UYS-S2E2-Max Cohen, hapily-16x9-Full
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Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Welcome to Up Your Stack Podcast. I'm your host, Noah Berk. Every week we feature some of our favorite HubSpot app developers. You've either built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot to help you get the most out of your HubSpot tech stack.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: And today I have a very cool guest. His name is Max. He's probably, he's pretty much famous already. You've probably seen LinkedIn. If you know something about the HubSpot ecosystem and today he's here to talk about hapily. Max, welcome to the show.

Max: Thank you for having me Noah, I am thrilled.

Noah: It an absolute pleasure to have you, by the way. This is going to be a fun conversation. Max,

Max: a good time.

Max: For the benefit

Noah: of the audience, your role at hapily? And then what does hapily do?

Max: Yeah, absolutely. So hapily we are a HubSpot app developer that exclusively builds apps on HubSpot and for nobody else, and that's a very intentional we're all HubSpot obsessed, grew up using HubSpot, worked in the HubSpot industry in some way, shape or form for a long [00:01:00] time.

Max: Now we're very invested in seeing HubSpot be successful. But like the big. Kind of thing to think about us is like everything that we build extends the HubSpot experience extends the HubSpot platform. It all very much feels like HubSpot because it all is HubSpot and it's within HubSpot, right?

Max: So like all the different apps that we build, you wouldn't necessarily use them on their own outside of HubSpot. You'd only use them if you were a HubSpot customer. And we do everything from Small little you like utility apps that solve like a very sort of specific migraine that the masses have, right?

Max: So you think of like our associates TikTok today clone attack, like a lot of these apps that like solve like for very one specific problem that everyone with which HubSpot just did natively, right? And then lately, We've not pivoted, but started investing a lot more into building more like products on top of HubSpot that feel like just HubSpot doing more right through in the event space and have the [00:02:00] CPQ space and we're in like the stripe integration space, things like that.

Max: So, yeah, we just build stuff on HubSpot. Me. So I am the chief evangelist over here. So my job, I mean, we're a startup, so I wish. I will tell you one thing, right? But my job here is evangelizing and I do that through a number of different ways. So one most of our content production is done by myself and Dax, the co founder.

Max: So I'm often the face that you're seeing a lot behind like a lot of the Frankly, sometimes unhinged content that we're putting out there into the ecosystem. So we do a lot of that, do a lot of stuff for YouTube, do a lot of the like LinkedIn engagement, things like that. Obviously supported by, really awesome marketers that know how to take my craziness and turn it into something real and useful.

Max: But then I also manage all of our HubSpot relationships. I spent the first year here, like building the partner program from scratch. Cause we very much want to sell through HubSpot partners. Cause We don't want to do any services, right? So it's building that until we just brought someone on to handle [00:03:00] that a full time.

Max: And then lately I've been doing a lot on the product management side on our event hapily tool and guiding the direction on what the second version or evolution of that's going to be. So it's really all

Noah: not really doing very much, are you right now? It sounds like your job is very confined to doing absolutely very little.

Max: But dude, it's so fun. That's the thing like I the reason I came to hapily is like just the idea of people building apps on HubSpot is just Extremely exciting to me because of course like you've been in the HubSpot space forever I'm sure you've had those moments where you're like, man I really just wish it could just do this thing or it had this feature And to be part of a company that's just focus on saying, what are those things that people are saying, man, I really just wish it did this and to be the folks that can say, Oh, okay let's make it do that is awesome.

Max: And selfishly, I want to see HubSpot do more. So to play a small role in like making that happen. It's fun no matter Crazy thing I'm doing from day to [00:04:00] day. So yeah, it's a fun job. Yeah.

Noah: Start with event hapily. What is, it,

Noah: what's it solving for people?

Max: for sure. So event hapily if I can I'll put it out into the world that I'm assuming listeners of this podcast are somewhat familiar with HubSpot, right?

Noah: can make that assumption.

Max: we'll make that assumption, right? Given the science in the background. So the easiest way to explain to someone who knows HubSpot, because if you think about HubSpot as a platform, okay, it's really only. A couple of pieces of like smart data structure, automation and CMS elements away from being like an event management platform.

Max: Truly, right? So what we set out to do with event hapily as we knew. And I definitely knew because I've been watching it for years, being an onboarding specialist and trainer and then doing, the solutions and doing stuff is that like people wanted to be able to do event management on HubSpot.

Max: The problem is all the apps out there that do event [00:05:00] management. The integration with HubSpot is like always an afterthought, and it's generally a pretty, sh y contact sync, and that's basically it, right? And so, what we set out to do is we said hey, a lot of companies are obviously running events, be it virtual or in person or whatever it may be, right?

Max: What can we do to make HubSpot better equipped to actually handle all the nuances of that and be able to, get that event data right alongside your sales data, your marketing data, your customer service data, all things by which your event information and your event data are Data touch and have an impact on in a thousand different ways, right?

Max: And we basically said, what would event management look like on HubSpot, right? So if you really think about what our app does, is it really fills in the three big missing puzzle pieces that HubSpot needs to be able to handle event management, right? So what you end up with, is a new set of tools inside of HubSpot [00:06:00] that lets you active lets you in a very customizable and either a simple or an extremely complex way

Max: manage your in person events, your hybrid events, your virtual events. And not only from the perspective of, hey, we're a company that hosts events, But also from the perspective of we're a company that goes to a lot of trade shows and conferences, and we capture leads. And I'm sure you know how much of a pain in the but that can be when people are

Noah: very much so.

Max: Yeah, you know this, right? And so we're like, how can we take all those problems and solve them with good data structure inside of HubSpot? Because the data model of event management is Very nuanced and very complex, right? You can't just measure everything on a contact record. What are the biggest things that are a pain in the butt to do that we can solve with like really smart automation and workflows?

Max: And then what sort of interaction does all that data need with your website, right? So things like CMS modules that show event listings taking HubSpot forms and doing things I [00:07:00] never thought were possible with them through CMS modules to be able to handle things like multi person registration, session selection all using native HubSpot forms and solving the things that are really difficult about using HubSpot forms or something like event management, which is way different than like a form for just like lead perhaps on a landing page, right?

Max: So it's really just this giant combination of custom objects, CMS modules, workflow actions that you can really put together in this. Beautiful symphony. To build the event management system of your dreams and get it all right next to the data that it touches, people talk a lot about like return on investment when it comes to event stuff, and what's beautiful is or what's typically pretty hard about that is like your return which in HubSpot world is generally managed through deals is generally completely separate from wherever you track the investment of the event, right? A really [00:08:00] beautiful thing is when you get it all inside of the CRM, all of a sudden that stuff becomes pretty easy, right?

Max: Because it's all there. It's all speaking the same language. And so we've built this just really cool app to help people handle all that stuff and we can dive deeper

Noah: That's awesome. Are you noticing when people come to events hapily that this is the first time they have a solution even to do this? Or are they generally migrating from another events tool to events hapily?

Max: Yeah, great question. So usually, well, it depends. So like a lot of folks that are doing things like just zoom, like webinars or something like that, they're generally using like the integration that HubSpot already has, right? The problem is it gets really difficult to track a lot of the other things around that, right?

Max: Things like ROI and then being able to even just like the way you represent data over time of people going to these, and I think also the big thing there is the connection to things like building landing pages in order to be able to, if you're doing like 10 webinars a week, right?

Max: That's a lot of landing pages to build, right? That's a lot of [00:09:00] forms to create right through dynamic content and things like that. We make that a lot easier, right? But then you got the folks that are coming from, well, You get the folks that are still coming from the spreadsheets, which is like incredibly ironic,

Noah: that's so common.

Max: It's really funny. What is wow, you did a great job getting out of the spreadsheet to manage your contacts, your deals, your companies, your tickets, right? And that's all working great in HubSpot. And then it's like, how are you doing your event management? Noah the spreadsheets that I have seen that people still use to manage their events are grotesque.

Max: It's brutal and like beautiful about an object inside a HubSpot, right? We create like an event object. It gives you this really wonderful way to interact with that data and tie it into everything else, which is cool, right? So that's like another folks like. Yeah. All manually and like spreadsheet.

Max: And then you got the folks that are coming from your event brights or your gold casts or your like, insert event management tool here. And the big problem with them [00:10:00] generally, is there like, yeah, it's got an integration with HubSpot, but It's just pushing over contact properties, and every single time someone goes to an event it's getting overwritten, right?

Max: And we can't really do anything with it. And we can't keep that historical instance logged somewhere around, This is the time that Noah went to this event, and this was his badge number, and these are the sessions he signed up for, and these are the ones he did or did not attend, things like that, right?

Max: So that's another big thing. And then the other one is folks just trying to use the HubSpot marketing events object, which is still for whatever reason, hidden in the bowels of the index pages and not something that's like front and center. And until literally just now, not even connected to reporting and you can't control the way the object works and it's very much a closed garden.

Max: And so a lot of times people that are frustrated with the lack of. innovation there, if you will, right? So it's generally those four areas is what we're seeing.

Noah: is there like a minimum? You mentioned the two, two different use cases. Maybe your team is participating at trade shows and events, and you're simply [00:11:00] trying to capture contacts. The other one is you're actually putting together events, whether in person, online, whatever the case may be.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Is there a minimum number of events?

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: That a company says, Hey, at this point, we need a tool like event hapily to manage

Noah: There's a, you could say there's a eventually a cliff that you're like, all right, I need a tool at this point. It's too much to just do the way we're doing it

Max: Yeah. It's, so it's interesting. So

Max Cohen, hapily: we don't bill like other event tools do,

Max: right? So for example, most of the event solutions you're going to see out there, they're always going to have scaled billing, depending on like how many events, right? We were gonna do that at the beginning, but then we immediately ran into the same bad vibes that like HubSpot contact pricing ran into.

Max: And

Max Cohen, hapily: we also didn't want to be like the other guys,

Max: right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So like now we charge

Max: like

Max Cohen, hapily: a flat rate.

Max: So

Max Cohen, hapily: what kind of depends there Is

Max: like

Max Cohen, hapily: how much of a problem do you have because you're running an events and what's it worth it to actually [00:12:00] solve?

Max: Because it's hard to say like a certain amount of events because People are getting different things out of the events that they go to like

Max Cohen, hapily: You might go to one or two trade shows a year and that alone might make it,

Max Cohen, hapily: Worth it If you're going there and capturing

Max: like

Max Cohen, hapily: an insane amount of leads and you don't want to spend

Max: Hours and hours

Max Cohen, hapily: doing

Max: You know

Max Cohen, hapily: imports and manual associations

Max: and a pending drop down fields and all this other crap that just takes so much time out of your day.

Max: But then

Max Cohen, hapily: even

Max: like

Max Cohen, hapily: after the event. You gotta remember people are selling to those folks

Max: and we've got a lot of cool workflow actions that will like automatically attribute those deals created later down the line back to events that people like went to, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So even when you're not running an event, the app is doing work in the background to

Max: be able to like

Max Cohen, hapily: do some light deal attribution

Max: to like things like event attendance and stuff like that, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So it has its uses even if. You're not doing like an event every week or every month

Max: or anything like that,

Noah: so it really comes down to almost to the, there's a point in time that you're like, is a [00:13:00] manual effort or the, I always think of it like there's different levers you can pull whenever you look at making an investment in a tool. Are you trying to save money? Are you trying to make money or are you trying to increase productivity?

Noah: And it sounds like everyone has that predetermined amount. Okay. I want to improve my my customer engagement by rather upload that list from the marketing department, everything is happening automatically. Which is fantastic. Or maybe it's simply, I have five people who are doing all this manual labor events hapily can literally save me all this time and they can work on more productive activities.

Max: yeah, and what's interesting is like we've actually found some like really wild use cases for it, right? Because like here's the thing, like you can also use event hapily, like the word event is like has in HubSpot land, it has a thousand different definitions, right? Even in the event management land, it has a thousand different definitions, right?

Max: So for example some more nontraditional stuff we've seen is you could be a company that's just like hosting trainings and like selling training courses. In theory, those are like little mini events, right? And then [00:14:00] you've got your events, you've got your sessions underneath it that are like all the different trainings and like your 12 week training session or whatever you can use it for that.

Max: We don't position ourselves as a training tool, but you can totally use it as a way to track

Noah: hear a new type of branding for it. So you just launch a product, make a tweak and call it something else.

Max: Totally. So there's that piece. We've had, it's interesting. It's like we had we have one company that's using like the lead capture features, but it's not like They're going to these events.

Max: It's actually like sales reps setting up lunch and learns at these different companies. And they're like these big kind of things that they put on and they go there, they set up these lunch and learns, and then they capture leads at those lunch and learns that they create. And then that runs like their deal attribution stuff down the line as well.

Max: So it's there's all this spread out. Events are very much a spectrum in terms of how you define them, right? And so we've seen people use it in like a lot of different ways, which has been super traditional super interesting outside of the very traditional, we're hosting a webinar, or we're going to do an in [00:15:00] person event, or like something like that, right?

Max: So yeah, it's

Noah: And, we work heavily in the association space, and I know the challenges you guys are solving for would also be challenges they have, especially as more of these associations are moving to something like a HubSpot from a traditional AMS that was managing those events for them, which is completely changing.

Noah: And so you've opened up new market opportunities, which I think goes back to your concept of hapily enabling organizations. To use HubSpot that may otherwise not have been able to without these tools.

Max: yeah, well, and what I was gonna say like the other thing like you get down to like you're talking about the AMS thing and I think a lot about, I see, people using HubSpot for ATS stuff and basically like building different pieces of software like on this platform and taking out traditionally what you would think about as like a CMS like again, like we've Taking it and turn it into an event management platform.

Max: What the real unique thing about this that I think is so interesting, right? Is that when you think about it, we just plug in these additional tools that HubSpot is missing, right? But it is still like on you to go in and build. The [00:16:00] event management system of your dreams and that's the beautiful part of instead of us creating a totally separate product that just integrates with HubSpot, we're giving HubSpot an injection of these tools that solve for the things that are a real pain in the butt when it comes to event management, but then you got to remember, you're still in HubSpot.

Max: You have access to everything else that HubSpot gives you. All the other customization you can do, how creative you can get with automation, how creative you can get with your data structure and records and all these different things. There is nothing stopping you from creating whatever you want with this or weaving it into something existing that you have.

Max Cohen, hapily: The best part is it's an event management system that's not beholden to the way some third party app works. You can build it to work however you want,

Max: which is scary to some people. When you have a partner, it's no problem because they can do anything that they want. But

Max Cohen, hapily: that's the really cool thing.

Max: It's

Max Cohen, hapily: Oh man, you wish your third party event management system worked like a little bit different. That's not a problem in an event hapily because you can get it to work however [00:17:00] you want, because it's surrounded by this full suite of a platform

Max Cohen, hapily: On all sides of it,

Max: right?

Max Cohen, hapily: It's just now letting that platform do more.

Max Cohen, hapily: That has to do with event management,

Max: right? And so like you get to take advantage of all these other things and weave it into every single hub and every way that you can imagine, right? Like I can't wait to get into having event management stuff, like affect this new lead scoring stuff and like engagement scores and like all this new stuff you're seeing in service hub and all that kind of stuff.

Max: So it's going to be.

Noah: sounds so exciting and fun.

Max: Ultimate level of anything is possible, when it's inside of the app versus being a third party one, just integrating.

Noah: In Max, we spent a lot of time talking about Eventhapily and it's not the only cool tool that you have out there

Max: You get seven more hours and I can keep

Noah: I mean, heck, we just keep going here. But but there's another tool that has been a true pain point in the HubSpot ecosystem, and that's really CPQ. And a lot of times that can be a hindrance for people actually making the switch from [00:18:00] whatever application they're on now to HubSpot.

Noah: So they generally need to leverage a third party tool. There's a lot of well known third party CPQ tools out there. But you built your own quote hapily. Am I saying that correctly?

Max: Yeah, you're correct.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: Sure quote hapily, which and of course, this particular podcast is being recorded probably a couple months before it launches.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: So it is out now, but by time start watching this podcast.

Noah Berk, Aptitude 8: It

Max: will probably be on the ecosystem a little bit, and it'll probably have way more features than I'm going to tell you about right now because we're moving fast on this.

Noah: just talk about this because this is a super exciting rollout. Yeah.

Max Cohen, hapily: It's really cool. So quote hapily, right? HubSpot quoting. And while I think it's cool, and it's great for small businesses that it's just I need to give you a piece of paper with a bunch of line items that tells you how much something costs, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: It's good for that, right? But especially when you start to see HubSpot move more up market [00:19:00] and be a lot more capable of handling larger teams with a lot more complex requirements and bigger organizations and larger project libraries and. More expectations around how pricing should work when it comes to different customers and things like that, integrations with other ERP systems or e commerce systems or whatever it may be, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: You're seeing HubSpot be able to handle a whole lot more except when it comes to functionality around quoting. Right now, I think a lot of that's going to evolve. Don't get me wrong. Like you can see the push that they're pushing into commerce. The problem is that they are heavily focusing on billing, not CPQs fundamentally separate part of the entire chain.

Max Cohen, hapily: And it is something that HubSpot has straight up told us we're not going to go super deep into that area. We want to lean on the app marketplace to extend CPQ in the way it needs to be. Which is smart, because CPQ can be very [00:20:00] different industry to industry company to company.

Max Cohen, hapily: And there's going to need to be a lot more solutions out there beside us That attack it in the same way we do, but niche into different industries and stuff like that, right? That's just the nature of how it goes. But with quote hapily, the idea there, the way it all started is we knew because we talked to HubSpot sales reps all the time.

Max Cohen, hapily: We talked to HubSpot partners all the time. That's who we sell through. Obviously we talked to customers too, right? We don't ignore them. But the thing we knew we wanted to make a CPQ product. Cause one, we obviously need it for ourselves, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: A lot down we need more ad hubs while coding. But two, we kept hearing it from people like, Hey, fix quoting fix. And so there was a couple of like really common things that we kept hearing as we're talking to HubSpot solutions engineers, HubSpot sellers that are losing deals to other CRMs because of CPQ, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: We all come from, well, not me, but like other people at that company come from working at solutions partners. They see it too as well, right? The big thing with [00:21:00] HubSpot quoting, right? Is that it's, it was missing a lot of key stuff. One It's just like guidance, governance and guardrails around what actually can be done when you're quoting stuff in HubSpot, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So it's Oh, my sales rep can just go in there and just, quote a 30 percent discount and that's fine. No, it's not fine. All right. So a lot of control over what can and cannot be done. Sure. Can you turn on approvals? Yeah, but that means literally every single quote is going to an approval and that slows things down.

Max Cohen, hapily: So like lack of an advanced approval process was a big thing. And that's often where you see people moving to a glean quote or a panda doc or like a deal hub or something like that. And the big one is Price books, right? We kept hearing like I remember every single time when I was a solutions in your hub spot and we were doing like a sales hub demo, I'd hear the word price books and I would just like my stomach would implode because I'm like, man, I'm about to tank this whole thing right now, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: Is either one. No, we don't do that. And then it was an instant [00:22:00] disqualification, right? Or it was like, no, we don't do it. But we have really good integrations with these other apps. And don't get me wrong, that's great. Like integrations are really important to

Noah: Mm hmm.

Max Cohen, hapily: The problem is there's a lot of other CRMs that do this a lot more natively, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: Or The other problem is like that slows down the sales cycle. It also means that's a whole nother company you got to go deal with. Now, granted, of course, hapily is a third party, but going to another like totally detached, non HubSpot focused, third party presents its challenges, right? One, You're not building HubSpot quotes anymore to you're working out of some other quoting tool that may or may not have a great integration with HubSpot three, you're working with someone who's more CRM agnostic, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: Which means like their integration with HubSpot isn't necessarily their top priority, right? Like they want to get people with data inside of HubSpot into that other tool and using that other tool And they don't necessarily have a lot of skin in the game when it comes to working with HubSpot to try to get [00:23:00] people to use HubSpot versus like any other CRM it works with, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So that's tough, but also it's just like for your reps that are using this stuff, like it's not a great experience to be like, all right, I got to manage everything I'm doing in terms of communication and managing the deal and everything in HubSpot. Oh, but then I got to go to this other tool to go make a quote, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: Or even if it like launches a little card or something, it's still bringing me somewhere else have. You might job and then does it come back into HubSpot? Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't still. It slows things down. It slows the deal from happening for HubSpot, but even when you're using, it's not necessarily a very fluid experience.

Max Cohen, hapily: Like we very much believe in keeping people inside of HubSpot as much as humanly possible and getting HubSpot to do more. So really what we sat down and said Hey.

Max: We

Max Cohen, hapily: just need to make HubSpot do this and very intentionally make HubSpot quoting do this, right? We didn't just want to make another app that was very friendly to HubSpot, but you still ended up doing quoting outside of [00:24:00] HubSpot and like making something that wasn't a HubSpot quote at the end of the day.

Max Cohen, hapily: Because we want this to like work with things like commerce hub. We want you to take that quote and be able to turn it into an invoice. Cause there's going to be so much happening in HubSpot downstream from the CPQ part of the sales cycle that we want to make sure that customers that use our stuff can flow into that and use it, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So the big things in terms of what it is is one, we've completely rebuilt in re imagined the quote building experience in HubSpot. So while it's still HubSpot quote you create at the end of the day, the way you create it is. Way easier and way better, right? And it actually replaces the quote builder inside of HubSpot, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So instead of going through like the carousel, like vanilla of creating a quote, we've consolidated that entire experience into one single page using a CRM extension, right? So instead of going left and right, back to forth, just to make one choice on all these different [00:25:00] pages.

Max Cohen, hapily: You have it all just laid out in front of you, right? And that was really important because we, in order for us to do things like enforcing rules on what you can and cannot do when you're creating quotes, we had to have our own interface. The other option was to make a HubSpot Chrome extension, which it's against TOS.

Max Cohen, hapily: It's also a giant pain in the butt. Cause as soon as HubSpot's interface. Changes, you break the whole thing, right? And not everyone's using Chrome, right? Not everyone wants to use extensions either, right? So like we had to make our own experience inside of HubSpot. So like when you install it, step one is, well, you go set it up first, but when you're ready to roll out, you go replace the quote card and the line items card with our own ones that provide our own experience, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: So. Streamline rapid quote builders the first piece. The second piece is the rules engine, right? so

Max Cohen, hapily: the rules engine comes down to

Max: again like

Max Cohen, hapily: Giving yourself guidance guardrails and governance over the quote building process,

Max: [00:26:00] right?

Max Cohen, hapily: People shouldn't be able to just quote whatever they want

Max: whenever they want for how much they want

Max Cohen, hapily: like there needs to be guardrails

Max: and stuff, right?

Max Cohen, hapily: There also needs to be guidance like a good example of guidance is

Max: Hey

Max Cohen, hapily: when someone adds a certain product to a quote

Max Cohen, hapily: And

Max: that should

Max Cohen, hapily: that product should be eligible for a discount

Max: because the company is spent a certain amount of money with you or something like that.

Max Cohen, hapily: You should be able to like nudge that rep in real time to say Hey, these guys have spent $10,000 with us.

Max: Like

Max Cohen, hapily: maybe give them a 5 percent discount on this.

Max Cohen, hapily: Instead of just assuming the sales rep should know what to do in that situation.

Max: So this interface allows you to drop in like notifications.

Max: It even allows you to block the creation of a quote if someone breaks a rule, right? So for example, if you don't want your reps quoting things at more of a more than a 10 percent discount, you can build one simple rule that just says, Hey, if someone puts more than a 10 percent discount on a line item, don't [00:27:00] even let them build the quote.

Max: We don't want to waste time with an approval. Just say you're not allowed to do that. Reduce the discount on it. This kind of feeds in like rules fits into this,

Noah: it's huge.

Max: Yeah, it's huge, right? You gotta be able to set some boundaries on what sales reps can do, right?

Max: So there's that piece. Rules, when it comes to the thing around like approvals though, this is where it gets really interesting, right? Native HubSpot quoting when you have approvals. You're approving literally every single quote, unless you build workflows to automatically push it through the process, you still gotta wait for that quote to get approved and you can't get the link for it.

Max: And like all that stuff. And that sucks. Like it slows down the sales process. So we were like, Hey, wouldn't it be great. If when someone's building a quote, it only went into an approval process if it actually needed to, right? So for example, what's really cool about this is you can build rules that say, Hey, if this quote meets whatever rule that you've [00:28:00] created, then just say, Hey, just so you know, this is going to have to go to an approval, right?

Max: But if it's fine, right? And the rep was able to build that quote without breaking any rules, We should be able to just let that one go out the door without human intervention, right? So the way it works is one, again, you set the rules and when you're building rules, you're able to look at anything associated to the deal.

Max: And basically say if any objects associated the deal meet some sort of criteria or if any line items on the quote or one town discounts or whatever, right? You can apply these rules, right? So what's really neat about this is like for the first time in HubSpot history, we're in a place where you could say, Hey, you know what? We'll let a sales rep at their own discourse at their own discretion give discounts of up to 5 percent That's fine. Right and again apply this like discounting logic to basically anything, right? It doesn't have to be discounting but that's like the easiest way to articulate it and you would think [00:29:00] about it So it's hey, you know We'll let the reps discount up to 5 percent on whatever if they discount anywhere between 5 and 10 percent You We're going to send it through an approval.

Max: If they try to discount over 10%, we're not even going to waste time on the approval, right? And so that's great because you're reducing the workload. It takes for the rest of the sales org to participate in the sales process. Cause they only have to approve what you absolutely need to approve. And you can stop the stuff that like.

Max: You know is immediately going to get shut down before they even create the quote, right? So it's really cool. And then the other thing that we did with approvals is not only can you set a rule to put it into an approval stage or like into an approval status or state or whatever, right? We made quote workflows actually useful, right?

Max: So what we did is we built two quote workflow actions. One, that actually sends the quote to be approved by someone, right? Another one that will actually publish the quote, right? [00:30:00] Now, it's smarter than just publishing the quote because anyone who's built quote workflows before Oh, Max, you could just do a set property action that'll just change the status from, pending to approved or whatever.

Max: Sure, what our workflow action does is it's smart enough to look at the quote and see if there are any Outstanding approvals in different workflows that haven't been completed yet, right? So like you can technically have your quote go through 10 different approval workflows It's only gonna take it out of the approval stage Once it's done going through the other ones if it gets to the end And it's I'm supposed to take you out of approval now.

Max: It goes, let me look and see if anyone else still has an outstanding approval for this. And if it does, it goes, I'm just not going to do anything. And it's always the last one that'll check to see if it's the last one and then take it out. So If you got to get a quote approved by 18 people at once, like you're not going to want to do like a game of Plinko where it's like waiting to go through because that quote won't get approved for six months.

Max: But so it's like it's built in really smart ways. But what's cool about this is [00:31:00] instead of it just being like, here's one email address that you send the quotes to. And that's basically it. You can build the approval process of your dreams, right? So you can say, Hey, if the quotes over 10 K, send it to finance, right?

Max: And then when it's done with finance, check to see if there's any like product with skew number five, four, six, five, right? If there is send it over to Jeff to approve. And then once Jeff's done approving it, go send it over to the sales manager. So like you can do. All this stuff using workflows, which you already know how to use, right?

Max: And it's like people have looked at quote workflows and said, this is what it should have been able to do the whole time. And we're finally giving it to that, which is cool. And then the last piece is price books. That's the last piece right now in terms of what's available at this moment. So price books.

Max: So The way price books works we use it for a couple of different things outside of what you would normally think price books are for. So one price books actually control, not only do they help you [00:32:00] control prices, right? They control access to who can sell what, right? So for example, if you're like a team that's got six business units and five different sales teams, but you only got one HubSpot product library because that's how it works, right? You can take the HubSpot products in your product library Divide them into price books and then set rules that will set the price book based on the business unit or any other property right let's say it's If we're selling outside of the US, here's this price book.

Max: If we're selling inside of the US, here's this price book. Like you can set them up however you need to, right? And so at a surface level, it is like almost a product catalog. It's Hey, in this situation, this and only this of the greater subsection of the product library, this is what you're allowed to sell.

Max: So you can deploy that in a billion different ways, right? But then the thing that we're working on now that's going to be available shortly is pricing rules for the price books, right? So if you think of like the way people [00:33:00] try to do it today is what they'll do is they'll take the same product and they'll duplicate it like seven times and just change the price.

Max: And then they'll put it into folders and then they'll go, ah, it's a price book. And you just got to hope and pray people are putting the right products on a quote when they're looking at seven different ones where all the thing is different as the price, right? What we're doing is we're building pricing rules.

Max: So just like you can set rules on what you can do with the quote, it's going to be dynamic rules of how the pricing is automatically adjusted for that same product based on the price book it's in. So you'll be able to do some where it's like. Cool. Here's our price book. And let's say this is like our silver to your pricing or something like that.

Max: You'll be able to set up a rule that just says any product that's in here has a 20 percent discount across the board, right? Or this specific product has a 5. 2 percent discount, but this product only and everything else is the same. Or maybe this, products that have a property of X that equals Y has this discount on it.

Max: So you don't have to duplicate. [00:34:00] The same product seven different times to get different prices, you can just have that one product and the price dynamically changes, which is a godsend for things like line item reporting and stuff like that, right? Because you're not saying, well, all of these seven products are the same product, even though they're not because the pricing is different.

Max: Like you don't want to do that. You know what I mean? So we're like, we're just solving for all of that. But what we had to do is we had to create like our own interface inside of HubSpot using a CRM card that would get powered by all these things that you set up in the admin panel. So we really think it's going to be something that's one going to bring a ton of value to HubSpot customers because here's the thing.

Max: When it comes to HubSpot quoting I always like to use this analogy, maybe this isn't going to translate that well to like audio, but look at my arm and imagine my arm is like all the features in HubSpot quoting, right? There's always this cliff at the end, right? Where people go, man, I really want to use HubSpot quoting, but if it only had price books, it only [00:35:00] had advanced approvals.

Max: If it only had product bundling, if it only had. Rules and regulations, right? And what we found is like, there are so many people that just get to the end of this cliff and go, damn, I've got to either look at another CRM that has CPQ built in, or I got to go look at a third party app. And the problem is, especially with the third party apps.

Max: Most people just need that one or two

Noah: Correct.

Max: have. And then they go and look at these through, I'm not going to name any specifically, but they look at these third party apps and they go, man, I don't need all of that. And what? It costs the same amount as my sales seat. That's crazy. So they end up just going, well, I'm going to go with the CRM that already has the half baked CBQ stuff or the CBQ stuff built into it.

Max: Well, we're trying to do. Essentially with quote hapily, we're not trying to be like a full fledged standalone CBQ app. We're trying to take HubSpot's quoting functionality cliff and extend it and [00:36:00] drag it as far as we can. So less people have to jump off of it,

Noah: Yeah. I mean, you're really solving for, the, instead of all those edge cases out there that some of these standalone applications are solving for, you really are solving for the majority. Of use cases out there that essentially the extension ability of what is currently in HubSpot. Now you guys said, Hey, here are the things that are missing.

Noah: So if you're out there and you're looking for a CPQ solution or you say, Hey, how so I got pretty close quote hapily, I think we'll take them all the way. And I'm really

Max: I guarantee you it's closer now.

Noah: What suggestions do you have for just people looking at apps in the Hotspot ecosystem?

Noah: Like how to look for them, how to find them, and what to really think about when you think, okay, I need some app.

Max: Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask you to participate in this answer. So let me ask you this. Have you as a partner ever run into customers where they're like, Hey, we want to do X, Y, Z with HubSpot and you get into this kind of awkward conversation with them where you say, yeah, HubSpot can do that, but you just have to [00:37:00] download an app.

Max: And then they go, wait a minute. I thought

Noah: The answer is yes. Here's a link. Here's all the information and here's our guide. And, sometimes the reviews are good. Sometimes they're

Max: sure.

Noah: because it's an old app and it's four years ago review. Yes.

Max: Then what's even more awkward is when you get the whole like, well, our sales rep said this could do everything. What do you mean? I have to buy this other thing to get it to do whatever. And what's so interesting about this is how it's always been in Salesforce. Salesforce, there's a whole app exchange. There's an entire industry built around apps on Salesforce. Yet for some reason, there's still so many people that come into HubSpot being like, Wayne, I thought it was gonna do everything. What do you mean I need to buy another

Noah: Well, the all in one messaging that can do everything is where

Max: a little bit.

Noah: from, yeah.

Max: Here's the funny thing. These are the same people that'll go out and buy an iPhone and then pay 50 a day to go play Candy Crush and they have no problem doing that, right? My, what [00:38:00] I think needs to happen and I only harp on this so much because again, I spent the first year talking to partners here and I always came across these partners that would go, Hey, Max, we get it.

Max: We know HubSpot. We think your apps are super cool. However, we have trouble positioning them to customers because they just came off the whole, they just came fresh off of the whole HubSpot. It's the all in one platform. It'll do everything for you conversation. And they are flummoxed that they need to buy something else to get it to do something.

Max: The big. Thing that I'm trying to put out into the universe and I don't know the best way of going around it So all I do is just scream about it on tiktok and linkedin all day The big there still needs to be a big mind shift that happens with hub spot customers and maybe partners a little bit And certainly with hub spot sellers, right?

Max: Is that hub spot? Is a platform and you're seeing let's take HubSpot out of the equation for a second If you think about it, your crm is like the iphone for your business, right? Think about this [00:39:00] like from a human perspective you use your iphone android smartphone You use your smartphone to communicate with the outside world, right?

Max: Well, guess what your crm system does the same exact thing right in the comparison of I'm the human, here's the company, my iPhone, that's the CRM to the business, right? It's where all the contacts are, it's how they send out information, it's where they store a lot of their very important information, right?

Max: It's how they communicate with the world. Imagine for a second, if the iPhone came with every single freaking app in the App Store already pre installed on it, right? Or if they tried to make the operating system do everything for everyone, no matter how niche the need or the use case was, right? The beauty of the iPhone, platform, by the way is that it comes with enough things that are universally useful to everyone that's using it.

Max: However, you have the freedom and the ability [00:40:00] to go get a better calendar app or to go get an app that makes it does something it did not do out of the box, right? If every single app came pre installed in the iPhone, it would be unaffordable, unusable, unscalable, and unsupportable. The same thing goes for a CRM platform, right?

Max: You shouldn't expect your CRM platform to literally do everything under the sun for every single industry, every single use case, every single type of company, right? You are buying the base framework of your platform, and then you have the flexibility and freedom to do what you want to make it yours.

Max: That's the beautiful reason why Workflows can be built in any way that they want instead of just here are the three workflows that this one sends emails, this one updates or whatever that's not how it works. The idea is that you should be able to get a platform that's still like affordable and universally usable and not bogged down by all of this very niche industry stuff.

Max: You should be able to pick and choose what you need and not be burdened by the cost of other customers [00:41:00] that need stuff that you don't, right? That's also the beauty of being able to buy in through the hubs, right? If you need sales hub right now, get sales hub, right? But like you shouldn't have to pay more for HubSpot because the insurance industry needs a very specific app that does underwriting for a very specific industry to do some funky stuff in HubSpot.

Max: Why should you pay more than that if you're the hair salon, right? So it's there's a reason Why like the, there needs to be a mindset shift. Mindset shift of like

Noah: I love this analogy. I love the analogy of using an iPhone or a smartphone and it doesn't come with everything. It's really designed to communicate. You can text, you can call, everything else is for your own personal use or whatever that particular application you're looking for. I think that's a brilliant analogy and thank you for sharing that cause I, I'm gonna steal that one a little bit if it's okay with you.

Noah: I'll start, I'll Transcribed by https: otter. ai

Max: on push back on, I'll tell you that. So once you go, it's just like your iPhone and open it up. But I [00:42:00] guarantee you're playing Farmville and spending a bunch of money on diamonds or something. You're gonna look at your CA little bit

Noah: Max, thank you so much for joining me. This has been like a fantastic conversation. If you were unsure of what hapily is or what they do, check it out. And Max, how do they, how do our listeners find out more information about you and hapily?

Max: Totally. So, one go follow me on LinkedIn or connect with me on LinkedIn so we can actually talk right. Hapily. com. It's got all of our apps, everything that we build right on there. We also have a YouTube channel that we pour a ton of content and love into. So go search, I think it's like at built hapily or something on YouTube or just search hapily HubSpot and you can find us there.

Max: And then we've got a lot of podcast content and we're just trying to like really crank up a content machine. So as long as you like follow us on all the LinkedIn page for hapily and me and Dax and everyone there and you'll be inundated with way more content that you want about apps and stuff like that.

Max: So yeah, we're everywhere.

Noah: Thank you so much. thank you for joining us so much. That really wraps it up today. Again, up your stack podcast and weekly [00:43:00] podcast features HubSpot app partners. You've either built their apps on HubSpot or integrated with HubSpot. Again, I'm your host Noah Berk.

Noah: Max, again, thank you so much for joining the show. This was fantastic. I can't wait to see what else you guys come out with next.

Noah: We're already promoting internally to our clients.

Noah: So you have one fan here already. Awesome ​