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9 min read
This edition we dive into:
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Recorded: Wednesday 08 February 2023 | Published: Friday 10 February 2023
The start of 2023 has been kinda strange… by February you’d expect to be back into full swing, the year planned out and strategy confirmed.
Perhaps surprisingly, we’re finding that’s not the norm in our larger clients. Many took extended breaks (to make up for not being able to take breaks in previous covid affected years) and after returning have spent the last week or two just catching up.
Only now are they setting aside time to think strategically.
And that’s fine. Strategy needs space. Space (ie time) to think critically and proactively. It’s hard to squeeze it in, in between meetings…
Don’t rush it - even though you are feeling the pressure of a quarter that is almost half over.
Think about your business goals. Be clear on those.
Break these down into sales, marketing and service outcomes.
Then map those against your available resources (and tech stack).
And then prioritise based on resource availability against the impact of the outcomes.
The biggest challenge we are seeing in companies is the lack of resources to actually implement the components of business strategy.
Key takeaway:
BTW, some wise advice from a customer:
“Version one is better than version none.”
- Justin from Red Tomato
So test and measure.
P.S. We used to guide companies through an annual marketing review (we called it an AMR). We no longer offer this service to new clients, but the Google doc we link to on the page is still a useful guide to use - free to access (no signup required).
A nice update to the Deactivate a user process - it will now prompt to remove a paid seat licence (if that user has one assigned to them).
This feature rolled out a few days after we mentioned it on the last show as a gotcha.
It would be nice to think HubSpot were listening and rolled it out in response to the show (lol), but I’m assuming this is a coincidence and they actually had this planned for months, and it just happened to roll out around that time.
Thank you HubSpot!
Here are a few other quick items of interest we noticed:
If you have a chat widget on the right side of the screen and you have a slide in form on the same side it will not work. So be aware of this!
The two will compete and cause issues.
Here’s our general guidance for placement:
You set this when creating the popup form:
Unfortunately there’s no way to change an existing form type or placement, you’ll need to create a new form.
You’ll notice that all our popup forms on HubShots and XEN all slide-in from the bottom left now, for this very reason.
Note: the new Popup CTA Beta that some portals have, only allows targeting bottom right ie can’t show in bottom left :-(
When closing a deal on the mobile app the close date does not automatically update like if you were to do it via the browser/desktop!
In saying that, here is a sales feature discussed with a sales team that we work with when they are completing a sale.
They mentioned that getting photos of completed projects were difficult and we had an idea of making it a significant moment.
So we decided to prepare the client and have the photo of that significant moment framed and sent to them as a memento of the occasion.
Have you ever wanted to trigger a Ticket workflow based on a contact replying to that ticket?
Not sure which ticket properties to check?
Here are the two properties you will be looking to use:
But when you search for them in the workflow trigger criteria you can’t find them.
Turns out the only way (that we’ve found) that you can access them is by using an automated ticket workflow that HubSpot creates in the background when you enable this option in the Automation settings of a ticket pipeline:
Enabling this tickbox will create an automatic workflow in the background, that you can find in the ‘Created in other tools’ category of workflows:
These are the automatically generated workflows HubSpot created, based on that tickbox in pipeline settings.
Simple edit one of them and clone to a new workflow - you can then use those same properties for your own workflows.
If all the above seems like a messy workaround, then trust your instincts - my gut is telling me there’s an easier way to do this and I’ve missed.
Please let me know if you have a better way.
A few episodes ago we discussed a gotcha relating to annoying notification emails being sent out to all users (and how to turn it off).
Little did we know that Notification profiles were just about to be released.
Notification profiles allow an admin to set up the default notifications that all users will receive.
You can set these up from Settings:
For example, as a default you could all notifications to be turned:
Or you can control just the default email notifications that everyone will receive when they are added as a User (they can always override their settings to their personal preferences):
Plus, bonus, these can be incorporated into Presets, another new feature in HubSpot - more on this in a future episode.
Tara has a good walkthrough on the HubShots YouTube channel covering both Notification profiles and Presets:
Security Center is a new page for getting an overview of how you are doing security wise. But I find it confusing - here’s Ian’s portal:
The above screenshots is from Ian’s portal, here’s ours:
I find this confusing, for example it indicates we have 6 Super Admin users (which is correct) but indicates we have 11 Partner users who are Super Admin. I’m assuming this is because some of our team - who don’t have Super Admin access in our own portal, do have Super Admin in some of our client accounts…? In which case, the Resolve link doesn’t offer any help…
I was surprised to learn this is actually released (I had assumed based on the above it was still in beta). I’m struggling to recommend this to anyone just yet as I think it will raise more questions than it answers… will review again in a few weeks.
As a general note though - I do strongly recommend making 2FA mandatory for all accounts - that’s something I’m tracking down in our portal - we have a few older generic user accounts that don’t yet have 2FA.
More to come on this once we have a clearer understanding of what this all means…
We’ve covered this on the show a few times (even way back in 2016 in our chat with Varun in episode 26), but after a conversation with a customer earlier this week, thought it was worth revisiting.
I know the topic of personas can be as simple or as complex (perhaps even controversial) as you want to make it, but for the purposes of this shot, let’s just agree that personas are a nice way to capture the attributes and behaviours of your contacts, and group them into appropriate buckets.
The ways of defining your personas is endless, and there’s been many books written on the topic (this one is a classic).
But, at the risk of oversimplifying, consider some examples:
If you are in B2B you might have personas for:
If you are in retail you might have personas for:
And many personas will combine a mix of these.
With all that preamble out of the way, we can now consider the concept of a Non-fit persona.
Simply put, Non-fit personas are a way of grouping together contacts who aren’t a fit for your business, either because:
As many a wise person has said, learning to say No is a skill (see also our quote of the week below).
Clearly defining your non-fit persona allows you to easily identify who you should be saying No to as early as possible. Better for you, better for them.
In HubSpot you can then use your personas to automate workflows for emails, internal notifications, advertising audiences, etc.
We added this new feature in the HubSpot build Xero sync to now get invoices into HubSpot.
Gotcha here is that you cannot see it on the contact record.
Scenario: using ChatGPT to prepare your emails to contacts and then the receiver using ChatGPT to summarise the email.
It’s like Twitter inefficiency all over - Twitter limits to 280 characters, so tools are created to prepare threads, and then Twitter has a feature to allow reading threads easily. Summary: Twitter creates a feature (read as thread) to overcome an issue it created in the first place. Inefficiency magnified.
Anyway, my point is simply this - don’t get carried away doing noisy ChatGPT activities (ie padding out emails) that don’t actually add value to your audience or recipients.
Instead focus on the high value activities that provide both efficiency and effectiveness.
Here’s a few simple examples of useful things to do:
BTW when I think of where ChatGPT is going, I consider it to be this generation’s spell-check. A tool/feature we take for granted in everything we do. The ChatGPT experience is going to be integrated everywhere. Just as we have a generation that don’t know what life was like before mobile phones, we’ll soon have a generation that doesn’t know what life was like before ChatGPT (or whatever it ends up being branded as in our collective minds).
“Hell Yeah or No”
- Derek Sivers
Last year Ian and I ran a private Masterclass for our clients, where we went through a ton of tips and new features using HubSpot.
We’re making the event recording available to our HubShots subscribers - you can access the slide deck and recording using the link in the show notes (not a subscriber yet? - you can sign up at hubshots.com/subscribe )
In the masterclass we go through 11 areas of HubShot across the hubs, highlighting the tools and features that we see most people miss.
We’re planning another online masterclass in the coming month - look out for a separate email with details soon.
Our HubSpot QuickCheck service has been popular with companies who are looking for a quick review of their HubSpot portal to understand these kinds of situations.
You can view more details and book in your session here.
Connect with HubShots here:
Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn
HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
We record using Riverside.fm (<= affiliate link)
Please share this with colleagues - it helps us improve and reach more marketers.
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