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Recorded: Wednesday 09 February 2022 | Published: Friday 11 February 2022
Last episode we went through the Lazy Salespersons’ Cheat Sheet to using HubSpot. We thought it worth clarifying that ‘lazy’ is a good thing (not a criticism). Ian and I both come from developer backgrounds, where the idea of a lazy developer is considered something to strive for.
The lazy developer principle posits that the best developers are lazy, and look for ways to accelerate and automate as much of their work as possible.
We used to have a saying ‘if you need something done quickly give it to the laziest developer’, the reason being that the laziest developer will look for the quickest way to get it done and off their list of items.
With that context set, hopefully you can see how our Lazy Salesperson approach is an extension of this idea. The best salespeople focus on high value tasks, and find hacks, tips, cheats and tricks to automate all the other stuff.
(ie it’s not about being unprofessional, slow, dishonest or low value - quite the opposite)
Summary: Lazy is good. And we’re help to help you be lazy. You’re welcome.
Note: Bill Gates is often credited with saying: “I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.” but there’s little evidence he ever said this…
Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:
Sending internal notification emails is a common action in workflows (eg a form is submitted and you want to notify people).
Whilst you could just use the basic notification option on forms, this would alert those users for every form. Instead you might want to selectively notify people based on the form details (eg you might have a location dropdown on the form, and notify different people based on which location was selected).
This is where Workflows allow much greater flexibility - since they can branch based on the fields and send internal notifications accordingly.
You have a few internal email notification options, perhaps confusingly labeled as:
What’s the difference?
The first option - Send internal email notification - allows you to build a simple text email, right within the workflow - we almost never use this action.
The second option - Send internal marketing email - is the most flexible and powerful, and what we usually use.
Essentially you are creating a normal automation marketing email (just like you would send to a contact), with full styling and drag-and-drop functionality, including personalisation options.
But when you use that normal automation email to send internally, it is via that second action option.
Ie Send internal marketing email = Select an automation email but send to internal users
The only difference between ‘Send internal marketing email’ and ‘Send email’ is who the recipient is: ie a user (internal) or contact (external)
We’d love to see: Personalisation via Form fields
Currently you can select personalisation tokens from :
Would love to see an additional option to select from Form fields (ie select a form and then insert the fields from it as personalisation tokens in the email).
Bonus request: would love to be able to insert multiple personalisation fields at once eg select a bunch of contact fields, or form fields and add at once (rather than having to individually add)
Here’s a somewhat related community post - see the comments.
Deal Create Cards - Global
Deal Sidebar Cards - this is based on Teams, and can be made conditional based on properties of the deal:
Deal Pipeline Mandatory Fields
Summary: The Create Deal card is global, and can't be tailored per pipeline. But sidebar cards can be tailored, and even be conditional. And required fields can be set on a per pipeline, per deal stage basis
One popular feature request has been the ability to add decimals in quotes and product line items. Good news, looks like it is coming this quarter.
It may look like something like this in Google Search Console, I found out that we have pages that don’t appear in Google because the following ERROR: Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404
In our case the page has a title and an embedded YouTube video. So the most likely reason is that each page has little to no content (in Google’s eyes).
Google would expect pages with little to no content to return an HTTP status code 404 Not Found.
So how do we fix this? In this case get the video transcribed and added to the knowledge base article.
Learn more about Soft 404 errors and how to fix them in this Content King post.
For the new Insert Proposed times feature (we discussed last episode) to work:
You need to have your Calendar sync enabled in Settings:
Note: this is in addition to the usual Calendar connection used for Meetings.
Here is a video we did recently on YouTube > Using HubSpot Meetings to sync with your Google/Office365 Calendar
Thanks to Mun in the HubSpot Technical Support team for highlighting this issue to us recently for a client.
The issue was that attribution for Facebook traffic didn’t seem to be correct.
Turns out the site has a cookie policy enabled (using HubSpot Cookie policy), a side-effect of which is that if the cookies aren’t accepted then the visit isn’t tracked. This is the case for most cookie consent tools. Because a lot of the Facebook traffic is on mobile (ie in the FB app browser) the cookie consent is being ignored and the visits not tracked fully. Which is quite a problem.
The solution to this depends largely on the location of your visitors.
In Australia for example there is no legal requirement to show cookie consent popups. Thus, in Australia, the answer is simple - turn off all your cookie policies. This is something we did in our portal years ago (ie Unpublish them all):
But if you’re located elsewhere, you’ll need to check your legal obligations.
For example, for HubShots we likely need to get legal advice about whether we should enable the cookie policy (ie annoy) for our EU listeners. Sorry in advance if this gets enabled - we all know these cookie popups are completely useless and a huge pain, but hey, apparently they’re protecting our privacy…
We’ve discussed this before back in episode 256 when HubSpot CMS Starter was first released. The Start version is limited to 15 pages, with no options for purchasing additional pages - the only option is to upgrade to CMS Pro, which is a significant price increase.
In the past few months we’ve lost 3 CMS Hub projects (they went to WordPress instead) due to this. It’s so frustrating because CMS Hub is an ideal fit in all other considerations. Two of the prospects had just over 15 pages, and on was under (but was concerned about limitations for growth in the future and being ‘stuck’ with HubSpot).
I really wish HubSpot just offered additional ‘packs’ of 10 pages that could be added on later. I’d also like the 15 page limit to apply just to published pages, not all pages (draft etc).
Btw I asked HubSpot in a partner call last year why the 15 page limit and they indicated it had been based on analysing all the existing portals and the typical page count in those portals.
I’d love to know if they have any telemetry on website portal deals they’ve lost? Eg what’s the typical page count of websites they don’t have on HubSpot CMS :-)
Makes me think of the famous Abraham Wald World War 2 anecdote about flawed analysing of bullet holes in planes that made it back (ie portals with more than 15 pages being the planes that didn’t make it back in this comparison).
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”
- Steve JobsCourse Details:
Another great person to follow on LinkedIn is Kyle Jepson who has some great videos on product updates. Follow Kyle here.
Connect with HubShots here:
Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn
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 and XEN Solar.
HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.
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