How to Successfully Implement HubSpot

Kathy (host):
Hello there and welcome back to another episode of Help! My Business is Growing, a podcast where we explore how to grow and build a business that is healthy and sustainable. I’m your host, Kathy Svetina, a fractional CFO and founder of NewCastle Finance, a company where we believe that everything you do in your business will eventually end up in your finances, and to get to healthy finances is to have a healthy business.

Kathy (host):
How do you get there? Well, this is where this podcast comes into help. If you are in the market for a CRM system for your growing business, chances are that HubSpot is on your radar because it’s a popular choice and is widely adopted by many businesses for its versatility and power. The problem with HubSpot is, well, I say a problem because there is a lot to HubSpot; it can be pretty complex, and it has a lot of features. It has a lot of benefits that can be a mystery.

Kathy (host):
So, with that many moving parts, you might not be quite sure what to expect if you migrate to HubSpot from other CRM platforms, or maybe you’re just implementing it from the beginning. So, we’re going to be looking into how does HubSpot actually work? And what are these different hubs that you can implement in your business? And when should you actually be implementing it? What do they actually do? How do they help you grow the business? And how do they help you run the business better?

Kathy (host):
And what sets HubSpot apart from any of the other CRM platforms that you might be thinking of? And also, what is really important is how do you know which one is the right CRM for you. Because it has to be the right fit for you and your business. And how do you make that decision if HubSpot is the right CRM for you?

Kathy (host):
As a quick reminder, all of the episodes on this podcast, including this one, come with timestamps for topics that we discuss, and each one has its own blog post too. So, if you want to read it instead of listening to it, you have that option. You can find the link to the episode’s blog in the episode show notes.

Kathy (host):
My guest today is Jennelle McGrath. She is the CEO and Inbound Sales and Marketing growth agency partner of Market Veep. Jennelle started as Marketing VP out of a passion for helping businesses reach a broader market, get more leads, and improve their sales and marketing alignment. Jennelle believes that people are the most important part of any business. The human factor is what influences her marketing method, her business philosophy, and her focus on company culture. She is also an expert on HubSpot. Join us!

Kathy (host):
Jennelle, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Jennelle (guest):
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

Kathy (guest):
Yeah, I’m super excited because we’re going to be talking about HubSpot, which to me is almost like an enigma. You know, there are a lot of options for CRMs. And HubSpot is very popular. But it’s really complex because there are a lot of pieces to it, in my mind. When I think about HubSpot, it has always been a type of graduate-level CRM. So let’s start here. First, who do you think is the best customer for HubSpot?

Jennelle (guest):
Yeah, so the best customer for HubSpot, I would say, is somebody who is looking to aggregate lots of different systems into one tool. Instead of having, you know, email over here and social over there, somebody who really wants one place to go to have really clean data is the first one. And then the second piece is, I would say, people generally who have multiple touchpoints in their buying cycle. And that can be short or long; they tend to be longer just because of some of the really neat automations that we can do. But those two things, I’d say, are generally what we think about when we consider who’s the best fit are the things that it boils down to.

Kathy (guest):
And you also think that it matters, what size of business you are in terms of people, in terms of revenue. So it could be that you’re more of a mature business versus someone who’s just starting out. Because you know, there are different sizes of businesses; there are people who have just started out, there are people who have been doing this for a while and they have a couple of people under them, a couple of salespeople, a couple of marketing people, and there’s obviously, there are, you know, enterprise-level businesses. So in terms of that, if you think of it on that scale, who would be the best fit?

Jennelle (guest):
Such a good question. So you can start from the beginning, whether you are a solopreneur or you’re a massive enterprise. Where it boils down to is what level of HubSpot that you get. So to your point, like a crawl, walk, run kind of situation, you don’t need every bell and whistle on enterprise when you’re a solopreneur. However, by starting out smaller for those organizations who start earlier, it saves a ton of time without having to clean up data later, reorganize things, migrate, import; it can be a mess.

Jennelle (guest):
So I think in terms of the size of the company, starting on the smallest plan, if you’re a solopreneur, I’d say, under a million. If you’re over a million, generally, Pro is the way to go at that threshold across whether it’s sales or marketing or service, depending on what kind of business you have. That’s really where I think the magic happens in HubSpot, where all of the automation is possible. So I like to think of it as essentially cloning your best people, your best processes, giving you like three assistants in the background. And it doesn’t, again, have to be something like out of the gate to use every imaginable bell and whistle. It’s really at what point in your growth are you at where you just need more arms and legs to be able to execute on these things?

Kathy (guest):
And you mentioned cloning yourself and having three assistants in the background. How does that look like in reality? Like, what are some of the features that enabled you to do that in HubSpot? Because like my mind is, how do you even, what are all these features?

Jennelle (guest):
So many good ones. I’ll start on the sales side because that one, I think, usually solves people’s immediate pain of, “Oh, my gosh, I have all of these emails, and I can’t get to all of them, or I have all these calls in a day, I can’t get to all my follow-ups in a timely manner.” So there’s a tool within there called sequences, which allows us to do automated drips. And there’s a tool in there called documents. Both of those things, combined, I think, create a lot of magic for a salesperson.

Jennelle (guest):
For example, if you are somebody who has lots of calls all day, and you have a standard format that you are sending a follow-up for your sell sheet, the common questions, your case studies, any additional like ebooks, attachments, anything like that, all of that can be put into a template and by a click of a button automatically sent to that person. You can also customize it.

Kathy (guest):
Is that like a content library, then you can actually put in the HubSpot. So you can put all your ebooks and all your whatever might have if you have blogs, or maybe you have a like a podcast that you want them to get. So you put that in and then you’re just clicking and selecting which ones you want to send them, is that?

Jennelle (guest):
So you can either use it when you’re in the HubSpot portal or use it in your email. Some salespeople just don’t even want to go into necessarily change their process, right? They’ve used email forever. So let’s just use that use case. It is a way to store your most commonly typed emails as templates, think of it that way, your most commonly attached assets, PDFs that you’re sending them. By literally clicking from your Gmail or your Outlook, you can have it automatically populate those common conversations in there. And then it tracks them. So it gives you the analytics of, “Hey, this person also clicked on that PDF, or they looked at it for this amount of time.” And so all of that also helps inform the sales process and the sales cycle. Like, “Okay, this one is working, people are clicking on it a lot versus this one is not being clicked on at all.” And it’s all through just clicking of a button.

Jennelle (guest):
And then if you take that one step further, let’s say you have lots of calls one day, and you have three people ghost you, and having to draft those emails to chase them, right? To get back on a call and reengage them. All that can be automated. So the first email goes out, let’s say it’s, “So sorry, we missed each other. Here’s some corresponding, you know, content that I thought would be helpful. Here’s my meeting link. Let’s hop back, pick another day and hop back on our call.” If they don’t reply to that email, the system is smart enough to actually send them another email, and you can draft what content there, and again, you can keep going with it. Whether you want to insert like a call notification, task reminder. But the idea is that it’s taking the human part out of it and the human error part of having to remember to follow up five times to get them to do it. The system is automatically going to send that pattern of emails.

Kathy (guest):
And you mentioned integrating with Gmail and Outlook. So I do want to get back to a little bit. When you’re using HubSpot, and from someone who’s never used HubSpot before, is there a separate window that you go to, or is it completely integrated with your existing email? So if you use Outlook, you’re going to be using the features of HubSpot in Outlook. Or if you’re using Gmail, it’s going to just be another layer on top of Gmail. How does it look exactly? ?

Jennelle (guest):
So you won’t have to log into anything else. You use your Gmail or your Outlook, things exactly as you have been. It just gives you more buttons when you go to create that email to be able to automatically enroll somebody, attach something, then it lives, like layered over that existing system.

Kathy (guest):
That’s really good because what I’ve noticed is it’s really, I have a different type of CRM, I use Close, which is an AI-generated driven CRM, which I really like. The only problem with that is that for you to be able to use it, you have to go outside of Gmail, which is paid for, and I don’t like that. So it’s really good that you can actually use it in your email, in your actual email. So that’s really good.

Jennelle (guest):
I was gonna say it definitely meets people from a salesperson perspective. Like I said, some people don’t want to leave their Gmail and others want to be in a system where it can automatically, they can just click down all their tasks at once. It’s really a personal preference, so it can meet you where you’re at. That’s really great.

Kathy (guest):
So you do a lot of HubSpot implementations. What is one of the most common things that you see that people struggling with when they’re implementing HubSpot? What are some of the things that go wrong for them?

Jennelle (guest):
Yeah, I would say there’s a couple of big ones. So the first one is not understanding what systems they currently have. So a lot of times, sometimes people will come in and say, “Hey, I have Salesforce, and I want to get rid of it, or I want to integrate it.” But they don’t realize that their Salesforce is connected to these other programs. And so really having a full picture of your data set to understand what is making the engine work so that when you connect it or when you migrate it, there’s no breaking of any of those external systems.

Jennelle (guest):
And then the next one, I would say, is just a lack of organization. So a lot of times, which is normal, right, when you’re migrating to something, the whole point is that you’re going to get to a more organized place. But people end up having like disjointed places where they’re keeping all of their data. So they might have Excel sheets, they might have stuff in the cloud, they might have bought tradeshow lists, none of them are formatted in the same way. They’ll have different headers. So really understanding what properties that you’re trying to capture because that will help inform later on what things you can market to and automate. So standardizing everything into one location or one file as you go to upload them are the two biggest ones. So that one usually takes a little bit of time for people.

Kathy (guest):
And is there like the businesses that you work with? I believe they’re a little bit on the larger size or enterprise going from Salesforce to HubSpot, is that correct?

Jennelle (guest):
So there’s a good size range, everything from I’d say like 3 million up to, let’s say average is 50 million that we have some massive enterprises above that, but I’d say somewhere in that middle range. So they end up having a pretty wide set of needs for what HubSpot is trying to solve. And even if they’re an enterprise, which we’ve seen recently, that is using Salesforce and has a really large, you know, 50-person, 80-person sales team. They’re still having problems with their Salesforce because it’s so bloated, and there are so many bells and whistles and standardizing people just aren’t adopting it, even if they’ve had it for years. So they’re paying for this system that’s just really not being utilized.

Kathy (guest):
Then, you know, when we had the conversation when we were prepping for this podcast when you told me that enterprises are actually going from Salesforce to HubSpot, my mind just kind of blew up because Salesforce is such an enterprise-level CRM, and I was really surprised hearing that HubSpot is taking that market share.

Kathy (guest):
But let’s focus more on the smaller businesses between, you know, like you said, between three and 20 million. And you said that they are coming to you to migrate to HubSpot. What is usually the reason why they try to migrate to HubSpot? Is there a common thread, the common problem that they have that they want to go and move over to HubSpot for whatever they’ve been using before?

Jennelle (guest):
Yeah, I would say it’s been called like a Frankenstein. So they have everything in all different places. Yeah, all of the teams, great humans, they’re trying to do their best to work together, but there’s no transparent location for them to see everybody’s team. And so I think, you know, in the last several years, especially with the change of COVID, and remote teams, it’s become much more prominent that people really want transparency across their entire pipeline, and there’s a lot more openness around what is working, what is not working, and less finger-pointing. And so when they’re coming, they’re using HubSpot to be able to see across sales, marketing, service operations, all within one ecosystem.

Kathy (guest):
This is interesting because I know that there are different levels of hotspots. So you have the sales, marketing, service operations, and the sales and marketing things are pretty, you know, well known. But let’s talk about the operation and service. What are those features? And how does HubSpot help with those? I’m really interested in that.

Jennelle (guest):
So on the service side, so operations does a bunch of generally we’ll see it more on the enterprise level. Service side has come a long way. Because it used to really be when it first was launched, more focused on like, e-comm. So traditional ticketing, you know, you buy a product, somebody has a question, service team needs to source it, or an IT team has lots of tickets, and they’re using it. But it’s really shifted where they can be used for things outside of these e-commerce solutions. So things like onboarding team members, onboarding clients, filtering out hiring by department, you know, when you have a high volume of applicants really using the automation to filter through based on properties.

Jennelle (guest):
So it can do the same principles on the sales side through all that automation; they’ve just applied it to the service side. It looks and feels the same, except they call them tickets instead of deals. But yeah, it’s we use it for onboarding of clients who use it for when we do integrations and migrations, we use it for hiring. There’s just it’s it saves a huge amount of time from a human habit into it.

Kathy (guest):
Yeah, I’d like to dive deeper into how are you actually using it for hiring because that’s a very specific HR type of function. And it’s interesting that you would use a CRM for that because what I think it’s interesting about this is that HubSpot doesn’t just become a CRM in terms of sales and marketing. It also becomes it evolved into the tool that you can use across your organization for other things than just sales and marketing, obviously. So how would you use that for HR when you’re trying to hire people and onboard people? How does it really look like?

Jennelle (guest):
So everything is very holistic within HubSpot, right? So everything can interconnect. For example, we might push out a social post through HubSpot, that social post drives to a landing page that has the job posting that has a HubSpot form with all the criteria, including upload your resume, maybe your references, you know, why you should be considered, that kind of information. It then automatically pushes it into the service pipeline and filters that criteria based on, you know, the number of years using HubSpot, number of years in marketing, and groups them for us, and then can assign right based on who needs to be the person that follows up with them, even down to what emails get sent to them, to book them with somebody for an interview. And so it helps you can automatically move somebody to unqualified without a human having to go through each one of those properties to determine, you know, we might post a job, we might get 400, 500 applicants in two days. And so it’s a huge amount of manual work before we were doing this, to be able to sort through them.

Kathy (guest):
Does it also read resumes as well when people are uploading the resumes, or that’s not the function that it has?

Jennelle (guest):
No, it’s more just like uploading of that file, so it would live on that contact record. So anybody on the team can go in and click and, you know, quick review it, but not as far as I’ve seen so far. I mean, who knows with what AI is doing at this point? It might be next week that it could do it. But in terms of how we use it now.

Kathy (guest):
So really, the filtering of candidates is truly based on the data that they provide on the forums. Right. Correct. That’s a great feature. Like I said, I had no idea that that’s what does that. How about for the onboarding of your people? Can you use HubSpot for that? How do you use that for that?

Jennelle (guest):
Yes, so we have a bunch of different quirky things like we have a welcome form. So things like capturing, you know, their birthday, their favorite color, their favorite candy, their shirt size, or sweatshirt size, all of these things so that as we want to do, you know, company culture activities later on, we don’t we can surprise them without having to go out and ask them. So that’s all form-driven. It can assign other people on the team for tasks. So did we get their I-9 completed? Did they fill out all of their paperwork through our HR portal? Not necessarily storing, we’re not storing any of that information is assigning somebody else tasks and keeping a running list of is this done? And can that be moved through that pipeline to the next activity?

Kathy (guest):
And I’m guessing that the automation can also go in conjunction with any project management tool, yeah, maybe you have a Trello or Asana or something like that. However, it would be, right?

Jennelle (guest):
Yep. So those do have native integration. So each one will be a little bit different in terms of if it’s a bidirectional or a single-directional sync of what can get pushed over in terms of task assignment. But within HubSpot, there’s a task functionality as well. So you can essentially assign teammates tasks, and you can see it a board view, they call it a task queue. So, for example, if I was the HR person, and I have five people that I’m onboarding, I can go to my task and hit start queue. And it will automatically bring up the first task. I’ll hit completed, then it’ll automatically pull up the second task, so I don’t have to go and look for any of the information within there. But if somebody functions in their project management tool, that can get attached and again, assign things there as well.

Kathy (guest):
And I’m also assuming that you have functions within HubSpot that tell you what type of people have what type of capability in HubSpot and what they can actually see. So that the HR person cannot exactly see all the customers, and the salesperson doesn’t see the entire organization that the HR would see. Correct?

Jennelle (guest):
Exactly. So the permissions have come a very long way too. They’re very, very granular. For example, you can create teams, essentially, and have certain teams only see certain pipelines. You can have people only see which contacts they specifically own. You can limit them to which hubs they can be in. And then within there, all of those functionalities are also controlled. Like, what access to look at your time-out sequences, if they can see other people’s sequences, or they can only see their own. So there’s a lot of them. But yes, you can absolutely control it. It helps them or bloat to write like they don’t want to. It’s not necessarily always like a security thing. It’s more like it’s a bloke thing of they can’t get to the stuff that they want to see or need to see because they have to sift through all this other stuff too.

Kathy (guest):
Yeah, that makes sense. And you’ve mentioned hubs a couple of times. Let’s talk about what are hubs and what type of hubs are there.

Jennelle (guest):
Yeah. So think of HubSpot is kind of like the umbrella. And within that umbrella, you have Sales Hub, Service Hub, Marketing Hub, Ops Hub, and CMS Hub. So each function is like their own individual tool, they can get combined, obviously, and you can get the whole suite, they got the whole suite, the growth suite of all of them. But within each one, there’s different tool sets, like Marketing Hub has social workflow, automation, emails, add capabilities, landing pages, blog functions, Sales has pipelines, and sequences, documents, all of these very specific functions. And then they layer in like what tier and things that give even more functionality, depending on which level that you’re at. But each one kind of like Lego blocks, you can add what you need. I like that.

Kathy (guest):
I like that analogy. Yeah. So what is the difference between the Operations and the Service Hub? And we think the Service is more of like a ticketing type of system, and the Operations are everything else.

Jennelle (guest):
And operations is more around data, like pushing in data. It’s like a connector tool. Not as many companies outside of enterprise do we see a need it, especially if they’re clean in HubSpot. You’re not going to need Ops Hub to be able to push that information. And then Service Hub, to your point, is very much functions like a ticket. But it doesn’t have to be used in a traditional way.

Kathy (guest):
So the Operations is essential, you can think of it as integration with other types of systems, not just tools, but other types of systems that you have in the business.

Jennelle (guest):
Yes, it’s like a data aggregator, so it can help clean data, that kind of thing. But it’s more of like a layer than a traditional hub like the other ones in terms of functionality.

Kathy (guest):
Yep. And let’s move back into the Marketing Hub for a second. You mentioned a blog functionality. How does that look like, and why would you even need a blog functionality, especially if you have a blog function on your website already? Like, for example, we just moved over from Wix to WordPress, and WordPress has its own blog function. Like, why would we want to move to HubSpot? What benefit is there?

Jennelle (guest):
So when HubSpot first started, it really came out as a content tool, as a blogging tool. And so that’s where it got its start. So content generation in terms of HubSpot, right? There are two ways that we see most commonly used. Most people would have WordPress, right? And they have their existing blog. They would leave their core website on WordPress but take their blog and migrate it into the HubSpot tool. So it’d be like blog.domain.com kind of thing. The benefit of doing it where the content lives on HubSpot is you have advanced reporting and analytics. You can actually build what we call campaigns. So we can say, a lot of people say, “Well, how content doesn’t work, it didn’t generate any leads. And how do I actually measure that?” Well, by creating campaigns within HubSpot, we can say, here are all of these assets. Let’s say you have persona A, we created an email to them, we created these five blogs, we created a landing page for them. And it attaches all of them into this campaign. And we’ll then be able to say, this prospect that came through on the sales side that it was a closed one deal is actually this is how much revenue, and they went to these five blogs. And so it weights it so that attribution is given to the content. Where in something like a traditional website, there’s no closed-loop reporting, saying, “Okay, this person became not just a contact but closed revenue.” And so that’s what this solves. There’s also something called topic clusters and pillar pages that help you rank faster in SEO. It’s structured in the back end of HubSpot for interlinking.

Kathy (guest):
And that’s very helpful as well to help rank faster in the migrations that you do, especially if you have a lot of content on your blog, and then you’re trying to push it into HubSpot. Is there like an automation tool that helps you do that? Or do you just have to go in?

Jennelle (guest):
Again, I hope the answer to that is no. So WordPress is the most common one. There is a bridge connector. So HubSpot, essentially, how it would work is the bridge connector gets connected to HubSpot, and those blogs get migrated over. And then an agency like us generally will go through and make sure everything is formatted correctly. Sometimes it ports over the information, but it’ll get wonky on like, the size of the images or the images are missing or links. And so all of that gets mirrored and cleaned up. And then after that, we make sure that there are redirects from your previous blog to the new blog. So if anybody’s going there, that they’re routed to the correct place. But it sounds, I think, you know, we think migrating, you know, 1000 blogs sounds crazy. But the bridge does a good amount of that lifting out of the gate.

Kathy (guest):
Yeah. You know, we’ve talked a lot about what HubSpot does and how to do that. But if someone is thinking about migration from whatever CRM they have now to HubSpot, and obviously, it’s easier if you don’t have a CRM, and you’re starting from scratch, because then you’re right. But if you already have a CRM, and now you’re listening to all of this, and trying to figure out, okay, I’m going to grow, and I’m going to need all these hubs, and I want to get this integration, I want it to grow with me. What is something that you need to do to prepare yourself for this migration? Because and on top of that, is how long does that take? And how do you really prepare yourself for it, because I’m thinking there’s, this is like, overwhelming, if you want to migrate?

Jennelle (guest):
Yeah, so we do these every day. We have a pretty defined process and a massive workbook that we go through when we do them. In terms of the best advice, I can give, number one, make a list of all the tools that you’re actively using and all the access to them. The other piece would be to find where all those contacts are existing right now, whether in the tools they’re in. Some people might say, “I have a list in MailChimp, but then I have a proprietary CRM that has a completely different database.” So knowing where all those contacts are. And then the third one would be any automations that are actively happening, having a running list of those because a lot of times people forget, “Hey, when we get a new client, we automatically send a welcome email.” Well, that has to be rebuilt someplace else. Otherwise, that’s not going to run when you migrate. So understanding what processes you have, all of the contacts that you have, and what tools you’re using are the three core things. Outside of that, it’s really not as bad as most people think it is. Once you have that list, it’s really straightforward and systematic. For us, our goal is not to blow up everything at once. Some people come in, and they’re like, “We want to bring over everything all at the same time.” And we want to get it done in two weeks. Well, that’s really not a great idea, and we can’t do it in two weeks. In our general, I would say timeline for a migration is 45 to 60 days. And if it’s a really large organization, probably 90 days.

Jennelle (guest):
The other thing to consider when you’re migrating from a pre-existing CRM specifically is depending on what CRM you can’t always export notes, tasks, activities, or emails. It’s how each system recognizes what they call objects within them. And so those things, understanding—some people come in even from Salesforce, and they’re like, “I don’t care about any of our old notes because nobody really used them, right? Or we have these archaic attachments from 10 years ago. We don’t need to move them.” But understanding if those, in fact, need to move, that’s a slightly different process. It’s completely doable. But you have to know that you need that part of it.

Kathy (guest):
I’m guessing you’ll have to be able to export it from whatever CRM you had before, put it in a format so that HubSpot understands it, and upload that to HubSpot. Is that how that looks like?

Jennelle (guest):
Sometimes we’re able to use a bridge to push that data over, depending on what CRM. Sometimes some CRM do not format it. Like, for example, notes are a really good example. When somebody exports it, you would think it’d be like, okay, Joe Smith, and here’s all Joe Smith’s notes in one cell. It’ll be like tabs of Joe Smith, and every note that he’s ever written. And so manually aggregating that is really not time conducive. So bridging those types of situations is way better.

Kathy (guest):
So we’ve talked about what HubSpot does, why you would want to consider moving, and then we talked about the migration. But I think a lot of businesses forget about the third part, which is also important. And that is making sure that your people are trained in how to actually use the tool. Because you know, you spent all this time implementing it, now you have it. Now your people are like, “Okay, I guess I have to use that. I have no idea how to. I’m gonna go back to pen and paper or whatever.” So what do you see that works well after the migration, so you’ve successfully done the migration? Now everyone’s on the hotspot? They should all be happy and go off into the sunset. But if so, what are the things that you see that happen after the migration that could be challenging? And how do you avoid that? So there’s a couple of different things.

Jennelle (guest):
Your point about training is very important, and ownership of the training. So a lot of times, you’ll see people go through the motions of doing two five-team training, but then it just completely falls off. HubSpot is a really robust tool. And so to expect that they will learn it all and adopt it all in that short period of time is just unrealistic. So spacing it out and having tracks of, you know, teaching them a couple of things, let them use it, have questions, then train them on the next thing. Don’t just fire hose it and give them everything under the sun.

Jennelle (guest):
The other thing is HubSpot has a massive library of certification training that I think are completely underutilized. Like people are like, “Okay, I got trained in HubSpot. I just want to use it.” Yeah. And then they’ll come back, and they’ll be like, “Oh, my God, I didn’t know all of these other things after I took that HubSpot class, that certification.” So really taking the time to fully understand the full toolset. The way I frame it to people is you’re only scratching the surface. And it’s saving you time if you can get deeper and understand it even more. Think about how much other opportunity for time-saving you’ll have.

Jennelle (guest):
And then the third biggest thing I would say is leadership, like holding, especially sales teams accountable to using the tools. They have a tendency a lot of times to go rogue. And so they’ll be like, “Well, this sales rep is a really high producer. So he has his own system. And he really likes doing what he’s doing.” But that is not reporting any information, and it’s not helping the rest of the team or the company grow. He’s functioning in a silo. And so having leadership be like, “This is the playbook. This is how we’re going to use the tool. And we’re all going to do it as a team,” is really, really important.

Kathy (guest):
And what have you seen that works well in terms of training schedules for the teams? Because, like you said, fire hosing people, it’s just going to completely backfire. But how long would you think it’s realistic for people to get comfortable with HubSpot and actually adapt that so that they feel comfortable with doing that? And what type of training schedule would you suggest?

Jennelle (guest):
I think if you have, let’s say, you have a sales team and a marketing team with several people on them, having a sales leader have a monthly spotlight on feature functionality and having a monthly cadence, maybe the first three to six months depending on how tech-savvy they are. On the marketing side, it’s a much bigger toolset. So I would say somebody who really is not a marketer, give themselves a year until you truly feel really, really comfortable. Not saying that we don’t have plenty of people that come in and are executing in week one or month one. But there are so many cool features that you can really go to town with. So pacing it out and definitely taking every, especially the marketing hub certification and that sales hub certification are the two most common that I think do the broadest scope of what you absolutely need to know.

Kathy (guest):
And would you certify every single person, or would it be like a champion on the team, for example, in a marketing team? They get certified, and then it teaches all the rest of the people.

Jennelle (guest):
I would have them all get certified. I think it helps avoid accidental mishaps, like sending to the wrong list of 50,000 people or accidentally sending social without the featured images—simple things that can be completely avoided. But yeah, the sales side is much quicker. I think it’s a couple of hours; everybody should absolutely take that one. I even like it when the marketing team takes it because I think it helps them understand some of the pressure and pain points from the sales team. The sales team does not need to take marketing. The goal is that sales is never in marketing, touching or sending marketing emails to anybody. They’re really just saying, “Here’s my hot leads list, marketing. Can you take it and run from here?” But yeah, I would have everybody in each department at least take their own.

Kathy (guest):
Have you seen that there were common oopsies in the sales and marketing team after the migration, that something went wrong because someone pressed the wrong button?

Jennelle (guest):
I think the biggest ones we’ve seen are on the marketing side, like sending to the wrong lists. Because let’s say the sales team didn’t update all their properties properly. Or they had fake first names. And marketing didn’t realize they put in a token, “Hello, Chris,” but the guy’s name is Joe, that kind of stuff. So data hygiene, you know, cleanup is really important. Emails can get wonky, like the workflow automation, if the properties again aren’t updated, sending to different companies that should, you know, sending it to a manufacturing company when it’s actually a healthcare company because the industry was marked wrong, that kind of stuff.

Kathy (guest):
So it’s really just data hygiene that you have to be super careful about.

Jennelle (guest):
Yeah, and there are safeguards to set mandatory properties. There are ways to set mandatory fields before a salesperson can move it to a certain deal stage. So once it’s been cleaned up and in there, there are safeguards to help prevent that. But that’s really where a lot of that sales and marketing alignment comes in. So important because if they’re honest about it, right, and say, “Hey, look, it’ll save everybody the embarrassment or the whoopsie later on.”

Kathy (guest):
For sure. After all, we’re all on the same team. So exactly. So Janelle, we, this was a really helpful episode. And if someone’s listening to this and saying, “Oh, my goodness, there’s a lot of stuff to consider. And I don’t even know where to begin. I want to go to HubSpot. But what can I do in the next week or two to get me closer to that HubSpot migration?” And then, you know, walking into the sunset with these new, brilliant, shiny new features and tool that they can use? What is the next thing that they can do, something actionable?

Jennelle (guest):
Yeah, I would say make that list of all the tools that you’re using right now. And then we offer a free process assessment. If you go to marketfeet.com, we’re happy to review kind of what your existing state is of how your systems are working. And then advise on, whether would HubSpot solve some of those pain points. If you come in with a working list of where you feel like you’re struggling the most, also very helpful, because the automation may be able to help save you a little bit.

Kathy (guest):
And where can people find you?

Jennelle (guest):
So marketveep.com. I also am obviously on LinkedIn, you can connect with me there, and happy to chat through.

Kathy (guest):
Yeah, and we will put all of these in the show notes as well. So if you want to see the website or Janelle’s LinkedIn, it’s going to be all in there. Thank you so much for being on the show. It was super, super helpful. And lots of good information about HubSpot.

Jennelle (guest):
Awesome. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.