Episode 300: 7 Years of HubSpot Tips

Welcome to HubShots Episode 300: 7 Years of HubSpot Tips

This edition we dive into:

• 7 years and 300 episodes
• HubSpot Email List columns layout
• Sales pipeline best practices
• Ticket pipeline best practices
• CMS Hub Content Staging
• Wishlist: syncing properties
• Shoutout
• The best tool to use is the one you know how to use well

You can watch this episode on our YouTube episodes playlist.

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Recorded: Wednesday 14 June 2023 | Published: Friday 23 June 2023

Table of Contents

• Shot 1: Growth Thoughts of the Week
• Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week
• Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week
• Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week
• Shot 5: HubSpot Service Feature of the Week
• Shot 6: HubSpot CMS Hub Feature of the Week
• Shot 7: HubSpot Feature Wishlist Item of the Week
• Shot 8: Listener Feedback of the Week
• Shot 9: AI Prompt of the Week
• Shot 10: Thought of the Week 
• Shot 11: Quote of the Week
• Shot 12: Training of the Week
• Shot 13: Download the HubShots Framework

🌱 Shot 1: Growth Thoughts of the Week

The power of time

As we reflect over the last 7+ years I think what is apparent is that there is power in time and longevity.  I (Ian) don’t think I could have walked this road alone without Craig.  Plus over time things have changed and evolved.  So has our businesses and our growth as individuals.  I certainly have more grey hairs of wisdom!  Although Craig does not look any older.

Some of the things that stand out:

• We have similar values
• We hold each other accountable
• We respect each other
• We help each other in busy and slow periods of time
• We eat together!
• We share openly things that affect us, good or bad
• We always look to do things better together
• We push each other to be better in life and business

The power of friendship

It’s unusual to make close friends when you are older - I (Craig) am in my 50s now. Most of us have our close friendships from uni days.

So it is unusual to meet acquaintances (eg in the HubSpot Community) later in life who then become very close friends. I feel very fortunate to have experienced that with Ian.

Ian is part of my 6. In the podcast and YouTube video I go deeper into what this means for me.

Thank you Chris Mottram

We also want to say a huge thank you and shout out to Chris Mottram, who has been our podcast producer from the very start - with episode 1.

Thank you for your feedback

We’ve had some wonderful feedback from listeners and subscribers (to the show notes), mostly focussed on our frequency of recording of late:

• Survey feedback, wishing we’d publish more regularly
• Queries from subscribers wondering if they’d missed being sent the show notes…

Thanks for the encouragement - we really appreciate it.

HubShots NPS = 86

Thank you to all our listeners over the years who spent time listening to the show and giving us feedback.  We do really appreciate it and are thankful for each one of you.

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✨ Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:

• Lots of BETA stuff!
• Login to HubSpot with Microsoft
• Workflows Custom Views and Subfolders
• Coloured object tag enhancements in Deals
• ChatSpot.ai has relaunched and now has a whole team behind it!

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🚀 Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

HubSpot Email List Columns Layout

Here’s a very simple tip (or reminder) about the column layout for emails.

By default your view of emails probably only includes a few columns eg:

Which isn’t very informative.

So, make sure you add a bunch of other metrics to the layout - you can set these by going to the ‘Manage columns’ link at the top right.

This will bring up a form where you can select a bunch of other metrics:

Once that is saved your layout should look like this:

There’s a ton of useful information now. Plus you can sort by any of the columns eg so you can quickly see which email has been sent the most times, or had the most Unsubscribes etc.

We also walk through this in a quick video here:

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💰 Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Sales Pipelines Best Practices

There’s two main questions regarding sales pipelines:

• How many pipelines should I have?
• How many stages should I have in a pipeline?

Quick tip: Start with reporting in mind

Will out of the box reporting work, Will forecasting work, etc

Note that most reporting works at a pipeline level - it is difficult to use out of the box reports to consolidate across multiple pipelines.

How many pipelines?

• Aim for pipelines to match prospect/customer journeys
• Common good reasons for multiple pipelines
• Sales teams/geographies (eg EMEA, North America, etc)
• Prospect journeys (eg long sales cycle versus short)
• Product types (eg new customer versus renewal/upsell)
• Channels (eg sales rep versus Ecommerce)

How many stages?

• Aim for simplicity
• Avoid stages that are just to prompt internal reminders (use tasks and reminders for that instead)
• Instead focus on the interactions from the prospect’s point of view
• This will also help with automating communication to the prospect
• Avoid multiple closed lost or closed won stages (eg use Closed lost reason property instead)

Tips

• We have found starting simpler and adding stages works better than cutting it down which starts with overwhelm.
• Have multiple pipelines when you have different processes as you can track this better and automate things precisely.
• Using properties versus pipeline stages (often properties are a better device than pipeline stage for internal processes)
• Use Filters on Views to manage what you see (ie using properties)
• Ultimately, the number of stages should be tailored to the specific needs of your business and should be designed to help sales reps effectively manage their pipeline and close deals.

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👨‍🔧 Shot 5: HubSpot Service Feature of the Week

Ticket Pipelines Best Practices

How many pipelines should you have? Here is what you should consider:

• Is it following a similar process?
• The types of tickets you will be managing?
• How large your customer service team is?
• Do you want to report on the pipelines together?
• If your answer to the above questions is yes, then having a single pipeline is better.

You also may want to consider adding additional pipelines for different categories of tickets or for tracking special projects.

Quick tip: Start with reporting in mind

How many pipeline statuses should each have?

This again depends on how complex you want it to be and where you intend on automating process.  However, a common approach is to start with the default statuses. Tip: don’t assume you automatically know better!

Starting simpler and adding statuses usually works better than cutting it down later.

Example here is of an internal manufacturing process that uses tickets:

Using Ticket Pipeline properties versus pipeline statuses

Properties and pipeline stages are both important components of ticket pipelines.

Properties are used to store and track information about a ticket. They are essential for organising and filtering tickets, and for reporting on service performance.

Pipeline statuses, on the other hand, represent the different stages of a ticket as it progresses through the support process. They are used to track where a ticket is in the pipeline, and to trigger actions or notifications based on the status of the ticket.

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🔥 Shot 6: CMS Hub Feature of the Week

Content Staging

HubSpot content staging is often an under rated and hardly used tool, may be because it is hidden under the More tools button!

It allows us to make changes to your website and landing pages in a secure environment. You can test out redesigns before pushing them live, and you can replace multiple pages at the same time. It is a similar editing experience except in a different area!

Read more about it here on the HubSpot knowledgebase.

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🔧 Shot 7: HubSpot Feature Wishlist Item of the Week

Syncing Properties

I’d love to be able to sync properties from one object to another (eg contact to company).

Similar to how HubSpot has the built in option in Settings to sync Lifecycle stage between Company and Contacts.

Example scenario: Preferred Meeting tool

We like to give contacts the option for which meeting tool to use (ie Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams). We store this as a field against the contact (eg so it can be used in Meeting forms etc).

Some companies use Microsoft 365 and thus all their staff use Microsoft Teams. So we’d like to set that at the Company level and automatically sync it down to all contacts.

Which means, we have this field on both contacts and company records.

What I’d love to be able to do is set up a syncing link between the two properties (ie one at the contact level, the other at the company level) and set some rules:

• If set at company record, sync down to all associated contacts
• If set at contact record, sync up to associated company record
• Option to overwrite on destination record if not empty

At the moment we could implement this with two workflows, but that seems messy to me.

I’d love a simple option or area in properties to define this syncing relationship.

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💡 Shot 8: Listener Feedback of the Week

Shoutout to Stephanie

It makes our day when we receive feedback like this - you’d be surprised how rare it is.

Key takeaway: be proactive in giving feedback to colleagues, suppliers, clients, family - it makes a difference!

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🏈 Shot 9: AI Prompt of the Week

Midjourney Prompt

Here’s my favourite Midjourney prompts from a few months ago:

Prompt: the most stereotypical person in australia

Interesting to note that MJ only chose male options for this run… (the orange colour was an unexpected bonus - nothing to do with HubSpot)

See more examples on our XEN Create Midjourney page - includes a bunch of prompts we’ve found, created or tested.

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📚 Shot 10: Thought of the Week

The best tool is the one you know how to use well

We sometimes have people ask us in calls about ‘the best product that should use for [insert common marketing activity]’

Whilst sometimes it’s because they have a genuine focus on best practices for their business, most of the time it’s because they are frustrated with their current tools and are looking for an escape.

In which case we like to dig deeper and diagnose the real problem. In many cases, it’s simply due to a lack of training. In the case of them being frustrated with HubSpot, it’s common for them to have inherited HubSpot from someone no longer in the company, and they haven’t had a proper handover, and haven’t had any training on how to use it effectively.

The solution is pretty simple: it’s not to get a new tool, it’s to get some proper training.

Here’s some common frustrations (actually misconceptions) we’ve heard recently:

• HubSpot can’t create beautiful emails
• HubSpot can’t build beautiful website
• HubSpot is difficult to track with Google Analytics
• HubSpot doesn’t have any way of managing social media
• HubSpot doesn’t allow people to book meetings
• HubSpot can’t track advertising campaigns
• HubSpot can’t report across our sales teams

If you’re a long time HubSpot user you’ll know HubSpot handles all of the above extremely well. But if you’re a new user who’s had HubSpot thrust into your lap, you may not be aware.

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✍️ Shot 11: Quote of the Week

 You can’t out-spend the giants, but you can out-think, out-teach, and out-help them.

• Brian Halligan

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🏋️ Shot 12: Training of the Week

11 Things You’re Probably Not Using in HubSpot That You Should Be

Our Masterclass training from last year is still very relevant.

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🏋️ Shot 13: Have You Downloaded The HubShots Framework?

HubShots Framework Poster

Download a copy of the HubShots Framework A3 PDF poster (recently updated with colour coding and more).

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🧲 Shot 14: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here:

• HubShots YouTube channel 
• HubShots Spotify channel 
• HubShots iTunes
• HubShots Facebook group 
• HubShots Twitter 
• HubShots Twitter Show Notes
• HubShots Instagram 
• HubShots LinkedIn 
• HubShots HubSpot Coaching
• Sales and Marketing Scorecard ⇐ you should try this

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)

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