HubSpot User Groups

Where is everyone calling in from today?

HubSpot User Groups

Despite this being the South Florida hug, we do do these virtually, so we welcome non South Floridian folks, like. Natalie from Vancouver and Zach from North Carolina. Alright. I'll get folks just a a minute or two, and then we'll get into it. Oh, West Palm Beach.

HubSpot User Groups

Alright. I'm gonna jump in now, and this session is being recorded, and we'll send out the slides and everything as we do, with each of these so you won't miss anything. If you're a little bit late, that's okay. We're gonna jump in now. Thank everybody for coming. We are gonna be talking about data, activating that data inside of Hubspot, and I do wanna be clear here that this isn't just a we're only talking about data and operations. We're gonna be talking about through the lens of marketing and sales. So, very, very relevant stuff here, and I'm Em Wingrove. I'm the CMO for Aptitude 8. We are a top solutions partner in the Hubspot ecosystem. Great, and we are leaders in AI.

HubSpot User Groups

Also, if you guys could mute yourself, I think I heard some feedback there. Top Hubspot partner. We're leaders in AI. I am our Hug leader. Although, I am quite the technical Hubspot user, I did wanna bring someone along with me, for this session who is known for his data analysis, data management, data orchestration chops, and that is Zach Chastain, one of our senior notes consultants at Aptitude 8. Zach, please introduce yourself.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. So, yeah, like, like said, I've done a lot of data work within Hubspot, mostly around enterprise implementations and migration projects, a lot of integration work. You know, I. I'm kind of our data go to guy, so I'm excited to be here with you guys today and walk you through some of the stuff that I see all the time in Hubspot.

HubSpot User Groups

Thanks, Zach. This is gonna be fun because you work with a ton of clients inside of Hubspot. So what we're gonna get into today is sort of what's going on in in marketing as it relates to data. I don't know if you guys have heard this, you know, new phrase, GTM engineering, but it's sort of flooding the airwaves these days, and in general, the marketing function is changing a bit, again, as it relates to data. So we'll go into that, what that shift is, what's happening, what does it look like in real life, you know, and what are some best practices, how can we get our sort of data chops optimized, and what are some mistakes we should avoid, and then Zach's gonna show us some real life use cases and demos to apply all the concepts that we'll discuss here in real life.

HubSpot User Groups

So I'm gonna set the stage here because I have strong opinions about this stuff. So. I've been a marketer for 15 years, you know, helped cofound up to two date. But for me, execution has always been the most fun part of marketing, and I feel like other marketers share this sentiment. Like, I remember when I was managing a team, like, 8 years ago being like, hey, guys. We gotta chill. We can't go straight into the content creation. We need to think about the audio. Yeah, and that was a long time ago. But back in the day, we could just buy a list, or you could build a list in your own database. We would take the list, and it was almost immediately actionable.

HubSpot User Groups

You you know, maybe you'd validate it a little bit. You'd import it, and then you'd send emails to it. Right? Maybe you'd target some ads at that list, and then you'd unleash your sales team on that list, and that worked. That worked really well for me and helped me climb the marketing ladder. But just a list or a purchase list, that's a drop in the bucket. Right? We have today real intent data. Activity data that's coming out of our ears, product data, and how they're behaving inside of your product, demo data, the you know, demographic data, firmographic data, technographic data. Right, and then there's things like these AI smart properties and other tools that can scrape and you know, gather data that we don't already have.

HubSpot User Groups

So there's just a lot of data, and on top of that, the way that we used to use that data, like sending those emails, doing mass email campaigns, that stuff doesn't work anymore, and it probably for for that reason. So it's feeling like an all hands on deck on marketing teams to action data. So we're all wearing marketing ops mops hats, and you know, while we were, you know, prepping for this webinar, we were I was doing some research and saw that Gartner had a study of stat. Only 49% of Martech capability gets used. So we're doing all this, you know, trying to get our arms around data, and we're missing opportunities to leverage really cool tools, and Zach, I know you can probably speak to this. Right? Because you're a lot of our customers, sure, are, you know, CROs, but a lot of them are CMOs or VPs of marketing. Right? Like Right. I'm sure you're seeing this.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. I I think that the capabilities have definitely outpaced what people necessarily, like, feel comfortable using, and there's a lot of that, hesitance to really, like, dive into some of the the technical side and and especially when it starts to get into, like, AI, and no one really knows how to leverage it in their organization yet. So that it's a problem that's just growing faster and and faster. It's a good problem to have. You know? It's great to have all these capabilities, but the real question comes down to how do we actually utilize that in your organization to drive results.

HubSpot User Groups

And for marketers, those results often look like pipeline and revenue numbers, at least as they're being measured from from the top. But, to get there to your point, you gotta be able to get your arms around the data and and truly action it. So given that this is a little bit of a struggle for a lot of our clients that that you're working with, Zach, I will say even for me, I struggle with it, often. I wanna hear it from you guys. I'm gonna run a little poll, see how you guys are feeling about your ability to to really action the data that you have available to you. So with that, I'm going to do this poll.

HubSpot User Groups

Sorry. A notetaker just joined, and I had to give approval. Alright. Polls, we're gonna launch it. Talk to me. One being very poor, 5 being we can totally action all of our data. We understand that we've got our arms around it. Alright. Alright. Alright. I don't think you guys can see the results yet. But if I end the poll and share them, you'll see, I think, a lot of folks are no. First of no one is excellent. Hopefully, you guys can all. Zach, can you give me you guys can see that?

Zach Chastain

I can see it, but I think that's because I'm cohost.

HubSpot User Groups

Well. Oh, they can see see it. I will tell you that a lot of folks were in the poor, fair, and good category. 50% fell into poor, 25 into fair, and 25 into good. No one is feeling their ability to action data is excellent. That's a very, tall order. So note that you're not alone, but we're all kind of trying to figure this out together, and that's why we wanted to do this webinar. So let me stop sharing that. Alrighty. So. I did a additional research and found another stat, by the way, that 75% of teams are not fully leveraging their available data. So not only are they not able to use the tools and you know, features of the tools that they have, they can't even use the data.

HubSpot User Groups

Can't even get it to be able to use those tools. So 75% of people saying that is very similar to what we've just, uncovered here with the poll. A lot of folks are struggling, and so. I think about sometimes you know, I've got a couple of marketing friends that are in b to see, and I think about how they have had mountains of data a little bit before we did in b to b. I'm in b to b, and it's this this race to kind of catch up, but it's also a race to get ahead. Right, and I think that that's where AI comes into play, which is definitely fun, and we're gonna be talking about some of as well.

HubSpot User Groups

Alright. So where does this leave us? This new term has emerged, GTM engineering, and it's emerged because the the the folks who own the responsibility of going and buying that list off of Zoominfo, that's not the job anymore. Right? What we used to do was was a lot of manual work and sitting and waiting. So we would say to the marketing ops person or maybe a rep ops person, can you please help me with enriching this list or appending additional data to this list? So you give it to them and then you wait, or if you wanna score it, you might have to call somebody else in to help with that. It's a lot of manual work and then waiting.

HubSpot User Groups

But GTM engineering is all about push, putting all of that onus onto the marketing team and building the systems necessary to design, automate, and manage what is driving a company's go to market operations. Right? What used to be data imports and choppy handoffs and all of the tools sprawl and waiting and manuals. Stuff. It's now a much bigger role for marketing ops. It's agentic automation. It's systems first thinking, and it it is a little daunting sometimes to think about. Like, as a marketer, I definitely identify as a marketer, and I'm thinking, wow. That all is now on us. But it's also, like, really, I don't know, empowering, like, that we get to do all of this now. Right? Like, I'm sure you're seeing that among our marketer customers, like, kinda stepping into new confidence.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. I think it it is it can be challenging for people, especially if you're used to the old way of doing things and you, you know, are are used to that mindset of, like, manually executing through things. But like you said, like, there's such a great opportunity to shift that mindset into, you know, what can we build in terms of systems and repeatable process, and I think the industry has been moving in this direction for a long time. It's it's definitely speeding up because of AI, but we we've seen marketing move in a more technical direction for the better part of the last 5 years. So, this this kind of makes sense. It definitely aligns with where I was headed with my career, and I think that a lot of other people in this space are gonna find the same thing.

HubSpot User Groups

It's interesting. You brought that up because Zach and I, we were talking about this the other day at up to two date. We have all these, like, highly intelligent technical consultants, and we were kinda plucking out. We were like, wait. So many of these folks actually started in marketing. Yeah. Zach, me, I'm not the most I'm not as data, fluent as Zach is. But, like, even me, we've you know, bunch of other people on our team. Like, it started with marketing, and then we've evolved into what the market and you know, what our teams and businesses now require, and it is cool to be kind of on the bleeding edge of that. So.

Sam Spicer

Oh, yeah.

HubSpot User Groups

We've gotta we to run our campaigns to to to build a GTM engine, it requires a bunch of control over your data and and understanding and knowing where is it sourced from, where is it where is the original tool that it's coming from. Maybe it's, like, data coming from an ERP. Maybe it's a list that you got from an event. Maybe it's, yeah, with Linkedin Sales Navigator. I don't know. There's ways that it gets in and then the ways that it gets mapped to different things and leveraged, and knowing that is, like, is how to win, these days, and there's tools to help with that, Hubspot being one of them. So we'll get into that as well.

HubSpot User Groups

What it looks like in practice. If you're systems minded, I would say that you know that everything is predicated on something before it. Right? Contingencies, dependencies. So it is you're zoomed out. It's much more of a big picture system than a and when I say system, I don't mean, like, a tool or a product. I mean, like, the full blown system. Right, and if you know that things are predicated on each other and that data is a big part of it, that's how automated or agentic systems, like, function and can can be successful. But no system is completely without humans. So I will say that humans are critical to how we market, how we sell, how we service, how we delight our customers.

HubSpot User Groups

But it is certainly it is certainly a different mindset. Is that kinda like what you were saying? It's like shifting how we think, but something has to happen. Right? A signal is fired, and then the next thing, is it is it enrichment? Is it, you know, appending more data to it so then you know what you could do beyond with it? Because if you wait and you enrich it later, well, now you don't have that property, that smart property that says this company is hiring see suite, and they're you know, they have a bunch of jobs that are showing big signs of growth. Well, now you can't tailor that message because you enriched it too late. So it's thinking through, yeah, all of these trigger points and then the building blocks for the ultimate end goal, which I will always say, think about what you want that outcome to be before you're starting to build or execute or work toward it.

HubSpot User Groups

I always recommend working backward out of an outcome, and then that way, you can set up the stepping stones the right way. I know Zach, I'm sure you've seen this done in reverse order or in correct order, but what would you say is a characteristic or a quality of an organization that is building these things in the right order?

Zach Chastain

So I think that if you're really doing this well, then you're stepping back and thinking through, one, how do we actually leverage the data that we have? You know, adding more data is not necessarily helpful. It really depends on where you're at in that process. So, like, stepping back and thinking through how do we leverage the data that we have today, and also, how do we make sure that that data is is up to our standards? You know? We have good data quality, data governance in place. Those are really those those foundational pieces that you you just have to have before you can start letting a a bunch of automation loose on your production Hubspot portal because you are only gonna create chaos if you don't have those pieces in place.

Zach Chastain

Because you've got the the humans in the portal today, they look at something, and and if they say, oh, this doesn't look right, then they don't execute. But the agent is not necessarily gonna understand what looks right. It's just gonna trust that the data's right, and it's gonna go. So that that would be my biggest my biggest piece of advice for someone who's trying to figure out, you know, are we ready to to unleash some of this type of automation on our portal? It's, like, make sure that you have that data foundation in place.

HubSpot User Groups

And when you don't have the data foundation in place, these are the mistakes that we see, and I don't think I have this one on the slide, but I will say, Zach, I know you've been there for it. Whether we're scoping a new engagement, the marketing stakeholder tends to want a lot of data, like, more than what they could realistically use, and I say that in full confidence in an AI era where you can do a lot of stuff with data. I've just seen, like, among our marketing customers really, really wanting to and like, what like, almost dying on the hill of trying to get this random ERP data into Hubspot that actually won't help. So I I do think that there's a little bit of that of of trying to get things in just to have it. Right, and as you know, Zach, like, that can create a mess.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. Yeah. I see the same thing happen in migrations at times too where you see people moving data, and it's just like, you're you're obviously just moving this just because you're afraid of losing it, and maybe it's important, maybe it's not. Yeah. You really wanna step back and and think through the data that you're bringing in and and the quality of that data and what you're gonna do with it rather than becoming, a data pack rat.

HubSpot User Groups

Oh, I like that, APAC rat. What I have also I've seen it a little bit. It's more of a fear, but the number one here on this slide is you automate a process that's already broken or has something slightly off with it, and then it breaks at scale. It's a much bigger issue than this process that was previously manually managed by a human is now fully automated, and it had a had an issue with it, and now you got much bigger issues because as fast as. AI can scale success, it can scale a mess. Maybe faster. Maybe faster, actually. What else? Teams buying the tools. This is I hate to to to rag on my marketers, but I feel like because I'm on it, I can.

HubSpot User Groups

But buying the tools before you really evaluated the system that you're trying to build or what the outcome that you want is, marketers usually have bigger budgets, and we like to buy tools. So if you do that, though, you end up with a bunch of tool sprawl, and I will also say, because we face this a lot with our customers that are on Hubspot, and they wanna use this fancy other point solution for something, you really should sit down and have the conversation of what sacrifices you're actually making. Because in the end, having a consolidated system, it it usually ends up being more ideal for the operators, the admins, the leadership, like everyone than, you know, the other way around. So just calling that out. Anything else here you'd say, Zach, is a common mistake you see?

Zach Chastain

I think that that that's a great point about, like, stepping back and thinking about what your overall stack looks like too because a lot of people I that I see today have, like, half broken integrations. Maybe there's mappings that are not correct or there's, you know, some piece of it that stopped working, and those are are things that can easily go under the radar if you're not checking on them frequently, but can contribute a lot to those data problems and even, you know, go behind you and mess them back up again after you think you've fixed them. So that that's something that I would really take a close look at as well if you haven't looked at it recently.

HubSpot User Groups

Good call out on that one. So thinking about the tools, which side note, I literally just had a conversation with my marketing team this morning. We were talking about getting another tool, and I was like, wait. Hubspot can do this. So tools matter. You don't wanna get too many tools. You don't wanna have there to be sprawl. But I would say that, you know, people and process in relation to the people, process, and tools, like, people and process alone aren't gonna cut it. Right? So I would say that it needs to like, there's a layer system, and I have another graph on the next graphic on the next slide that that helps sort of, I don't know, highlight it a little bit better.

HubSpot User Groups

But there is this remember what I said earlier about if you enrich too late, then you don't have the data before you need it to actually make a decision on how you're gonna do the outreach or personalize. So there's this enrichment component that really needs to happen, and it really needs to happen in a, you know, in a certain time, and then there's unifying all of that data. Right? A modeling layer that's gonna structure and define what it means, and then you can activate it, and like I said earlier, like, on slide one, we all wanna go straight to activation. It's the most fun part. But to get there actually and successfully, realistically, is a few more steps.

HubSpot User Groups

Right, and and it's enrichment, it's unification, and it's getting your arms around all of the data so that you know what you wanna activate. Because from there, then you can start talking about pipeline and revenue impact. But you skip one layer, and you're probably gonna have a little bit of a mess or you're gonna be missing opportunities, and this is a graphic pulled straight from Hubspot. This is the graphic that they use to describe and sort of define the agentic customer platform, and it's the same stuff. Right? Like, you're still enriching. You're getting the context that's required. You're still coordinating and unifying and understanding whose roles are what, who's gonna do which parts, and where, you know, should that data be mapped, and then activation is actually doing it, right, getting the work done, and these assistants and agents and even if, I don't you know, doing something a little bit bigger with an MCP, they don't know your context unless you give it to them.

HubSpot User Groups

So it's the activation part, that's where the risk comes then Because if they are missing context, then they're gonna go execute against it and scale that mess like we mentioned. So we've done a lot of talking. Let's get into the platform. Zach, you came up with some use cases, built out some demos for them, and like I said, they're through a lens of a marketing sort of program. So I'm going to stop the share and hand it over to you so we can jump into Hubspot.

Zach Chastain

Alright. So like Em said, I set up a couple of demos for us in in a demo portal here to walk through just to give us an idea of, like, what do some of these tools look what does using them look like in practice. So in in this case, we've got a a new target account. It's a biotech company called NGEN. We've got all these contacts from a recent event, and we wanna pull them into Hubspot so that we can do some enrichment and run some. AI data agent enhancement on these records as well once we've got this data into Hubspot. So let's talk about what that process looks like. So first, we're gonna go into the data management section here of Hubspot and go to Data Studio, and we're gonna look at datasets, and so I've I've created this dataset based off of this Google Sheet here, but it doesn't have to just be a Google Sheet.

Zach Chastain

There are a lot of different external data sources that you can connect this way. You know, you can pull in. CSVs this way. You can pull in data from. Shopify, Stripe, third party databases, you know, whatever platform you might be working out of, you there this is a great way to be able to pull in data into Hubspot, especially if this is more than, like, a onetime use case. So, like, you know, maybe if this is a a onetime event, you might ask, you know, why not just import this into Hubspot the way that we've been doing forever, and so the answer is really if we get into some of the the capabilities around syncing data into datasets, and so we can actually come in here and build out a a dataset based on our source data, map it once to our contact data, make sure that we're mapping to emails so that we're deduping automatically throughout this process, and we can even set up a sync an ongoing sync so that, you know, this isn't some, like, manual task that I have to go in every week and maintain.

Zach Chastain

This can run, you know, on its own in the background in your Hubspot portal, pulling in, you know, mappings that you've already validated into a uniform dataset that you've created that you can run enrichment and other activities against knowing that, you know, this is this is quality data.

Zach Chastain

And the process for creating this is is really straightforward. Like, if we if we create a dataset.

Zach Chastain

It's as simple as just connecting connecting a source like we looked at earlier.

Zach Chastain

And I just need to grab a spreadsheet in this case.

HubSpot User Groups

And I put it in the sec while you're playing up, Zach. I put it in the chat, but I I have been told Bertie told me that that list of sources to connect data from is growing.

Zach Chastain

Oh, yeah. I'm I'm not shocked to hear that. If you have multiple sheets, then you can also select between sheets here, and then Hubspot's gonna automatically look at that header row, figure out, you know, how does this most likely map, and then you can add your data sources and you know, just go through the the normal mapping process to to build out your dataset. So now that we have our dataset in here, what are we gonna do with it? So our first stop is we're going to enrich this data.

Zach Chastain

So in this case, we've created a new company by pulling these records into our portal. In this case, we've got some data that. Hubspot knows about this domain. If this company were already in your portal, then Breeze won't, like, automatically override that data. It's it's good. We'll take a look at this here in a second too, though. It's good to check your enrichment settings just to make sure before you do any sort of enrichment just like we've been what we've been talking about throughout. If you want it to override anything that Breeze considers incorrect, you know, there is a setting to turn that on, and you also really wanna double check your mappings to make sure that, you know, this is actually mapping to the properties that you expect and using your portal just to, again, make sure that you're not creating any of those, you know, data issues that can occur in the background, and then we will run our enrichment on our record here.

HubSpot User Groups

And this By the way, the enrichment is free in Hubspot. Yes. No credits.

Zach Chastain

Alright. So we've we've created our date. We've created our prop our contacts. We've created our company. We've enriched our company. The next step that we want to do is we want to start to take some action against these contacts that we've created. So if we take a look at the data agent section here so this is where we can create and manage agents within Hubspot to take on some automated actions for us, and to M's point earlier, this piece does use Hubspot credits, so that's something to be aware of. You know, you wanna make sure that you're controlling this with as much as much, like, segmentation as you can to just make sure that you're not not running this against, like, you know, your entire database.

HubSpot User Groups

Goes back to that coordination layer too. Like, how much of your functionality do you want AI to run versus a human?

Zach Chastain

Because it.

HubSpot User Groups

Comes down to pricing as well. Right?

Zach Chastain

Exactly. Unlimited. Yeah. So, you know, you're trying to build some automation into your process. You wanna make sure that this doesn't become just a task a manual task for some bite have to go in here and do, but you also wanna control for just how much of the database this is being run against as well, and so you can you can build out a prompt in here. You can also reference existing fields within Hubspot when you're doing that the same way that you would insert a property token in an email or or yeah. So so that gives you some some control over, like, you know, specifying exactly what data you want this to reference. In this case, I've got this prompt taking a look at job title and then deciding, you know, what is the role that this buyer has in this buying process based on their title.

Zach Chastain

And so.

HubSpot User Groups

Based on their title and the titles of other folks as if it's going and scraping the web.

Zach Chastain

Right.

HubSpot User Groups

Very cool. So.

Zach Chastain

So this this runs whenever a record gets created, and it can also run on a schedule as well. So, you know, if in this case, yeah, you probably wanna do this as soon as the record's created, but you could have use cases where you want to run this on a daily or weekly basis. There's a lot of flexibility around how you schedule that as well.

Zach Chastain

And so if we take a look at this agent so you can you can also control this with these smart properties, and so that's that's what this prospect role property is essentially is this is a smart property that gets filled using a data agent. That's where my prompt lives. That's where my property token was added as well, and that just lives under the data section or data agent section here within the property itself. So there's a lot of different capabilities within Hubspot for how we can ingest this data, how we can enrich it, and also what we can start to do with it with some logic against that data once it's in Hubspot. I'm gonna show you guys something really cool that that I like doing as well.

Zach Chastain

So Breeze is is really flexible. It it's it's got a lot of great capabilities, but, obviously, there are also other third party AI agents out there that you probably are already using or may be considering using. So in our case, you know, we we use Claude a a lot, and obviously, the capabilities of of a tool like Claude when it comes to reasoning and running through more you know, having the AI take more ownership of a task. It's really flexible. So how do you how do you do that? So we can create a service key in Hubspot, and that might sound daunting if you're not used to setting something up like this, but it's really simple, actually. You give it a name.

Zach Chastain

And you add some scopes. So this just gives you some ability over, like you know, basically, what do you want the service key to have access to to read and write in your portal? So, yeah, if we wanted to give this control to read and write contacts, you know, it's as simple as just checking these boxes here.

Zach Chastain

And so I've already set up a a service key.

Zach Chastain

And this is if you haven't if you haven't done anything like this yet, then it's also probably gonna be surprising to you just how simple this is to do.

Zach Chastain

In this case, you know, I I took my service key in a text file. I gave that to Claude, and I told it, You know, this is the service key that we're gonna use to connect to this Hubspot portal. We're gonna be doing some demoing, and as it's really as easy as that. Once you hand the service key to Claude, then you know, it's it's got it. It understands what to do with it, and you can make API calls in and out of your Hubspot portal without necessarily needing to know how to code. A couple of things to step back at this point and just give you guys some some best practices. One is, obviously, don't share your service key with anyone outside of your organization.

Zach Chastain

You know, you wanna keep that protected because anyone else who has that service key could also access that portal and make API calls just the same way that you can. Another thing to keep in mind as well is you should probably start out with just having read access. Like, I wouldn't recommend giving Claude write write access, especially if you're new to using. AI tools in this way just because to M's point earlier, this is something that can that can scale a mess quickly. So you you wanna be careful around how much access you're giving Claude to do that.

Zach Chastain

And as long as you're reading, then you know, you're you're pretty safe to just give it read access. As you get more advanced and you feel more comfortable using Claude or another external AI tool that you're using, then you could start to do some some write some writing back into the portal as well.

HubSpot User Groups

And really quick, just before you get into the I this is not Zach trepidatiously going out on a limb and being like, this is some crazy, cool, unique, random no. No. No. Like, Hubspot is moving this direction. Salesforce and Hubspot both, they came out with this whole, you know, press release and movement, what was, like, a month ago. Open ecosystem, APIs, MCP. Like, this is where they want their customers to go, because they know that that's where the market is going anyways, and so what Zach is showing you, although it might some of it might seem a little you know, the surface key is not a little scary. This is the the modern marketer's way of operating is what I would say.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. I think that we'll see a movement in this direction over the next couple of years for sure. I mean, especially as people get more comfortable with, like, interacting with their CRM and and and their data in this way. Like, you know, telling Claude to just pull me a list of contacts who are all at the same company, that's a much more natural way to interact with with a with an interface than having to click through, you know, 3 or 4 different menus to get to a list that I had to manually build. Like, really, really user friendly. So in this case, I've asked Claude to pull those contacts who are employees of NGEN. I pulled all of my records that I created originally, and then you know, we can we can do some QA work with Claude as well.

Zach Chastain

So, like, in this case, I'm asking, is anyone missing a value for that prospect role field that our agent is filling out based on title, and obviously, John Hammond here, he doesn't have a title, so it it is going to flag that his prospect role is empty, and it's gonna ask, you know, do we want it to update it? So maybe maybe I don't know John Hammond's title, and so I don't really have a a way to easily just put that information in and and have it run. So. I can actually ask Claude, you know, let's let's just see, you know, what what do you think his title is? Search the web. Help me determine what John's job title should be, and in this case, it finds that John Hammond is the CEO and founder. So it asks me, you know, do I wanna set that job title as CEO, and I'm gonna say, yes. Please set. John's job title to, CEO.

HubSpot User Groups

And we're expecting it to update it in the portal.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. So it's gonna make an API call into the portal to set. John's title to CEO. I don't have to go back in and manually do that, and it's also offering to go ahead and set his prospect role to decision maker based on the the rules that I created for the agent, or I could also not set it at this point and just let that automation, the next time it runs, update that for us.

Zach Chastain

And so we'll take a look at the portal here in a moment, but it should update both of those fields for us as simple as that.

Zach Chastain

So when we look at his job title, it now says CEO, and another thing too is just like any other update that you make in Hubspot, that does get logged, and it's tracked as a source as an integration. So, like, you know, it's not like that. Claude can make all these edits in Hubspot, and then you can't keep track of what's being changed. Like, just like any other outside source that edits data, you can track that in your logs, and if you needed to, you could roll it back, and honestly, it makes it easier to do stuff like that now because in the past, if you had, like, some big data automated data action that messed up a bunch of contact records, and then you know, your only option to fix that is to, like, write a script to make an API call to hit the API and say, roll it back to the latest value. Well, now you could just prompt Claude and say, I want to roll these back to the previous value. Do that for me, and it's as simple as that.

HubSpot User Groups

I think how fast and to your point, like, some of the stuff just when you see it, it's like, well, that's really simple. I think that makes it easier to zoom out and be more systems minded. Like, if the new tool in the toolkit that can be applied in, like, a different way, I feel like I have to zoom out to be like, wait a minute. Now that I have the ability to efficiently and autonomously change things inside of my CRM and my outcome is over here, well, now I have new ways to get to that outcome. You know what I mean? Like, maybe I'm just speaking for myself here, but I think it helps that it's so simple.

Zach Chastain

Absolutely. I mean, at this point, the limitation used to be that you have to understand everything that Hubspot is capable of and everything that the API is capable of, and then on top of that, you also have to be capable of actually writing that code or you need someone who can do that for you. You know, now the only real limitation is you just need to understand what. Hubspot is capable of, and there there is still some gap there in, like, what the API can touch, but, you know, like you said, Hubspot's goal is to make everything in the interface exposed to the API. So, eventually, you will be able to anything that you could click and do in this interface, you can do just as easily by prompting any AI that has access to your Hubspot.

HubSpot User Groups

To that point, if you are like, I don't know all of the parts of Hubspot of my Hubspot. I don't know all of the workflows and things. I think you can still like, without having to if you didn't wanna do the whole cloud and MCP or what you could still use Breeze. Like, you can chat with it and say, hey. Can I did this in a bit to, like, pulling a report, and I was like, hey? How many deals have we closed this quarter so far, and give me a breakdown by the industry. I think two seconds. I got it.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. You you always can can also reach out to Breeze within Hubspot as well. You know, they make that really easy right here to just ask a question, pull up the window, start chatting. I I'm just so I'm so biased because I I work in Claude so much, but, like, yeah, it's it's already built into the platform too, and it is very capable.

HubSpot User Groups

Yeah, and to be fair, it not only will give you answers, like, answer questions about the platform, it can also execute for you. Like, you can have it update a property and all that good stuff that Zach just showed using Cloud, but with Breeze.

Zach Chastain

Yeah.

HubSpot User Groups

And it it, like, comes I think I I feel like when people ask me, well, what should I do? Which one should it's like a big I hate say it depends. Like, it's a pretty big conversation for the company. Like, it's a discussion for the leaders of the company because if so as a marketer, like, we were saying, I have a big budget, and I'm able to, like I own a bunch of the tools. I don't own Claude in our organization, and I don't know every single thing that we're being billed for and where we're overage and all of that good stuff. I do own Hubspot, and I can go look at Breeze and have it do it. So it comes down to how does your business operate, who owns which functions, who owns which tools, and how, if you're in a regulated industry, how data has to flow for certain functions. So it's a it is an interesting enablement, all of this.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. That that brings up a really great point too, which is, like, you need to understand what what sort of agreements and tiers you have with any third party AI tools. You know, ideally, you're on those enterprise plans where they're not, like, training models against your data, and and you really wanna understand that. Because if you if you don't already have, like, an AI policy, then that's something that you're gonna wanna implement for your organization at some point as well just to make sure that you are clear on what type of data you're sharing with with these third party AI tools. You know, in our case, you know, we we do have those policies in place, so we we know, you know, this is these are the approved tools, and we need to stick with those. But that is a really great point to to make sure you know that before you connect any tool to your, like, actual production Hubspot account.

HubSpot User Groups

Indeed. Alright. Is there anything else cool left to show? Should we go back to the deck?

Zach Chastain

Yeah. Let's let's go back, and let's do some q and a.

HubSpot User Groups

Let's do it. Alright. I got my screen back in working order. I had a couple of wrap up slides here, but enrichment, unification, activation, coordinating the roles, knowing which tools are supposed to do, what which humans are supposed to do what, and which processes exist and that they're documented, and you know, this is a job now. Like, the role has shifted. The modern marketing function is different. Right, and data is a massive part of it, and in order to win and and be successful, you have to be system like, system minded. You have to think systematically and zoom out as far as you can and have outcomes top of mind. What is the desired outcome that you want always because you're always gonna be working backward out of that, and earn your auto automation.

HubSpot User Groups

Don't don't just feel like you can just go build a workflow with a data agent in there today if you've never done it before and hit go. You know? Make sure you you model all these things. You test them. You talk to the departments that maybe they don't own these data points, but they use them and they leverage them for XYZ other thing. Right? You you gotta get your arms around it and earn the ability to automate and create things that are autonomous. So with that, any questions, comments, or like, situations you wanna share?

HubSpot User Groups

So just.

Zach Chastain

Out of curiosity, how many of you are are already using some of these features in your in your Hubspot worlds, or are you guys doing a lot of automation and AI work around your data, or would you say you're more kind of in the stage of getting the those foundational, like, data pieces in place to open up those capabilities for you.

HubSpot User Groups

The building block stage is the smart one.

HubSpot User Groups

And not that you you can't come back from anything, but it is certainly more difficult to walk execution decisions back after they've already happened. So that building block stage is what's going to derisk you from that.

HubSpot User Groups

Yeah. I saw a a graph, showing AI usage among Hubspot customers, and it was super interesting to see how it, sort of panned out or how it, like, manifested on the chart itself, and it was interesting. There's a lot a lot most customers are using some form of AI, whether it be inside of Hubspot itself or connecting these other AI tools. Hi. We're getting the foundation set with some demo first. We're looking at adding workflows once we get the workflows. See, that's the right like, the Yeah. You to do that. Right.

Zach Chastain

And just like we did with the demo here too, I mean, you can always set up some segments that are, you know, just some tight demo data for testing and and play around with this functionality to make sure that, you know, you're not, like, running against your entire portal, but you can get some sense of, like, what what sort of use cases would we wanna implement for our organization and what is what is using these tools look like in practice within our portal without, like, having to go all out, before you're ready.

HubSpot User Groups

Zach, isn't it demo portals are free. Right?

Zach Chastain

I I know that. I think so. Yeah. I mean, I've never had to pay for my demo portal.

HubSpot User Groups

It's the sandboxes that aren't. But so if anyone can go create a developer portal, demo portal for free, like, you should.

Zach Chastain

That's a great point. Yeah. That's a great place to to test stuff out like that and just it could just have fun. It's the best way to learn. Box, though.

HubSpot User Groups

So it's not gonna have, like, your same prod setup, but it's still a safe place to test.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. Yeah, and you can do to just build stuff, and that's the best way to learn it.

HubSpot User Groups

Can't you, Zach, also I feel like I've heard our consultants talk about this before. Like, you can go get test data. Like, aren't there, like, websites out there where it'll give you a bunch of contacts and companies?

Zach Chastain

That that's another thing I love to use Clogd now for too is you can just tell it, hey. Make me some test data, and it'll do it. So.

HubSpot User Groups

Oh goodness. I didn't even think of that, but that is a perfect use case for an LLM.

HubSpot User Groups

If you're because I've done this before. I'm like, oh, I'll go model it out in the demo portal, and then I'm like, oh, man. There's nothing in here. Like, nothing works. Yes. They are free. Free 99. I'm also happy about the enrichment being free 99 because I think when they first rolled it out, it was paid or credit based.

HubSpot User Groups

That's awesome. Alright, Crystal. We had a a conversation, you know, after today where we've been sitting on the same Hubspot portal for many, many, many years, and we were thinking about how we're gonna audit it and do some cleanup, and one of the term the terms of phrases that I heard someone used for not demolition, but it was taking it down to the studs.

Sam Spicer

So.

Zach Chastain

Yeah. Okay.

HubSpot User Groups

But in a lot of instances, taking things down to the stud or studs or demolishing them is is the right answer. It's just, again, it's always a discussion. This is never a decision that should be made in a vacuum or by one person.

Zach Chastain

I I've definitely seen some portals that just needed to be taken back down to the studs.

HubSpot User Groups

I would say, I feel like of all the clients that I've worked with and interfaced with and all of my other friends, the that work in any form of operations or CRM, the the number one desire shared by all of them is a clean slate. Like, how many times have you heard someone say, god. I would give anything to just, like, clean slate, start over. It's a I mean, I wouldn't say it's a pipe dream, but it you know, how often at an organization are you gonna be in a position to say your leaders are like, yeah. Just tear it all down. Right? It happens. It's it can it can happen, but you certainly have to be cautious.

HubSpot User Groups

I wanna share something really quick. If you wanna connect to that state on Linkedin, you can do that. You can also connect with me and Zach. I've got our stuff here. But what I wanted to show you is that for all of the actual Floridians in the group, we are finally doing an in person meetup, and this is technically a Hubspot user group, but it's a workshop, and it's in person. It'll be in Fort Lauderdale. So, hopefully, our West Palm folks and Miami folks will meet in the middle, but, we'll be doing that on Thursday, July 16. It's all around, prospecting agent, and again, me, my members of my team here on the right, you'll see we'll all be leading roundtables and educating and demoing and doing workshops just to make sure that everyone's got their arms around the prospecting agent. Because I will say, at Apptouche Day, we're using it pretty heavily now. Don't Zach, do any of your clients use prospecting agent?

Zach Chastain

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Cool.

HubSpot User Groups

Yeah. So come hang with us. We'll have food and beverages, and I think I'm bringing some swag. So I gotta sort that out, but that'll be in a couple of weeks in Fort Lauderdale, and I look forward to seeing you guys all later.

Zach Chastain

That's awesome.

HubSpot User Groups

Zach can't come. Sorry. He's in North Carolina.

Zach Chastain

It's a little bit of a trip, but. I'm sure you guys will have a blast.

HubSpot User Groups

Oh, it'll be a good time. There's a surprising number of Hubspot users in the South Florida area, and also, I think folks who aren't from the area aren't as aware, but West Palm, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami are 3 distinct cities, and while they're relatively close to one another, they're still kind of far. So it's a big area, and when we took over the Hug, I think it was originally just the Miami Hug, and I felt pretty passionately that there were a lot of folks in West Palm and Fort Lauderdale, Boca, all of those things, right, using Hubspot, and so we expanded it, and anyways, we are excited about this in a couple of weeks. So come hang with us.

HubSpot User Groups

It'll be a good time. We can make friends, network. That's that's what community is all about, and Hubspot is, like, the number one company when it comes to community and connection. That's, like, part of their culture, and it's part of ours as well. So I am looking forward to it. If there aren't any other questions, I say we go ahead and wrap it up, and we'll see you guys next time. I'll let you know when the next virtual hug is happening. It'll probably be in. August or September, but more to come there, and then yeah, like I said, for the in person one, it'll be in a couple weeks on the 16th, and I look forward to seeing you all there. Thank you all for coming. Thanks, Zach, for joining me. Appreciate you.

Zach Chastain

Of course. It was, great to be here.

HubSpot User Groups

Alright. Bye, y'all.