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Recorded: Friday 25 August 2023 | Published: Friday 01 September 2023
Have you noticed that most companies don’t care about their customers anymore?
Just a few short years ago companies were focussed on their customers’ outcomes, these days they are just focussed on their own needs.
Here’s a quick test you can do next time you get a sales call: start explaining the context of your situation, and listen for how they respond. The majority of replies will be focused on turning your situation into a reason to buy their product. Not many will ask for further details about your situation.
I play this game every time a sales rep from HubSpot calls me to ask about sales opportunities with one of our clients. I deliberately start to talk about our customer’s situation and wait for their response. Most will hurry me along, only focussed on whether there’s an opportunity, and quick to get off the call if there’s nothing immediately obvious. Occasionally though, a rep will take an interest in the customer and want to understand further. They are keen to ensure there’s a fit and the customer will benefit. These are the reps that I add to my contacts list and always answer their call. Lately there’s only been two who have risen to this level (Mike and Paul, you know who you are).
The 0% interest rate years were great for hiring tons of people and giving lots of value away. They’re long gone though, and the true colours of most cultures are shining through.
Kinda related:
Takeaway: for the minority of companies who are still focussed on customers, please continue to play the long game - it will serve you well when the inflation tide turns.
However, speaking of people who actually care…
Reminder: Moby, Tasha, Linda and the Red Pandas team are hosting the They Ask, You Answer Summit in Australia in October.
Marcus Sheridan will be flying down to be one of the speakers. Don’t miss this.
We’ve already booked our tickets. HubShots listeners can get a 50% discount on ticket prices by using code: hubshots
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
Reminder: Access your updates from your profile:
And then view the updates, and the Beta releases you may want to join:
HubSpot has now enabled Deal lists in portals (previously it was a public beta).
This is an excellent update and opens up a bunch of options (see below).
Hopefully it is the start of being able to create lists for any object (ie Tickets, Quotes, Custom objects etc as well in future).
A few quick thoughts on Deal lists:
To get started, use the usual approach for creating lists, you’ll see a new option to create Deal based lists:
You can then create Deal lists using the familiar interface you use for contacts and companies.
You can easily use criteria across associated objects (eg line items):
These lists can then be used in workflow triggers (and branching), other lists, and in Views and reports.
Use Deal Lists in Deal Views:
Aside: List permissions are set in the Marketing permissions area:
Further to the List discussion, here’s a simple example of building a Contact list (ie not a Deal list) that looks at Deal details.
For example, you can build a list of Contacts who have deals with specific line items. You can then use this List in a Contact View and reps can use this for upsell/cross sell opportunities.
You can use this in a Contact View using the List Membership filter:
This isn’t a new feature, but it is one that is under-used.
You can use the description on a workflow to note the recent changes or key outcomes of the workflow. This can help when browsing through workflows later - simply hover over the description to see the full details.
It can save a ton of time going into each workflow to review (especially when consistent naming conventions haven’t been used historically):
You can set the description by clicking on the workflow name, when editing workflow:
One of the things I really like about using HubSpot CMS Hub is you can easily build a full site on the temporary HubSpot domain before going live. And then when going live you simply add the domain into HubSpot and point the DNS, and HubSpot takes care of the rest.
HubSpot automatically updates all the page URLs to use the live domain, including things like updating links in menus and CTAs, form submit destinations and list criteria.
So simple and useful.
Note: this works for HubSpot CMS Starter as well - it’s not a Pro feature.
BTW check out this new site we built, all on HubSpot CMS Starter and CLEAN theme, using a beautiful brand design by Brand Chemistry.
We love lists (see Shot 3 above), but I’m a little disappointed to see HubSpot setting arbitrary limits on the number of lists you can create in a portal.
For example, for a typical Marketing Enterprise hub, the limit is 2000 lists.
And this includes static lists.
Lately we’ve been noticing that Active lists take a while to update eg it can often take minutes for a list to update, compared to seconds a few years ago. This totally makes sense, given that lists often query across associated objects and can put substantial load on the system.
So I can see why having limits is needed for this scenario.
However, the list limit includes static lists that might be nothing more than a list of people who were imported. Ie tiny processing required (and only once).
I’d like to see the list limit only apply to Active lists, and the static list limit be much higher.
In the episode I mentioned the 2000 list limit for Enterprise portals was the total for both Active and Static combined. This is incorrect. Each can have a 2000 list limit:
Some things I’ve been writing:
Prompt: view of a village with many lights in the buildings, Japanese dream village, amazing wallpaper, hyperrealistic photo of a village, ancient Asian village, Japanese city, rainy afternoon, ancient Japanese castle, beautifully lit buildings, at night during the rain, beautiful and aesthetic, photography, cinematic, 8k, high detail
Tons more Midjourney prompts and inspiration here.
BTW download the new Midjourney Inspiration guide PDF here (no signup required).
From my blog post:
The last few years have seen a crackdown on tracking activity across platforms, mostly with Apple leading the charge (eg their private relay release as well as IP blocking and email open rate blocking).
We’ve seen services like Hey focus on this for years, and block any tracking pixels.
To date, email open tracking has been the focus.
This is all expanding though, with Apple’s upcoming iOS17 release stripping utm parameters from emails, so that all tracking is now effectively removed (ie can’t even track link clicks).
Others, including Proton have also implemented this (it went live with Proton in July).
Expect this to be the norm in the coming years – and any insight you gathered from email open rates and link clicks will quickly head towards zero.
Of course, marketers will be working on other methods of tracking (eg coupon codes only included in emails, sending to specific page URLs, etc) so it’ll be a continual game of privacy whack-a-mole.
Image credit: 9to5mac
“Ehh, good enough”
― Mediocrates (yes, that meme again)
If you’re an Alex Hormozi fan then you’ve likely watched (or even attended) his massive book launch last weekend.
In it he launched his new book: $100M Leads as well as a massive free course covering everything to do with lead generation. It’s well worth watching.
Start with his book launch recap:
Download a copy of the HubShots Framework A3 PDF poster (recently updated with colour coding and more).
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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, XEN Create and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
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