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Recorded: Wednesday 26 April 2023 | Published: Friday 05 May 2023
We’re in a season of tough times - running our businesses is hard, the free money is over, and our prospects (and customers) are cautious about spend. Nothing new there. And perhaps the surprising thing is that prospects aren’t always like this…
So we need to be proactive, work harder (and smarter), provide more value, and keep a level head if we’re going to survive.
Sadly though, for some people this also means bending the rules, lowering their standards and employing activities that are on the shonky side. Some justify this under the guise of ‘always be hustling’ or ‘gotta make ends meet’.
I’m all for hard work and being proactive. But I have zero tolerance for dishonesty.
A small example: Recently we’ve been getting people booking in meetings with our consultants under the guise of getting help with HubSpot, but once they are on the call we quickly realise they don’t even use HubSpot and are purely on the call to pitch and sell. The meetings usually last 2 minutes before I boot them off the call. If you’re not going to be honest in our very first interaction, why on earth would I consider buying from you?
So, here’s my call: let’s all make sure we keep our standards high. Be proactive. But always be honest.
Yes, we all want proper attribution reporting - but if we aren’t logging all the activity, any insights we get will be low value.
It is important to log activity as it not only helps with attribution but also other areas of the business, like sales support, service and marketing.
When we discuss attribution reporting with clients we guide them through the first 3 stages of the HubShots Framework first, to ensure everything is being tracked. Only then can we start to get some useful insights out of the attribution reporting in HubSpot (which is why we consider it a Stage 4 item).
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
How can you tell if a form (eg a pop up form) is working well?
View the Performance tab for a form and check for the following key areas:
(if the original email thread isn’t logged)
If sent to you personally:
- these won't get logged into HubSpot
The only way to have new conversations from contact logged, is if:
- they were sent to a Conversations > Inbox
- you can reply to a contact for an email and then it will get logged (based on your logging settings)
- you can also forward conversations into HubSpot, using your forward email:
[portalid]]@forward.hubspot.com
(get this from the Settings > Activities page)
- if you send an email to a contact
- and they reply
- you can optionally have their reply also logged automatically into HubSpot
- this is available from your personal Email Automation settings:
https://app.hubspot.com/settings/[portalid]]/user-preferences/email
A common request from service teams is for the Ticket name to be consistent and meaningful, based on items submitted (eg by a customer).
If you are using a form to submit tickets, it’s easy to update the Ticket name based on form properties:
Note: you can only use Ticket properties (ie it won’t be able to use Contact properties from the form)
By default when you set up a blog you probably see date and time on blog posts eg
However, you can easily change this to just show the date (which is probably more what you wanted):
Thanks to Kevin at Helpful Hero for alerting us to this - I had totally forgotten about these settings!
This caught me out this week. Prepared a list for a client and added in a bunch of columns. Saved the List, ie
I then shared the list link with the client, but they didn’t see the columns I had saved into the list.
Turns out this as per design. Via the HubSpot Knowledge base, the layout is only saved for your browser - other users (or even just other devices you used) won’t see the layout.
These are the reasons we tend to find why people upgrade:
So if you have more than 3 websites then upgrading to CMS Hub Enterprise should not be a big decision!
The XML Sitemap is a list of all of the pages on your site that you would like a search engine (eg Google or Bing) to include in their search results.
It is a file that is built by HubSpot (and hosted on HubSpot) that you can ‘submit’ to Google or Bing, by giving them the URL link to the file.
This is the sitemap that's purely used for indexing and crawling your website and is manually submitted (eg to Google Search Console).
You can access it from Settings > Website > Domains & URLs > Sitemap
If you are managing multiple sites in your HubSpot portal, each domain will have its own sitemap.
However, it’s important to keep the XML Sitemap ‘clean’ and remove any pages that you wouldn’t want Google to index - for example, Thank you pages (you likely don’t want them turning up in Google results).
If you see a page in the sitemap you don’t want included, simply hover over it and click the Remove button:
Recommendation: check through your sitemaps and remove and pages that you don’t want appearing in Google.
Don’t be afraid to jump on a support chat or create an email - use the Help icon in the bottom right of your HubSpot portal
By the way, we asked Midjourney to create some images to match this Shot, here’s a few examples (see if you can spot the problems!)
“Different is better than better”
Sally Hogshead (YouTube video)
Here’s a few of the AI related profiles and channels I follow:
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/icreatelife
https://twitter.com/nickfloats
YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@AllAboutAI
https://www.youtube.com/@godago
Download a copy of the HubShots Framework A3 PDF poster (recently updated with colour coding and more).
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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, XEN Create and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
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