Episode 277: HubSpot Top Tips April 2022 Edition

Welcome to HubShots Episode 277: HubSpot Top Tips April 2022 Edition  

This edition we dive into:

• Quick tips for improving your HubSpot efficiency and impact, including
• Using Progressive Form fields
• How to merge contacts in HubSpot *
• How to view all properties on a contact
• How to export contacts *
• How to pin notes on the HubSpot activity timeline *
• How to filter activity timeline items
• 4 tips for using Views *
• How to add a simple feedback popup on your site
• How to add NPS survey reminder emails *
• Reminder to focus on what you can control
• Reminder to not believe everything you read (even on reputable marketing sites)
• An example of how a company compared themselves to HubSpot but got just about everything completely wrong - it’s kinda embarrassing  

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Recorded: Wednesday 06 April 2022 | Published: Friday 08 April 2022

🌱 Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

Quick Tips for Incremental Growth

This episode we are going to concentrate on quick tips for improving your HubSpot efficiency.

These are based on Ian and my experience with clients in the last few weeks.

Some of the tips will seem really simple and obvious - hopefully you are already using them. But it’s easy (for me) to fall into the trap of thinking that just because something is obvious to me, then it is obvious to everyone else! So, perhaps there’s some quick items in here that will make a huge difference to your processes - we’d love to know (feel free to reply with you feedback). Plus - is there an ‘obvious’ tip that you’ve used that you’d like to share.

We’re going to see how this episode is received - if you like it we’ll aim to do one every quarter.

And, if not, we’ll can it, in case:

Help us grow - join us on YouTube

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Thank you for your feedback

Thank you to Sera who wrote us a lovely note with feedback about:

• What topics she’d like to see
• Ideas for improvements
• Plus some website feedback
• And some things that were missing (eg our TY email after signing up for show notes wasn’t being sent)

Thank you! We’ve started making some changes already, and your topic ideas are planned for a future show.

We love feedback.

✨ Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:

•  Microsoft Teams integration available now in HubSpot
• Association labels: Associate multiple companies with objects (rolling out in public beta)  
• INBOUND22 is open for registration 
• Only 151 days to go until INBOUND (via inboundcountdown.com) - it’s on 6-9 September
• I wonder if anyone will click this link 
• Google rolling out new utm parameters (for use with GA4)
• HubSpot Attribution reporting continues to improve (J shaped attribution, new sample reports)
• New game/s from Dharmesh

🚀 Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Use Progressive Form Fields

Progressive Form fields may sound like it’s complex, but all it means is that you can switch out a form field if it is already known.

It’s a handy way to keep your forms from being overwhelming.

All you need to do is add a ‘queue’ of other fields to your form. And then, if a non-mandatory fields is already known (Eg perhaps you have Job title as an optional form field) it is switched out for the next field in your queue of fields (Eg perhaps you have Twitter handle as a progressive field).

How to merge contacts

It’s easy to merge contacts in HubSpot - just look for the Merge option in the Actions menu on a contact:

How to view All Properties on a contact

In the same Actions menu as the previous point you can see there is also options for:

• View all properties
• View property history

Bonus: you can also ‘Follow’ a contact, which means you can get notifications whenever there is any activity on that contact.

How to export contacts

You can export contacts from the Table Actions button when viewing contacts:

Original Source versus Latest Source properties on contacts

Add these field to your Contact view:

You can easily compare to some of the start and end points of people’s journey:

What to expect:

• Understanding how people found you on the last visit
• Has the channel changed?
• Also adding the ad interaction can show you if they interacted with an ad

💰 Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Pinning Notes

You can pin notes to the top of the Activity timeline:

Filtering Activity

You can easily filter the activity that shows in the timeline:

Tips for Using Views

Here’s 4 quick tips for using views:

1. More filter - you can filter your list of contacts down by using any of the properties on a contact
2. Edit columns - you can edit the layout of the list to just the columns you want to see
3. Save - you can Save your view settings (which includes the filtering and layout)
4. Pin - you can pin (5) of your favourite Saved views to appear everytime you come back to Contacts

👨‍🔧 Shot 5: HubSpot Service Feature of the Week

Simple Feedback popup on your site

These are so easy to create and publish on your site:

A very simple way to ‘take the temperature’ of visitors on your site.

NPS Survey Reminder emails

You can remind recipients about your survey:

Just tick the box, and set the delay time (2 days is recommended).

🔧 Shot 6: HubSpot Gotcha of the Week

Using ‘is none of’ filtering criteria in lists

Using the ‘not any of’ criteria in lists (and workflow triggers) can get you into trouble if the property is unknown on objects

For example, let’s say you have a contact property you’ve created called ‘Favourite James Bond actor’.

Now let’s say you have a total of 100 contacts in your portal.

You’ve just started surveying contacts, and so far 15 contacts have had the property updated:

• 10 have it marked as Daniel Craig
• 5 have Roger Moore

If you were to run a query of ‘is none of Roger Moore’ how many contacts would you expect?

If you answered 95, that would be understandable.

But the result would actually be 10.

The gotcha is because the query by default only applies against contacts who have anything in that property.

To overcome this, you just need to tick the option to include records where the property is empty:

Alternatively, you could also do an OR filter group and select ‘is Unknown’:

We actually try to avoid doing any negative criteria (eg ‘is none of’, ‘has never been any of’, etc) because they can be confusing.

We often create lists for the positive (eg ‘is any of’) and then use them as exclusion lists in other lists.

💡 Shot 7: Insight of the Week

Focus on what you can control

If you feel a bit like this now, you’re not alone:

A reminder to myself, that the best thing I can do at the moment is focus on the areas that I can control (ie not to spend hours worrying about things that I have no control over).

Keep working on the areas that I can control and provide value in.

📚 Shot 8: Quick Thoughts of the Week

Don’t believe everything you read (by experts)

Reminder that even the reputable online sites get things wrong. Eg here’s an SEO site being called out for publishing incorrect information (called out by a senior Google engineer)

Comparison blog posts can expose your lack of understanding

Many SaaS companies try to capture ‘compare’ traffic (ie ranking for search terms related to comparing products). Sometimes they are done well. Other times not so good.

Here’s a post by Landingi which has tried to compare itself with HubSpot (and highlight why they think they are better), but has unfortunately shown up their lack of knowledge of HubSpot.

Just about everything in the post that they claim HubSpot can’t do, HubSpot actually can do, including:

• HubSpot editor supports drag and drop (and thus reordering)
• HubSpot landing pages are mobile optimised out of the box, but allow you to override responsive look and feel using CSS in the template
• HubSpot has hundreds of landing pages templates available for free on the Asset Marketplace
• HubSpot has saved sections (the Landingi post got this confused with smart content)
• HubSpot allows you to add HTML code to pages no problem, it’s on the Settings tab of a page (and you can easily do it on the page itself using the rich text module as well)
• HubSpot thank you pages are easy to create (in the same style as the landing page)
• HubSpot supports modules (eg Countdown timers, etc) -  get them for free on the Asset Marketplace (eg search for Digital Woods for a good free one)
• HubSpot supports Files being uploaded and available on buttons on forms and pages

BTW, we use (and recommend) Landingi for a number of our clients, so we’re actually fans of the product. But this post of theirs is just embarrassing.

✍️ Shot 9: Quote of the Week

“Never ask anyone for their opinion, forecast, or recommendations. Just ask them what they have - or don’t have - in their portfolio.”

A good approach to not just investing in stocks. A good approach when you’re about to invest in software.

🧲 Shot 10: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here:

• HubShots YouTube channel 
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• HubShots HubSpot Coaching
• Sales and Marketing Scorecard ⇐ you should try this

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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