Do you live in a world filled with corporate data? Are you plagued by siloed departments? Are your lackluster growth strategies demolishing your chances for success? Success? Are you held captive by the evil menace Lord Lack?
Intro:Lack of time, lack of strategy, and lack of the most important and powerful tool in your superhero tool belt, knowledge. Never fear, hub heroes. Get ready to don your cape and mask, move into action, and become the hub hero your organization needs. Tune in each week to join the league of extraordinary inbound heroes as we help you educate, empower, and execute. Hub Heroes, it's time to unite and activate your powers.
Intro:Before we begin, we need to disclose that Devin is currently employed by HubSpot at the time of this episode's recording. This podcast is in no way affiliated with or produced by HubSpot, and the thoughts and opinions expressed by Devin during the show are that of his own and in no way represent those of his employer.
Liz Moorhead:Welcome back to another episode of Hub, Heroes, Gentlemen. Are you ready?
George B. Thomas:Welcome back.
Liz Moorhead:I know.
Max Cohen:Welcome back. Welcome back.
Max Cohen:Welcome back.
Liz Moorhead:Well, there's that. There's also welcome back, Kotter. We could go many different ways.
George B. Thomas:That's that's what I was singing. Wasn't that what I was singing? Oh, man. I'm a terrible singer. Never mind.
Liz Moorhead:We're doing great, kids. How's it going this week? Going great. Yeah? Max, how are you and your hair doing?
Max Cohen:Tired. Very tired and sleepy.
George B. Thomas:Well, your hair ain't sleepy.
Max Cohen:Taken now.
George B. Thomas:Your your hair is not taking over the world right now, which which, by the way, if you're listening to the podcast right now and you wanna see what Max's hair looks like, then head over to community.hubheroes.com. Sign up for that free account and go ahead and watch the video version of this podcast. It'll be fun. Trust me.
Max Cohen:Wait. My my my hair is in the free version?
Liz Moorhead:Your hair is in free version. Sorry. Your your, your emo sweet stylings are not a premium. Oh, you
Max Cohen:gotta blame me.
George B. Thomas:Max is like,
Liz Moorhead:you gotta Max is like
Max Cohen:I look like the weekend right now.
Liz Moorhead:Max is like, you gotta pay for this. And on that note, hi, everybody. I'm Liz. You're apparently lacking Hub Hero Wrangler this week, but I am very excited to dig into our topic. In fact, I'm gonna forego some of our usual extra intros this week because we have a lot of ground to cover.
Liz Moorhead:So if you've been listening over the past several episodes to Hub Heroes, we have covered a ton of ground. We've talked about workflows and service hub and campaigns and reporting and certification week and artificial intelligence. We have even talked about inbound coming up this September. But gentlemen, do you know what we haven't talked about now in many, many moons? Sales.
Liz Moorhead:We have not talked about our pals in sales. Now to be fair, if you missed any of those episodes, definitely go back, listen to them. They are amazing. But today, it is time for us to give some long overdue love to one of our favorite teams, making sure that HubSpot flywheel is spinning ever so smoothly, and that's sales. So today, we're gonna be doing a deep dive into three of the most cool tools in school in the HubSpot sales hub.
Liz Moorhead:I know. Look at that. I did rhyming, and I didn't even need AI to help me write it. Thank you. Thank you.
Liz Moorhead:That see, that's what happens when you have an entourage. Right? Yes. But today, we're talking about snippets. We're talking about templates, and we're talking about sequences.
Liz Moorhead:Oh my.
Max Cohen:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:Excited.
George B. Thomas:Oh, I'm definitely excited. I can't wait to see how this conversation goes and what, everybody has to say about these three tools inside of HubSpot pertaining to sales,
Liz Moorhead:but also We're gonna get to that we're gonna get to that question. We're gonna get the don't let the key get out of the bag yet. I know. Don't let it out of the bag just yet. We're gonna be talking about what these tools are, what they aren't, and how these tools can be super powerful for you even if you are not in sales.
Liz Moorhead:Now if you've been listening, we have touched upon these tools before, but we have never done the deep dive deep dive like we are doing today. So with that, you know what, George? I'll let you let the cat out of the bag a little bit. I'm gonna let you jump in here.
George B. Thomas:Oh.
Liz Moorhead:Why are we talking about these three tools together for a reason, and why did you get a little bit chafing when we pigeon holed it into something?
Intro:George, are you chafed?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. I've got a cream
Max Cohen:for that. Does this
Max Cohen:I've got a cream for that. Subject get you chuffed? Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:All those opposed to chafing, please say aye.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. I don't like chafing. It's not a good look. But but here's the thing. What what I want people to realize and, again, we are gonna go at this a little bit out as a a sales conversation at first, but I want everybody to realize that snippets, templates, and sequences are a, the ability in HubSpot to create a process, to have a system, to streamline communication, to have consistent brand voice, to always be ready at a moment's notice for the thing or things that you might have to do in HubSpot or around HubSpot as long as you've got your Outlook and Microsoft Exchange and Google connected.
George B. Thomas:Like, there's just a lot of power. And, unfortunately, I go into a lot of portals, and these three tools are just usually being used poorly.
Liz Moorhead:When you say poorly, give me an example.
George B. Thomas:They're not being used.
Liz Moorhead:That's a tough one. So so it's not necessarily poorly. It's that people have politely abstained from using them for the most
George B. Thomas:part at all. Listen. Listen. If I have and I'm not saying you have
Liz Moorhead:to use all 5,000.
George B. Thomas:But if you look at snippets, you have, like, 5,000 snippets you can create templates. Like, 5,000 templates you can create. Ladies and gentlemen, if you got four in there or you got even 10 in there, we are not leveraging it to the ability that we could be using across all team members and especially as marketers to enable our sales team and especially as sales teams being able to streamline their day, spend less time doing the thing that they hate doing, and more time playing golf. I like to call golf.
Liz Moorhead:Specifically. Golf. You like to play golf?
George B. Thomas:Maybe you love your family. Maybe you wanna spend time with your family. But but most sales reps, when
Liz Moorhead:I say golf, they're like, hell, yeah. Let's go golf more. Max and Devin, you wanna weigh in here on golf or snippets, sequences, and templates?
Max Cohen:No? Literally just had the conversation about golf today, and, no, I'm good. Thanks.
Liz Moorhead:Wow. Do you like golf as much as you like Fast and Furious there, Devin?
Max Cohen:I actually if I had
Max Cohen:to choose between the two, I I I would choose golf.
George B. Thomas:Oh my gosh.
Liz Moorhead:Oh. Oh my gosh. Oh. Oh my god.
George B. Thomas:Oh. I might need a
Liz Moorhead:minute. I might need
Max Cohen:a minute.
Max Cohen:That was awesome.
Max Cohen:What in
Liz Moorhead:the name of Dominic Toretto are you saying right now? He can hear you.
Max Cohen:Often and and as much as possible. Like, I I you everyone who's a regular listener knows my opinion on the Fast and Furious. I don't need to rehash this.
George B. Thomas:Why did you
Liz Moorhead:hurt me?
Max Cohen:They they Wait. I don't
Max Cohen:know what your opinion is, but is your opinion that it sucks?
Liz Moorhead:Max, we don't need to do that. 555
Max Cohen:when you should go. And, like, it's like physics are just like, meh. Like, it's gotten so bad. They went meta with Spot Armor in the last one. It's like, how are we not dead?
Max Cohen:And I'm like, exactly, Tyrese. And yeah. I mean, I'm gonna watch Fast x when it comes out on streaming, on a night that I have nothing to do.
George B. Thomas:It it's available on Vudu right now. It's available on Vudu right now. So there you go.
Max Cohen:That makes a lot of sense.
Max Cohen:Free is the question. Because that's the thing. I'm gonna use it
Liz Moorhead:on the footage that
Max Cohen:I'm already paying for. I'm not paying extra to see Fast x. I I don't need to know about anyone's family anymore. I don't care about Aquaman being crazy. I
Liz Moorhead:don't I don't
Max Cohen:I don't care. Like
George B. Thomas:See see, you know way too much about it to have maybe not watched. I think your closet
Liz Moorhead:Exactly. Your closet,
George B. Thomas:fast and for but but
Max Cohen:I saw the trailer. That was good news. That was good news.
George B. Thomas:For you. Speaking speaking of it being free, you know what else is in free
Max Cohen:My brain was just going to the person listening to this episode with, like, a pen and paper down just like they just wrote snippets at the top, and then they're just sitting there just listening to everything that we just said about to hit the hit the fast forward button. Yeah. I mean, snipping the
Liz Moorhead:save us.
George B. Thomas:Bring us in.
Max Cohen:I mean, I don't know how much I'm gonna save a year. I think, you know,
George B. Thomas:for me, like, if these
Max Cohen:are really tools and much of the rest of HubSpot, I think, you know, is is the value you're gonna
Max Cohen:get out of them is gonna be the creativity in which you use them.
Max Cohen:Right? I mean, you know, if we think about, like, what a snippet just literally is, it's like, alright. Anywhere that you can input text to the CRM, it's gonna drop some text in. Right? So the question is is like, okay.
Max Cohen:How do you take something inherently simple like that and make it creative? Right? Like, are you using it to save someone some time in their day? Are you using it to make sure you're, you know, making sure the language and common verbiage that you use is consistent among your folks using, like, the conversations tool? Are you trying to solve little problems, like making sure people don't have to just remember the support phone number?
Max Cohen:They can type in hashtag s n and drop the support number in there. Right? There's a lot of little things that you can do, you know, all the way from that to, like, using it as sort of like a lightweight version of playbooks where you just drop a call script into, like, a meeting that you're logging. Right? So there's a lot of cool stuff that you can do with it.
Max Cohen:Again, it's all gonna come down to your creativity.
Liz Moorhead:You know, George, I saw you shaking your head over there. Sir, do you have a few thoughts you'd like to share? Oh, now what
Max Cohen:we You want to make snippets with me, George?
Max Cohen:I mean Let's
Max Cohen:go, brother. Step into the arena.
George B. Thomas:I mean, it's like I I'm I am listening to Max, and I'm like, oh, man. Like, text. Text. Only you can only text. But when I think about text, like, the words can be powerful.
George B. Thomas:Right? The fact that you can, put links in those words can be powerful. The fact that you can use personalization tokens in those words makes it powerful. So imagine I get asked the same dumb question 50 times a day, which there are no dumb questions, so don't send me hate mail. But I get the same question 50 times a day.
George B. Thomas:I can literally say, hi, Bobby. Hi, Susie. Hi, Jenny. Great question. As a matter of fact, we've got it several times, and here are three links to content on our website.
George B. Thomas:One is a video, one is an article, one is a webinar that you can go check out that will give you full answer on that. I am able with those words to to deliver the value and the time for them to journey down understanding versus me writing a freaking 17 paragraph essay in my inbox and having to send it to explain the question.
Liz Moorhead:George, let me actually have you guys back up here for a second because one of your biggest airing of grievances in the earlier part of this episode, our very own Hub Heroes Festivus, was that people aren't using these tools, which leads me to wonder, is it because some of them may not really understand what they are? So we're already starting to dig into here into snippets. George, can you give me the, like, thirty seconds what of snippets? What are they? When and how do you use them?
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Do you have to speak to people in email? Do you have to speak to people in a chat bubble? Do you have to leave notes? Do you wanna be able to log calls and SMSes and all those meetings?
George B. Thomas:Do you need a quick outline somewhere in your CRM? Well, imagine instead of typing it out every single time, you could literally do a pound sign, a couple letters selected, and it magically shows up wherever you need it to be and do and be whatever you need it to do and be. Right? So you get a chance to, a, you can have a folder structure, you can name it, you can then build it, and then you can give it a shortcut, and you're off to the races. It literally is the thing that would allow a human who sits down and strategizes the way that they communicate in a day and broke things down into repeatable pieces as snippets.
George B. Thomas:I bet you could do double the amount or relax double the amount by using snippets in your daily life.
Liz Moorhead:So what are some of the creative outside of the box ways that we've seen people use snippets? Devin, do you have any thoughts here?
Max Cohen:One of my favorite uses that we used to do, we talked touched on it briefly, but was, standardized language. So if we were communicating with a customer, and wanted to, put in something about, like if we have, like, a canned SLA or, another use case is for a call recap email. All of our call recap emails were forwarded the same or for formatted the same, I should say. And so we would use it just we would drop in the, the call recap, email, format and then or snippet and then just fill it in. And it's it's great for templatized, emails or templatized communications that you use regularly.
Max Cohen:Now as far as something out of the box, I I've heard all kinds of crazy stuff. Like, for instance, there was this one company, I listened to them, I wanna say, in 2016, '20 '17. What they used to do was use, custom data fields, as personalization tokens for, CAN language that would be sent out to specific clients. And so they would have a snippet that specific or or or a little snippet within a snippet, you could say, that's specific to that client within that field. And then they would put in that personalization token, so you have canned language plus personalized, information.
Max Cohen:Because the idea is, and sorry, sales people. I don't mean to insult you, but they wanted to make the sales people write as little as possible. Yeah. Sales people don't always write well.
George B. Thomas:Sales sales people don't necessarily wanna write, though.
Liz Moorhead:To be fair, though, who a lot of people don't write well. Let's get
Max Cohen:And and and and and as great as you are communicating and as great as you are at getting people to like you, your your grasp on the written version of the English language might not be that strong. And so we want to make it, as simple as possible. I'm trying really hard to be diplomatic.
George B. Thomas:You're doing good. You're
Liz Moorhead:doing good. We
Max Cohen:we want me.
Liz Moorhead:I'm Now we choose to be diplomatic. Now we choose to be diplomatic. Yeah.
Max Cohen:We want to make it so the salespeople have in easiest time as possible communicating with, prospects and customers, without offending them with the fact that they dropped out of high school in, like, freshman year. So it's like
George B. Thomas:yeah. Okay. Maybe that wasn't so nice. But let me double down on what
Liz Moorhead:let me let me double down
George B. Thomas:on what Devin is saying here. Because what I want everybody to realize while I'm talking about text and Max is talking about text and we're talking about personalization tokens, I want everybody to understand that you can insert personalization tokens around a company, around deals, around tickets. You even have a section in there that is sender, that gives you some sender properties. So you can do things like first name, last name, email, phone number of the sender, you, by the way, of the snippet. And so now if you think about what Devon was talking about, you can create a company deal, ticket, or contact property.
George B. Thomas:By the way, one of the properties that you can now create is a text field. Right? And so you can now have these written text items, which by the way, in a text field, can you add imagery in a rich text? Yeah. Yes.
George B. Thomas:You can. And if you can use that as a property that you can pull into a snippet, is that a way that you can actually hack to do more than just text in a snippet? Yeah. Yep. You can.
George B. Thomas:So, again, it's getting creative with different pieces of the tool to then bring it into a part of a tool that we're talking today, and that's snippets. So you can you can do almost anything you want as long as you connect the dots properly with properties, snippets, objects, and the way that you wanna communicate or the way that you want to be able to dictate, the information into your CRM.
Liz Moorhead:What are some of the most important do's and don'ts that someone needs to keep in mind with snippets? And I'm gonna open this up and say, you know, I'm I'm open to do's and don'ts that live outside of the sales team since we did kind of tease that up at the top. Right? That some of these tools can be used by teams other than sales.
Max Cohen:Be be super careful when you're using like, if you're getting, like, really, really cavalier with using properties in there, be be careful that in the context that people would be using them, that you can guarantee the proper text is in there. Because if if snippets is all about saving time, which I think is just one of the good reasons. Right? Nothing wastes more time than having something like, like, a sentence of text or, like, something like that get created or generated, and then no sort of, like, value goes into, like, where any of these dynamic tokens are being used. And then that person's gotta, like, stop all their momentum of what they were doing, go back, and then figure out how to, like, reword what they wrote or type filling missing stuff in or anything.
Max Cohen:So it's like, just be, you know, careful in those situations. Like, also be very careful with, like, how you word stuff depending on how those tokens can manifest themselves in the snippet too as well. Like, you don't want people to, like, waste time going back and saying, oh, it's kinda awkward the way this is, like, written now based on the type of information that, like, came in from that property. And then it's just again, you're creating a lot of these, like, nuanced little time wasters, like, throughout people's days, which, you know, one or two isn't a huge deal. But when you multiply that across, like, a whole team of people relying on this, like, you know, quick snippets of text to be doing the job that they should be doing, and all of a sudden, you know, more often than not, they're becoming a hindrance for people.
Max Cohen:What's the point of even using them? Right? So it's just, like, just be careful. And if you are gonna put personalization token stuff in there, say, hey. Are we sure that when they're using this, there's a value?
Max Cohen:And are we sure that, like, whatever the values may be, the sentence structure still works, sounds natural, things like that. Right? Okay. Okay.
George B. Thomas:I gotta jump in here real quick before Devon says something. Because Max does bring up a good point, and it's actually a point that I wanna make that almost could have nothing to do with snippets, templates, or sequences. But since we're talking about snippets, templates, and sequences, I'm gonna throw it in here. And that's right. I'm talking to you right now.
George B. Thomas:If you have been rocking out your HubSpot portal for two months, two years, I don't care how long, you haven't spent the quality time that should and needs to be spent on your personalization tokens, meaning your property defaults so that when you do or your team does use these objects, these properties, and we don't have the data collected or input into the CRM yet, that we don't look like we don't know what we're doing, then buy all that is holy, spend some time in email in your settings and landing pages or pages in your settings depending on if you're using CMS full or not, and look at the contact company, AKA default properties for personalization that you can set up and have in place. Okay. Back to our regularly scheduled show.
Max Cohen:So quick quick thing with that, and and you you bring up a really good point, George. And in email, like, when you're building, like, marketing emails, you have the option to use, like, the global default, right, or set a specific default to use as a fallback value for personalization tokens. However, snippets only will let you use the global default. Right? So that's something to kind of keep in mind.
Max Cohen:Like, when you're creating those global defaults, you can say, Hey, we'll use the global default for snippets, but then whenever we're doing this in, like, the context of a marketing email, we can kind of customize it to use what we want in there, right? Just so we don't get that same option when we're inside of snippets and actually, like, building one as, you know, to only say, Use this value for this specific snippet. It's always gonna default to what a global fallback one would be. Devil's in the details, baby.
Liz Moorhead:Alright. Gentlemen, let us turn our attention to templates. And we're talking specifically about we're we're talking about a very specific type of template here. So what when we when we're talking about templates in the sales case, what kind of templates are we talking about? What are they?
Liz Moorhead:What are their intended use case? Because you hear template. You could be thinking of website theme templates. You could be thinking of email templates. There are so many different templates inside of HubSpot.
Max Cohen:One off email templates as if you were sending an email through Gmail or Outlook or whatever. Not a marketing email template, not a website template. Right? So you can kinda think of them like snippets snippets except they only work when you're sending, like, a a sales email, if you will. Like, I hate the term sales email.
Max Cohen:I think, like, a one to one email. Right? So you're on a CRM record. You're sending an email to somebody. The big difference is that it's not just like the body of the text.
Max Cohen:It's the subject line as well. Right? So the template will the template will include a subject line and then full body of an email. And then when you're actually in there in that email, like, personalizing it further, you could even drop in other snippets. Right?
Max Cohen:If you if you have the need to do that. Right? But think of a template as giving you sort of, like, the overall beginning structure of a email you commonly send out a whole bunch.
Liz Moorhead:Thanks, George. No, George. I'm gonna need more than a yep from you. Give me some
Max Cohen:commentary people are coming for.
Max Cohen:Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:No. Ditto.
George B. Thomas:No. No. I I mean, again, if I think about, snippets, templates, and sequences, and I go into what my normal kind of narrative is, I think about a sequence as a a wall like a wall. Right? And, or actually, a sequence is a house.
George B. Thomas:I think of a sequence as a house. I think of the template is a wall, and I think of the snippets as a brick. So, like, you can use snippets inside of templates, by the way. We'll probably get back to that because talk about having a template that is, like, 70% done. I'll get back to that too.
George B. Thomas:And being able to do, like, 10% of completing it with snippets, I'll tie that together. But then, again, you have to think about the end means here. It's like, these three templates or four templates are going to be put together to create this sequence, the house in which you're trying to build, to communicate in a streamlined way. But not only streamlined way of communication, an entire process that you're gonna, like, reach out on social, give them a call, send this email, do this other thing, you know, take a nap and then send this other email. Whatever it is, it's the process.
George B. Thomas:So So when I start to think about these templates, I start to think about a way that I can build the messaging tube about 70% complete knowing that I'm gonna customize it 30%. Meaning, I'm gonna find any personalization tokens that I can put in there. That's gonna be 10% of it. I'm gonna find any personal trigger moment that I can put in there, not trigger in a bad way, like, oh, you triggered me. A trigger moment meaning, hey.
George B. Thomas:We met at the lunch and learn, or we were talking at the barbecue and you asked me these three questions about your content strategy, blah blah blah. Whatever it is, like, to the connect or trigger point that this conversation is starting on based on the connection of the humans. And then I use another 10% if it is a piece of content that I've created snippets around. Now I've got this template that is 70% done, 10% personalized, 1010% specific to the human, and 10% filled in with the content of snippets that I actually wanna share with them. And I am off to the races.
Liz Moorhead:Devin, when I talk about templates, where does your mind immediately go?
Max Cohen:Version control. Oh.
Liz Moorhead:What about it? Oh. Oh.
Max Cohen:So the thing is is that it's really easy to mess up your sales team by use by changing what they're used to using. And that's just in general, where you can create a template. And this is even, for snippets as well, where let's say that there's something, language that you wanna deprecate in the old one, but you didn't maybe talk to the sales team and say, well, we actually like it saying this because they're able to know, one, that there's a newer version come out if you put out version control, and they can give you feedback on the two if you don't have feedback, incorporated in it. But it also keeps everybody on the same page as knowing, okay. Here's what we've changed.
Max Cohen:If you do do updates, here's what we changed. Here's what you need to know. Everyone start using version six now.
Max Cohen:Yeah. And the other thing too, like, it helps with, like I mean, that helps with consistency. Right? Because, like, what are you doing when you're not using a tool like this? Is everyone's got that, like, you know, Google Doc full of, like, fire email templates that people have been using, and you just copy and paste it and forget to remove where it says, hi, first name.
Max Cohen:Not that I've done that a million times. Yeah. It's very, very embarrassing. But, like, the I think the other thing and and maybe was you're you're getting to, like, the best practices part of this. But, you know Let's go
Liz Moorhead:ahead and dive into it. Let's start talking
Max Cohen:about that. Let's dive into it. The the big thing well, actually, what there's one other thing we're we're also kind of forgetting about, like, what templates are because I forgot about this. They're not just for email now. If you go into the templates tool, you might also see that there's a WhatsApp section.
Max Cohen:Right? Oh. So you can build WhatsApp conversation templates that will, like, start new conversations with people. I don't know how it works because I've never used WhatsApp. But if you see that in there and you're using the WhatsApp integration, it basically is like a car conversation, like, starter, like, through a WhatsApp message.
Max Cohen:Right? You can you can build as, like, a template. And I think you have to get them, like, approved through, WhatsApp or or something like that. But, anyway, going back to, like, the more classic sort of example of it. George, do you have a Yeah.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. Yeah. Before you dive into that so hold your thought.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah.
George B. Thomas:If you're listening to this podcast right now and you are rocking out the world of, WhatsApp app and HubSpot, and you're doing dope stuff, you need to reach out, to me or anybody on the team. Let us know. We might just need to get you on an episode where we talk about everything HubSpot and WhatsApp and what the teams need to know. Sorry. Max, go ahead.
George B. Thomas:I just wanted to put that out to the community.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Calling all WhatsApp gurus. Anyway, so when it comes down to, like, the the best practices around it, you know, what you definitely shouldn't be doing with templates is just using it as a way to, like, enable your salespeople to become mass emailers.
Max Cohen:Like, that is like, that's the wrong
Liz Moorhead:Yes.
Max Cohen:That's the wrong way to do it. Like Yeah. Gmail or Office three sixty five are not meant to be high volume marketing email sending platforms. And you have to remember, when you're sending emails through HubSpot, right, these one to one, you know, you know, emails sent from the CRM record or through sequences or whatever. It's not going through HubSpot's like mass email sending servers.
Max Cohen:It's going directly from your Gmail account, which has a daily limit of how many emails that get sent. Yeah. Exactly. So, like, you need to treat these like regular emails. Like, I would use templates when you're doing, like, one on one emails with people, but you know it's an email that you type all the time and you wanna save some time and get it in there.
Max Cohen:But the other big thing is, like, leave room for human personalization. It's not meant to be the entire email. It's meant to be the framework of the email. Right? And then go in and kind of add your own personal flare to it so it's not just like a copy paste send job.
Max Cohen:Right? They added a really cool feature a while ago where, like, not only can you drop in personalization tokens, like, that's been around since templates have been around, but they also allow you to add in what they call placeholder tokens, right, which to me is, like, one of the cooler things that they've done. So when you add in a placeholder token, what you can basically say is, like, you can say, alright. At this point of the email, write about a personal experience you had with the last person on the last call or something like that. Right?
Max Cohen:So, you know, make some sort of personal reference, ask them some sort of genuine like, whatever it may be. Right? And you can build in, sort of, like, these these, not notifications, but I forget the word I'm looking for. Like, context clues to say, hey, sales rep, mention something personal here. Add your own set of, like, you know, personality to this email.
Max Cohen:Right? Instead of it being just, like, a rigid copy of the same thing you're sending out to everybody. Right? You know? So leave room for that.
Max Cohen:That. Leave room from, like, other snippets that you may, like, kinda toss in there, like, depending on the context of the email. It doesn't have to be the entire thing. But also, like, think about how you could fold it into different processes that you have. Right?
Max Cohen:So if you are someone who is onboarding new customers, right, this could easily easily have everything you need in it to get someone to, like, book time with you and start your onboarding process or, like, whatever it is. Because you could easily drop in, like, meeting links. You can drop in stuff from HubSpot video. You could put in any documents that you have from the documents tool. Like, it talks to all these other productivity tools in HubSpot that you could then include in your template.
Max Cohen:Right? So use it. It doesn't just have to be text and, like, a personalization token of how your first name. Like, you could do so much more with it.
Liz Moorhead:Dude, you're stealing my fire. You're stealing my fire.
George B. Thomas:I totally wanted to talk about the documents tool, right, and and the ability to have that meeting links in there. And and, by all that is holy, video. Having video that can sit in a template that you can then grab and send and not have to, like, search for it and upload it and embed it and find the link and blah blah. Like, I I love templates.
Liz Moorhead:That's all you gotta say about templates, George?
George B. Thomas:Well, no. I wanna give Devin some space to talk about templates too.
Liz Moorhead:Alright. Alright. I just wanna make sure you sound
George B. Thomas:super smart. Wanna be a Max about it. Right? Max is stealing all the fire, you know, not really letting us have stuff to talk about. You know?
Liz Moorhead:Oh my god.
Max Cohen:Because I'm just I'm the alpha right now. It's almost doing alpha shit.
Liz Moorhead:Damn. Devin. Devin, she's coming to restore order. No. Devin, that was a joke.
Liz Moorhead:That was a joke.
Max Cohen:Well, just just a small, use case that, I've used in the past was for a a franchisor that was using a single, HubSpot dashboard to manage all of their franchisee communications. And and I mean, customer communications via, the franchisees, and what we did is we created a workflow that automatically assigned, the EVP, general, manager, I think it was, and the sales rep to each of the people by region, each of the, contacts by region. And then what we would do is we would use those personalization tokens within the templates. So then we would be able to utilize one template, instead of one for every person using, like, the signature function, and it would have all of the correct people and their contact information auto populate into the template for that particular contact.
George B. Thomas:Nice. Outstanding. Nice. It's tight.
Liz Moorhead:Max, did you enjoy that one in particular?
Max Cohen:It was tight. It was very tight.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah. Yeah. It was good. It was good.
Max Cohen:Yeah. It was good.
Liz Moorhead:Yeah. It was good. Yeah. It was good. Yeah.
Liz Moorhead:Alright, gentlemen. What are what are some of you know what? Let me come down to your level. What are some of the don'ts around templates before we move on to sequences?
Max Cohen:Don't overdo it. Don't have a template for every possible conversation. Leave some room for personalization, please. Like, it it because you gotta navigate these things, people. And then the last thing you want is, like, 50 different templates, and they're all saying kinda close to the same thing, but you never know which one you want in order to Yeah.
Max Cohen:Just don't. Stay chill. Stay general with templates. You don't have to have one for every kind of conversation.
George B. Thomas:And and in that with
Max Cohen:your team every once in a while Yeah. To make sure, like, you don't have too many that you don't need.
George B. Thomas:Oh, yeah. There's nothing wrong with deleting a template, by the way. If nobody's using it, it doesn't have to hang out in HubSpot. My god. So here's I wanna kinda go a little bit in the same vein as Devin is.
George B. Thomas:I think and by the way, this happens in a lot of spaces. Like, if you talk to marketers about creating an article historically, they might think about one article at a time versus, like, a trifecta of three articles that belong together, that go actually through the funnel. And so when I bring it back to templates and start to think about this, it's not only just thinking about a singular template, but thinking about a template that might be paired with another or it might be a set of three. Meaning, there's probably gonna be different places in a sales funnel, in marketing conversations, in a podcasting process that you're gonna have to meet people. And so when you think about it as a process of communication instead of a singular thing to communicate, now all of a sudden you're building a a toolset, that you can use instead of these kind of one offs.
George B. Thomas:So so think of how you can pair them together, I guess, is what I'm trying to say here.
Max Cohen:Yeah. One more thing. Be mindful of the voice used in your templates, in your templates and your snippets. One thing that can be extremely jarring in a customer, experience is when you've been interacting somewhat with someone and then you get an interaction from them that is obviously not from them. It it definitely takes away from the customer experience.
Max Cohen:Don't be overly formal, in in your templatized speech, in in your snippets. Try to sound like a human being having a conversation. There have been numerous times where I have been in an organization that we use templates and snippets, and I'll take it and I'll just rewrite some of it because it it doesn't sound like me at all. And it is so it it was, like, so hilariously obvious that, one, it didn't sound like me, and then, two, it was verbose and, like, overly apologetic, and then it started giving me solutions. And three, And and then they sent it within thirty seconds of my response.
Max Cohen:It's like, so, obviously, it's a cut and paste job. So Yeah. Yeah. Just just be mindful of that, and and don't discourage people, from editing templates. As long as the information is there and accurate, empower people to make your messaging and your templates and snippets their own if they feel so refined.
George B. Thomas:Yeah. It's it's interesting because, Max, I'll give you one second here. We can tell that it was a copy and paste job, Devin, because I might have gotten that template from you. And the first line said how much you actually love Dominic Toretto, and that you're you're a big fan of his. So I immediate I immediately knew that it wasn't coming from you.
George B. Thomas:It was it was coming from somebody else. So that that's no good.
Max Cohen:It's some identity theft right there.
George B. Thomas:But here's what I'll say too before I pass it over to Max is that, if you're if you're c suite right now and you're listening to this, I hope you would take what Devin said to heart and realize that the templates and probably the snippets too are really meant to be, like, kind of a little bit of guardrails that people play within, but that we are allowed to have the freedom to make it sound like us, be us. Because, again, if we go back to the whole thing that makes all of this work is that we come off as
Max Cohen:Humans.
George B. Thomas:And we're serving God.
Max Cohen:Humans. There it is.
Liz Moorhead:We actually served
Max Cohen:right before
Max Cohen:minutes in.
George B. Thomas:I'm just gonna throw that out there.
Liz Moorhead:Just throw that out there.
Max Cohen:That looks so organic too. That was
Liz Moorhead:That's Smooth. It only took me 10 episodes of coaching of you telling you, like, if you try to squeeze it in in the first thirty seconds, it doesn't count. So I'm glad here we are, finally, 18,000 episodes in, and we've got it. Hey.
Max Cohen:It's good.
George B. Thomas:It's good. Practice takes perfect.
Max Cohen:We did it.
Liz Moorhead:We did it.
George B. Thomas:Max, you did have something important that you wanted to say, though.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Man. This is gonna be the goofiest transition back to what
Liz Moorhead:we were talking about. But,
Max Cohen:I'd say the one thing is, like, you know, templates should feel like a tool that, like, you as an individual contributor should feel comfortable experimenting with. Right? As long as you're I mean, I would I would hope that your organization would give you kind of the autonomy be to be able to do that and not be such like a, I don't know, police that the templates and email stuff that you're doing with people. But, like, the one thing I'll say in terms of, like, template etiquette, if you have some templates that, like, you're experimenting with and you haven't wanted to, like, release them to the team yet, put that thing as private. Right?
Max Cohen:Instead of available to everyone. Because you're only gonna confuse people if you make a whole bunch of templates that you're testing around and playing with and and testing out and stuff like that. When everyone can see them, they might get confused about what they should be using. Right? And maybe those templates aren't, like, really fully baked out and, you know, performing that well yet.
Max Cohen:So make sure you're setting stuff to private. And, hey, if you end up getting a, like, a a template that that hits, right, don't don't keep that to yourself. Share the wealth. Open that thing up. Make it make it available to the rest of the team so they can use it.
Max Cohen:Just make sure you have some conversations with them about why it's there, what situations you use it under, how you go about adding a little bit of personalization to it just so people can use it with the proper context and get out of it what you got out of it when you were using it.
Max Cohen:So
George B. Thomas:One more thing before template.
Max Cohen:One more
George B. Thomas:thing before we go away from templates too. By all that is holy, use a freaking folder structure. Like, just let's just use a folder structure. Be be a good human. And and by the way, while I'm on the soapbox, HubSpot.
George B. Thomas:That's right. I'm talking to you. If you work at HubSpot if you work at HubSpot and you know somebody that works on the templates and the snippets tools, it is twenty twenty three. Can I please, please get folders inside of folders? Because the fact that I can't go and make a folder for Jimmy and give Jimmy a folder for outlines, question asks, like, different things that Jimmy might need to dive into.
George B. Thomas:I love you, HubSpot, but can I get folders and folders, please?
Max Cohen:Yeah. Just go talk to the workflow team. They just did some folders and workflows.
Max Cohen:You know?
Liz Moorhead:You just they they go over there and
George B. Thomas:chitchat with them. I'm just saying.
Liz Moorhead:Big orange sprocket. Shots fired. Alright. Now let's bring it home with sequences. Who is gonna tell me what they are and what they are supposed to be used for?
Max Cohen:One to one communication.
Liz Moorhead:Okay. So, Devin, I see you have a couple feelings here. Maybe five of them. You wanna unpack them with us? It's a safe space, buddy.
Max Cohen:Sequences are not workflows. Oh. They are they are not designed for one to many communications. You should not be attempting to bulk enroll people into sequences
George B. Thomas:I can't wait to ask a question.
Max Cohen:For sequences to do your job for you. Sequences are are meant for salespeople to nurture more effectively.
Liz Moorhead:Max is gonna be back.
Max Cohen:Sequences include not just emails, but reminders. They tell you, hey. You should connect with this person on LinkedIn. Have you given them a call yet? And and it's, oh my gosh.
Max Cohen:Like, they're one to one communications is what sequences are for. If you're gonna do one to one to many communications first, rethink it. And and it's like because you're you're doing sales, not marketing. You're interacting with human beings, not bombarding them with spam. Like, there there was a reason why it took so long.
Max Cohen:Like, I don't even I I I feel like you can mass enroll, but but but don't. Don't. Just stop. Don't.
Max Cohen:Don't. Okay. Never.
Liz Moorhead:So that was gonna be my question. And if hold on. I was patient. Max.
Max Cohen:Hold on.
Liz Moorhead:Max has been popping back
Max Cohen:to the sales director out there
George B. Thomas:Oh, god.
Max Cohen:That thinks you're gonna go and buy a list of contacts. Come on, brother. And you're gonna take that list of contacts, and you're gonna give it to your sales reps, brother. And you think that they're gonna enroll those 1,000 new contacts that you just bought, you need to shut the delete your HubSpot account and never ever do
Max Cohen:that because you can't and you shouldn't and you you won't be able to and just it's a bad strategy. Strategy.
Liz Moorhead:Next, can you tell how you really feel about that? I'm I'm a little lost. I feel
Max Cohen:like I finally don't work at HubSpot anymore, and I can speak my mind truly about how
Liz Moorhead:I feel about it. Okay. We need
Max Cohen:to get that out for a while. Listen. There is no good strategy of I'm gonna of contacts and tell my salespeople to shower them with sequences. It doesn't work. Don't do it.
Max Cohen:Stop.
George B. Thomas:So that's it's I love
Max Cohen:first of all, that that is good.
George B. Thomas:So good.
Liz Moorhead:Good. So
Max Cohen:That's good.
Liz Moorhead:First of all, that that I'm a
Max Cohen:long off.
Max Cohen:Thanks, guys.
George B. Thomas:That right there is hitting the Internet tonight. I swear by all the powers that I have
Liz Moorhead:Oh, god. Somehow, I gotta clip that out and
George B. Thomas:put it on LinkedIn and be like,
Liz Moorhead:how am I? Include the five minutes of rocking in that situation. Oh, it's it's hilarious. So so here's here's the thing. Because I wanted to immediately ask
George B. Thomas:the question, and now I think I know. But what do you two think about the fact that I can actually use a workflow action that is mass enroll people into a sequence? Like, it never made sense to me. I know there are people that probably have use cases. If you're a listener and you have a use case that isn't spammy, that isn't crappy, to how you're actually auto enrolling in a workflow people into sequences, I wanna know.
George B. Thomas:But Max and Devon Okay. Have you guys ever heard of a good reason for this?
Max Cohen:No. Okay. No. Okay. So here's the deal.
Max Cohen:There's been I I I can't tell you how many people I heard over the years going, why can't I enroll someone in a sequence via a workflow?
Liz Moorhead:Yes.
Max Cohen:Right? And that's because people don't understand that sequences send emails from your Gmail or Office 365 account, not from HubSpot's email sending service. Now here's the deal. When HubSpot sends mass marketing emails out, okay, you may notice that you can't send those emails out without the little information in the footer that shows the address of your company. CanSpan.
Max Cohen:And that's I I believe that's CanSpan. Yeah. Right? So what is actually happening in the back end? You know how you have to go into the settings in HubSpot somewhere and type in your company's information versus actually typing it in in the footer of an email?
Max Cohen:That's because it inserts these tokens into those emails to guarantee that you have your can spam information in the footer to protect your ass from getting in legal trouble. Alright? Because you can't be sending out mass emails without can spam information at the bottom. Okay? So here's the deal.
Max Cohen:If HubSpot were to allow people because do you really think it was that hard for them to build the the the feature that enrolls people in a sequence? No. No. It they didn't do it because if you did allow that to happen, right? And it works the way people wanted it to work, you could then use workflows to mass spam people using sequences in theory.
Max Cohen:Right? Now that's bad because of a couple of things. One, you're you're we we have no guarantee that you're not violating the can spam, rules or laws or like whatever it is because that email is getting sent out by Gmail, not our servers that can check to see if that token is present before the mass email goes out. One. Right?
Max Cohen:So HubSpot didn't do that to protect your asses, first of all. Okay? So give HubSpot some respect there. Second of all what was the second one? Second of all, there's another reason.
Max Cohen:Oh, yeah. If you were to just, like, be able to enroll sequences via a workflow, right, you could easily, like, go over the total amount of emails that you could send, like, from your Gmail account and all of a sudden, oops, you you know, you sent a you enrolled 5,000 people in, like, a sequence or something. My email's locked up for the rest of the day because Gmail only lets you send out, like, what, 3,000 emails total a day. Right? So it's just like, it's not that it was a deficit a deficit in the product that it wasn't in there.
Max Cohen:It's just that the way those emails are sent are not meant to be sent in a mass way. Right? So for all the folks who were, like, dying for HubSpot to be able to send sequences via workflows, there's reasons why HubSpot didn't do it. Now, they did eventually roll it out to people. Eventually roll it out to people.
Max Cohen:Yeah. Right? But it's done in kind of like a very limited capacity and there's some limiters in the back end that make sure that it doesn't screw up your email and stuff like that. Right? But, you know, that's like the way it works now is you can really only send out a sequence from a specific person.
Max Cohen:Right? Instead of just like from whoever the owner is. Right? And that's because you can't really guarantee who's connected their email and who hasn't because again, these emails get sent from a connected inbox. Yep.
Max Cohen:Right? Now, I've found certain situations where it actually makes sense where you might have one or a couple people in the company that need to set up some automation for them personally or maybe a couple other possible people that a lead could get rotated to. Right? But you gotta do a lot of, like, branching logic stuff and things like that. It doesn't really work too well if you're scaling it up to a massive amount.
Max Cohen:Like, if you have, like, hundreds of sales reps, you're probably
Max Cohen:not gonna use it because you
Max Cohen:gotta make sure all of them you're probably not gonna use it because you gotta make sure all of them have their email connected. All of them have, like, access to the right sequence. You know, like, all this stuff is set up, and it's just not a super scalable thing, but that's because it's meant to be used on a one to one basis and not for mass email, guys. Like, let your marketers take care of the mass email. You can send emails from HubSpot that are marketing emails that accomplish the exact thing you want them to accomplish and make it look like it's from a sales rep.
Max Cohen:You can do that. It doesn't have to be in a sequence. Right? So sorry. Yeah.
Max Cohen:This one makes my blood boil a little bit. So I just had to I had to set the record straight for folks.
George B. Thomas:Makes great TV. Makes great TV. I'm just gonna throw that out there. Yeah.
Max Cohen:There there there's the thing and I I I know Max said it repeatedly, but I don't think he stressed it quite enough. Sequences come from your inbox. They're not coming from HubSpot. When HubSpot sends out a market when you send out a marketing email through HubSpot, that's coming through HubSpot's IP address if you have a dedicated one or if you're like most people doing the shared IP address. All of that is coming from HubSpot.
Max Cohen:Imagine if you log in to your email and you can't use it, your personal Gmail. And then and then you might have the audacity to get mad at HubSpot about it. No. You did that. With great power comes great responsibility.
Liz Moorhead:Let's go right now.
Max Cohen:Let's go. Yeah. Yeah.
Max Cohen:You can blow your whole stuff up if you do this wrong. Can you imagine?
George B. Thomas:Can you imagine you wake up in the morning, you got your, you know, PJs on, you're like, I'm gonna get my cup of coffee. I'm gonna check my morning emails, and then you can't. Can you imagine the call to your boss of, like,
Liz Moorhead:hey, boss. I think I screwed something up.
George B. Thomas:Yeah.
Max Cohen:Oh, we could take it we could take it one step further. Can you imagine if your regular email that you're sending to someone goes directly to spam because you shot up your entire company's real IP address over doing something you weren't supposed to be doing? I know a guy who tried to send me driving directions. Just regular old email went straight to spam. Like, hit every communication you send will go to you can't get you can't get out of that.
Max Cohen:There there's no comment. You gotta change your domain now. You gotta put in a subdomain or something because you you just shot your own self in the foot.
Max Cohen:Yeah. One Which is also why you just patience. Yeah. Which is also just another reason why you don't buy listed contacts and just shower them with emails randomly. So because I blow your domain reputation into the stratosphere.
Liz Moorhead:So Alright, guys. Guys. Alright. I'm putting a pen in this place.
Max Cohen:I'm putting a pen in this thing.
George B. Thomas:Listen. There's so much one
Max Cohen:more trauma. There's so much trauma that we're unloading right now from years of talking to people about this stuff that didn't understand it. Like, it just has to come out. I'm sorry.
George B. Thomas:One one more thing.
Liz Moorhead:One more thing. Need to be signed.
George B. Thomas:One more thing I gotta add in, unless you can take it to wherever we gotta go. But I can't wait until we hopefully do a live episode at Inbound of the Hub Heroes podcast because I'm gonna wait for just the most opportune time to light a stick of dynamite and be like, Devin, Max, what do you think about enrolling people in sequences via workflows? I'm just gonna
Max Cohen:throw it out there right
George B. Thomas:in the middle of everybody and just watch it in
Max Cohen:sync. Gonna start throwing chairs and our Yeah.
Max Cohen:We're gonna start fighting people.
Max Cohen:Just like just elbows everywhere.
Liz Moorhead:You know, George, you said, Liz is gonna take this wherever we need to take this. I don't know if I need us to go to, like, some sort of therapy office or maybe just to the I don't know. I will come around and hug all of you after today's episode because clearly, we George will be last. But yes. You know?
George B. Thomas:Not nice.
Max Cohen:But, hey, guys. Sequences are cool too. Like, they're great. Like, you can use them to make sure that people book time on your calendar.
George B. Thomas:They're processing.
Max Cohen:Email them because they book time.
Liz Moorhead:That's great. Gentlemen. Outstanding. Alright, guys. You know what?
Liz Moorhead:If there is one thing from this episode that someone needs to remember that has nothing to do with sequences not being mass email explosion machines, what would it be and why?
Max Cohen:I don't even know, man. I've, like, wiped out all higher functions now. Like, I can only focus so much. And and and y'all you you really lit a fuse with the sequences question.
Liz Moorhead:I know. How dare I ask what sequences are?
Max Cohen:Here here we go. Here we go. Sequences are more than just sending emails. They're an opportunity to keep your salesperson on track when it comes to interacting with a, prospect or or, a customer. This is an opportunity for them to set reminders to do things, to reach out.
Max Cohen:Yeah. And, also, you can unenroll someone from a sequence and put them in another sequence depending on where they are in the buyer's journey. And so these are all things to keep in mind. They're they're, they're it's about process. Like George said, this is all about helping you streamline your process and keeping your sales team accountable keeps leads from falling through the, cracks once you start engaging, once they're supposed to be in that sequence.
Max Cohen:Because you only enroll people in a sequence if it's a one on one communication. You don't let let me stop for these people in this hallway.
Liz Moorhead:Start knocking on my door.
Max Cohen:George so
Liz Moorhead:George and Max, if if people only remember one thing about snippets, templates, or sequences from this episode, what should it be and why?
Max Cohen:Be creative. We talked a lot about sales, but these tools are just as great on the service side. Right? I mean, I will tell you, it is it was when I was an implementation specialist, it was the best thing ever when I got a new customer just to put someone in a sequence that would just take care of getting that onboarding call booked. Right?
Max Cohen:Like and for me to not have to think about it, for me not have to, like, manually make reminders of myself for myself to reach out to people when they wouldn't pick up the phone, and I was trying to book this call. Right? Being able to reenroll people in a sequence, in a different step, at a different date, like, there's so many cool things that you can do with it. But again, I'd say find the nuanced repetitive interactions that waste a lot of time and figure out how you can use these three tools to plug those holes, right, and make things a lot more efficient.
George B. Thomas:I'm gonna go back to the very, very, very beginning of this episode. And the thing to remember is that these tools are not just for sales teams. They are for all teams, to do exactly what we've said you should do and to not do what we've said you shouldn't do. So just like we're getting all hype about buying lists and auto enrolling and sequences and stuff like that, make sure your sales team is being human. Make sure your service team is being human.
George B. Thomas:Make sure your marketing team is being human. Again, these tools are tools. They are there to help us be better versions of ourself, faster Like, it all comes down to snippets, templates, and sequences are at our fingertips to create a better user experience for prospects, leads, customers, evangelists, whoever we happen to be communicating with at that point in time.
Liz Moorhead:Gentlemen, thank you for a really tame, uninspired episode.
George B. Thomas:It's kinda boring.
Liz Moorhead:My coach my coaching note to all of you is next time, can you give a damn? Just next time, try.
George B. Thomas:Give a little more.
Liz Moorhead:Next time, try. Give a little more. Give a little more. I love you all.
Max Cohen:Off the show.
Liz Moorhead:And to all of our listeners
Max Cohen:Hey. What
Liz Moorhead:I hope you're alright. Yes, Max. What?
Max Cohen:Thank you for listening.
Liz Moorhead:Get out of here. Please go. Everyone, leave. We're done now. Goodbye.
Liz Moorhead:No poetry. I was gonna do a poem today, and I am poetried out.
Max Cohen:Oh, wow.
George B. Thomas:I know. Oh. I know. I know. Wow.
Liz Moorhead:I might be saving up for next time, though. Oh, so
George B. Thomas:Okay, hub heroes. We've reached the end of another episode. Will lord lack continue to loom over the community, or will we be able to defeat him in the next episode of the Hub Heroes podcast? Make sure you tune in and find out in the next episode. Make sure you head over to the hubheroes.com to get the latest episodes and become part of the League of Heroes.
George B. Thomas:FYI, if you're part of the League of Heroes, you'll get the show notes right in your inbox, and they come with some hidden power up potential as well. Make sure you share this podcast with a friend. Leave a review if you like what you're listening to, and use the hashtag, hashtag hub euros podcast on any of the socials, and let us know what strategy conversation you'd like to listen into next. Until next time, when we meet and combine our forces, remember to be a happy, helpful, humble human, and, of course, always be looking for a way to be someone's hero.