Why go HubSpot Sales Hub? Featuring Kyle Jepson

Because if you think the HubSpot Sales Hub is just another ho-hum CRM kid on the block, you couldn't be more wrong.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN ...

• What is the HubSpot Sales Hub really? Is it more than just a CRM? (Spoiler alert, it's wayyyyy more than a CRM, although the CRM is pretty sweet!)
• How the HubSpot Sales Hub makes the dreaded – and all too common – sales team CRM adoption problem so much easier.
• How you can use the HubSpot Sales Hub to not only streamline, but also create powerful visualizations of your sales process in action.
• The top HubSpot Sales Hub features every business must know about – because even if you have it already, you likely haven't heard of a few of these! 
• Why Kyle's favorite HubSpot Sales Hub tool is playbooks, and how you need to start using them immediately if you aren't already ....
• Why if Max had to ask one HubSpot Sales Hub feature to prom, it would 100% be deals-based workflows.
• The most common HubSpot Sales Hub mistakes companies make.
• The ongoing content battle between our very own Max and Kyle!

And much, much more ... 

YOUR ONE THING FROM THIS EPISODE

Oh yes, an episode this jam-packed comes with homework. And this assignment is for everyone – whether you've got HubSpot Sales Hub or not, get thyself over to HubSpot Academy sales section immediately for some education.

It's a treasure trove of fun, user-friendly education that will help you maximize the HubSpot Sales Hub investment you already have or realize all of the answers to your sales automation prayers can potentially be answered with HubSpot.

RESOURCES FOR THIS EPISODE

Some of these we talked about, others we're adding because they're only going to make the episode that much sweeter for you ... 

• HubSpot Academy sales courses 
• What the heck is growth strategy? Featuring Troy Sandidge (HubHeroes, Ep. 8)
• HubSpot consulting is always available, if you want me to address your specific HubSpot customization challenges 1-on-1 with you
• Join The HubHeroes Podcast community!
• Wait, what the heck is The HubHeroes Podcast?

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

George B. Thomas: Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by silo departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Are you held captive by the evil menace, Lord Lack, lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge. Never fear hub heroes.

Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub heroes, it's time to unite and activate your your powers. Before we begin, we need to disclose that both Devin and Max are currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin and Max during the show are that of their own and in no way represent those of their employer.

George B. Thomas: And for another week, I have to add a caveat. Otherwise, I would pay that gentleman with a really dope voice many, many dollars to have to do this every week. But we have to add Kyle Jepsen. He has his own thoughts, believe it or not, ladies and gentlemen. And, Kyle, let's start there with the shenanigans.

I'm sure 99.9% of the Internet knows who you are, at least the HubSpot space. But why don't you, for any listeners who are like, who is this Kyle Jepsen guy on the Hub Heroes podcast, why don't you let him know who you are and what you do, my friend?

Kyle Jepson: Yeah. So I'm Kyle Jepsen. I work in HubSpot Academy. I have been there since the start of 2016, so that's a while now. My official job is to create sales related education, mostly sales hub trainings, but I kinda have this thing I do on the side where I post videos to LinkedIn every day because every day, there is a new update to HubSpot to talk about.

And now I'm running a user group for HubSpot admins, and I still create sales education. I still have some coming down down the pipe right now, but I am rebranding myself as the advocate of HubSpot admins everywhere. And I hope to hope to do a lot of work in the coming years on that front.

George B. Thomas: Oh, yeah. Which means we might just have to have Kyle back for the what the heck is a HubSpot admin episode to come in the future. But today, we are talking about the sales platform, the sales hub, and really the question, and obviously the title that you saw is why HubSpot Sales Hub. This is not only for current users, but it is for folks who might be on the fence wondering, should I use the Sales Hub? Why would I wanna use the Sales Hub?

And learn some tips, tricks, hacks, techniques around all of this stuff that is the HubSpot sales hub. Now, Max, you I amazingly can't believe that you're this quiet at the beginning of this episode, seeing that there is a little bit of a battle between you and Kyle, and who can get content out quicker around these daily updates that Kyle is doing.

Max Cohen: Is it a battle or is it brotherly love? That's all I'm I'm that's that's what I'm I'd say it's playful. It's playful is what it does.

Kyle Jepson: The the line between battle and and brotherly love is is very much blurred. At least in my house, I have

George B. Thomas: 2 sons, and it's

Kyle Jepson: always a battle, and it's always loving. Mhmm.

George B. Thomas: So Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yes. And with my brothers, I just love to battle them.

So we'll throw that out there, ladies and gentlemen.

Max Cohen: Also, to be fair, I wasn't being quiet. I was eating a piece of cheese. So I am stoked that, Kyle, you were here. I am, like, I've been so pumped for this all week. It's an honor to be in your presence today, man.

Kyle Jepson: It's an honor to be with you 2.

George B. Thomas: Well, see, it's just a big bro fest because I'm just happy to be here with everybody that's on the screen. And, unfortunately, we have to do say this. Our friend Devin is not feeling well. He won't be on this episode, but he was super sad not to actually be the 4th 4 horsemen of this episode. Now here's the thing.

Let's start like we do at the very beginning. Kyle, we'll let you go first, probably Max, and then I'll follow-up on this first question. Well, I love to do foundational pieces, get people up to speed because remember, we're not only just talking to HubSpot users who are geeking out that the fact that the 3 of us are on episode together. We're talking to people that don't know us and maybe don't know HubSpot. And so historically, when you've had to answer the question or explain what is HubSpot Sales Hub, where the heck do you go?

What do you say?

Kyle Jepson: Sales Hub, it's got the core CRM functionality you would expect from any CRM, and it's got this fully integrated set of of some sales acceleration tools. And it's it's all part of this HubSpot platform that has marketing tools and service tools and a CMS, and it's all this big interconnected platform that you can run your front office efforts out of. And the thing that I think really makes Sales Hub different in the world of CRMs, if we wanna talk specifically about that world, is when we first launched HubSpot CRM in 2014, I think it was, It was very lightweight. It did very few things, but we started from the beginning to solve problems for the reps. Most CRMs, they're built to solve for upper management.

The VP of sales, the CEO, they wanna know how revenue is doing. They wanna have the the reporting on whatever sales activities. We really wanted to build a thing that would make it easier for reps to do their job, to find the information they're looking for, to be relevant to their prospects, to deliver a message that resonates, and to track their progress. And so that's where we started. And for a long time, Sales Hub didn't have great reports for managers and VPs, didn't have a lot of sales ops kinds of things.

It was all about the rep experience. How can you keep track of your sales, your contacts, identify the right person to reach out to, tell them the right thing at the right time? And that is really at the heart of sales help. Years have gone by. It's now fully grown up, and we have all those reporting and permissioning and other things that executives and VPs and ops people care about.

But at its heart, it's still a platform that helps reps sell better. And I think that is a very important thing to keep in mind because you look at most CRMs, getting reps to adopt them is hard because it's a miserable experience for them. Them. It wasn't built for them. This is somebody else's problem being solved, and it's like, hey, rep.

You gotta go use that CRM so I, your manager, can get credit for the work you're doing. Like, what sort of incentive structure is that? Whereas with HubSpot, adoption tends to be easier because it's, hey, rep. Here are these tools that's gonna help you get more money. How about that?

And that's what I love about Sales Hub.

George B. Thomas: Man, I love more money. I I mean, not in a, like, a weird way, but, I mean, I money money is good as a sales rep for sure. And I love, Kyle, that you started at the beginning and the and you even used the words because my mind was like, oh, but ladies and gentlemen, we're all grown up now. Like, we but, Max, it's your turn, not my turn. When you have to explain what is HubSpot Sales Hub, where do you go historically?

Max Cohen: I had to kind of I I had to spend a lot of years trying to make this as, like, simple and succinct as I could because, again, explaining every single part of HubSpot to a class of 60 new hires in in a limited amount of time is a pretty difficult thing to do. I think what a lot of people forget sometimes is, like, the HubSpot CRM, while it's the bone like, it's the core structure, it's the bones, the the backbone of fuel of, like, all of HubSpot, CRM is free. So, like, you can still go in there and run a sales process alone in theory without paid Sales Hub features. Well, not in theory, you can do it. You can run a pretty substantial like, you would actually do a lot with the free tools, let's be honest.

The way that I was kind of like positioned what's the gist of Sales Hub is that it's really what supercharges the CRM, especially for your sales reps. So like a lot of the stuff that you're getting in there, besides like a lot of like the reporting things and and and stuff like that is tools that just make your day to day life for a sales rep not suck. You know what I mean? Sales rep spends too much time sending the same email over and over again, figuring out when people can book meetings, doing follow-up, all these mundane administrative BS tasks that they have to waste so much time on that they could be spending actually talking to people who wanna talk to them. Sales Hub really helps enable your team to do that.

I'm a big believer that you can't create a really great sales process if you're not taking care of your sales reps and making their lives easier and their lives more enjoyable. You also can't like expect them to use a system where they need to input data so the stakeholders can see what's happening, if that's not an enjoyable system to use that's actually bringing them value and letting them work faster. When you look at a lot of the productivity tools that Sales Hub introduces, which you see a lot of it too in the in the Service Hub to be fair, that's really all it's everything you need to really make sure that sales people have a delightful experience actually being a salesperson in a CRM. It gives them the tools that they need to get their job done faster and not hate it. So whether you look at that through a lens of reducing burnout or just making people more efficient, you can kind of approach the way you use the tools through a lot of those different lenses.

So again, comes down to supercharging the CRM and and making it a a wonderful experience for your sales rep.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. I totally agree with this. And I love the narrative that we're talking about because many times you're right. We're gonna be talking to companies that it is about the sales rep and all the things that you guys said. But I'll be honest with you.

Up until about 6 months ago, I could teach the sales tools, and I'd love to get buy in from sales reps for the sales tools. Really good at that just from a communication standpoint. 6 months ago, though, when I started the business, I actually had to really dive into the sales tools and use the sales tools as a owner of a company. So I'm gonna go at this a little bit of a different direction, but it is all the same stuff. Meaning, if you're a company of 1 and you're, like, I need to do some things.

I need to be able to streamline my sales process. I need to be able to set goals and visualize it. I need to be able to communicate easy or easier, and I at the end of the day, I wanna be able to find a quick way to get paid. There is a set of tools that does every single one of those things in the HubSpot sales hub from payments to quotes to snippets to templates to pipelines to stages to deals, tasks to keep you organized. And here's the thing, I love, Max, that you are like, so that you can talk to more people.

No. So you can go golf or spend time with your family more. That's what those tools are in there for, ladies and gentlemen. I'm just saying. True.

Like, you gotta optimize your life. And if you can optimize your sales process, life gets better. Life gets better. Let's dive back in. Let's get into the

Max Cohen: I meant talk to the talk to the caddy. Yes. You know what I mean? You talk to

George B. Thomas: the Yes.

Max Cohen: Talk to the person where you buy the golf balls from.

George B. Thomas: Yes. The guy who sews the football. Yes.

Max Cohen: You'd let me finish my sentence, George. That's what I would've said. That

George B. Thomas: that's it. That is it exactly. So here's the thing. Okay? So we talked about what is HubSpot Sales Hub, and here's the thing.

We we kinda dived into this a little bit. Kyle sorta cheated a tiny bit in his answer. Because really what I want us to paint a picture of is there are a lot of CRMs out there. There's a lot of sales tools out there. And so when you think about all the things that we've talked about thus far, what makes HubSpot Sales Hub special or different than kind of these other tools that are out there that one might choose if they're listening to this and thinking, well, is it HubSpot versus and then insert CRM here.

Kyle Jepson: How about I I take another stab at that and tell another thing that I think makes HubSpot different? And that's just the velocity of our product updates, which is unbelievable. Couple years ago, I got this idea, like, hey. What if I, posted LinkedIn videos anytime there was a product update so people could know the product got updated?

Max Cohen: Big mistake.

Kyle Jepson: Like, now I literally post a new video to LinkedIn every single day I'm in the office, and it's not enough. I've got, like, this oh, I can tell you. I've got my backlog here. Let me tell you the number right now. I've got 20 8 things waiting for me to, to right?

And, like, I'm doing daily videos. Sometimes I talk about multiple things in a video. It's just impossible to keep up. But the good news for for anyone who adopts HubSpot is that means at any time in the last 6 months somebody said to you, oh, don't use HubSpot. It can't do x?

Better revisit it because it might not be true anymore. We are moving so fast, and the rate is just accelerating, and we love feedback from our customers. Our idea forum is not, like, I I I there's this sense that SaaS companies send you to their idea forum when they really just want you to go away, but our product managers are on that ideas forum all the time. And the highest bonus ideas turn into features in HubSpot, turn into videos on my LinkedIn feed. And it's just amazing how the platform continues to grow and accelerate the development rate even as it's reached this this sort of enormous size of having more than a 150,000 customers using it or whatever.

So I think I think that's incredible. And and in the CRM world, it's very normal to have annual releases or every 6 months. Here's what's new. And HubSpot is is playing an entirely different game in that regard.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Max, go here in a second, but I gotta unpack something, by the way, because I love Kyle's updates. And I do wanna let the Hub Heroes listeners know that we're actually working on something. And, Kyle, the fact that you just said you have 28 more videos, like, a backlog of them, I have to share, a little bit of an experience. First of all, ladies and gentlemen, you might not know, but you will know after this that I have about 2 episodes ago stopped editing the Hub Heroes podcast.

George B. Thomas: Oh my gosh.

George B. Thomas: So it's not so. But my son, I've actually hired my son to do podcast editing and video editing for me because I needed to claw a time back in my day. Earlier this week, I gave him a task. I said, there's a task. We've got this guy.

He's super dope. He's amazing. He does HubSpot updates on the daily in LinkedIn. You're gonna start adding them to the YouTube channel so people can find them easily. He looked at the sheer mass amount of videos and was like, oh my god.

And I said, yes. You're gonna be busy for a while, but we're gonna do this because as a problem solver, my problem was I love Kyle. I wanna find all of Kyle's videos. I hate LinkedIn because I can't find all of Kyle's videos. So we're working on getting them all in one place.

It's the massive Kyle Jepsen HubSpot update jam playlist that you'll just be able to know every HubSpot update that has ever happened almost in time. And so when Noah is editing this, and he realizes that it's never stopping, it's gonna keep coming. I'm actually excited. He might be a little bit freaked out, but but here's the thing. Max, I'm gonna pass it back over to you after that little bit of a tangent, and also probably got some people excited about where's the YouTube channel that I can find Kyle's jams?

Anyway, when you think about this what makes HubSpot Sales Hub special, where do you go, Max?

Max Cohen: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of the times, like, when you think about the tools that Sales Hub provides, oftentimes, your CRM and then your sales acceleration tools are 2 totally separate things. 2 totally separate pieces of software, and it's usually something you're plugging onto your CRM system. So then you often find the problem of being able to, like, hey, do we need to build any extra integrations between these two things? Or where the reps expected to spend their time?

It's one more interface they gotta work out of. It's one more set of tools and a whole another support team we gotta deal with. It's a whole another bill that we had. That's pretty tough. It's like your sales acceleration, your sales enablement tools should just live in your CRM.

They should just be part of your CRM. And the reason it's cool and and it's kinda like the other bigger reason why I like HubSpot is the whole idea behind HubSpot grows with you. When you need that, it's available. When you start growing a sales team that needs these tools because they need to be more efficient. Maybe marketing's producing a lot more leads and you have to be efficient in the way that you work through them, or you're just scaling up a sales team and you need to be able to provide them aids to do their jobs through, like, playbooks or whatever.

You can start investing in that stuff when you need it because it has those additional levels. But the whole point is that it's all just in your CRM. It's not another thing you're attacking on top of it. And I'm not clowning on integrations here. Like, integrations are a big part of the game.

But a lot of that stuff that enables your sales team to do their job should kind of live natively where they're working versus making them go somewhere else. I think it's cool that when

George B. Thomas: you need it, it can be

Max Cohen: there and you can grow into it as your sales team kinda grows, and you don't have to go out and buy, like, a separate tool to do it. Just use the CRM in a better way.

George B. Thomas: I love that that was your answer because, honestly, I'm gonna be a true hub hero. I'm gonna swing in and save the day because my answer to this is actually integrations. And let me get very specific. The fact that I can generate a QuickBooks invoice via a workflow action and invoices and quotes and HubSpot payments all work in a magical cylinder of making my life easier is amazing. The fact that if I wanted to do sales videos and I wanted an integration, if I there's just so ZoomInfo, SalesLoft.

So if you want to do whatever with whatever, it's possible, and there's so many tools that it's impossible, or the bonus that I'll add to this is that HubSpot is really making themselves special in the way that they actually show the tools that are integrating with them. Meaning, if you go into many, dare I say, Salesforce instances, it might be a hot mess for you to figure out how to work or get to anything in there. But HubSpot is really focused on a sleek, clean, user designed, just makes sense platform, and I think that makes it super special. Speaking of special, I wanna get to our next question because I know my answer. I'm super curious about the 2 of you, what your answer is.

But do you have a favorite HubSpot sales hub tool?

Kyle Jepson: Dial off Playbooks. And I love that Playbooks recently moved down from the enterprise tier to the professional tier. I think it is so cool. For anyone who doesn't know, Playbooks is this thing. You can you can create a playbook inside of HubSpot, and you can put basically whatever you want in there.

If this playbook is some people use it for competitive battle cards. So your rep knows they're going into a call and there's this particular competitor on the line. You can have a playbook that has, like, videos and images and charts showing us versus them and where we win and where we lose, and they can study that up before they get on the call so they're ready to go. Or you can have a playbook that's more like just in time information. They're like, I'm on a call.

This concern came up. I'm gonna open that playbook. Now I have an outline. And the really cool thing about playbooks, my favorite part, is you can insert these interactive questions into it. So we're not talking about just giving your reps a rote script, and you're gonna recite these words at every person you meet with.

We're more helping the rep organize their thoughts and ask the the most important questions and collect that most important information in the simplest possible way for them. Instead of having like a typical call script where they read it and they're typing their answer somewhere, the the playbook could have a question, what are your top three priorities for the year? And you could even have buttons in it where they can just click the buttons that best match the answers they're given and type any additional notes if they want. But basically, the rep can just click buttons and talk and focus on listening rather than focusing on, I've gotta type down what you're saying so I don't forget it later, which I think is so huge. And then we've introduced a lot of cool features to playbooks in the last year or 2.

You can now connect those interactive questions to your CRM properties, which then can trigger automation and do all kinds of magical things. We recently made it so you can recommend specific playbook when a deal is in a particular deal stage. So now, like, oh, I'm in a discovery call. There's the recommended discovery call playbook. Gonna open that up.

Gonna ask these questions. Gonna collect this information. It's gonna trigger this automation. And it's just, again, it delivers on this promise of we're trying to make the reps' experience better. We're trying to make it easier for them to do their job, and I think Playbooks does that exceptionally well.

George B. Thomas: I'm telling you, ladies and gentlemen, Kyle Jeffson is a walking wiki of what you can do in HubSpot. See, that's what happens when you pay attention to every update that slams in here because that was probably a rewind point where

Max Cohen: you should just what are

George B. Thomas: all the things that I should be doing with playbooks, like, yesterday, immediately? Again, I'm gonna hold my goal or not my goal, but, dang it. I just let it slip, but I'll get back to it. My favorite feature. Son of my god.

Max. Max, I wonder what it could be. What's your favorite?

Max Cohen: Kyle stole mine. I am the self proclaimed on LinkedIn biggest fan of

Kyle Jepson: Oh, this might be a rival of friends.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Yeah. I will say I had the pleasure of sitting down with Drew McDaniel, who is at the helm of Playbooks now within the HubSpot product, and the future is very bright, let's say, for playbooks, which is extremely exciting. I'll leave it at that. But, yeah, playbooks are just you know, what I love about playbooks is that it's really only limited by your creativity in terms of the use case.

You know what I mean? There are so many cool things that you can do with just a blank canvas of questions and fields to input data. It's wild. Anyway, I'm going to then pick my second favorite, and that'll probably be deal based workflows. Just like with the sheer amount of things that I've heard from sales leaderships or sales managers complaining about either they're, like, visibility to what's going on with deals and and things like that, and a lot of the manual work that has to be done maintaining a pipeline.

A lot of people forget that workflows tool in the back end can center around other objects besides contacts. And with the sales hub, you unlock that ability to do workflows and automations around that specific deal object. And there's a lot you can do with that, especially when you pair it with a lot of the other things HubSpot has, including that newer feature you were talking about in one of your updates earlier, Kyle, where you can prevent people from editing deals when they're certain stages. You pair that kind of stuff with the power of workflows. There's, like, really a lot that you can do there.

Just simple stuff in terms of saying when deals reach certain stages. Let people know or do you hit some sort of notification. Let's use a SaaS example. You could do something crazy like if a deal close wins, you could have a custom coded workflow action that maybe creates someone's account in your SaaS software. There's so many different things that you can do when you really start thinking about automation that has to do with, like, the deals you're closing.

A ton of power comes out of that, which again, especially in the days of operations hub is really limited by your creativity and send automated emails to people.

George B. Thomas: I'm super shocked. You 2 did really well because I love this question, but I hate this question. Because when I put this question in for the show, I was like, I don't know how I'm gonna answer this, by the way, because it could be snippets because it streamlines the way that I communicate. It could be meetings because I don't have to deal with dumb people asking me if I'm free at 2 when I already said I was only free at 4 and 5. No.

They're not dumb people. They're just calendar challenged. So let me digress on that one. But here's the thing. I thought to myself, what is the thing that I've seen a lot of people not using in their HubSpot Hubs, and what is the thing that actually brings me joy when it happens?

And I fully understand that the joy is because I am a big fan of a big dose of dopamine. I love me some dopamine. And so my favorite one, and I let it slip out the bag, is using goals for your sales team. If you don't have goals set up and all of a sudden your rep can see that they're a 104%, 125%, 160% past their goal and they're killing it or they're not killing it and they need to do some things. Well, you should have that in place.

And I I know it's like a little kind of really? Is it that important? Yes. It is actually that important. Because without a goal, without vision, I could go somewhere with that one.

Anyway, let's move on to the next thing. Oh, wait. Kyle, do

Max Cohen: you have

George B. Thomas: something to say?

Kyle Jepson: I was just yeah. And we have fully custom goals now. HubSpot's always had goals. You could, like, set quota and stuff. But, like, if you wanna get really granular and you wanna have some sort of deal creation or call count or something goal and hold your reps accountable to that, like, whatever it is you need to do, you can do it now.

Max Cohen: Yeah. And they do, like, formula based stuff too in there. It's almost like a calculation type thing that you can do. So, yeah, it's it's pretty sweet.

George B. Thomas: You can keep it simple or you can get nerdy with it. It's totally up to you. So we've had we basically for these first three questions, we've had, if you will, a HubSpot sales hub love Fest. Now let's get into the trenches for a hot second, and let's talk about and, Max, I'm sure you have some horror stories, Kyle, you as well. What have you seen that most companies get wrong when they're using the HubSpot sales hub?

The potholes, the hurdles.

Kyle Jepson: One thing I wanna mention is we each just shared our favorite features and tools, but that's actually kind of the wrong way to think about Sales Hub. Because like Max was saying earlier, they're all connected together. So, like, sequences, a great tool. It lets you automate tasks and emails. Meetings, a great tool.

Makes it easy for people to book time for you. If you aren't using those 2 together, you're doing it wrong because like sequences, you can set up these automated email things. And then if someone replies, they automatically get unenrolled from the sequence so you don't keep bugging them after they've replied. But if they don't reply but they book time on your calendar, also unenrolls them because HubSpot is this big interconnected system. Each tool is awesome in its own right.

Great. But start looking for ways to put them together and and you can really unlock a lot of a lot of potential there. But if I have to stick with just one, I will stay on the sequences train here for a minute. Sequences for a long time, it's kinda one of the the first sales acceleration tools we introduced in Sales Hub back before it's called Sales Hub even, and it was just basically the ability to automate up to 5 emails in an outreach. And then we expanded it.

You used to have to enroll people one at a time. Now you can enroll groups of people. But kinda quietly over the course of the past couple years, sequences has become a lot more than just automated emails. It's become like this task orchestration tool. And if you're just using sequences to send a series of 5 emails and now the limit is 10, so a series of 10 emails.

You're living below your privileges. There's so much more you could be doing with that tool. And and I really love it's interesting. If you look at sequences and you're building a sequence, you can put in an automated email or you can put in a task to send an email. And you might wonder, what?

Like, why would I? But actually, depending on what you're trying to accomplish here, and again, it goes back to goals and visions that George was just talking about, those are 2 very different things. If you have a stack of business cards from people you just met at a trade show, by all means, send some automated emails with your meeting link in there. Say, hey. It's great to meet you.

Let's find some time to talk, and that's fine. But if you're doing literally anything else with email, the email tasks are probably gonna be better. You can still select an email template, but what happens now is let's say you're enrolling 50 people into a sequence at one time. If you're doing automated emails, then at that time of enrollment, you have to personalize and update all those email templates and hit send all at once. And if you're doing 5 or especially if you're doing 10 emails, to anticipate the way the world and your relationship might have changed by email number 10 and try to update it ahead of time, it's kinda crazy.

Again, if it's just like, hey. Great to meet you at that trade show. Let's find some time to talk. Relationship isn't changing. World probably isn't changing that much in relevant ways.

That's probably gonna be okay. But any other part of your sales process where you're you're connecting with people or trying to help them move forward, these emails tasks are really really great because now you enroll those 50 people and all those tasks get scheduled for the future at whatever cadence you've selected. And then that day comes, and now you have an email task. And when you click on that task, it takes you right to their contact record, opens the email pane. There's the email template right there all filled in.

If nothing has changed, you can just hit send, but you can do a quick look over the contact record, see if any properties have updated, look at that timeline, see if they've taken any new actions or anything, and then, you know, drop in a few personalized touches and then hit send. This is still way faster than the typical process of just checking in with people and writing an email from scratch, but it's so much more personalized and contextualized. And I think if you were just using sequences to send automated emails, you should definitely at the task management part of it because it's not just emails. You can do calling tasks and to do tasks, LinkedIn tasks. You can do lots of different kinds of tasks and help now, again, we're helping reps know what to do, when to take particular actions, and and making sure nobody gets left behind.

Max Cohen: Yeah. I I think also, like, to even add to that, like, task thing, it's also making sure that tasks that don't need to be created don't get created. There's nothing worse than when you have, like, automation set up that's creating tasks, But it turns out there's no need for them to have ever been built in the first place, and you end up with a whole bunch of bloat of these tasks that just aren't relevant anymore and people are spending time deleting stuff. What's really cool with the sequence is that when it gets to the point where the task actually does need to be created because that person hasn't reengaged with you, then and only then does it get created when it's needed. So that's, like, a cool thing.

And I think I'll hit the sequences thing just again real quick. Big mistake that I see people. It's not an email marketing tool. Marketing email is the email marketing tool. If you're the sales director saying, hey, here's a list of people.

We're gonna blast them with a sequence. Guess what, dude? You're just gonna burn your domain. Your Gmail, your Office 365 business email is not meant to be email marketing server. And again, like, you're you're trying to use it that way if if that's what you're trying to do.

And if anyone's wondering why there are certain limits around how much you can do it, it's to protect you. Because again, sequences is not made for bulk email marketing. The best sort of use case you can or the way you can kind of frame it up is that it's made to automate a lot of the things you do in the different scenarios where you're either introducing yourself 1 on 1 for the first time, reconnecting with someone, or just trying to to get back into like yeah. Either reconnecting or introducing yourself for the first time. Like that's like really the big thing.

What I tell people is in terms of what sequences should you set up, think of all the different scenarios where you would deploy that sequence. Because the the cadence that you would create to kinda follow-up with someone whether it's the first time that you're assigned and you need to book that kickoff call, or you're in the middle of a deal and they ghost you, or you're just trying to reconnect with someone you haven't talked to in a while, Those are all different ways that you would engage those folks. So if you build these if you talk to your sales team and say, hey, what are the common scenarios where we usually follow the same sort of standard operating procedure to reengage with someone? Let's build those in a sequences, so we have those there at our disposal, and we can use them and and get some reporting on them and all that. That's kind of the best way to approach it versus just saying, oh, this is like an email marketing tool.

George B. Thomas: Because it's not.

Max Cohen: It's not that. It's not that. Beyond the sequences stuff though, I think one of the biggest things that I see sort of people get wrong at a more like macro sense is trying to recreate their sales process exactly as it was before and not using this as an opportunity to make it better. And I think also a trend that I've been seeing a lot that I'm not totally in love with is the idea of having competing sales teams working out of a single CRM. I've heard a lot of requests of people wanting to be, like, yeah.

Well, we've got these competitive sales teams and they like to shark each other's deals and deal information from each other. So we wanna make sure they can't see other stuff, and we wanna be able to have duplicate records. They can all work on their own and keep it separate, and it's just you realize that's gonna create an awful customer experience, 1. And also, and this is a maybe something to think about not only for Sales Hub or for any other part of HubSpot that you're using. Some things are people problems and some things are technology problems.

They're not always technology problems. If you have like a toxic sales culture or you've set up your sales incentives in a way where your own employees or people under your same umbrella have to compete with each other, it really doesn't matter what technology you're using at the end of the day. You're creating a bad experience for your employees and for your customers. Just going into it thinking technology is gonna solve problems that need to be solved in other ways that aren't technology is just what I see a lot of people be blind to when starting to use it.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. Max, I love that you went in that direction. And by the way, the way that I love to look at this is its platform, its platform. Those are the 3 kind of vector areas that you can pay attention to when you're trying to fix something. By the way, let me just back up for a hot second, because I feel like I'm at HubSpot Sales Hub Church or stuff.

Like, I was getting I was getting sales goosebumps as you 2 were talking. I'm like, this is so good. It's so much great value for the HubSpot and inbound community. And then what was amazing is that the thing that I am like, this is a travesty. It's a train wreck.

It didn't even hit the map of, like, the brains of Max Cohen and Kyle Jepsen. Here's the deal. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are using your deal pipeline for some type of process that has zero to do with revenue dollars Oh. Stop it. Stop it.

It's a ticket pipeline. It's a custom object. It's something. But you are not to build a process that is not revenue based in your deal pipelines because you will jack things up. Reporting, goals, forecasting, it will get ugly real quick.

Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox. Let's move forward. The next thing that I wanna talk about, because we're trying to squeeze this all in the amount of time that we have, is is there a ninja or samurai or, I don't know, whatever your favorite thing is, ladies and gentlemen, tip, trick, or hack that you like to use or you've seen people use inside of the sales hub that you're like, oh, oh, that's pretty dope.

Kyle Jepson: There are lots of crazy things people do in HubSpot. We could go into some really technically advanced stuff that I don't even fully understand because it's over my head. I mean, George, you mentioned just briefly early on in this episode snippets, and I feel like snippets I people are not excited enough about snippets. So a snippet for anyone, for for anyone who's new to HubSpotter or not in HubSpot is just a tiny block of text. It can have personalization tokens in it.

You could format it with in whatever way you want, and then you assign it like a hashtag shortcut. And then you can just use it so many different places inside of HubSpot. You're sending an email to someone, we have email templates, and that gives you the subject line and the full body. If your email template is proposition value number 1 goes here, proposition value number 2 goes here, you can have a whole library of value props in your snippets, and you could just drop in the relevant ones there. There.

But it's not just in in that little communicator box where you can send emails and and leave notes and assign tasks and things. You can use it when you're generating a quote because that's another thing you do in HubSpot. And if you wanna drop in a standard terms of service or or if you have you can put comments to the buyer on your quotes inside of HubSpot. Now you can have your comments to the buyer probably one of 5 things you say to every buyer. Just have snippets for them.

Drop them in there. Don't type that up every time. I think it's just so fun. It's like a little scavenger hunt inside of HubSpot to figure out all the different places that snippets can be used, and it's a lot. And you can just build a whole bunch of those.

And anytime, you know, you have that thing, you you type over and over. You can put it there, and and I I think snippets is is great and can can save you so much time in so many different ways.

Max Cohen: Yeah. Also, if you don't have access to playbooks yet, maybe you're on starter. A snippet is a great way to come up with just a notes taking format when you're logging calls. I think, where my mind kinda goes with this is and and maybe it's a little bit more nuance, but I don't think a lot maybe I'm wrong. But at least with the folks that I've had experience onboarding, a lot of people don't really look at the sales hub as like a coaching tool.

Like, if you think about it, there's a lot of ways that managers can coach reps with a lot of what you're seeing and logging and doing inside of the sales hub. If you look at things now, conversational intelligence for example, where you're putting the call recordings in HubSpot, you have that space to leave notes and comments and everything and give feedback around the calls people are having. That's a really cool thing. When you think of something simple like comments in a chat. Maybe you have sales reps that are working a chat and you're a manager and you wanna come in and coach them in real time by leaving comments in the chat that the recipient on the other end can't see.

That's a really cool way that you can kinda do that in real time and help someone like through a sales chat conversation. Again, playbooks is also like a really good way to help make sure your coaching reps things like that. But also, in the way that you set up your dashboards. If you have these dashboards that you're building that are, like, giving you information and sure, maybe you're sharing those with, like, key stakeholders that, like, aren't going into HubSpot stuff. Have you ever thought of building your dashboards in a way so that when you're sitting down having a 1 on 1 with your sales reps, you can filter it by the rep, and then all of a sudden your data that you're you're seeing is just for that rep.

And you could have a conversation around that. You can do pipeline reviews by looking at your card view of deals and just filtering it by certain reps. There's so many ways that you can use the data and stuff that people are generally just looking at in HubSpot to do their job as aids for these different coaching conversations that you have with sales reps. But a lot of people just don't think to do that. Think a little bit more about if you're a manager, how are you using what's available to you to coach your reps in different

George B. Thomas: amazing in your sales process tools because it works in HubSpot, and it works in Gmail and Outlook. Like, it's just anyway, we'll get off of that because snippets, they get loved. I wanna throw in there, by the way, the activity feed under your contact menu because, man, if you're not using that to actually look at the things you should be doing for that day to communicate around what's happening, that's not the one I'm gonna pick. But I at least wanna throw that in this episode because it's it's some valuable information. But here's another tool that I just feel doesn't get enough love for the magic that it could actually provide your sales team.

The big culprit is the visibility of things. And when things are invisible, we can't make smart decisions. And the fact that you can actually use the documents tool and upload a document, a PDF or a PowerPoint or whatever, and you can send it to somebody. And you can see that they viewed page 1, page 3, page 7, but they didn't view page 8. Oh, no.

Because on page 8, we talk about pricing. Well, that makes you know exactly what you're gonna talk about on the next call with them, because you know that they're inept to the fact of the pricing that is actually important to them moving forward in the process or whatever it is. But the fact that we can see intelligence around what was once hidden when you attach that PDF to your email and you didn't know if it was downloaded or viewed or thrown away or whatever, those days are gone. So please, if you're not using documents, check out that tool and figure out how to leverage it. I was gonna skip the next question, by the way, because we're running out of time.

But I saw the notes for this next question. I'm like, I can't skip it, so I'm gonna skip something else. Because I was like, maybe I don't wanna talk about the things that are missing from the sales hub. And then I saw anyway, I won't even say it because I want you guys I don't wanna steal your your thunder here. Let's go into this, and then we'll move quickly into action items that we want them to take from this episode.

Although, I do have one other special thing, Max, that I wanna share before we send Kyle away from this episode. I've been waiting to actually share this thing. But what is the biggest thing that you 2 feel is missing from HubSpot Sales Hub to date right now of the recording of this episode?

Kyle Jepson: Really wish we had deal rooms. The idea of a deal room is you have this space that's unique to a sale, and the prospects can come in, the seller can come in, you can communicate with each other. We have integrations with tools that do this. This is the idea that the the Sales Hub development team has been kicking around for a while. I was in conversations with with people a few years ago, and we were kinda, like, whiteboarding and figuring out how it would work.

And then the project got moved from one team to another, and you know what we got It's customer portal, which is awesome. Inside Service Hub, customers can now log in. They can see their tickets. They can ask for updates. They can give updates.

They can close things. It's awesome. But it's just like, tickets and deals, they're they're they're they're cousins. They're they're practically twin brothers. Like, can't we just have this on the sales side too?

I hope we get there. I feel like with HubSpot, you can sort of build 1 ad hoc, especially if you're really good at using objects information in the CMS, which is a HubSpot superpower that way beyond me. You could have embedded videos and a chat and your deal info and all kinds of things, but I really feel like this is a a just come standard in HubSpot, turn it on sort of solution we could have, but we don't have it yet.

George B. Thomas: Oh, I'm looking forward to that day. Oh my gosh. Like, because I know how client portal in 2023, how important that's gonna be to the way I run my business. And to hear you say that for the the sales process, I'm like, actually, I might need to, like, wipe the saliva off, like, the side of my my face. Max, what's missing out of HubSpot Sales Hub as of right now?

Max Cohen: We grew up on small medium businesses. Small to medium businesses don't always just sell in a b to b motion, which if you think about the deal object, that's uniquely set up to be able to handle that. But small to medium businesses also sell online through ecommerce. And while there are great integrations that shove in ecommerce orders and things like that in the HubSpot, a lot of times, you know, it it takes a little bit of like, not mental gymnastics, but verbal gymnastics to get someone to understand that, hey, a deal doesn't have to be something a sales rep works. It can just represent an online order for something.

We shouldn't have to have that conversation with people. I think the sales hub could use, like, a little bit of almost tweaking to kind of account for the other ways people sell. Especially, if you're thinking about maybe, like, integrations with point of sale systems at like brick and mortar stores. Or maybe instead of a deals object, we have an online orders object that's easier for someone to wrap their head around that. Maybe it works kinda just like a deals object, but it isn't called a deal.

Like, it's an online order. It's something different. Instead of having to make, like, other pipelines for it. So I think just like accounting for some of those other ways. On top of that, I think there is also when we talk about small to medium businesses, an idea of appointments versus meetings.

And I think I'll probably like mentioned this like in previous episodes. If you think of something like a barbershop, some sort of place that sells training or or any places that sell by people booking appointments for things. You see that a lot with small to medium businesses, service providers, or or things like that. I think that's something that's, like, really missing because you could build some sort of we have all the pieces in HubSpot to be able to do something like that, where you can say, here are appointments that are available. Here are users or employees that can work them.

You can book them. You can pay for them. Like with HubSpot payments, we have the guts to make this happen. And this I think is what's stopping a salon from using HubSpot Yes. Or, like, you know, some other, like, small to medium business that, you know, people pay to book appointments to come in, and you can't expect folks who aren't living and dying by a a Google Calendar to understand the nuances of setting up everyone's individual calendar perfectly to make some sort of system that works this way.

I would really love to see us kind of just recognize that not every small to medium business sells in this exact motion that a deal is really purpose purpose built to support, make it a little bit more accessible for folks that sell in a different way.

George B. Thomas: Yeah. The amount of hairdressers or salons that we could sell HubSpot CMS and the CRM to if they could do appointments and have a dope looking website at the same time that is intelligent would be absolutely amazing. Now I'm not actually

Max Cohen: That's that's sweet. It's $45 a month. Everyone can get it. You know?

George B. Thomas: I'm telling you, it's it's just waiting for that feature, and then I'm I'm gonna be the king of hairstyles and salons and all that barbers. I'm just gonna go rock the world and and and do that. Now I'm not gonna say what's missing because we're quickly running out of time. Here in a minute, Kyle Max, I'm gonna ask action items that people should take after listening to this episode. But before we do that, I feel like people that are listening to the podcast need to get to know Kyle Jepsen just a little bit better than they might know him now.

K? Because something happened. And, Max, you know, Usually, I ask people on the episode, hey. Who's your favorite superhero? And you'll get a quick, like, Spider Man, Hulk, whatever.

Whoever it is. Eric was, like, Green Arrow and Christina, you know, Scarlet Witch. Kyle Jepsen answers me back. I say, bro, I wanna cartoon you for the episode. What's your favorite superhero?

And this is a light into who Kyle Jepsen is, ladies and gentlemen. His response says favorite superhero question mark. I added the in there. It was just a question mark. But he says this, Max, and listeners.

I like the green lantern. I like it because it's a role that's bestowed upon you as opposed to a superpower you're born with, Superman, X Men, etcetera. Or get from an accident, Spiderman, etcetera. Or experiment, Captain America, etcetera, or that you build with expensive technology and a huge budget Batman, Iron Man, etcetera. There are multiple Green Lanterns and they all get called to the work, and they just have to do the best they can to fulfill their duty.

Max Cohen: So remember when you asked me that what my favorite superhero was, and I said, oh, I don't know, Batman?

George B. Thomas: Yep. I remember that. I do remember. So that's Kyle Jepsen, ladies and gentlemen. But here we go back into the exit of this podcast episode of the hub heroes.

What is an action item that the listener should take after listening to this episode?

Kyle Jepson: I would love for everyone to to check out HubSpot Academy if you haven't already. Like, we've got lots of if if I mean, we're talking about sales here. If you wanna learn how to use Sales Hub, HubSpot Academy is totally free. Don't have to be a HubSpot customer to use it. Just go to academy.hubswap.com.

Sign up. Check out the catalog. Take some courses.

Max Cohen: Action item for me, check out the app marketplace. There's a lot of really, really, really, really, really cool sales specific integrations. I'll mention 2, DealHub CPQ is one that a lot of the solutions engineers are flipping on about. Sales commission by quota path is also pretty cool to pretty cool cool one as well. Beyond all that, beyond, like, anything specific in the tool.

I've I've given similar advice for the service hub, and I'll give similar advice for the sales hub. Stop looking at the sales hub as a way to just absolutely maximize your sales people. And and I mean, think it's okay to think about stuff from, like, efficiency standpoint. But also thinking of think about what are you doing in the tool, and what are you doing with your strategy, and what are you doing with your culture to help your sales people put their freaking oxygen mask on first, so they actually can help others. Instead of just making it a tool that's gonna let you squeeze every last drop out of them, think of it as something gonna help them just enjoy doing their job a little bit more.

That is a very valid thing to do. Sales burnout is very real. Sales is a very just by its nature, a cutthroat profession that's very difficult. A lot of emotional ups and downs. You don't need your technology adding to that.

You don't need additional stressors. So start thinking about ways you can remove that. And a low hanging fruit is the technology that you use, but don't set like but you need to separate that also from like the strategies and the cultures and things like that too as well. Right? Those are all individual things to kinda tackle but you can bring them all together in certain levels of harmony too.

George B. Thomas: I love both of those. And ladies and gentlemen, I fully know that my advice is gonna sound weird at first, but please please stick with me. My action item for you after this episode is to listen to yourself. Listen, we talked about a ton of stuff in this episode, and I want you to listen back to yourself if you had a moment in this episode that you went or I wonder. I want you to go back to that point, look at what we were talking about, and learn about that, test that, try to add it to your process, see if it makes your sales process, your sales organization, or your use of HubSpot better.

And then move forward with the next thing that you heard us talk about, and we'll see you in the next episode. Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will lord lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the hub heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode.

Make sure you head over to the hub heroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the league of heroes. FYI, if you're part of the league of heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag, hashtag hub euros podcast on any of the socials and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces.

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