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Webinar

On-Demand: Power Up Sales Hub with Operations Hub

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Speaker 1: (00:00)
Thanks everyone for joining us. This is actually the third event. Uh, the second event, sorry, I'm already getting lost. The second event in this workshop series that we're doing, uh, if you don't know me, I'm young. I'm the Rev Ops community manager here at HubSpot. My pronouns are he, him, I'm a white male wearing glasses and as you, uh, yeah, I'm wearing also a gray sweater. Uh, I'm really excited cuz this is the second installment of this workshop that we're calling like PowerUp Sales Hub, uh, with Operations Hub. Uh, we're doing five of these events. Last time, the, I think two weeks ago we did the one on Marketing Hub. Next one will be on Service Hub, and that will be on April 21st, if I, uh, recall correctly, uh, and these are really great, we get people like Connor here, uh, of Aptitude eight, which is an elite solutions agency at HubSpot. Uh, and he's, he's just, he's a know-it-all when it comes to Operations Hub. And I say that with, uh, the most, uh, in

Speaker 2: (00:59)
Positive ways,

Speaker 1: (01:00)
In a positive way. And we also have Jack Calk, who's our, uh, well, he, you actually changed jobs, right, Jack? So I'm not sure how to, uh, how to refer to you at this point. I kind of forgot

Speaker 3: (01:10)
. It's, it, it's funny you say that. Yeah, I, I'm a sales specialist now, so I, I'm still working pre-sale, but I'm focusing solely on operations home and, and also our c M S home, uh, products. Um, so yeah, I just wanted to try something a little bit different and, uh, yeah, I moved into the role on, on Monday and, and really enjoying it. So I still actually just reminded me I have to update my email signature. It still has my own job title. So, uh, but really happy to be here and, and, uh, my pronouns are he and him, uh, and for anyone with a visual impairment. Uh, and my white male, I have black hair wearing a black hoodie. And, um, my background is a fake HubSpot office. .

Speaker 2: (01:49)
I, uh, I'm Connor. Uh, I, my pronouns are also he, him, I'm a white male. Uh, I have wavy brown hair and I wear glasses. Uh, and I usually just say, uh, imagine a more American and slightly chubbier, uh, yawn. And, uh, you get close. Uh, but, uh, we're really excited for everyone to be here today. Uh, I am, uh, the CEO of Apps today. Jan touched on it a little bit. We're an elite partner. Um, we do tons of work on Operations Hub and HubSpot and C m s and everything else under the sun. And so we're really excited for, uh, this whole event and sharing with you guys some of the stuff that we've built, some really awesome ways that you can be using Operations Hub, uh, and how you can tap into it for some of your different use cases. Um, so I will sort of touch through, we're gonna, this'll be three parts.

Speaker 2: (02:28)
So if you've, if you've come to any of our other workshops, uh, you'll be ultra familiar with this. If this is your first one, uh, then here's our typical format. So first we'll do very brief overview on Operations Hub and, and what it is and why it's awesome. Uh, we won't go as deep as we've gone in the past. Um, but then we'll get into some operations use cases that Jack and I have pre-prepared. We'll talk through some conceptually. Jack will do some really awesome demos of actual code in HubSpot and talk through how it works, why it works, and how you guys can use it to benefit some of the things you might might be working on. Um, the goal of those use cases is to generally get your juices flowing and to think through some things that you might want to solve for.

Speaker 2: (03:06)
Um, and so if you have either projects you're working on, can I use Operations Hub to solve this particular problem, or here's something I'm trying to do, uh, throw that into the q and a, uh, and we will answer all of those at the tail end of this. So typically the first half of this is gonna be, uh, about 20, 30 minutes, and then we'll use the back half of our time together to talk through your use cases, your examples. So please throw them in the q and a and we would love to talk through, uh, projects you guys are actually working on, uh, and see if Jack and I can help point you in the right direction. So, uh, let's go ahead and, and jump into why, why Sales and Operations Hub. So if you are a Sales Hub user, uh, why is Operations Hub awesome and powerful and extends what you can do?

Speaker 2: (03:47)
And so when I sort of explain what is Operations Hub, why is it really powerful for what you're doing? Um, operations Hub kind of helps you do two things. Uh, one is it's going to extend the power of what Sales Hub is able to do for you. Um, you can automate anything that you might be struggling to do with Standard out-of-the-box, ultra powerful HubSpot tools and really take those to the next level. We'll talk through some really awesome examples of that, uh, on both our side and Jax. Um, you're also going to be able to extend HubSpot into other applications. So we're gonna talk through data enrichment. You can use Operations Hub to connect Sales Hub to your systems, your tools in the e r p, another, uh, solution. You might be using, perhaps an in-house database or an in-house application, and really extend the power of what's possible using Operations Hub.

Speaker 2: (04:33)
Um, so really, really awesome, powerful, powerful tool. Uh, and we'll talk through some really good use cases of, of how you guys can use that. Um, and of course the primary goal for, uh, when you work with any sort of operations function and sort of that revenue operations, and this is that classic HubSpot flywheel with Rev Revenue Operations between, uh, all of these go-to-market functions and your customer. But ultimately the end goal for Operations Hub and for leveraging the HubSpot platform is to break down silos between all of your teams, grow your business, and make a really amazing customer experience. And so we're gonna talk through some really awesome ways that you can make that possible. So the first one that we're gonna talk through, uh, is data enrichment. Um, so when we, when we think about and talk about what is data enrichment, what does that mean?

Speaker 2: (05:13)
Um, how do we add more context, more information, more, uh, details about records that come into our CR M uh, and HubSpot has some really amazing features to this outta the box with HubSpot Insights. Uh, however, there are tons and tons of products and tools out in the universe, either that are generic, could be specifically focused on a particular industry or a particular set of data that will give you more information, uh, about the prospects that you might be wanting to work with. So whether those are folks that are in your system that are cold or perhaps warm leads coming in and filling out forms, and you wanna make sure that you get them to the right person and route them in the right direction, operations Hub is going to help you accomplish those things. Um, so with an example here, um, so this one is all on the, uh, starter, uh, element for Operations Hub, which lets you connect to, uh, other systems and tools using the data sync functionality.

Speaker 2: (06:05)
So this example is Clearbit, uh, and there are a bunch of other, uh, software products that will help you accomplish similar goals here. But what you're able to do is you can map your HubSpot properties into those data enrichment tools so that as records are coming into your system, you are adding additional context with things like their company size and their industry. And so you can use that information to route records to the correct, uh, rep or the correct associate, perhaps automatic automate, uh, marking things as qualified or disqualified and sort of prioritizing those leads as they come into, uh, your organization and into your system. Uh, and you can do this with Operations Hub, and you can extend this even to additional custom fields. So we see customers who really focus on either industry or maybe they're a specific tool set or tech stack that the customer is using, um, to validate that they might be looking for, uh, particular service line or a particular product that you might sell.

Speaker 2: (06:57)
Um, so something that you can configure does not require any coding knowledge, uh, or anything overly technical to set this up. Um, and you can explore, there are tons and tons of data connections. Uh, I'll rely on Yon to give us the link to all of them, but they also show in the, uh, app marketplace that's built by HubSpot. Uh, and you can connect to lots of other platforms to sort of add context and add information onto your C r M records. Um, to take that one step further, uh, the best part is this isn't just a one point connection. So you can connect, uh, HubSpot to lots of other tools and multiple data enrichment functions. So this is an example that's showing sort of that, that clear bit information, maybe taking into some pageview data, using some company insights or perhaps some Salesforce data that you're syncing in if you're using Salesforce on the c r m side as well.

Speaker 2: (07:41)
Uh, and you can start to add a lot of context to all of these records and enrich them across multiple different data enrichment platforms. So we see this as being hyper, uh, useful when we see customers who maybe are trying to do some enrichment from something like a Clearbit, maybe simplifi down to, uh, they only want to capture an email address from a form on their website, for instance, and then auto add everything else so they can optimize for conversions. Uh, but then perhaps adding additional data from industry specific, uh, data sets or, uh, some data enrichment providers that focus on something that sort of clear bidder HubSpot Insights might not be able to support. Uh, you're not limited to any one of those providers. You can work with a whole bunch of different ways to add a lot of that information. Um, so we're gonna jump from this basic example into something a little more complex, uh, which is how to manage recurring revenue. And we're gonna talk through using coded actions and how you can extend HubSpot and manage this in really awesome ways. So I'm gonna pass it over to Jack, uh, and let him talk through, uh, how to do this.

Speaker 3: (08:37)
Um, uh, brilliant. Thanks Connor. Um, so yeah, I, I suppose like I, I've, I've worked some context. I've worked post-sale in HubSpot for two and a half years. I have a lot of hands-on experience actually implementing the tool and integrating with the tool, and I've seen all the weird and wonderful ways that people want to use it. Um, and I suppose that's the reason I've kind of gravitated towards Operations Hub since it was launched, uh, uh, in, in April of last year, is because it opens up the, the, the possibility to so many ways in which you can, uh, I suppose increase the, the, the, the power of the hubs, uh, and the default functional functionality that they provide. So one way that I've, I guess been exploring and have spoken to people about is managing recurring revenue. Um, this is a very common thing that we see, uh, with, with customers, especially those that maybe operate in the SaaS space, much like HubSpot Wood that have, you know, monthly, uh, subscriptions or, you know, monthly payments that are being processed.

Speaker 3: (09:34)
And, um, yeah, I wanted to walk through, uh, an example of how you may choose to do that. So what I'll do is I'll share my screen and I will basically run through everything from start to finish. Uh, so in a moment, we should hopefully see, uh, HubSpot appearing here on the, the screen. And I will be zooming in, apologies if it's hard to see. Uh, I'm quite a, a wide screen here. Um, what we're looking at here is a list of deals in the HubSpot system. Uh, and you'll notice, uh, that each deal, we've got deal named. You can see that they're, they're name, they're, they're named, uh, based on the months in which they fall under. So you have one here for Burger King. Um, very, uh, gets very hard to kind of come up with company names. So I've got a lot of , big major brands in my system.

Speaker 3: (10:20)
Um, but we've got Burger King here, and you see that there's a deal for each month. They're on a six month or seven month contract rather. Um, and you can see here, uh, we have got, uh, a different date for, for each of those, those, uh, for, for each month that they have a contract with us. Uh, we've got the revenue we're expecting for that given month in the company, of course. And the same goes for, we have Marvel here. I'm a big Avengers fan. We've got Marvel, uh, we've got several deals. I think they've got a a 12 month contract with us. Uh, I'm also a big rugby fan, , so we've got the Irish rugby, uh, the I R F U, uh, taken out a plan with, with this fictional business. So the way this is working, if I navigate to the, the pipeline, uh, which is where we would really manage our deals, is, let's imagine I created a, um, a deal here and it's, uh, a new deal.

Speaker 3: (11:07)
And we're gonna be, in this case we're selling to HubSpot. So I don't know, it's gonna be $650, uh, uh, uh, a month. Uh, and we're gonna attach HubSpot to this deal, okay? Uh, and I click, uh, create. Now, at this point in time, obviously I'll have that sales force, uh, that sales process that back and that fourth, um, but what I can also do is if I drag it here into the close one stage, when it's ready to be closed, one, it's prompting me for a contract link. Now, we can also change the, the variables we ask for here. I've kind of kept this a little bit, uh, simple just for the purposes of this, but let's say it's a a three month contract, a click save. Now, what happens behind the scenes here, this is where we get into the operations component of, of, of the solution, is that we have a workflow, and let me close that down.

Speaker 3: (11:56)
Host bot workflows are ways of automating processes. Uh, and you can see here what we've done is we've created a workflow that's listening in the C r M for any deal that has a contract link that I've specified, and that has been moved into a closed one state in this particular pipeline. Uh, and what I've then done is I've used a custom coded action to carry out some, uh, bespoke or more advanced logic to basically replicate a deal for each month of the contract. Now, uh, I can certainly share all of this, uh, uh, with anyone. I think it'll be included in the follow up anyway, but there, there's a bit of code that makes this happen. Um, I'm not gonna go through it line for line, but essentially what I'm doing in here is that I'm looking at that original deal that I closed, uh, and then what I'm doing is I'm actually, uh, looking at the contract length and I'm creating x number of deals off the back of that, uh, and I'm creating 'em in that respective pipeline.

Speaker 3: (12:50)
So what we should see if we navigate back to this, uh, pipeline here is you can see that new deal for HubSpot, if I refresh the screen, we should see, uh, yeah, you'll see that we've got, uh, the original deal and we've got our, our our different months that the, that the contract is going to, to carry on for now. This is great because obviously it allows us to manage that, but what's more is I could actually create a dashboard to break this data down in more detail. Uh, and this again, is where the, the operations hub does a small component here in that it's the custom coded action that's facilitating the logic to, to create these deals and, and, and, and, and, and I suppose modify the pipeline accordingly. But it's then using the pre-built out of the box tools to create these insightful reports.

Speaker 3: (13:33)
Uh, now admittedly, my data is a little bit light. I've only got a few deals in that pipeline, but just to give you a flavor of what's possible, you see, I've got a few different reports here. I could create a, a breakdown of revenue month on month. So you'll see here on the, the y axis I've got the, the total amount of that revenue. Uh, you can see here on the, the, uh, the x axis. I've got the, the, the dates. Uh, and what we're also looking at then is, uh, we've got a goal. So maybe I have a goal, I want to have $2,000 worth of recurring revenue every month. So I can see how we're tracking. We can actually see, uh, I think this is in, um, October, uh, November. We're kind of dangerously close to that, that kind of, uh, threshold. Um, and then obviously from November onwards, we're actually performing below target.

Speaker 3: (14:17)
So we need to, you know, we need to plan ahead and we need to maybe increase the pipeline there. So again, this is just an example, but hopefully giving you a taste of what's possible. And what you can even do is you can add an extra dimension to this type of data. So this next report, it's actually the exact same thing, but you'll notice that the different colors, uh, on the, on the, the different columns, and what we're looking at here now is the recurring revenue by the company month on month. So I can very easily see that, uh, the I R F U, the Irish Rugby, uh, uh, association are, are gonna be a customer of ours up until, um, you know, know just before October, let's say. Um, we can also see that Marvel, uh, have a contract with us moving forward, right up until February of 2023.

Speaker 3: (14:59)
So I, I suppose something like this then allows us to see a little bit more clearer as to the companies that that, that we're obtaining that revenue from. Uh, and then purely just for, uh, uh, aesthetics, I created another one that is somewhat similar. It's, it's just a, a, a, a a graph showing the, the revenue by, by, by company, and we can see dips and that type of thing. So again, it's more aesthetics and visuals as to how you want to report on this. But I just wanted to show you that whilst the custom code is, is I suppose, handling the heavy lifting, it's then building these dashboards off the back of that, that makes it so powerful. And this is, of course, just an example. Um, I, I try to make them as, when I, when I put these together, I try to make them as generic as possible so that people can kind of build on top of them and, and, and, you know, get some inspiration as to how it can be improved.

Speaker 3: (15:45)
Um, but, you know, some ways you could think of this as well is, you know, what if we have variable recurring revenue as opposed to fixed recurring revenue, which is the way I've approached this. Well, if that's the case, we could navigate back to our coded snippet. Uh, and you can see down here, um, the logic here where I'm creating new deals and passing in a amount in, I could create some additional logic to calculate discounts or percentages. Uh, so there's a lot of possibilities here that custom coded automation presents us with, but at the end of the day, as an end user, I am able to leverage that data and report on it and, and manage a sales process. So I just wanted to show this because it is something that comes up quite frequently. And, um, yeah, I, I think it's a nice kind of, uh, uh, bridge between the sales and the operations hopes that we provide

Speaker 2: (16:34)
To extend some of that as well. Jack, we've seen, uh, similar use cases in actually applying this so that if you are, whether you're encountering churn or sort of customer loss or anything in that effect, that you could go and automatically go and update all of those deals. And to your point that the power of that is because all this data is in HubSpot, and when you build those reporting, uh, functionality on top, you can then reflect that in some of your forecasting and your dashboarding. And I think one of the things that we have conversations about all of the time, uh, are, how can I manage a bunch of this forecasting and, and how can I get a handle on this? And operations have really unlocks tremendous opportunity and power there for you to sort of extend, uh, your ability to manage all of that data.

Speaker 3: (17:11)
A a, absolutely. And, and, and one thing I would say as well is, um, operations hub is different, uh, peers just like our other hubs. So you've got your starter, your pro and your enterprise, um, starter would primarily be around data sync. So getting, you know, solving the problem of data silos and getting data into HubSpot as a central location so your teams can work off of the same, uh, dataset. Uh, professional then kind of introduces that automation, that data validation component. Um, and then enterprise introduces what we call data sets, which is a way of, uh, which really sort of extends into the reporting tools, um, which allows you then to, uh, perform calculations and group data into cohorts and, you know, make it much easier for your end users to, to build and work with reports. So there's so much ways that you can use it, um, and, uh, to be, I, I work with operations of every single day, and I'm continually learning about new, unique ways that it can extend the, the functionality of our, our, our, our existing hopes. Um, and that's, I guess, what makes my job so exciting and interesting, .

Speaker 2: (18:17)
Sweet. Uh, great. Well, let's jump out to our next example, uh, and then start throwing stuff in the q and a. Uh, if, if you're interested in either something similar to this or, or how to manage some of this data, uh, we'll talk through a bunch of those examples here, uh, momentarily. So the next one I'm gonna talk through, uh, conceptually, uh, and sort of paint a picture for some of this that we run into all the time is what we call advanced lead assignment. So when we think about that, how's that has really amazingly powerful out-of-the-box lead assignment tools, whether, uh, you're setting a specific rep or you're doing round robin or you're doing round robin across a team. Uh, but sometimes we run into requirements and requests that have a little bit more complexity, a little bit more nuanced than we're able to achieve with sort of out-of-the-box functionality.

Speaker 2: (18:59)
So for a couple of those examples, um, we'll we're gonna go through, so one of them is, uh, managing and assigning some of those off of geographic territories. So especially when you have lots and lots of territories, our territories are shifting and changing, or maybe the granularity is a little bit bigger than just a state match, uh, we'll talk through how to do some of those. Um, another area where we run into this is, uh, having routing rules that maybe have, uh, some exceptions or nuance where you maybe have reps that are managing specific states unless something has a specific account name and you're trying to sort of manage to some of these, use those use cases, um, or, uh, out of the office or p t o, we see a lot of examples where, especially for inbound sales teams, leads are coming in and what, uh, our customers are wanting to do is be able to skip over the standard lead owner and have kind of a backup or reroute in the event that somebody is out of the office or unavailable, uh, for a particular moment in time.

Speaker 2: (19:53)
So we're gonna go through each of these and kind of how and what you would do to, uh, manage these. Um, and so for our first one, um, we jump forward, I think one or two here, um, for our automated territory management. Um, and so in this example, uh, what we're actually seeing is being able to come in and, and set really complex territory logic in that custom coded action. And so when you predefine what that is, or if you're storing some of those territories in another database, you can run that coded action when a deal is created. So this, this example is, this workflow is being powered by deal owner is unknown, uh, and we're, what we're gonna be able to do is then go and look up across all of those territories and logic to be able to figure out who should handle and who should tackle this deal.

Speaker 2: (20:36)
Um, you can take this same concept in the same use case. We're gonna go through sort of where they apply, but whether you're using it on contacts and you have sort of inbound form fills or inbound leads, or maybe on the service side as well, where you, you might have tickets, uh, coming in or any other object that might be coming into HubSpot. Um, so one example here is assigning some of those based off of, uh, the IP address of the submitted record. So something we see a lot is we know on the contact record, uh, perhaps the IP address, which comes through, uh, on those HubSpot Insights when that record is created. Um, but we then have it associated to the deal. And when the deal's coming in, we want to be able to know, okay, where is that person located so that we can connect them and assign them to the best rep to handle that particular request.

Speaker 2: (21:20)
And so what we can do here is run that coded action, fetch the contacts associated to that deal. You could also filter that down if you're using flexible associations or some mechanism of flagging, which, which record you wanna prioritize, uh, you can then grab the IP address of that particular form fill or that person who came through, uh, and then you can route it to the rep that should be handling that specific, uh, region or territory. And so we've done this with really complex long lists where perhaps we have, uh, really small regions, whether it's a cluster of zip codes or something that's sort of a, a territory or a time zone, uh, and you can store those in sort of a hub DB table or sort of another table and make it easy for a sales manager to go and update and say, I no longer want Jack to manage the, the Southwest.

Speaker 2: (22:03)
I want Jann to manage the Southwest. And so that'll keep firing on your coded action. So it's easy for someone to go and change as opposed to going and looking at a workflow and trying to update a whole bunch of different nodes. And if thens and logic to try to maintain and manage it. Uh, which I think is another good example of what Jack touched on, which is that the, the best part of Operations Hub is that it flows seamlessly into all of the functionality that's in HubSpot, uh, outside of that. And so you can extend a lot of what you're able to do. Um, another example, we run into this a lot for local service businesses. So we see this, um, for, uh, hvac, uh, electric, electrical, plumbing, anything that involves sort of some onsite technician, uh, whether from a a B2C or B2B type of organization.

Speaker 2: (22:45)
Um, and so this example actually lets you go and fetch from the Google Maps api and you can grab what's the closest, uh, distributor or the closest franchise or the closest, uh, individual location to this particular request. Um, and so by hitting the Google Maps api, we can feed in sort of a service address as an example, um, and then we can ping Google Maps and we can say, okay, from a Maps endpoint and from the stores that we have, who's the closest technician? Who's the closest franchise? Where should we be routing this lead in this record? So really, really awesome way to extend kind of geolocation, um, if you're using fenced areas as well. Uh, we've used this similarly for automatically sending emails to customers and saying, Hey, we actually don't support your region at this time. We've added you to a wait list.

Speaker 2: (23:29)
We'll reach out to you when that region is supported. Uh, and that's something that we've done for some folks that maybe are expanding and wanna manage their marketing efforts. And they were spending tons and tons of inbound sort of sales time saying, oh wait, we can't service this person because they're outside of our region. Uh, you can automate that whole flow, uh, using Operations Hub by just flagging whether or not, uh, they're sort of in a region that you might be able to serve. Um, for our next example, uh, we're gonna talk about P t o. Uh, so super similar concept. Um, we've done this, whether, uh, we've done this with some different H R I S systems. Um, so effectively the way that this works out is we build a workflow. So the workflow runs whenever, uh, a new demo request or contact us comes in on the website.

Speaker 2: (24:09)
And then what we wanna be able to do is say, okay, we assigned this to Jack, but what happens if Jack is out sick or Jack is on vacation, and now we have to go and update and, and manually, uh, go and, and manage a whole bunch of different workflows or sort of say, oh, wait, no, if it's Jack routed to Yan and, and try to build that in, um, with this flow, what we can do is we can actually have a coded action that can go and grab information, uh, about that p t o in, uh, p t o data to know, is Jack able to handle this particular, uh, record. And so we've done that with either going and, and requesting p t o information from an H R A S system, uh, totally dependent on on how and where you store your P t O information, um, or a Google Calendar.

Speaker 2: (24:50)
We have customers that sort of have created a Google calendar, and, uh, if a rep is out of the office, they'll sort of add an event to that Google calendar for sort of their P T O piece, and we can go and search for that p t o calendar and say, does Jack have an event that's associated with this p t o calendar today? If so, uh, assign this to somebody else instead. Um, and so really, really awesome way. We see this a lot with large organizations that have tons of operational overhead and they might be swapping out. And I think another really good example of how Operations Hub can sort of help you scale up some of what you're able to do out-of-the-box tools, uh, and be able to apply that at really large organizational levels. And you can use kind of the same concept, um, for any sort of trigger logic or, or rerouting that you may have exceptions to, and you store those exceptions somewhere outside of, uh, of HubSpot itself. Um, so all of those are examples of, of how Operations Hub can help you manage complex lead routing, uh, exercises. Um, what we're gonna do now is jump into some of our q and a and questions. So if there're things that you guys are trying to build, if there's questions about this use case, uh, Jack, and I'll talk through them in sort of live, live answer, live demo and, and try to give you guys, uh, clarity on, on how to build some of what you guys are trying to do.

Speaker 3: (26:02)
Uh, and, and maybe, maybe, uh, at, at at at that juncture. Um, Connor, there was two questions that came up that maybe I, I could take straight off the bat. Uh, and if I could share my screen again, that would be much appreciated. Yeah. Uh, because they're very valid questions. Uh, I'd love to, to to, to go into more detail on them. Um, so somebody first asked, uh, could you, could you potentially forecast by product in terms of recurring revenue? And the short answer there is yes, you could. Uh, and I, I wanted to just share my screen and, and give, uh, give an overview of what that might look like. So you'll, you'll notice here, uh, if we navigate into my, my deals that I've created, um, let's just take maybe one of these deals. Uh, if I look for, um, you know, Marvel, one of the deals that I have for the Marvel, uh, company, uh, yeah, this one here, you'll see that every deal that I create has a, um, or should have a, a product attached to it.

Speaker 3: (26:57)
Um, if I've done this correctly, uh, let's see. Yeah, so this particular deal has linked to product one and product two, three, whatever, X, Y, and Z. Now, what does that would allow me to do here is I could navigate into the report builder. And instead of breaking it down month by month using companies, for example, what I can do is I can change my data sources. So in this case, I'm reporting on deals and I'm not reporting on companies. So I could incorporate that. I'm actually looking at the, the line items attached to those specific deals. And what you end up with, and again, this is oversimplified cause I just don't have the data, is a breakdown. Now, you'll see in April, we have a breakdown of the different products we're selling. Truthfully, I haven't set it up so that it will copy products to the, the deals after, after the, the, the action executes can easily do that.

Speaker 3: (27:46)
And certainly we'll follow up with that. But this just gives you a taste of what that, that looks like. So we have that, that forecast in terms of revenue by product, who, what this code is doing with a standard workflow. And truthfully, absolutely, yes, you could. Um, however, it would take an awful lot of management. And, and I'm speaking from experience, that's why I, I actually jumped at the chance to put this together. Um, you could certainly do, uh, what this is doing, um, in, in, in the following way. But you'll, you'll see now how quickly things start to get a little bit crazy, um, or a little bit out of control. So imagine I wanted to, uh, create a, a, a workflow that looks at the contract length and it will create several records off the back of that. Um, oh, can you hear me okay, or have I been disconnected?

Speaker 2: (28:38)
You, you were, and then I, it looks like you came back on my side. I thought it was, uh, for me, but you're fully back now. I think,

Speaker 3: (28:45)
Uh, yeah, apologies. My whole internet there froze up. Um, where did I fall off?

Speaker 2: (28:50)
? I, you, I, I think it was just when you had said is, is this, could you build this recurring workflow, uh, use or the recurring revenue workflow, uh, with just a standard workflow action? Gotcha. And anything else you did was great. So it's just the intro and that's what you're talking about.

Speaker 3: (29:04)
Uh, perfect. So in, in that case, yeah, what I wanted to kind of show here is, um, this is the issue you'll run into, but certainly want to be as transparent as possible. Um, so you'll see here I could create a deal-based workflow and I could say create deals for renewals or something like that. Okay. And I click next. And just like my, my workflow, we looked at my enrollment criteria, I would say contract length is, is known. Uh, so there we go. I'd also say, and maybe the, the deal is in the, the closed one stage of the specific pipeline. Um, so closed one in that whatever recurring revenue pipeline could choose any pipeline here. Um, now the next thing is, what we'd have to do then is we could have contract links of fluctuating links. You could have a two month contract, a three month contract, a 24 month contract, a 16 month contract, not to mention the variables in pricing.

Speaker 3: (29:53)
So the next problem you get into here, though it is entirely possible, is you basically have to then say, right, well, for deals that have a contract link that are maybe, uh, less than or equal to, or sorry, rather you'd have to do, uh, equal to now, you'd have to be precise here. You'd have to say, you know, one, and you can kind of see here we'd say contracts that are equal to maybe 12 or, or whatever, 12. And if we save that, you're gonna end up with branches like this for each variation. Uh, and then what you'd need to do is you'd need to use the create record action to create a deal. So in this case, if it's going down branch one, we just need to create one deal. If it's going brown down branch two, we'd actually need to create 12 deals.

Speaker 3: (30:35)
We'd have 12 consecutive actions. Um, so that could get quite, depending on your sales process of course, and your pricing structure, it's doable. What it could get. And from my experience with the given customer I was working with, it got very difficult to manage. Um, when you couple that with the fact that you then lose the impact of, uh, of modifying the data and, and, and more advanced logic within the code, whether it's, you know, applying a discount or varying rates month on month, it just doesn't really, in my opinion, scale very well. Um, so absolutely can be done with standard actions if then branches in creating records, but I think you have to factor in the complexity of your sales process, um, and also the amount of work it's gonna take to actually manage and maintain it. Uh, so there just wanted to address those two because there were very good questions. Um, and, uh, yeah, wanted to be as transparent as possible.

Speaker 2: (31:26)
Yeah, I think to, I think to further that one Jack, I mean, we just ran into, uh, we'll give everybody some, some free, free best practice consulting beyond what, uh, Jack is talking about. But we just ran into that exact same issue where we have a customer who wanted to, they may sell multiple products and one transaction, and on one product they want to discount for the first three months, but on the second product they don't. And trying to manage that and a deal workflow gets incredibly unwieldy. And then if anyone ever changes anything, it, it all sort of falls apart, uh, and you now have to go and update all of those records. And so I think that coded actions a really good example of how you can sort of make your deal process of how your reps sell and how you configure and manage those, uh, deals a lot easier.

Speaker 2: (32:05)
And then use some of the operations coded actions to empower all of that downstream reporting that you might need later. Um, and just because you, you can solve for something with some of the, the standard workflows, um, if you're trying to optimize what's best for some of your teams, uh, some little bit better ways to do that. Um, question from, uh, Grayson, which is, have you done live routing? So as example is, uh, someone fills out a demo request form as a net new contact, uh, and then you auto show the correct HubSpot calendar. Um, so that type of a use case wouldn't necessarily be Operations Hub. Uh, the reason for that, that is, is operations hub happens in a workflow. And so a record has to get created, it has to get enrolled in a workflow. A bunch of other things have to happen.

Speaker 2: (32:45)
Um, you could theoretically use Operations Hub to do that and then send someone an email with the correct sort of rep calendar link. But if you're trying to do it all on that web flow, you should be able to do that on the CMS side though. So you should be able to take, uh, sort of a form fill and an action and then use, uh, on c m s hub, uh, serverless function, uh, which is super similar, uh, to a coded action, uh, but would allow you to then, um, build that logic into that demo request and then immediately direct somebody to, uh, the right page that that shows them what you wanna show them. So whether that's a booking link or maybe it takes them to a specific product checkout page or sort of anything else off that first form, um, you can kind of power those types of flows, uh, with c m s, uh, but it wouldn't necessarily be on the operations side, but, but certainly, certainly viable, uh, with with HubSpot for sure. Um, Jack, you're nodding a lie. I don't know if you had anything to add to that, if you're just like, yes,

Speaker 3: (33:36)
No, no. I, I, what I was gonna say was speaking from my, my services days, uh, that, that has come up for me in the past as well. And I think you, you aced it, Connor in what you said. Um, you know, people have, there's all sorts of ways you could get, as you say, serverless functions and route to the appropriate page. Others have just embedded the different meeting links on, on a, on the, the form page and on submission, you know, shown a popup with that. So, so it's doable entirely. It's just a question of how you wanna do it,

Speaker 2: (34:03)
For sure. Uh, anything else for other q and as for folks? Um, looks like one might've just come in the chat. The best way to, we'll, we'll try to look at the chat also guys, but if you do have things, the q and a is, is easy for us. Cause it lets us sort of take dibs on on some of those. So, question from, uh, Craig and the chat. You're all good, Craig, I saw it. It's, it's no problem. Uh, which is, how can ops hub update, uh, HubSpot objects when a change is made in a system outside of HubSpot? Uh, excellent question. We've run into this one all of the time. Um, so Hsub is, today is extremely powerful when a record is changing inside of HubSpot because we're able to then use that to trigger a workflow. Um, two ways that we've solved for something happens in another system.

Speaker 2: (34:47)
So, uh, let's use the one that doesn't necessarily put dependencies on that system, which is we've done a scheduled action, uh, inside of ops sub. And so with ops sub, you can schedule, uh, an action to run, uh, every day. Uh, and that action could go and fetch information from, uh, another system. I think in, in one of our, uh, workshops, we, we did a live example of this, but, um, what you'll be able to do is go and fetch data from another system and update records. So we've done that. Uh, an example is, uh, we had a customer where we did sort of an e r P connection and the sales process ran, and then the, the sort of production process had to happen in the E R P. And so after that deal is, is one, uh, we would create that order in the E R P and the, the order sort of moving through some stages.

Speaker 2: (35:32)
And so every day we would run those deal actions through a workflow. We would go and, and fetch information from the E R P and say, ha, has this been shipped yet? Has this been shipped yet? And then once it had been shipped, then we would update the deal stage so that the rep knew where it was at in its process and they could sort of communicate that to their customer or automate an email. So that's sort of one method you could do it. Um, we've also done really, uh, complicated things with, um, webhooks fired from other systems. Um, though in order to receive those webhooks, we're typically putting those into serverless functions, um, which are on, on the C m S side. But more than happy to explore your particular use case further. Um, if you wanna jump to the, the next site, Caitlin, just if we do have, um, other, other things, if you wanna reach out to either me or Jack directly, we'd be happy to. We're also reachable on, on LinkedIn, but we'd be happy to talk about that particular use case. Um, Jack, I don't know if you're looking in, in the q and a, if you had one that you wanted to touch on. Uh, but I can, I can hand it to you or I can sort of scroll through.

Speaker 3: (36:29)
Uh, yeah, sorry. Uh, well, uh, I just saw chat ads ask a question around does Operations Hub have anything exclusive to maybe, you know, or unique that would solve for calculating commissions for sales reps and that type of thing. Um, so I, I just sent a link there to chat to explore maybe data sets. I've used that to kind of look at, you know, if a product is in a certain category, perform a calculation and that's ultimately the commission or something that we would be reporting on, and we can create reports. Custom coded automation could be used from our advanced things, but truth truthfully as well within our sales tools, uh, calculated fields, um, more often than not can solve for that. So, uh, I'd probably start there if I'm, if I'm being ultra honest with you, um, uh, there's also deal split functionality built into the sales hub now as well, but Operations Hub certainly can take it a step further if needed. Uh, so yeah, um, just, uh, that was the one I was looking at there

Speaker 2: (37:20)
For sure. Uh, question here for, is it possible using the operations sub to create a churn report? Um, I think we'd need a little bit more details. I think the, the answer concretely is yes. Uh, do you, do you need operations sub to manage that churn report? I'm not sure. Uh, so the example I was giving when, uh, let's assume that what, what Jack was sort of showing with the recurring revenue, um, is you wanted to be able to see, uh, what the, um, what all of that deal forecasting would be for sort of each month of, of that revenue. Um, you could do this similar thing and we've done where perhaps a deal, uh, the original deal gets marked as churned or closed lost, and you could go and say, okay, go find every deal that's date is greater than today. Uh, and, and close that one out.

Speaker 2: (38:03)
And then you could use all that data set whether you're, maybe it's just a specific deal stage is churned, or it's a different pipeline, depends on how you kind of have it configured. Uh, but you could use that data in your churn reports to show, okay, well what, how much revenue have we churned? When did we churn it? What's the downstream impacts? And, and be able to aggregate and report on that particular data set. So, uh, you, you may not need to do that at all. Uh, if you're just updating the deal to churn, depending on the way you look at it, um, you may just need to either have a churn stage or to have sort of a pipeline that reflects that. Um, we've done that in a whole bunch of different ways depending on, on the use case.

Speaker 3: (38:40)
There, there, there's one there as well from, from AJ. And, um, I, this may have come in earlier, so I'm not sure when, uh, when they repre when they mentioned, could this be done easier through what we're describing? I'm not sure if it was when we were chatting about the C m s or when it was when we were talking, I'm,

Speaker 2: (38:55)
I'm reading that as c m s, uh, from the, from the form side, but I'll let you take it.

Speaker 3: (38:59)
Yeah, so either way, I, I guess, um, certainly on c m S enterprise, uh, uh, the reason enterprise is required is it gives you access to serverless functions. And that opens up a a ton of potential because with serverless functions, you can basically write code to execute logic that will dictate what happens on the front end of your website or where users end up. So when a form is submitted, you could certainly look at the timestamp that that submission has occurred upon, and based on that you could re you, you could, you know, perform another action. Um, same could be done with a coded action on Pro, but the, the problem is that happens off of the website, if that makes sense. So if, if, for example, you wanted to send a different type of communication to somebody after a form submission, you know, certainly a a coded action could look at the, the time the form was submitted, and then if it was before noon or afternoon, you could send them down a, a different pathway. But yeah, uh, on the c m s it would be doable with serverless functions for sure.

Speaker 2: (39:56)
Uh, I'll do, I'll do an additional, uh, plug there on only because, uh, time and HubSpot today, there're there you can create a time property, uh, via a p i, but updating and managing those is a little hard. Um, we have an app, it's, it's an SLA tool called Timer Man. Um, and it may, it may be applicable to what you're describing, it may not be, um, but really good for sort of setting specific rules on times of day or when things are happening, um, that is in the marketplace that you can check out, uh, has a trial, may, may be helpful. We, we, we originally built it because, uh, of some of the constraints around time, um, operations Hub helps us solve a lot of those. Uh, but, but could be an answer, um, for what you're looking for as well.

Speaker 2: (40:36)
Uh, let me jump back to the chat. Anything else in QA for folks, otherwise we can, we can, uh, start to move towards wrapping up. But, uh, we have a, we have a little bit more time if anybody wants to, to ask anything else in the q and a for either something you're trying to solve or how to tackle a specific problem or expanding on anything we've talked about. Cool. Uh, Yan, I can, I can pass it to you to start doing wrap-ups and if, if we get a really good one, uh, as you're going through it, then uh, we can jump on it for sure.

Speaker 1: (41:09)
Yeah, sure. Uh, thanks. Thanks, Connor. Thanks Jack. Uh, again, like a really amazing session, A lot of, a lot of examples, um, and, and things that I didn't know were possible. So, uh, I, I hope everyone here, uh, learned a ton. Um, and again, like I, I plugged this in the, in the chat, but if you're interested in learning more about Operations Hub or other ways to bring your automation to the next level, you can also always reach out to our, your HubSpot growth specialist or account manager or reach out to Aptitude eight. Um, we, we'd be happy to, to help you, um, just bring everything to the next level and, and have you automate more and, and give you, give your your customers a better, uh, experience overall. Um, but yeah, like I said at the beginning, this is the second workshop in this series.

Speaker 1: (41:57)
The next one is in two weeks, April 21st, we'll be discussing Service Hub, uh, use cases that you can uplevel using Operations Hub. And, uh, joining us again will be Connor Jeffers and Jack cald Rick. So, uh, be sure to tune in if you want to learn more about it. I'll put the link in the chat again. Uh, if you want to sign up tomorrow, you will get the recording of this event as well as access to the these slides. Um, and yeah, I think that's everything that I wanted to mention, uh, Connor, Jack, anything you want to say before, uh, we close off,

Speaker 2: (42:34)
Re reach out to me more than happy to talk about your guys' use case. Uh, follow us on LinkedIn, Jack post this amazing content. Uh, we put some stuff out occasionally as well, but if you're trying to solve different operations hub use cases, uh, we'd, we'd love to work with you. Um, we do a ton of that and otherwise I hope to see you on the next one. Um, and then Jack, I can pass it to you if you wanna say anything on your end.

Speaker 1: (42:56)
I think you're muted, Chuck.

Speaker 3: (42:57)
I, I was just gonna say, uh, great, uh, great questions. Uh, some really great engagement and, uh, really enjoyed the session. So yeah, uh, feel free to connect and otherwise look forward to chatting to you all, uh, in the next session. Thanks for,

Speaker 2: (43:09)
Can't recommend following, uh, Jack on LinkedIn enough. He has awesome operations, up content and post great stuff. So check him out,

Speaker 3: (43:16)
. Thanks. Thanks for the shout out, hunter.

Speaker 1: (43:18)
Thanks everyone. See you next time. Bye.

Speaker 3: (43:20)
Cheers. Bye-bye.

 

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