Episode 220: Inbound 2020

Welcome to HubShots Episode 220: Inbound 2020

This jam packed episode we discuss:

• The latest product announcements from Inbound 2020
• Our 5 year podcasting anniversary is coming up next week
• Marketing Hub update: Marketing Contacts
• Sales Hub updates
• Service Hub tip
• A tricky gotcha that happens with the Original Source Drill-down properties
• Answer to listener questions
• Email examples: done right and done wrong
• Facebook ditching its 20% text rule on ads
  

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HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems.

Recorded: Thursday 24 September 2020 | Published: Friday 25 September 2020

Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

This week is a big week in HubSpot land - with their annual Inbound conference being held. We’ll cover a bunch of the announcements in this episode, but first...

Our HubShots 5 Year Anniversary is coming up

We’re coming up to our 5 year anniversary for the HubShots podcast.

We started HubShots 5 years ago at the end of Inbound 2015. This was all at Ian’s prompting (and I’m very thankful he pushed me out of my comfort zone to do it with him).

Episode 1 was published on 05 October 2015, right after we returned from #INBOUND15.

Which means that our episode next week will almost coincide perfectly with 5 years.

Send us a note if you’ve listened right from the start and we’ll give you a shoutout next week.

BTW if you ever need encouragement to start a podcast because you’re worried you won’t be any good - have a listen to our first episode… we’ve come a long way since then!

Inbound experience

Back to Inbound, Ian watched the keynote with Brian, Dharmesh and Chris and found it… serious.

Listener shoutout

Shout out to Noam from New York for connecting with us!

Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

• HubSpot Product Announcements including Marketing Hub updates, Sales Hub updates and Service Hub updates.
  HubSpot held their annual Inbound conference this week - this time all virtually. As usual their /New page has the overview of all the new features. We’ll dive into a few of the major announcements below
• Apparently everything is a relaunch… and it’s powerful and easy
• The HubSpot Product Engineering team has a blog, you can read it here.

Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Marketing Contacts

One of the biggest announcements at Inbound in terms of the Marketing Hub side of the product is the introduction of marketing contacts.

In a nutshell: you can choose to have contacts marked as marketing contacts versus non-marketing contacts. Only contacts marked as marketing contacts count towards your contact total.

Sounds great right?

It is.

But it’s not without its complications, which we’ll touch on today and expand on in future episodes.

Although the official release of this new option isn’t until 21 October, down under in ANZ HubSpot has been testing the option with new HubSpot customers.

We’ve been working with a few customers with this enabled in their portals.

In a sense we have been the guinea pigs in Australia & New Zealand testing this in the last 4-6 months.

We have to say it has been an interesting journey of working out the kinks when it comes to something that sounds simple. So for the greater good of the community I think that this was a wise idea to test it on a region and iterate the solution we now have today.

Although there wasn’t any embargo or NDA on the features, given it was only available locally we decided not to mention it on the show until it was officially announced this week.

We’re excited that we can now chat about it.

Initial Thoughts

Overall, we’re both big fans of the option.

It means customers can now import up to a million contacts into their portal and then just mark a subset (eg just a few hundred contacts) as marketing contacts. And only be charged for the marketing contacts (with a minimum of 1000 contacts, and then in increments of 5000+).

It’s still changing

Just in the last few months of testing with it we’ve seen it improve dramatically.

Most of my Support queries in the last 3 months have been related to marketing contacts (with the sometimes added complication that Support staff working in other regions weren’t yet aware of it).

However, the product team have fixed bugs rapidly, and the process now is pretty stable. There’s still some little quirks, but we expect those will be ironed out before the October release.

A few quick questions

One of the main questions people will ask is how can you set contacts to (or back to) non-marketing. This HubSpot KB article covers the main processes. Yes, it’s easy to do, and the total count of your marketing contacts is rechecked each month. Note however that the tier you are at is only reset each renewal (ie usually annually).

What this means is that if you increase past a tier eg you go over 1000 marketing contacts you are in the next tier. Each month you can set and unset contacts as marketing contacts, but if your total set as marketing goes under 1000, you are still charged each month at the next tier until the renewal at the end of the year.

This is a little frustrating, but is at least manageable.

It means it is aimed at growing companies, as opposed to companies that want to have big spikes in the marketing activity.

How to quickly get up to speed

The FAQs section on this Partner knowledge base is the quickest way to get up to speed with how it works, plus the pricing changes.

Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Some of the features that have rolled out and are about to be rolled out following INBOUND.

• Custom Objects - here is a good introduction to Custom Objects
• Attribution Reporting - here is a lesson on from HubSpot Academy on Attribution Reporting
• Field level permissions - admins can lock down the values of specific properties to certain reps, so everyone on your team can edit exactly what they should!
• New Quoting Template editor (CPQ) - this is rolling out shortly but here is what you need to know about Configure, Price, Quote

Shot 5: HubSpot Service Feature of the Week

Using Customer Satisfaction surveys in Service Hub with suppliers as well as customers.

This is another way to understand internally how your supply chain is working. Hat tip to Charles McKay for chatting about this one and how he uses it with suppliers.

Shot 6: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Original Drill-Down property changes a second after being set

We came across an issue with the Original Source Drill-Down 2 property being changed a few seconds after the contact was created from a form submit.

Here’s a quick look at the property history for a contact - notice how it is initially set to a random string, and then right after is set properly:

This was causing issues for workflows that triggered on the property being known.

The contact would enter the workflow (because the trigger is known) but then not meet branching login within the workflow.

Turns out that the property change wasn’t in place in time for the branching logic to properly use it.

Shoutout to Rachel in HubSpot Support for highlighting why this was happening. It’s because some properties aren’t updated instantly from a form submit - they sometimes go through other processing.

This is particularly the case for analytics events and IP related information on a contact record. The initial value in the property is set to a random string, and is then updated later (could be in a second or two or more) with the real value once it comes from the other processing.

Which means that workflow enrolment criteria that includes ‘is known’ will see that random string, and enrol, but the real value might not be set in time for any branching in the workflow.

To get around it the workflow we added a delay of 2 minutes and added an if/then branch to look at the property specifically. This gives us flexibility in the future if we need to cater for any other Original source drill-down 2 scenario we may need to deal with.

Here’s Rachel’s full notes in her Support reply:

Hello Ian,

It was a great pleasure working with you today. I also see there is another way other than adding a short delay that we can prevent this from occurring again. Either way would work:

Enrollment triggers include does not contain any of or is not equal to any of

Contact-based workflows using these filters will enroll contacts that don't have a specified value for the selected property. This means that if the property is blank, it will meet the enrollment trigger. This also applies to objects associated with the contact, such as an associated company.

This can especially affect workflows that use analytics or association properties for enrollment, such as:

• Create date
• IP Country
• Original source (or original source drilldown 2 in your case)
• Associated contacts

Analytics and association properties are processed and populated almost instantly. However, workflow enrollment may occur before HubSpot fills the property. For example, if your workflow enrolls contacts based on the trigger IP Country is not equal to any of United States, a contact with no value may enroll before HubSpot is able to set the property with the value United states.

To prevent contacts without property values from entering the workflow:

• In the enrollment trigger editor, add an AND condition underneath the doesn't contain any of filter.
• Select the same property that you're filtering for, then select the is known filter.
  Click Apply filter.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you need any clarification on this!

Best,

Rachel

Shot 7: HubSpot Support Win of the Week

Workflows to the rescue again!

Thanks to Abigail at HubSpot Support for her awesomely elegant solution to this query from Martin (long time supporter of the show):

Hi Craig and Ian, I need your help.

A client generates leads from all over the world.

As we want to keep the form short we use the IP Country to identify the country of the lead. We also sync every MQL to MS Dynamics.

In MS Dynamics they need a certain Country Code: For example AU Australia, BE Belgium and so on. Altogether for 170 Countries.

Our idea is to use a workflow to set this up. How would you go about this? For every country an IF/THEN?

So at the End, if a lead is coming from Australia, we have the IP Country code translated to the Format (AU Australia) and this format is synched to MS Dynamics. The sync is already working .

Thank you!

Abigail suggested using a workflow to combine the two properties into a third custom property, like this:

The branch is there to catch cases when the IP properties aren’t set.

There are two situations under which they would not populate. This knowledge base article has the details:

HubSpot uses multiple third-party databases to try to match a visitor's IP address to their geographic location. There are two reasons why a contact's IP Country, IP State/Region, or IP City may be blank:

• Contacts must submit a form with cookie tracking enabled or interact with (open or click) a tracked HubSpot email to have an IP address associated with them.
• In some instances, HubSpot may not find a match for the geolocation properties against its databases. IP address location data can be inaccurate or spotty in certain geographical locations, so there may be instances where HubSpot cannot find data for all three IP properties.

Shot 7: Marketing Tip of the Week

Two email examples this week, one of email done well, and the other of email done poorly.

Email Marketing Done Wrong

First up, is this example I received from the Australian Tax Office. They are using multi-column emails that aren’t responsive, and thus look tiny when viewed on mobile:

We always recommend single column emails these days.

Email Marketing Done Right

Here’s an example of email done right.

This email from LegalVision is an excellent example of prompting people to take action:

BTW, LegalVision are an instructive example of digital excellence in general. Their site is well optimised for Google with lots of content, their email marketing is useful and consumable, and their overall brand is very well positioned.

Shot 8: Insight of the Week

We need to be reminded of the basics. Attending INBOUND, broadening your horizons is always a good way to refocus and ground yourself.

One thing that stood out to Ian was how important it is to understand our customers and what they are going through be it B2B or B2C. As Brian Halligan said one we need to think H2H, human to human. In a crowded world where everything is fighting for attention if you can connect with others in a way that others don’t then you have the advantage.

Shot 9: Resource of the Week

What drives attention? Exploring the new front line of ad effectiveness.

Shot 10: Quote of the Week

Advice from Ruth Bader Ginsburg

When asked: “Do you have some good advice you might share with us?” Yes, I do. It comes from my savvy mother-in-law, advice she gave me on my wedding day. “In every good marriage,” she counseled, “it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.” I have followed that advice assiduously, and not only at home through 56 years of a marital partnership nonpareil. I have employed it as well in every workplace, including the Supreme Court. When a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken, best tune out. Reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one’s ability to persuade.

• Ruth Bader Ginsburg (via NY Times)

Shot 11: Big Shots of the Week

Taronga TV

Watch lions, tigers and elephants via Taronga Zoo’s webcams on Taronga TV.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with marketing - the answer is: absolutely nothing!

But you’ll feel better about the world after watching them for a while.

Facebook is removing the 20% text Rule

Yay, a nice update to ad imagery on Facebook. To date they’ve had a 20% text rule that meant if more than 20% of the ad image was text the ad was usually rejected. They’ve now binned that rule.

GitLab Handbook

GitLab have open-sourced their entire company handbook. It’s full of useful information about how they run their company, including topics such as how they operate as an all-remote company. See also this FastCompany article on how GitLab is transforming work.

Shot 12: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here: HubShots YouTube channel - HubShots Spotify channel - HubShots Facebook group - HubShots Twitter - HubShots Instagram - HubShots LinkedIn

Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

Please rate and leave us some feedback as this helps us improve and reach more marketers.

Full Transcript of HubShots Episode 220

- Hi everyone, welcome to "HubShots" episode 220. This is the all about Inbound episode, where we talk about the latest product announcements from Inbound 2020, for Marketing Sales and Service Hub. We've got some tricky gotchas and, we're celebrating our five year anniversary, Craig. You're listening to Asia Pacific's number one HubSpot Focus Podcast, where we discuss HubSpot tips, tricks and strategies for growing your sales, marketing, and service results. My name is Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and with me is my excellent cohost Craig Bailey, from XEN Systems, how are you Craig?

- I am so well and so excited. And look, before we go on, I do wanna say five years it was after Inbound and I wanna thank you for dragging me along. And, I was reluctant, but I still remember sitting next to you in the main auditorium at Inbound 2015 and you were saying we should do a podcast. I'm like, I don't know. But yeah, five years have flown by 220 episodes, it's been a ball. And so, yeah, thank you, Ian. And by the way, to listeners who are wondering whether they should start a podcast, but are reluctant to 'cause they don't think they'll be good enough. Just go and listen back to our episode one. It's still up there in, and I know people are still listening to it and I cringe when I do, but we've come a long way. So, don't be discouraged you just gotta start somewhere and enjoy the ride.

- Correct, and like I said, listeners previously, It is a partnership here and Craig I'm grateful because it takes the two of us. There are days when we don't wanna do something and we push each other. So, I encourage people-

- That's right.

- To who are listening. If you're doing something that is sometimes out of your comfort zone, is best to have a partner to take along for the ride and we've become great friends over that time. So, thank you, Craig, it's been excellent.

- Now, speaking of Inbound, back to the Inbound experience, you've actually been online 'cause it's all been virtual this year of course I haven't actually and my frustrations when I couldn't log on, there's something wrong with my registration. But, you watched a bunch of them. And in particular, I was interested in your thoughts on the keynote with Brian, Dharmesh and Chris, tell us your thoughts.

- So firstly, for those that did attend, it was an interesting experience. They try to recreate the experience. I guess if you'd been to Boston, they try to recreate that in a virtual environment, which is quite kind of interesting. You could choose your avatar and for the fun of it, I thought, oh, I'll try and find myself in the crowd on one of the first sessions with Mobi. And I found myself, because I was, on very purpose I wore orange shoes with orange glasses and I wore shorts and a t-shirt, where everybody else is dressed nicely I think. So that was the giveaway. Okay, coming back to the keynote, which was one of the key things, in previous years we've always had something, I guess, funny and interesting with Brian and Dharmesh. I've just loved watching like I look forward to their keynotes over the years. And this year was really different. It was a keynote that included Chris, who is the product manager. And they were at Fenway Park, which is where the Boston Red Sox play. And that's where they did the recording. So it was obviously it was all empty, but it was also a bit serious and, it's like kind of shuffled between them at Fenway Park and in the office I think. And, had Chris O'Donnell in there as well and kind of went through this journey of what's taken place and then went into the product stuff. So it was interesting from that perspective, not as interesting as I thought like Brian and Dharmesh usually make a really big deal and do something interesting, and I didn't get that feeling again. Anyway, I guess given the year that we've had, it's fantastic we even had what we did. But, if Brian and Dharmesh are listening, keep doing what you used to do. I think it just brings a little brightness and spark to our lives.

- Was it perhaps an appropriateness for the years?

- Possibly.

- Do you think they toned it down just... 'Cause it is a hard line to dance around, isn't it? You don't wanna be too happy when hundreds of thousands of your fellow countrymen people have died. It's a terrible year and yet you wanna be uplifting and positive and it's a very hard balance to strike, isn't it?

- But in saying that, I think well done to everybody that had their finger in the pie to do with Inbound, I take my hats off to you.

- Yeah, I've heard nothing but good feedback. And even in our WhatsApp channel then, jumping in saying it's like one of the best virtual events well, the best virtual event he's been to 'cause he's been to a ton of them. So I think that's really good they've made it different, they've made it special they've made an experience, that's really good to hear.

- Did look like with all the speakers and all the sessions they had it really well planned. They had a consistency about the slides. After a while, I was like, oh, hang on I've seen that slide it just looks a bit different. So, I think that was really nice, like just providing a consistency of visual messaging so that people knew that they were the Inbound was really good. And, even it was really short, sharp and punchy. Still you got stuff you want. And I think they really understood it's online people are doing stuff and keeping it really on time and on point was so good. Now I do have a listener shout out to Noem from New York. Thank you for connecting with us. We'd love to hear from you and we had a little chat over LinkedIn. So listeners, if you're listening and you haven't connected with Craig and myself, please do we'd love to hear from you.

- Hey, speaking of connecting, if you were with us, right from the start, episode one, you've listened right through, can you send us a note, hit us up on LinkedIn or just reply to that email that you should be subscribed to. Oh, by the way, if you haven't already subscribed to our weekly newsletter, which had includes all the show notes, plus a bunch of extra stuff. But yeah let us know, you can just reply to that. Let us know and we'll give you a shout out on the show. It'll just be great to know who's been with us all along the journey.

- I'm sure I could name a few but we'll wait until next week. All right, Craig on to our quick shots of the week. And, we've got a whole bunch of announcements from marketing sales and service hub updates, and we'll go into some of them further down through the show.

- You actually should put in this link the product engineering team they've got a blog, so we've gotta link it to there. And apparently, everything this year was a relaunch. Did you know that Ian? It's powerful and easy in the newly relaunched insert your favorite hubs.

- Correct, and you don't need to choose one you can have them both, Craig.

- That's right.

- All right, I'll turn back the feature the week. And this is about marketing contacts. So listeners, if you're listening, marketing contacts is something new that's been introduced globally at HubSpot after Inbound 2020. And with that I think it's a great move because that's where a lot often, lot of people got stuck. So, if you didn't know, when you were buying Marketing Hub, you paid on the contact basis. So even if you didn't utilize all the context for marketing, let's say you started with CRM, you still had to pay for, to house all of those contacts. With new marketing contacts feature, what it means that you can have contacts markers, non-marketing or marketing. And you only get charged for what is marketing related. And in the last four to six months in Australia and New Zealand, we have been the guinea pigs to test this out. And, it's been an interesting journey for Craig and myself as the things we've come across on doing signup on switching people over, on understanding how we put people in and out of marketing contacts. And it's been a journey. And it's really great to see this being rolled out globally, but I guess there are tools in the system to even work out is it worthwhile switching? So that's one of the things, and if you're talking to HubSpot they can do that for you. But I'd definitely take a look at this if you were considering, and you haven't moved across to marketing because of that reason.

- In my mind, this is the biggest announcement from Inbound. I know they're talking about attribution reporting and a bunch of other really cool things in marketing, but, marketing contacts I think is the big change in their model. And, as you said that you can have up to a million contacts in your HubSpot portal now, but only have maybe a thousand of them marked as marketing contacts. So you've got a million contacts in there, but you're only paying for a thousand 'cause they're the ones in your marketing marked as marketing. Now, as you said, we were the guinea pigs down in A and Z and we've been hanging to talk about this but, even though we weren't on the NDI or anything, but we just felt it wouldn't be fair to kind of talk about it, until it was actually available. So we're very excited it is now available. There's a lot to learn about it. We've got a ton of information in the show notes, including the screenshot just from one of my clients actually which just shows you some of the new tools and how you can manage the billing. Put some initial thoughts, I've answered a few quick questions because of course the question people are gonna ask is well, what's can I downgrade and my contacts that are marked as contacts can I mark them as non-marketing? Yes, you can. That's recalculated every month at some gotchas, but, the very last item, how to quickly get up to speed. We've got a link to a knowledge base article, which is a really good coverage of... It's not really the one that linked to publicly on the site, but this is a partner knowledge based article, it's publicly available. And it's got an awesome FAQ section at the end of the page. So just go and read that if you read that page, you'll be across 90% of it. We've had a few bugs there, haven't we Ian?

- We sure have Craig.

- HubSpot support must love us. I think the majority of my HubSpot support queries over the last three to four months have all been about marketing contacts.

- And also internal HubSpot liaison. Should we say I've had lots of fixing ups to do.

- We have been playing with this with in InGo, shall we say, but, I think it's pretty stable now, wouldn't you say Ian?

- Yes, I would say so Craig. Now listeners, if you're thinking, what does this all mean? And if you think marketing, the first thing that came to my mind, I'm gonna email market to these people. Yes, that is a marketing contact. But the other marketing contact is if you plan on putting these people into a list and putting it into Facebook or Google or LinkedIn, and you're marketing to them via ads. That is also considered a marketing contact. So those are really the two key things that classifies them as marketing. So just take a note of that because some people are like, oh, I'm not gonna do anything with that. I'm just gonna run ads to them, but no, that's a marketing contact. All right Craig, onto our HubSpot sales feature of the week. And I'm gonna talk about a few things that have been rolled out at Inbound, some of them are already out, some of them are still coming. And the first and biggest thing was to do with custom objects. And, this is... So, listeners you might note, there are objects like contacts, companies, deals, et cetera in the system. Now you can make your own. So, a really common example that they've used is like, you might have an object, that's a car, right? And the object car has different attributes, like color, seats, what else? Engine size, or maybe it's electric. And so you can capture this and you can, and it also ties into reporting. So this is the big part. You can capture the data, you can make it valuable to your business, but also you can report on it, just like your report on any other objects within HubSpot.

- Yeah, look I think this is the big thing from the sales side and full disclaimer. We haven't actually used it yet, so I don't actually have access to it. Yeah, we want to talk about it at length at this stage. But one of the best examples I saw in some of the training I was doing on it, is they used real estate agents as an example, and products or houses as an object, a custom object, which can have all the properties. Then they showed how that can be included in emails. So pulling properties from that custom object to house object, here's the price, here's available. You could send emails to your prospect or your customer list based on their post codes or zip codes, things like that and pull in data. So, there's a really good example. The sky's the limit now, this really opens up HubSpot to a lot of things. I know we've done stuff around using HubDB to try and kind of get a clunky way around this, but, I think we'll be moving once we got across custom objects we'll be using that and said. But, plenty to chat about in the coming weeks about this.

- The next one is attribution reporting and, I have a link to a lesson in there from the academy about attribution reporting and there was a great session at Inbound about this. So if you attended Inbound and you didn't do it have a look at it, I'd encourage you to go and get to that session. And it was by one of the Inbound professors or HubSpot professors sorry, and it was really well done. And so encourage you to do that. The next one is field level of permissions, and this is where admins can lock down specific values so that only certain people can edit what they should. And there are those really interesting what they shouldn't and what they need to. So that's a really key thing. And the next thing, which is about to roll out, which we don't, well, it's not available publicly, is the new coding template editor, which is the configure price quote. So if you've been in enterprise land and you've been using a tool called CPQ that is now coming to HubSpot in the enterprise version, so you can utilize that. And I've just put a great article on the HubSpot blog that will explain to you what that is.

- I am really looking forward to this one and after custom objects, this is gonna be my next favorite feature. We're sending so many quotes from HubSpot these days to be able to customize them make them more like proposals I think it's gonna be excellent. And then the other thing they're talking about is integrations with say Netsuite, Xero, MYOB. So I'm really looking forward to doing not only the quoting, but then initiating invoicing and just thinking that, yeah, it's really coming together, isn't it?

- All right listeners onto our HubSpot to service feature of the week. And a shout out to Charles. And I think this is something that he did and I picked up on one of our sessions. Hey Charles, how're you doing? Now there's one person has been with us from the start.

- He has, there you go, yeah, big shout out to Charles.

- And this is to do with customer satisfaction surveys, and doing a survey on your internal suppliers as well as your customers. So, one thing I picked up from one of our sessions was that, he was even surveying actually people within HubSpot. And, so surveying suppliers in that journey that he's taking his customers on so he could understand how everybody was doing. And I thought that was a great tip, so-

- You know what? You could almost send out staff surveys couldn't-

- You could, that's the thing it's internal, yeah.

- Totally, yeah, how well do you like working here? These surveys are not anonymous.

- Here's another way to utilize the tools that we have to really make an impact. And listeners if you didn't know, the previous episode 219, we talked about using this exact survey in the sales process to understand how sales was interacting with a customer on the initial touch. All right, Craig now onto our HubSpot gotcha of the week.

- Oh my goodness, is this a good gotcha.

- And we've spoken about not this gotcha, but, original source drill down to property changing. How I came across this, I was using this in a workflow for a customer of ours, to basically take some certain actions. And what happened, it was good. It was working until they went and connected their Facebook page, and then they started syncing leads, which happened to be so it's a franchise business. I was looking after the franchise side of the business, the retail side, connect to the Facebook pages, and then they're running some Facebook ads that are run off somewhere else. Leads are flowing in, meet this criteria or shouldn't it met the criteria and they were now getting triggered from the workflow, getting sent all of this stuff to do franchising, anyway-

- Just before we go on, I just, original source drill down. What is that? Let's just quickly explain to listeners if they're not familiar with that field. Well, there's three fields mainly isn't it, yeah.

- Drill down one, might say Facebook. So might tell you what platform it was. And, I just sort drilled out to generally tell you probably the campaign or in this type of Facebook so I think it was an organic post or something. So that's the data that gets captured. So, when I had done this workflow, it was actually meeting all the criteria and triggering off and I couldn't work out why. Anyway, here's a big shout out to HubSpot support, and-

- The first of two big shout outs this episode.

- Correct, and this is a shout out to Rachel. Rachel, it was lovely speaking to you. And what we discovered, that the analytics engine can potentially put a value, which if you look at the show notes is a whole bunch of numbers before it actually updates to the right property value. So, the criteria was mainly was correct, and it was going through this workflow. And so what we had to do was put a delay in place to make sure that the property got updated in time. So that was the solution, and, we've put in the show notes the delay before we branch. So we're checking the property, and then we're branching and checking that it's the right property, in the branch before we go and carry on the next steps.

- All right, so can I just get a little bit tacky and expand on this a bit? 'Cause it took me a while to understand this gotcha and when you explain it to me and then why I think it's really useful for the techie people listening to understand. So what I didn't realize, and now this highlights is that there's certain properties on a contact record that come from different processing. So, a contact might be created from a form, instantly you get the form fields on that contact property. But then, so the contact property has been created and some of the fields now, some of the other fields and specifically analytics related fields, such as the source where it's come from and some others, they kind of get processed off on a little secondary process. The form submit kicks it off so, you've got the contact record bang, great and straight away. But it might take a second or two for the analytics data to come in and get added to that contact record. Now, when the contact record's credit, initially that property original source drill down to it it just gives it some random, it's just junk in there before it's filled. And then it comes in a, later, a second or two, and that's why you've got the delay in the workflow. So to allow that to be populated before you're testing against it. Now, I thought that was fascinating because there have been other instances I'm sure with workflows when it just didn't, some things slip through and you don't really know, like, in a few million seconds between the form submit and triggering the workflow versus the analytics coming in, or sometimes the workflow might be running it. So some of them slip through, and that's what you found. You were kind of like, why is it working for some and not others? And that's why I'm learning this. And yeah, shout out to Rachel and she's given me a really good answer which we've put in the show notes explaining that. The other one that I thought was interesting was like IP country or IP things 'cause that's an analytics piece really related to the contact. So that's another example of a field that might not get populated to a second or two after the contact records actually in the database and potentially have triggered a workflow by then. So, these little gotchas, they come with experiencing, even after what, how many years have we been using HubSpot? Probably a decade now. These little things, we still learn these fascinating little gotchas around the product.

- That's right. So listeners, if you want to see exactly everything, please go to the show notes. And a shout out again to Rachel for helping me out. And listeners, how did we figure this out? I'll just take a step back Craig and say we started looking individual contacts and looking at the property, and looking at the property history is how we worked out that this was happening. That wasn't happening to everybody, but it was happening to a lot of them, and that's how we tracked back the issue. And here's our HubSpot support, winner of the week, Craig.

- Oh yeah, it just keeps getting better with HubSpot support this when you showed me this. I was like, oh my goodness, this is such a smart answer. And it came from a listener, a big shout out to Martin by the way.

- Yes, Martin all the way from Austria.

- Austria, yeah

- Yes.

- And we've put it in the show notes, his email And it was really, well and you actually had to chat to him about it. Why don't you explain the scenario, what he was trying to solve?

- Listeners, what Martin was trying to solve was data was being synced from HubSpot marketing back into Microsoft Dynamics. When they synced the marketing qualified lead into Microsoft Dynamics, they needed to make sure that the IP country and the country code was in a particular format, right? And so, I think there must be some processing happening or it's expecting this value when it gets transferred. So, he was thinking what's the best way to do it. The first way he thought of doing this was creating a workflow, that looked at the property within HubSpot, which is the country code, and then filling it out based given the data that you had was doing a workflow to fill out these country codes. So that means you'd have a workflow with about, let's say 170 to 270 branches, depending on the number of countries you wanna cover. And, to be honest, I looked eager with the work I'd actually handle that, or is this a really bad use of a workflow? So, we had a chat. Our initial discussion was, update everything you've currently got. If you wanted to do a bulk update was to extract the data from running through Excel, into another field, basically do a find and replace and then load it and load it to update the contact, based on the contact ID. Moving forward was to actually have a new property that had a dropdown, that had those country codes already coded in, so that when it was selected, it would then populate correctly. The next thing that... So then after I did that, I thought I'm gonna go find out . I had a chat with HubSpot support and that's when we came up with the new solution. And so, a big shout out to Abigail, thank you for helping us out. And, Abigail suggested using, combining two properties that were already in the system into a third custom property to figure this out. So, she did that. And then I had to think about it and had a chat to Martin and, it looked like a really good solution. Now, there is some caveats and that's why when we did the workflow, you will see we do, we actually do some checking and then some branching for that particular reason. Essentially what we're doing is we're checking two HubSpot properties, called, IP country code and the IP country. So, the code might be AU, for example in Australia with the IP country being Australia. So, he was expecting AU space Australia to go to be the field that was being transported. Now, in some cases, this property doesn't get set. So, what we did was we created a workflow that checked the property. If it was set, then we went and in the workflow we set up property based on the combination of the two, and if it wasn't, then we were creating a task to notify the contact owner to update it appropriately.

- So I love this solution you know what's so good about it Ian is because when I first saw this note from Martin I was like, ah, you could be a big FLs if then branch, I was like, my gut feeling is that there's a smarter, easier way to do this. And, I didn't know what it was, but some part of me thought that there must be an easier way to do this. When you showed this, the solution that Abigail came up with. The reason it's such a good and simple solution is when you see it, you go, of course, how did we not think of that now, ourselves? I love those solutions, it's so simple and elegant. She's put it in there and yeah, well done I ever got. I just love that, that's such a good solution. Workflow's to the rescue as usual. Is there anything in workflow I can't do?

- Very little, for what I'm finding out, Craig.

- The only thing I'd like to see is calculated properties I'd love to do that in a workflow where you could calculate them, not in terms of addition, but in terms of string manipulation. I'd love to be able to use string functions within workflows and then write them between properties.

- I did see in there today, you can execute code.

- What?

- Yeah. Have a look.

- Like HubCode.

- Yeah, there was a place in there that said you can execute the code. So, after we finished the show, we'll have a look.

- Oh my goodness, all right, okay.

- Don't get distracted right now, Craig, all right. On to markings for the week listeners and this is we've got two examples of email that's done well and then another one that is done poorly. And our first tip here is-

- I don't like to make examples of companies in the show notes so we're normally trying to be positive. But here's an example. It's from the Australian tax office, right? I'm happy to show them. I've got a screenshot. They send out their emails with three column formats in the emails. It's not responsive, so on my phone, you can't read it you're doing the pictures.

- Looks terrible.

- It's just ridiculous. It's actually, doesn't look as bad in the show notes 'cause I've got this giant screenshot I've made up. But if you can imagine them on the phone, you can't read it, it's just ridiculous. So, as we always say, and we always recommend single column emails. Don't do what the Australian government does, but in that email done, right. Did you see this one? This is from legal vision. They just sent out a, basically it's an email saying, "Fill out this survey." And I get, how many emails do you get like this? Please fill out our survey and give us. I get them from Hub so I get them from all the vendors all the time and I hardly ever do them. The genius of this one is their subject line they said, share your feedback about membership and we'll plant 50 trees. So there's a call to action around environmental impact. Very appropriate for Australia given the bush fires and how 80% of our bush got destroyed at the start of this year. And basically within the email and then say by completing this short three minutes so if I've got a screenshot, we'll plant 50 trees in conjunction with our partnership. I filled out that survey straight away. I couldn't wait to click it and feel the joy of 50 trees being planted just by giving my response to their product survey which of course is very good they're an excellent company. And a good example of digital marketing done right as well they're very smart serving company,

- All right, lessons on time instead of the week. I just came back to this. We need to remind you of the basics. Attending Inbound and broadening horizons is a good way to refocus and ground yourselves. And why I said that because one thing that stood out to me, it was how important it is for us to understand our customers, and what they're going through B to B, B to B, B to C. And I got reminded of Brian Halligan saying, "We really need to think H to H." Which is human to human. And in a crowded world where everything is fighting for our attention. If you can connect with others in a way that others don't, then I think you have the advantage. So, I was just reminded that with a lot of sessions, I went from account based marketing to, how to get your marketing working well, what to do when things aren't converting. It always came down to, do you understand your customer that you're marketing to? And do you understand where they're on their journey and what are the things that they need? And it was a lot to do with experience of them, what they were using, how they were being treated, questions they were being asked, how they were asking their questions. And, it just reminded me, we just go back basics. All right, Craig, our resource of the week. And this is a interesting article that we had and it was to do with, what drives attention and it's exploring the new front line of ad effectiveness and this is from Google.

- And what does drive attention in?

- You'll have to read the article.

- To read the article, thank you.

- There's a link to it in the show notes, when you subscribe and you get it delivered to your inbox every week, Craig. All right, Craig, the quote of the week is yours.

- All right, this was from Ruth Bader Ginsburg who as you know, passed away this week as we record this. Sadly and what a life, what an amazingly impactful life planning to celebrate there. But, in an interview, this was from the New York Times. She was asked if she had any advice to share and she said, yes, she'd been told by her mother-in-law in every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf. She goes on to explain, "I've employed it as well in the workplace, including the Supreme Court, when a thoughtless or unkind word is spoken best tune out, reacting in anger or annoyance will not advance one's ability to persuade." So, rest and peace Ruth and thank you for your service and the advice.

- All right, Craig, on to big shots of the week, Taronga TV.

- Nothing to do with marketing but if you wanna look at web cams of animals, tigers, lions, elephants then that's Taronga TV right there.

- And list as if you don't know, Taronga zoo is here in Sydney. And if you ever do come to Sydney, I would say go to the zoo because it's on the harbor, and you get a magnificent view of the harbor across the city. And, we are truly blessed to have such a nice zoo I have to say. And Craig, this is the one I didn't know about Facebook is removing the 20% text rule.

- And about time too. So, previously as many advertisers are now, you couldn't have more than 20% text in ad images. And they're scrapping that. I reckon it's just 'cause they're sick of reviewing them all and conventional wisdom whenever you get an ad on Facebook disapproved, is it just resubmitted. And based on the review, chances are they'll approve and they record they just got sick and they're out damn it well, so excellent.

- All right, and finally.

- The GitHub Handbook, go and check that out their entire company, handbook, they've open-sourced, including, how they as a company with thousands of employees work in an all remote approach. So yeah, that's interesting reading.

- Well listeners, I hope you've enjoyed the show. Please follow us on the socials. Connect with us on LinkedIn, and please send us a message to say that you listened to the show we'd love to hear from you.

- Before you close in, I just wanna say two thank yous firstly to Chris Mottram, we're recording this on Thursday, the 24th and he's staying up to edit it for us to go live in the morning. So, thanks for doing that, Chris, and we're putting a lot of pressure on you, but we wanted to get this out after Inbound, yeah.

- And thank you, Chris, for being an editor for the last five years.

- Yes, right from the start, there you go shout out to Chris kind of Skype this can he.

- That's right.

- Thanks Chris. And the second thank you I wanna say is to you, Ian, because I know you've been up all night, attending Inbound, you must be totally smashed and needed good sleep, but, thanks for staying up and recording the show tonight.

- No, thank you, Craig. It is always a pleasure to do this with you. And listeners, is if you wanna have dinner with us and if you're ever in Sydney, or if we ever get to go back to Boston to have lobster rolls and chowder, we would love to meet with you. So until next time, Craig.

- Catch you later, Ian. Hey there, thanks for listening to this episode of "HubShots". To get the latest show notes, HubSpot tips and marketing resources, sign up at HubShots.com. You can also book time with us to help you grow better, with HubSpot.