's, that's a true added value from a salesperson.
[00:28:55] It's the network they can build inside the industry, the, the relationships they can have. And, uh, and that's, that's how they can bring the best customer to the company.
[00:29:08] Chad Hohn: Well, that that's a, and it brings it completely inside a hub spot. So you have an accurate, accurate picture of. But really all the interactions that your team has had, right? And, um, I've, uh, one of the things I've noticed recently that's been particularly helpful is at the top of different record pages, the summary of activities that have been recent, um, that has been really helpful before I go dive into, you know, uh, dealing with a company or a customer if I'm working inside of HubSpot.
[00:29:38] Um, and with the HubSpot sales extension, Offering like your breeze AI in on any domain has been particularly helpful when you actually go to somebody's website to take a look at it. Um, you can kind of get that associated activity and some summaries there have, have those particular features. Then like insightful, or is that something that, uh, you know, cause like, that was like hub lead is helping you get all that data back to hub spot, but getting that complete summary, I think will be, you know, particularly useful for people.
[00:30:14] Right. Yeah, sure.
[00:30:17] Bastien Paul: I didn't try right now because I don't think, uh, I mean, maybe now I have access, but I didn't have the time to check, but I know that say I did the personalized sequence for one, one person. Uh, and normally one of the product manager told me LinkedIn activity. You know, when you. When you have activities, you have LinkedIn activity type and this one, that's how, what we, we fill in, um, for the message and so on.
[00:30:47] So technically, if they can really use that, technically you can use a LinkedIn conversation. To build, uh, this, uh, personalized sequence, but I didn't test it, uh, myself right now, so I need to verify that. But, uh, when I wanted to do that, it was like, uh, end of the last year and they, the beta was still closed.
[00:31:09] It was not for everyone, but I think maybe now it's for everyone. So I need to try it again. Unfortunately, we do also, uh, log the linkedin invitation, you know. As a property, but also as a timeline event. I'm not sure they use that inside. I don't think so that use that inside the personalized sequence, but maybe, maybe one day,
[00:31:30] Chad Hohn: Yeah, well, you can log LinkedIn messages specifically, right? Like, and that is that currently restricted to the LinkedIn integration only, or can you log those via the API now?
[00:31:42] Bastien Paul: you, you mean about the native integration with LinkedIn?
[00:31:45] Chad Hohn: Like the, the actual like LinkedIn timeline activity. So like, you know, the. Timeline
[00:31:50] Bastien Paul: yeah, we, we, we, we log
[00:31:52] Chad Hohn: an integration, but then the activities can be linked in type.
[00:31:57] Bastien Paul: yeah, the activity of LinkedIn type, we
[00:32:01] Chad Hohn: Mm hmm.
[00:32:01] Bastien Paul: we do create an update that one. So, so for me, this one should be reusable inside the personalized sequence from Breeze. So I think that one can be really helpful. And of course, like, since our product is on top of LinkedIn and we try to match the LinkedIn contact to HubSpot.
[00:32:21] You have now the Breeze enrichment, where you can enrich your contacts. Of course, I guess you can enrich with the LinkedIn URL. And the more you have the URL, the more you can do things. For example, when you go back on the contact, it will be automatically identified. Reducing the number of duplicates and so on.
[00:32:39] But of course, if you have the LinkedIn URL, you can do automation, plenty of things like that. So that's perfect because most of our customers are going, using Uplead. They say, hey, you don't recognize this contact and this, uh, this HubSpot contact with this LinkedIn contact. And I say, yes, so you don't have the LinkedIn URL.
[00:32:55] So we have to try to guess with the first name, last name, company name and so on. But if you, if, if the company domain is different from the LinkedIn page or the name is not the same as the LinkedIn page, then we cannot be sure it's the same, you know? So, um, I hope one day all HubSpot CRMs from all customers will have the correct LinkedIn URL, but this is not, uh, not in place.
[00:33:20] You know, like the primer.
[00:33:22] Chad Hohn: things to solve, like even, even just, um, phone call, like getting phone numbers formatted properly in such a way that you can link up. Uh, for your VOIP system to make sure that the people that it thinks are, you know, like, and that's just one number, like it's a number, but there, and it's, you know, like you think, Oh, it's not that hard to format it with rejects or something, but it's just dirty data, man.
[00:33:50] Like I mean, how it comes in and now it's stored on the internet and you know, anyway, it's just, it's no tour, a notorious issue. For HubSpot admins around the world to try and figure out how to make all that, all that junk line up with the integrations that are feeding it data,
[00:34:08] Bastien Paul: Yeah, it's, it's really hard because we've CRMs and I think more with HubSpot because it's really open. You can do a plenty of things, but at the end, it's really hard to know, like, okay, you don't have any framework. You can just follow and say, okay, we will report like that. We will do the lifecycle this way.
[00:34:27] So this is this way, you know, you can really personalize plenty of things. And at the end, you try to personalize. Personalize so it sticks to your business. really important to have the, take the time to simplify what, what your people are doing in the real world. So you can translate in CRM, you know, in CRM world.
[00:34:50] And this is the hardest part, instead of really knowing like HubSpot, how to use workflows and so on. But the hardest part is how do you simplify your process so it's easier for everyone to understand and then having inside of HubSpot.
[00:35:06] Chad Hohn: Well, I think one of the interesting things to think about is just because you can do it doesn't mean you should, right? Just because it's possible doesn't mean it needs done. Uh, and I think that all, you know, especially what you're just mentioning leads really nicely into this next little segment, which is, um, you know, for teams that are overwhelmed by.
[00:35:29] The amount of things, the amount of tools out there, you know, like the different email scrapers, the different or like warmup tools, like there's all these different integrations, there's all these different things. Um, you know, and you were talking about like, well, there things are so customizable, there's not quite a framework, but.
[00:35:49] What would you say might be a simple framework for helping decide which HubSpot native or integrated solutions to invest in or which ones to avoid? Right? So like, um, there's so much stuff out there, like for everyone who's overwhelmed, how would we. and determine which things we want to use more easily.
[00:36:10] Do you have, maybe a framework for deciding on integrations and for sales teams?
[00:36:15] Bastien Paul: So, first of all, everything inside HubSpot, the more, the more you can, the better. And for me, HubSpot should be always the source of truth. Um, everywhere you, you, every application you want to work with, whatever, the source of truth should be HubSpot. So you need to be sure that the integration works in both ways.
[00:36:38] And most of the integration works in one way, HubSpot to their app, but not their app to HubSpot. I think that's the most important thing to do not forget for the. Uh, reverse when they are going back to HubSpot with the information. So, if you want everything inside HubSpot, whenever you are evaluating a linked, uh, something integration to HubSpot, you need to think, to ask for, okay, I can access to my data from HubSpot, but can I access the data from the app is now generating inside my HubSpot?
[00:37:09] And then you can look at it. Do you have to do it? Uh, is there any tion or do you have to do it on your by yourself? And so on. this is the, uh, most important thing. Um, and second one, I will say, so it's a bit linked. I would say the more you stay inside the spot to manage everything, the better. So especially for your salespeople, you don't want to give them like five or 10 tools you want, or I mean.
[00:37:37] Five or 10 dashboard, 10 things, 10 different web app, uh, you want to stick to HubSpot and of course, LinkedIn to prospect, for example, or I don't know, uh, uh, if you want to listen to conversation for, for training and so on, but if it's in HubSpot, it's That's the best. Uh, so how do you, how can you manipulate this tool from experts or from the website?
[00:38:04] You are targeting people, so like does it integrate inside the sales flow on a daily basis or do, do you, are, are you adding a new web app, a new thing to do for the salespeople? Really
[00:38:17] Chad Hohn: Right.
[00:38:17] Bastien Paul: And um, yeah, I think, I think that's kind of the main things for me. Uh, and of course, like just preventing that duplicate error, things like that.
[00:38:30] But if you have a good integration, if you're evaluating a good, the good integration, as I said, like going back to HubSpot, getting back the data inside of HubSpot, then inside of HubSpot, you can manipulate the data. The data so be sure you don't have duplicate having your dashboard to to be sure that you're not Doing you're not doing wrong things to your database, you know on your hotspot.
[00:38:56] Chad Hohn: For sure.
[00:38:57] Bastien Paul: Um, yeah, I
[00:38:58] Chad Hohn: One of the things I. Yeah, yeah. One of the things I've, I've seen, um, HubSpot integrators do, and this is just like a software says, Hey, we want to have a HubSpot integration. So then they get their developer to build a HubSpot integration, but they don't use HubSpot. I think those integrations often are, they just integrate with an object and put some data on there or something, but they're not.
[00:39:28] As useful, if that makes sense, like the integration doesn't help you work out of HubSpot. It helps them get their data to your HubSpot, if that makes sense. Like a lot of those, those systems want you to use their user interface, whatever it is, right. Rather than allowing you to deal with. Inside of your HubSpot, like, and one of the things that, that we added to our integration for our CPQ software, it's like a roofing specific one.
[00:40:01] Cause I work with roofing business partner, it's called sumo quote. And, you know, at first we built our app so that it would like drop a link to the sumo quote project, and then you open it and you open it in a new tab and you work on the quote. But now we've added obviously the iframe card, so you can just click the button, it opens up and inside a HubSpot, yes, you're manipulating their user interface in their software, but you don't have to leave the tab you're on, and it pulls up the project that you're already in, right, um, for the linking to the deal, right?
[00:40:36] Um, and I think that's something that a lot of, um, integrators use. Thanks. You know, they're almost not even wanting to do, they're not wanting to allow you to just stay in HubSpot and never leave. And I think that's been one of my, one of the most difficult things for choosing integrations is finding ones where their people are, are HubSpot first, if that makes sense.
[00:41:03] Right. Right.
[00:41:04] Bastien Paul: agree more because that's what we do. Um, yeah, I do agree with you when you when you're looking at some, like, if I'm just Trying to not be biased, uh, if you're looking to, um, to people, companies doing, uh, different integration, uh, of course, if you do like at the end, if you do four or five integration with your app, normally at the end, you will have kind of parallel to low or something like that, where most of your customers are coming from one kind of CRM.
[00:41:35] Or CMS, for example, and then everything you're shipping is for them. So the other one they won't they won't get the same features that the other one is getting so you cannot go Deep dive, you can go really deep inside different CRM, because one, you have to understand what the CRM is about, how they are structured, the API, what kind of new things they are implementing, how people are working with that CRM, as you said, and of course, like having a CRM.
[00:42:04] Like, still I know HubSpot for five years now, it's easier for me and for my, when I speak with my co founders to say like, Hey guys, like customers are doing like that and like that because this is impossible inside of HubSpot and I know because I already experienced it. So, um, Uh, when I speak to customer, sometimes I am, I'm like, like, okay, give, show me your dashboard.
[00:42:27] And I've just, uh, like consulting them on their HubSpot, how they, they use it, uh, beyond, beyond HubLead. But at the end, it's, it's, it helps you really like as a founder to better understand what your customer are experiencing and to provide this kind of thing you, you said, like CRM card, iframe and so on.
[00:42:45] And you have more of the spirit of, uh, not developing things inside, inside your app. But more inside HubSpot. So yeah, I do agree. And one of, um, One of the main thing I need to work on for our customer, kind of customer care point of view is, okay, now we we update some properties. Uh, you know how to do some reports, but what can I do more?
[00:43:12] You can create tasks, you can create lists, you can create workflows, you can create plenty of things, you know? And then, like, for example, you have the new sequence, as I said before, uh, personalized and so on. But this one, you, me, as Bastien, I know. But most of our customers, they don't know. So I need to create some content to them to explain to them what they can do and so on.
[00:43:35] And it brings like a level of opportunities, really, really huge. So you can bring a lot of value to your customers. So yeah, I do agree with you. It's still The ecosystem is still in the beginning of that. We are seeing more and more companies only HubSpot focus.
[00:43:54] Chad Hohn: hmm.
[00:43:54] Bastien Paul: But I guess, like, there will be more and more and more.
[00:43:58] And it will be way better for HubSpot users because they will have a dedicated team doing more things with HubSpot will be more useful for everyone.
[00:44:10] Chad Hohn: Yeah. I mean, if it's called HubSpot, it should be the hub where you work out of, right? The central point of where all your data goes, or at least it should be aware of your data. And I think that, you know, when we come back to source of truth, right? Um, my thought is if it's not coming from HubSpot, HubSpot should at least be aware of wherever it's stored in real time, right?
[00:44:36] And, um, like for example, I'm never going to do my accounting in HubSpot, but if I need to attribute expense data back to my sales or something like that, I should be able to see that expense data related to my sales. Right. For example, um, uh, but that's not the source of truth is in that case, QuickBooks, right.
[00:44:56] Or whatever my accounting platform is, but I at least need to bring. That data back in real time from an integration that's, that's good. So it's a window into the actual thing. Right. For example.
[00:45:09] Bastien Paul: Yeah, I completely like, uh, I did that for, for Stripe, for example, for every, uh, not, not MRR, but really like the amount we invoiced and we really had inside the bank for every deals. So whenever you were speaking with a client, you, you, you know, for example, the MRR, so you're saying like, okay, this is a good, uh, huge account or not, but you know, also the amount you bid the guy.
[00:45:35] So let's say, for example, 60 bucks per month, for example. But you, you see like, I don't know, 1000 bid, you know, that, okay, this is a small customer, but it's 1000. So I need to be maybe more careful or something like that. So you, you, you switch your mindset, you know, and for your sales, that's so it's easier.
[00:45:52] It's better because I can see like, Hey, this deal. I closed like six months ago. It brought like I don't know six thousand to the company So they are proud they are happy about their work, you know, so yeah, I do agree with you like even even if it's not Used inside the workflow or something like that having everything inside HubSpot to better know your business It's really good for your daily operation for sales team marketing team, whatever you want
[00:46:19] Chad Hohn: for sure. Well, I have one more question, but before that, just a little birdie told me, uh, from the commerce hub team that payments. Maybe getting custom properties at some point. I don't know exactly when, but how cool would that be inside a HubSpot? Because I mean, I've had to have a custom object to represent payments in the accounting software.
[00:46:41] Cause I can't do anything to the payments in HubSpot. And I'm pretty sure there's a beta out where you can edit invoices via API now. So you still have to opt into beta, but like. Being able to manipulate HubSpot invoices, that's pretty slick. And you can put custom properties on the invoices and everything and all that, you know, too, but, uh, just, you know, so that you're aware if you hadn't seen those come out, that's then, then there's some stuff on the horizon there that might be particularly useful for some of those use cases. Yeah.
[00:47:14] Bastien Paul: salespeople, when you have custom invoice and so on, it can be really, really interesting.
[00:47:18] Chad Hohn: Yep. It can. Um, but anyway, I guess, you know, coming back to the sales topic, right? Uh, so I, everything's kind of related to sales at the end of the day, isn't it?
[00:47:28] Bastien Paul: Yeah.
[00:47:28] Chad Hohn: You could go in so many directions from sales just because like. Everything ultimately comes, comes back to, you know, it starts with sales or something touches sales in some capacity.
[00:47:39] But anyway, um, for like people who are sales leaders in HubSpot, um, who feel like they're not getting everything out of their tech stack. Uh, what would be the best place to start in your opinion to turn that around? So like, Hey, I feel like I have all this stuff or I feel like I'm not leveraging everything in this platform that I pay all this money for, especially smaller teams really feel the burden of that expense a lot more than bigger teams.
[00:48:11] Um, you know, just because of the size of organization, where's a good place to start to really start turning that ship around and feel like you're getting value out of your hub spot.
[00:48:21] Bastien Paul: the best thing, when, when, when you're in this situation, normally you It's been like maybe three, four months. You tried different tools, try different processes. You might create some properties and so on. So I think at the end, what you need to do is just to get a blank paper or whiteboard, whatever you want, you know, and just try to, okay.
[00:48:46] What is the process in a simple way? And, um, if you cannot explain it in a simple way. Then you didn't understand then you need to rework and you need to erase everything and restart Because the goal here it's not to fix the thing The goal here is to remove what doesn't work and to remove things you tried because maybe three months ago Your understanding was like that and now you tried and now you know that your understanding changed And so you have to get rid
[00:49:20] Chad Hohn: Or didn't work ever. Right.
[00:49:21] Bastien Paul: it didn't work and brought something else, something.
[00:49:24] So, this is something I do like. It's a second order thinking. It's when you're bringing something, a solution, because of a problem. Then you're bringing more problems. And then you're bringing more solutions. So, instead of going at the end and trying to fix the solutions. Things are new problems. You have just get back to the real problem.
[00:49:45] You had in the beginning and maybe that at that time when you implemented solution, you didn't really get the problem. That's okay. Because that's experience. That's how
[00:49:55] Chad Hohn: we have more, more, more, more information now, right?
[00:49:59] Bastien Paul: And so
[00:49:59] Chad Hohn: You understand more? Mm-hmm
[00:50:01] Bastien Paul: so to get back to the root of, uh, to the roots of the problem, you have for me to, to, to, uh, to restart, uh, with nothing. So go for a white paper and just write down like, okay, what are the sales journey? What are my sales are doing and so on and try to find things that are doing, uh, in duplicates or, uh, things that are doing, but not useful anymore or something that are not doing and you can maybe replace, not use it again, you know?
[00:50:30] Um, Yeah, so that's that will be the first thing I won't have any blank white paper where I note all my tools and trying to articulate it. No, I will just go back to the process what people are doing, what my sales people are doing, maybe asking them, you know, and trying to have something really simple.
[00:50:50] And then, you will find out, okay, this one is not useful, this one we need to fix, we can check another tool, and, and, uh, and so on and so on, you know? Uh, but yeah,
[00:51:02] Chad Hohn: Yeah. That's
[00:51:03] Bastien Paul: to, uh, to add things than remove things, and, uh
[00:51:08] Chad Hohn: it is. I mean, and that's, I think one of the difficulties that people get into is they just keep adding on top of layers and layers, like you're saying, rather than, um, you know, I mean. I guess in engineering, the best part sometimes is no part, because if you don't have a part, it won't break.
[00:51:24] Right. And so like when you're architecting a solution for your sales, you want to have as few moving pieces as possible. Like you should almost be taking away so much stuff that you have to add stuff back. Right.
[00:51:37] Bastien Paul: Yeah, and, uh, one advice, of course, is to read the book, uh, high output management, uh, from the founder of Intel, I guess, if I remember. Yes. Uh, well, uh, incredible. Like he explained, uh, how, uh, production factory works. With, uh, explaining, uh, how you do your breakfast for, uh, for a restaurant doing breakfast.
[00:52:04] And when you have this level of, uh, simplicity when you're speaking, like when you're explaining, that's, at that point you really understand. So every time I'm rethinking about my process of state automation and so on, and I think truly inside me that I'm not sure I really understood. I'm like, okay, you need to re, you need to rework.
[00:52:25] You need to go back, blank white paper, and try to understand what's not clear in your mind, because if it's not clear, it won't be clear anywhere.
[00:52:34] Chad Hohn: Yeah. No, that's perfect. Well, Bastian, I, uh, I wish I didn't have another meeting coming up that, cause I really, really enjoyed our conversation today. And, um, you know, I'm sorry you were stuck with just me, but Hey, I'm,
[00:52:46] Bastien Paul: Yeah, it was good.
[00:52:47] Chad Hohn: it. I really, truly enjoyed, uh, you know, getting into all these little nuggets of information from you.
[00:52:53] Thanks so much. And we'll definitely have to have you back another time. I think, uh, Going to, you know, back to sales church, if you will, right, is where we are. And, and, uh, that's always just such a good time because it touches every part of the business. So thank you so much for your expertise and thanks for being on.
[00:53:11] Bastien Paul: Thanks, Chad, for having me. It was great, even if you were alone, but, uh, we had so deep, uh, subject, uh, uh, discussion together. So great. Great. And, uh, yeah, sure. Next time I'll be there.
[00:53:24] Chad Hohn: Cool. Thanks so much. We'll see you.
