Michael Hartmann: 0:25

Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of OpsCast, brought to you by MarketingOps.com and powered by all the mud pros out there. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Danielle Urban, co-founder and CEO of Cartographer Consulting. Danielle brings a unique mix of demand gen, operations, and platform expertise, especially in the world of HubSpot. She's helped early stage startups and scaling companies figure out not just how to use HubSpot, but when and how to level up. We are going to be talking about RTech maturity, how to recognize when you're you've outgrown your setup and what signals to look for before your stack starts slowing you down. So whether you're a team of two or scaling fast, Daniel has been there and can help you avoid the pitfalls of skipping key maturity milestones. Danielle, welcome to the show.

Danielle Urban: 1:08

Thanks. Thank you so much for having me.

Michael Hartmann: 1:11

You know, I thought I was going to trip over the name of Cartographer, but uh there's a nail that there's there's a one of the my favorite books that I ever read is it's called um, I think it's called The Map That Changed the World. So, you know, obviously cartography is a part of that somewhere. I I would like encourage you to go check it out. It's a pretty fascinating story about one of these people who did some work, wasn't appreciated at the time, died a pauper, you know, and in major debt, and then now is looked on as someone anyway, had to do with how we um the value. I forg I forget the person's name, but anyway, good good work. So, all right, well, um enough of that. So you um yeah, when we talked before, you you said you know you've worked with teams at different stages of growth, which is great because I think there's a lot of people who listen who maybe are probably gonna be going through transitions. When you think of maturity, especially around Martech, like how do you define that? Like, what's your approach to that?

Danielle Urban: 2:15

Yeah, I I've seen multiple inflection points. And it's funny because our sales conversations, we always try to say, like, what brings you here? Like, how can we help you today? Um, and you get a huge range of answers. But even when I was back in-house, I started my career in Demand Gen um million years ago at a very, it was like a medium-sized company that got acquired by a very, very large company. Um, and so it was really interesting to see the juxtaposition between like our small nimble team that was supporting a 200-person company inside of like a 300,000-person company and the differences in how we talk to our colleagues. And so very early in my career, I got exposed to like both extremes. Um, and then I went even further down the extreme on the smaller side where I worked in a handful of startups as their like first marketing hire. And so I was really setting up systems. And so, with that background knowledge, now coming into the consulting world over the past four or five years, um, I feel like we've seen, we've seen it all, truly. Um, and a lot of times there are these sort of trigger points where either they're expanding their team or they have some new initiative that they need to measure, that's sort of that inflection point of like, we actually can't measure any of this. We don't know how. Um, or it's a new leader that steps into play, or they they are putting a renewed or new focus on, say, customer success, and they need, you know, systems to support that function. So there are a lot of different things that will pull you in at different times. Um, and it can be as small as like, we made our first marketing hire. Now we need to give them tools to do their job, or it could be like we're building out an entirely new branch of our business, uh, or we're you know, beefing up our marketing team. So usually there's some indication of growth or major change that will start that conversation. Uh, but there sometimes it's just like we need to fix this, it's so bad.

Michael Hartmann: 4:08

Yeah.

Danielle Urban: 4:09

Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 4:10

I mean, it seems like the the driver for the Martech maturity is really like almost like a business maturity is the leading indicator.

Danielle Urban: 4:19

Yeah, I'd say so, definitely. Because the the people who will see the need are the people who have a goal to accomplish. And so if you are adding new goals and new people are assigned to those goals, then you need systems to support that. And that system can be like a people-driven process. You know, when you hire a new salesperson, all of a sudden now you need to train them. Well, what are you even training them on? Uh, so there's that process piece of it. And then there's the system of like, okay, you're training them to follow the methodology. Well, where are you tracking that? Where are they understanding their success? How are you understanding their success? And that's where the Martech piece comes into it. And it's it's funny we're talking about sales and marketing technology, but in the HubSpot world, it's all one and the same these days. Right. So there are so many different functions that come into play when you can put it all under one roof in HubSpot.

Michael Hartmann: 5:11

Yeah, I think I think it's interesting that you've had that exposure to like really, really large organizations down to early stage, startup, whatever, small organizations. And you talked about how like the lay the way that you talk to each other is different. And there's there's a difference in like there's a difference in language. There's also what I've seen is I think if there's an expectation, if you're growing, right, you add a person, right? There's um a straight line of increased output, right? But it's not that because there's I don't there's probably somebody studied this, but I suspect that like there's a there's a point at which like adding another person does you don't get another you know X one X of whatever uh uh the average is across the team, right? Right becomes lower because of a number of things. Part of it usually there's specialization, right? You've got enhanced you got it now. You put in more process, right? And I think there's there's a risk there too of um expecting more out of that one additional, you know, that marginal addition of the headcount to what you can produce to and then you add in the language differences, like it's just like that is a whole nother piece of it.

Danielle Urban: 6:23

Yeah. Well, if you think about it, there's sort of the small company that, you know, I like I said, I was a first marketing hire at a handful of startups. Usually they've got a salesperson, maybe a sales leader and one person under them in place. And so because I'm the first one in who cares about marketing, the sales team has probably just gotten by on spreadsheets. Maybe they've chosen their favorite cheap, free trial tool to keep track of everything. But then I'm like, well, now my job is to help you guys. I was usually in demand generals because that's what they hire marketing for at an early stage. So I'm like, if I have to do work to feed you leads and to create all of this buzz, how am I going to track what I'm doing and how it impacts what you're doing? And so I implemented HubSpot more than once when I was in-house because we just needed some level of tracking things. And I think if their sales team were to grow bigger before that point, they would have already been on a system to know that like if you've got more than two people, if you can sit down over coffee or talk to each other in the hallway to get your work done, when you add one more person, that's too much coordination. So if you reach more than two people on your team, you have to build processes. And so if I had stepped into a team where there's already more than three salespeople or three or more, then there probably would have been a completely different approach for me to take in trying to bolt on to what they're already using so that we can all work cohesively. And that's only at the small scale. When you talk about adding people at a larger scale, adding one more salesperson to a predefined role is not going to break anything because you've already gotten to that level of specialization and the sort of role function inside of the systems that you already have.

Michael Hartmann: 8:10

Yeah. So, I mean, we're normally um sort of tool agnostic, but you basically you with your expertise with HubSpot, um, something that was interesting to me because I'm less familiar with HubSpot is that you said that the subscription tiers in HubSpot kind of loosely map to maturity levels that you think of. Walk us through what you mean by like what the tiers are, what those maturity levels are, and and maybe what is unlocked as you move forward in those maturity levels.

Danielle Urban: 8:39

Yeah, it's funny because since we last spoke, they've even changed it. They used to be pretty locked in, but at inbound, they announced their new smart CRM uh pricing model. Um, and so it I'm not gonna go too deep into what it used to be because there's a lot of what it used to be. But today you can buy a smart CRM seat. Seat-based pricing is still relatively new in the HubSpot world, but they announced seat-based pricing. And it used to be that you buy a core seat, which is like your super admin seat, and then you have specialized seats for sales, marketing, et cetera. We still have that, um, which is great. And then we've layered in this new smart CRM pricing model where you as one person can sort of push yourself through the subscription tiers. They have their starter level, which is pretty locked down. It's really just basic information keeping. It lets you into even on the free version, there's not much functionality you get over the free version and the starter version. Um, but free and starter, it's just like information keeping. You're tracking your emails, you see what happens where, you can keep track of people, you've got basic deal function.

Michael Hartmann: 9:45

Um like a spreadsheet with connections and some app on top of it.

Danielle Urban: 9:50

Yeah, exactly. I think most people will move from a spreadsheet to HubSpot because it tracks your emails automatically to the contact record. So that is the thing that you want when you decide to go sign up for HubSpot on a random Tuesday. Um, but then you get into the pro level tiers, which unlocks some automation. So when you need more things to happen in a consistent way, then you feel yourself pushing into that pro level tier. Um, and the smart CRM seats let you, you as an admin or you as one person potentially who's building your one person company or a small company, can move yourself into that seat without having to get into the specialized functions of marketing sales, customer service, data, engineering, any of that. Um, whereas it used to be you had to choose one of those to sort of unlock that functionality. So I'm very excited about that because me, as one person, can do a lot if I'm able to push into some of those higher level features. But as soon as you move into one of those specialized tiers or specialized hubs, as HubSpot calls them, with marketing sales or customer success, then you're sort of locked into that. You follow that path now or follow multiple paths at once. Um, and so generally speaking, the HubSpot tiers are starter pro and enterprise with free as a kind of an option. Um, and pro is where you first unlock that uh automation piece of it. Um, you can customize some of your views, you get a little bit more flexibility in reporting. And then when you get into the enterprise level, you're able to capture data at such a granular level. Um, the big, big feature for me in that level is uh custom events tracking. So you can indicate if there's a change on a record, you're capturing that as its own thing. If somebody clicks a button on a certain page, you can capture that in its own record. And so you're able to track at a level of granularity that no one in a startup is really going to care about. And if they do, they probably have a specialized tool like their product team who's looking at product interactions. You're not building that into your marketing yet. And so, or definitely not your sales. So if you are reaching that level at a business, then generally your bigger business with more specialized people who want more specific information. And so that's roughly how it all sort of maps out.

Michael Hartmann: 12:04

Yeah. It's interesting because I heard about that in my first reaction is if I was responsible for this, I would be really worried about people coming to me like, we want this random activity to be tracked without really thinking about like how would it, like, how would it actually inform what we do.

Danielle Urban: 12:26

Yeah. And in the reason, my pocket Mopsapalooza. Is that it? Talking about enterprise report or executive reporting and how you get to a report that's actually useful and not just because somebody asked you.

Michael Hartmann: 12:40

Yeah, I just like my this is kind of goes back to my early years when I first moved into the kind of a marketing domain and I worked in database marketing. And you know, there's all these providers that could you could get, and they're still out there, probably more of them now where you could get additional data. In our case, it was consumer oriented, right? Like get at the zip code level, right, information about whatever income levels, you know, preferences that are typical, yada yada yada, right? You can imagine all those kinds of things. And if I ever put that in front of our marketers and said, here's you know, here's a basket of you know a hundred potential fields that we could get, right? What do you want? Invariably the answer would be like, well, we might use any of them, so let's get them all, right?

Danielle Urban: 13:23

Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 13:24

So and like, but the reality is there's probably 10 or fewer that are the realistic ones you would use. And I think like that's the like with what you just described, if like that's where my head went was like, how do we keep that from going out of control in terms of all the things we could track versus what we would actually use?

Danielle Urban: 13:41

Yeah, definitely. And I mean that you're at that point where if you have that functionality and you're willing to pay for that level of service from HubSpot, you're doing it for a reason. There's something you want to track. And it's okay. Yeah. It's okay if that evolves and changes over time. If you're measuring a single campaign and you want to know how many people click that red button during Black Friday, you don't care that much come January. You might want to compare year over year, but once you've captured that data, it's okay to just sort of move on and let it evolve. I think you have like 150 tracked events. So there's a lot of things to play with. And like at the end of the day, if you're capturing extra information, like fine. You're already paying for the feature, whatever.

Michael Hartmann: 14:22

Yeah. I mean, my point is like have a plan for like actually using the stuff if you're gonna do it. And if in and it's okay if you think you will and you end up not, and then you can double it, right? But don't just keep it because you made that decision a year ago. So, okay, so let's know, like, this now to me gets into a little bit of like how how would I, maybe as a as a team of one or uh a leader, right? How would I know what are the signals that I should be looking for that we should be thinking about, you know, moving whether it's the next tier or someone based on what I if I understand right now with the new model, right? A particular user's tier to within HubSpot, right? How do you think about that? Like what what are the you've I think you've hit it at a couple of things, but what are some of the changes or signals that would indicate, hey, it's time to be thinking about us moving maturity, moving our users to different levels and so forth.

Danielle Urban: 15:24

Yeah. Well, why don't I outline what I've got for the sort of rough maturity model that's still a work in progress, but so far, I think it's tracking. Um, the first stage is really just like a speed to function. You're a small scrappy team, everybody is using tools that they need to get their job done that day. There's not a whole lot of thought about how it comes together as a functioning platform, a complete ecosystem. We're not really connecting things together that much. Maybe one or two things are sharing data, but it's really just like, how do I, as a marketer, as a salesperson, get through today? Yeah. And maybe next week. And maybe we get to some numbers for the board, but that's really not coming to mind on a day-to-day.

Michael Hartmann: 16:07

And maybe this is something I want to be repeatable, but like that's not probably not thinking.

Danielle Urban: 16:13

Uh, would not from what I've seen. But in that case, there's so little focus on scalability, and you end up, it's very easy to change platforms, which is great to maintain flexibility, but that consistency and tracking and data capturing over time makes it very difficult for your team to share information. So if you're one salesperson working out of a spreadsheet, sure, you can share your Google Sheet and then it's up to date. But if it's not in a format that's accessible to other people, or if someone needs to transform that data to get a different kind of number, it kind of starts to fall apart really quickly.

Michael Hartmann: 16:44

Yeah.

Danielle Urban: 16:45

Um, and so then you find that you need more specificity and you need a little bit more maturity. Yeah. Um, and you need to create those repeatable systems. And I think that usually comes. This is what I want to test a bit in more conversation is like, I think that comes when people want more analysis out of their data. So, like you're tracking it, you're reacting to it, you're doing things on the day-to-day. But when you're like, well, how did that work? Or how do I do more of that? What is the pattern here? That is, I think, when you hit step two in this maturity model. And that's where you start to need those repeatable systems. And maybe it's when your team grows past two. Um, and you just need to get that data model to be meaningful because your business needs to track deals consistently. They need to track, you know, lead um, lead creation consistently and those sources that they come in from. Uh, and you need to turn around and report that to a board and say, this is how we're growing our business because leads are coming in from these sources, we're following up in this way, and here you go.

Michael Hartmann: 17:47

You want you to be able to translate. I mean, the word that comes to mind that I talk about when you get into that is discipline, right? You need to discipline the way that you're executing. And I I use that like specifically instead of process, because I think like it's really like we are gonna be because you like you said, you add this one other person. If you're doing this sort of free-for-all uh model, right, each if you now get two people doing things differently, they're calling things that are the same, different words, right? Yeah, very quickly reporting is gonna be a challenge, um, let alone like knowing like what's working across the two different people. Exactly. Like consistency and discipline is what you need there. Okay.

Danielle Urban: 18:28

Absolutely. And I think there's still at that stage, because it's still small, it's still pretty flexible, you're moving between systems. If you do a system migration three times in the space of a year, you get to that sort of tribal knowledge where it's like, we just use this one. Like, don't worry about those other confusing things that have created some debt for us. Like, just use that one and don't worry about the rest. And so there's still sort of that that people piece of it that hasn't been codified into the platforms that you're using. Um, but you're you're aiming at that consistency and you're aiming at that discipline because you recognize the need. So maybe you've got some tools, maybe you're starting to build that out and recognize the need, but you're still kind of sitting in this place where like everyone's just trying to get their job done and also get numbers to the board once a quarter. Um, and so then I think you can move into the next stage when you need to share that information more broadly. So maybe it's more teams, maybe it's that the board is putting more of a microscope on you because you're getting to a point where your revenue is high enough, the investment is high enough that that needs to be real. And they everyone needs the validity in the reporting that you're putting out to know that it's real. And so that's where you want to be able to look back over time. You want to do predictive uh modeling, you want to do forecasting. So all of that is the next stage three, maturity level, um, where you just need to get more granular, more specific, more disciplined. That data dictionary needs to be super duper clear and everyone needs to be bought in on it. And I think that is kind of the point where you need to put someone in the function of owning the platform and processes.

Michael Hartmann: 20:10

Yeah. I mean, yeah, it sounds like it's almost like a switch, maybe not like a switch from we're just looking backwards in performance and now we're looking at that and trying to inform what we expect the future to look like.

Danielle Urban: 20:21

Right. Exactly. We want to be able to tell a complete story of a single person, but also find those patterns where, like, if this happened in the past, then it but it happened this way on the next few steps. So if we do the same thing or do something very similar to follow that path, we think this next thing is going to happen. But my notes here say the skill set is likely not on your team to be able to hit that. So you're still, even though you're getting to that point where you can capture the data and maybe you've got someone sort of owning the capture of that data, but do you get into like statistical modeling? You probably don't have a data engineering team. And how much money is that?

Michael Hartmann: 20:58

What are the biggest gaps in skills across our team? Absolutely. Um definitely.

Danielle Urban: 21:03

And then I think the the stage four and final stage I have noted is like that deep analytical need where you do get that data engineer on board and you're finally big enough that you can justify having like an analytic center of excellence or a platform ownership that's more than one person, and really make sure that the data is flowing between your systems, that it's accurate, that it's measured, that there's you know, buy and an understanding on what what the numbers are telling you. Um and you're not sort of cobbling it together and saying, just use that one property that we made up three years ago.

Michael Hartmann: 21:36

Well, yeah, this field is labeled this one thing in our CRM, we actually use it a different way. So do like this is what you yeah. Um that's interesting. Yeah, the thing about the one nuance I think I would add to that last stage, and I don't know if that was actually the last stage, but the last one we just talked about, yeah, is um when you get to that data engineering aid, right? What I've found is really difficult is finding someone who understands data statistical analysis in the general sense, but also in the domain of sales and marketing, because it's got its own set of uh like challenges, I think is the best way to put it, right? It's just it's messy data, it's not like finance data, right? All that kind of stuff. Um curious, so I mean, I I'm tracking all these different stages. I think there were four total. Yeah. Um the uh the thing I'm like it came to me in mind to me is like um is it ideal that like you would see organizations going kind of step by step through those? Or does it make sense to skip them? If so, when like what or like what are the it feels like it feels like it could be skipped in some cases, and maybe there's like a major capital infusion or merger, right, that would be a driver for that. But like outside of that, like it feels like there might be some risk in sort of jumping steps.

Danielle Urban: 22:57

Yeah, I I think you would find yourself like over-engineered if you skip some of these steps. And I've seen that be the case. You know, you outsource something and they you get sort of a a copy paste process into your systems, and then there's no adoption because it just wasn't built for a way that serves your business. And that's that's what we as consultants are always trying to do. We we want to talk about how do we build the best system for you right now. There's a lot of pattern matching that I can do, there's a lot of commonality between different types of clients. But at the end of the day, the way that your teams are structured, the way that your teams like to work, what else is in your tech stack is very custom. Um, and so I I've only seen one client really need to skip a stage. And it was exactly what you were talking about. Like they just they have the product market fit at exactly the right time. The industry was just absolutely blowing up. They couldn't even keep up with themselves. They couldn't hire fast enough. They had a massive capital infusion, and they went from like step one to step four. Like they really jumped the gun in a matter of a couple months. And but that is so, so unusual. I really think that it comes into play. And maybe you could break it out into the different teams that are doing that. But I think this this functions mostly at the business level. Um, because even if you had like the maturity of a customer success team, it's gonna sort of follow these same steps, but it's only gonna follow those steps because of the needs of the business. Um, so yeah, I think it's pretty rare that you would jump around.

Michael Hartmann: 24:25

Yeah. I I love you use the term pattern matching, which I love. Like I feel like I see I it's I always sort of have this really like visceral reaction when people are like, I'm you know, there's this best practice, and it feels like that doesn't really like uh and I think what they be people mean is kind of what you're talking about, right? Pattern matching, like applying the lessons I've learned to your specific situation, environment, maturity, whatever, and trying to match that. And that's like that makes a way more sense to me than just throwing, hey, I've got a cookie cutter solution, I'm gonna drop it in, right? And I see Yeah.

Danielle Urban: 25:03

I I had to laugh once when I lost a deal because they wanted quick best practices, and I was like, Yeah, but for what? And they were like, we just want best practices. I was like, I'm not it then. Sorry.

Michael Hartmann: 25:14

Yeah, that's probably probably good to avoid that client, right? Yeah, yeah. Because they think there's they think there's an easy button to to this stuff. And yeah, okay. I'm gonna I could go off on a tangent that I don't want to stack. So okay, so we've so we've I think we addressed maybe one common thing that could be a risk or a pitfall. Um are there other kinds of things that could be pitfalls as teams are going through this like maturation process, um, kind of trying to keep up with their growth or whatever that um we didn't already touch on?

Danielle Urban: 25:49

Um, I think maybe if the teams are, I just sort of said like if you hire customer success and they're sort of following their own path uh through those maturity stages, it really should be at a business level because if you have, say, sales and marketing, which is such a classic example, but if you have sales and marketing who are moving through this differently, then your whole business is going to fall apart. So I think the sort of platform considerations and how you bring people into processes and platforms needs to be done very carefully and sort of the assessment of platforms. Um, someone needs to own it, whether it's their full-time job because you're at you're at sort of a stage three or stage four where there's enough need, or it's someone who's recognizing the need enough to go looking for a solution, they need to sort of step back and move themselves from step one of very reactive day-to-day into step two, where it's like we are evaluating this for a long-term implementation. We don't want this for six months, we want this for three years, depending on how fast they're growing. But still, you don't, you don't want a sales leader going off and be like, well, I bought this CRM because I like how it works or it's my favorite. And marketing is like, but we already had a CRM that's hooked up to all of our marketing activities. Like, then you're just in different places. And so I think keeping that focus at sort of the top-level leadership executive level needs to be really important. You need to get everyone on board.

Michael Hartmann: 27:14

Yeah. So have you, um, do you have any examples of where you've helped clients or where when you were on site or in embedded with teams, right? Where you had some, you know, did some changes, maybe because I think what you're alluding to is sometimes you need to make smaller changes, right? And they can have that size impact, which I'm a big fan of. It's like yes, looking share there.

Danielle Urban: 27:38

Yeah, I one of my favorite recent stories was uh a small company. They're a pretty small startup. Um, they've been around for a while, so they've they've sort of grown and shrunk and changed course a little bit. Uh, but they had been on HubSpot, not under my expertise, um, not under my guidance. And they they then sort of shifted focus, shifted their sales team a bit, ripped it out and went to Monday.com and then decided they hired like three new salespeople, came back to me and said, we think we want to be back on HubSpot because our salespeople are comfortable with HubSpot. And I was like, okay, here we go. So we got into it. And um the data model they had created for themselves in their Monday.com CRM was a train wreck. Like they didn't, there was no consistency to how data was captured. Like there was a company object and then there was company name typed in. And there was also like a notes field where sometimes company names were typed in and it just was all over the place. And so our team sort of take deep breaths right now. Like I exactly stressing me out. And you're like, but our team painstakingly pulled all of that apart. Thankfully, it wasn't a huge amount of data because they had they'd been through a lot of change. But they um we pulled that apart. We got it into HubSpot properly. One of my favorite things to do with HubSpot uh clients is to sit down and show them the view of the data model that you get inside of HubSpot. It's sort of this little thing that's tucked away, but it's really powerful for helping people understand what the different objects are and how they relate to each other because it lays them out in boxes, then you hover over a box and it draws lines to the other things that they're related to. It's a really great view for getting people to understand this is how it all connects together. Um, so I love that. We did that.

Michael Hartmann: 29:20

We did not easier to consume than like if you're not familiar with looking at massive data models, right?

Danielle Urban: 29:27

Yeah. When you start talking about objects, uh the salesperson who's not familiar with administering a CRM is gonna be like, I don't care. Like they are so gone from that meeting. And so we went through and onboarded them very meticulously and set them up with a system. But the my favorite part of that project was that their CEO wanted visibility into leads in a very specific way. And he was like, I can't get that with HubSpot. That's why we got rid of it last time. I was like, that's such a lie. Like, we can always get you there. And so we sat down and had like a 45-minute working session and created CEO's homepage as a dashboard in HubSpot. I walked him through how to set that as his homepage and HubSpot. So when he logs into HubSpot, that is exactly what pops up in front of him. It's the fields he wants to see listed in the way he wants to see them, relevant to how the sales team is working that day. And they're thrilled and they're actually using the platform properly, finally.

Michael Hartmann: 30:21

Yeah, it's so funny how these. Misperceptions or or not even misperceptions, but perceptions can taint someone's view. And sometimes it's like a little investment in like going, actually, no, this is like this is totally possible. Sometimes it's not, right? Sometimes what they want is that possible. But like at least you can show what is possible, and I think that's that's huge. So you see you you hinted at a couple of things. So I know like I like I said, I'm not familiar with HubSpot. What I do know is it's like as you already kind of hit it, like they're like, I feel like there's an announcement of some sort of change every week or two from them. Yeah. Right. So they're evolving a lot. What what are what are some of the what are some of the other underused features that you think more teams should be taking advantage of?

Danielle Urban: 32:16

Um there's so much. And it's the features that are getting released are getting more and more specific, I think. Uh, so it's a little bit harder to keep track of. But I think some of my favorite things to sort of really reduce complexity in accounts, um, people may not realize they're there, like calculated properties. Uh, you can write a calculation into a property so that you don't have to do that calculation in a report, in a workflow that adds it together and creates a new property. Like you can just do that and you can add days. There's some funkiness to it. Like you need to remember to change your time windows to epic time. But like once you figure out what that is, you can eliminate workflows. Like you can eliminate all of these processes that are happening and have built out, have been built out to automate things for you just because you rewrote it as an equation. Um, and in a similar vein, the sync properties that came out are very, very cool when you're stamping data between objects. Um, we try not to. In most cases, you don't need to because you can cross-reference objects in a lot of the different features in HubSpot, but there are cases where you can't or you need to be able to see it in a specific way. And so these sync properties are like a mirroring of data from the other object, which is super, super helpful. Again, can cut down on a lot of the workflows that people have to stamp numbers across. Um, and uh in the same vein, stamping data across the custom events are so desperately underused. There's been a huge amount of change in those. Shout out to uh Maggie Philbin over the last year. She's a product manager, she's wonderful, uh, very accessible, clearly. Uh, but there's been so much change just over the last year in what you can capture, how you can capture it. Um, and people just don't think about it for the use cases they're trying to solve because they don't know that it's matured to that point or that these new features are available, that you can track it in that way. Um, so I think there's a lot of opportunity in those that people just aren't aware of.

Michael Hartmann: 34:11

Yeah, that sounds that sounds good. So another thing, like use what we talked before, you use a term that I hadn't heard before about doing reverse demos as a way of diagnosing things. So explain what that is and why you think it's so effective and helpful.

Danielle Urban: 34:31

Yeah, I think I co-opted the term from a sales method, but it's my own now. Go for it. Yeah, we we really like to do that as part of our discovery. So we'll schedule an hour-long call with the person who has to use the tools that we're developing for. So if it's a sales process that we're working on, then we want to talk to like the lowest level salesperson who is picking up those leads every day and logging in to make calls because I want to see how they work. I want to see what buttons they press, I want to see what they're looking at, I want to see what they're updating, what other platforms they're accessing. You might find out that somebody has their own spreadsheet that they're maintaining and copying data from HubSpot into that spreadsheet. You might realize that people are filling in data in three different places that they don't need to, but they think they do because no one told them otherwise. And it's so incredibly telling. It's mind-blowing.

Michael Hartmann: 35:24

Yeah, hardest. So I've done that kind of thing before too. And I think the hardest part is not saying something while they're going through it. Oh my gosh. Not correct it, correct. Yeah, not yeah. Um, it's and it's funny that you talked about like the side spreadsheet. So I did a a project at a company years ago uh that was uh intended to try to enable the support team to scale without adding headcount, right, to match the growth of the company, which it typically had a parallel growth pattern. And so the like short short version is like we've we found a methodology and there was some pushback about it, but what we found in doing investigation is because it was kind of a knowledge-based solution um on steroids, but like we found out like pretty much all the all the sport teams had their own version of a knowledge base. It was usually like a Word document on their computer that nobody else could see, right? Control F. Right, yeah, and so they had already kind of made that solution themselves, but it's like that in like going and sitting with somebody and seeing how they actually do the work, yeah, is uh can be mind-blowing because if you're going like like I've I've I tell this to people all the time is like if you don't know what you're if you're asking as a marketing team, why can't those salespeople just update their CRM with opportunity status or convert a lead or whatever, right? Go watch what it takes to do it. Right. Because you might be shocked at what a pain in the ass it is to do it. Yeah. Um and then you can go, like I think it will give you a very different perspective about how to do it. Like, and it's not that you don't want that, and it's probably not that they don't want to do that for you. But their goals and objectives and what drives them is not that.

Danielle Urban: 37:17

Right. Well, and we'll have people come to us. I'm working on a project right now. They they signed on for a really small, like three-week project to just get some reports stood up, basically. They wanted a little bit of automation, a little bit of visibility. And I was like, all right, cool, we'll we'll start there. We will start there. And even in that conversation, I was like, put me on with one of your salespeople. And I we've gone back and forth a bit because they were like, well, you can talk to the sales manager. I'm like, I don't really care what the sales manager has to say. I want to see who's clicking the buttons and how, because I need to build what the sales manager wants them to do into what they're already comfortable with. Like, we all benefit if I can build a system that gets done what the sales manager wants done, but it is in such a way that it's so accessible and straightforward to the low-level brand new salesperson that just came in because they are being basically guided through that process. Like, yeah, sales manager, you need to tell me what the process should be. We'll get there. But I want to see what the person is actually doing every single day because I'm setting up these automations to say, hey, there's a new lead assigned to you. Are they checking their emails? Are they seeing it in HubSpot? How do they get into that? What are the views that they're accessing? How do I make sure that they know it's there and they should follow up? Um, and this your sales manager can't tell me that.

Michael Hartmann: 38:36

Yeah. Well, we set up notifications for when a new lead goes and they should be checking their email. And they go, like, I get so many email notifications, I ignore it, right?

Danielle Urban: 38:44

Yeah. Your inbox starts filtering them out because you never open them. Right. Like, you just don't know.

Michael Hartmann: 38:50

That is like that by itself, that tip of getting that insight into like the boots on the ground and what they go through on a day-to-day basis, is such a great piece of advice. Like that, like I tell people regularly, like, go hang out with these people, these other organizations, it will benefit you. And they'd loved for you to know. It like this is exactly why, right?

Danielle Urban: 39:15

Yes. I had a client where we had one representative of their team do the screen share, but they brought the whole team with them. That was really interesting too, because it's one person saying, This is how me, as a representative of our team, is doing this process. Some people were like, Oh, I didn't know you did that. Or like, yeah, I didn't know we were supposed to do that. I didn't even know that I could do that, right? Yep. Or like, oh, I didn't know you could filter it like that. I didn't know that button was there that made my life easier. And so you get that information sharing, even just among your team, to look at the same screen. And it's so, as a consultant, I'm like, great, there's project number three, four, five. Like, I'm seeing so much that can be impacted, you know, depending on the scope of what we're working on to begin with. But it could be as simple as like creating a new card view in their center column so that they can just click and start typing into the things that they're supposed to be filling in. That takes me five minutes, but I wouldn't know that that's helpful without seeing the exact buttons and things you're hunting for in other platforms that you're accessing directly on your screen every day.

Michael Hartmann: 40:14

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, like we could almost like this. Maybe we need to like cut out just this part and just share that to the world.

Danielle Urban: 40:23

Consulting advice piece of this podcast. Yeah.

Michael Hartmann: 40:27

Well, I mean, but it's like it's if people aren't thinking about that, which I suspect a lot of people aren't, um especially when they are looking across at other teams and um like it's like putting yourself in those other people's shoes, right? Call it whatever you want to call it, is is a valuable exercise to go through, right? And it feels like it's maybe a waste of time, maybe you feel like you know already, yeah, but you don't.

Danielle Urban: 40:57

It's that like go slow to go fast.

Michael Hartmann: 41:00

Yeah.

Danielle Urban: 41:00

Thinking. Like if you slow down and understand how people work, you make their work more efficient, you make everybody's data better because the data capture is easier. Like it just pays off tenfold.

Michael Hartmann: 41:11

Yeah. What is it? Like slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Is that the I don't know if I've heard that one. I think they're anyway, it was some variation of one of those, right? Okay, so so we talked a lot about like different things like stages and when to recognize it, some like great tips like we talked about. Yeah, but let's say that someone in our audience is listening, they're a team of one, maybe a team of two, um, and they're buried. How how would you advise them to think about like when do you need to like look at hiring somebody versus bringing in maybe outside help like your team? Um and and going through that thought process.

Danielle Urban: 41:55

Yeah, I think it it differs for a lot of different use cases. I think in the the smaller teams, I've had a lot of conversations with freelancers consultants who are like, hey, I just got onto HubSpot, I'm paying for the basic version. What should I be doing? And I the first thing I do, I'm always open to like a one-hour call. Like, yeah, let's get you set up. Let's be friends, let's hang out. Well, you're never generous enough. Yeah, it's more of a networking call, but like, how do I help you? Um, and so in that conversation, I had one last week, uh, I was like, share your screen and tell me what you're working on. And the very first thing I did was show them the data model and HubSpot. I'm like, you have all of these different things that connect to each other. She was like, I didn't know I had companies. I saw that they were there. I didn't know what they were. I didn't know how they connect to anything else. And so once we got that baseline, she understood all of the things that she could do, even at the starter level. And so we walked through some of her views. I introduced her to some new features. We sort of got some things dialed in, made sure that she had all of her um like inbox tracking set up properly, her calendar and got that connected. So there was a lot that we could do in that hour just to be like, all right, you are set up as much as you can. Because on the starter version, there's not a whole lot of things you can customize. You're just sort of getting into it to use the core features. Um, but I think when you get to that maturity level where you're working across teams, that's where you might want to talk to a consultant or a platform expert, even if it's just like an advisory call one time, like talking to someone to figure out how these teams need to work together. They each have their own goals and focuses that they need to like dive into and own and the outcomes they need to own. But someone needs to tie it together. And hopefully you have leaders that can do that and are talking to each other and working very closely. But when you get multiple teams, uh, those leaders are focused on guiding their team. And then there's no one to really own that in between and own the process of how data flows through the rest of the company. So you might have someone like me come in and say, like, all right, let's figure out what sales needs, let's figure out what marketing needs, let's figure out how we need to track the data through for the executive team, for the product team. How can we bring product activity into HubSpot to better inform your sales and marketing teams? Like, that's where we can start to pull all these pieces across the organization. Um, and so I think you kind of have to get to that point where you've got one or two levels of management, maybe even three levels, if you've got sort of the executive team, a VP level, and then you know, a marketing manager type person. Um, that's when you need someone to step in and own the processes and the platforms that connect it all together.

Michael Hartmann: 44:29

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I know how I've thought about it. Like usually for me, I like use a spreadsheet. Like, here's all the things that our team or I mean or my team needs to accomplish. And then who's got the responsibility of it um sort of a matrix of the people quickly identifies where the gaps are or where there's points of failure, right? Right. Right, there's no redundancy. Um, and then I can sort of prioritize. I I hadn't thought of tying in the connection with like I guess because it's sort of implied in my own brain, right? There's just connection to other teams, and how do you build those relationships? Um, so that's good. Um why don't we do this? Like I we're uh we could go on for a while here, I think, but we need to probably wrap up.

Danielle Urban: 45:13

Seven minutes left.

Michael Hartmann: 45:15

Yes. Um okay, so like it like it feels like this is an obligatory question these days. Like, like what's what do you see as the impact of AI um in kind of marketing teams, marketing ops teams, RevOps teams? Um and I know there's a lot of stuff going on within the Hubsbot ecosystem around it too.

Danielle Urban: 45:36

Yeah, such a token question. There's there's so many different ways that you can apply it though, because me as an admin and the things that I'm doing to assess sort of as an outside perspective, I'm using AI in a bunch of different ways every day. I one of my favorite tools these days is Fathom Note Taker. Um, and the reason I love it is because you can add your recordings to folders and then have a chat conversation with the entire folder. So if you're trying to do these reverse demos that you're recording and you're putting them all in the same folder, then you can go back and say, like, okay, the sales team, it's so good. The sales team said they're filling out this property because they think marketing needs it. Well, did marketing say they needed it? Where when the video was sales talking about that, and then did marketing talk about this? And then you just like three seconds later have an answer. Like, it's so powerful because I don't have to sit there and take notes and go back through. And that's driven by AI on top of the transcripts. One of my friends yesterday introduced me to a new concept that I feel like is a complete unlock for me, where I have very, very basic coding knowledge. Like I can do some JavaScript magic inside of AppScript, but I'm not a coder. I went to business school, I studied marketing. Like, don't trust me with apps. Um, but I know how powerful it is, and I have built out solutions on uh JavaScript that can accomplish things I can't do inside of HubSpot. Um, or if I need reporting in a specific format, we can build JavaScript that like pulls it every week and sticks it into a spreadsheet. Um, but one of my friends showed me a trick where he pulled the JSON for I was trying to audit a whole bunch of workflows and figure out which ones were relevant to the project I was working on and might impact the work that I'm doing. And so he pulled out the JSON of all of those workflows, fed it into an AI project, and then just asked, like, is how does this work? Which ones are the ones that matter? And I was like, I never thought to do that. I was trying to use like the Chat GPT connector or the cloud connector into HubSpot. It didn't have visibility into that object. I was trying to use HubSpot Breeze, which I have a lot of not very positive feelings about. Um, and so I was like, that like pull data out and put it here and then ask questions, like broke my brain. I'm so excited for the things that I can do with that. Um, and I just using my very basic JavaScripting knowledge that is very much supported by AI these days, to get the data that I want to ask questions of and then put it into an AI project where I'm just accessing it in that chat. Like that's huge. There's so much that I can do to shortcut my day in getting the answers I need and like taking inventory, like my efficiency is off the charts now, if I can do that. So I think that's my favorite use case that came up yesterday.

Michael Hartmann: 48:33

Well, the so the the one I'll just add, somebody I saw somebody posting about notebook LM. Have you used that?

Danielle Urban: 48:39

I haven't yet, but we've talked about using that as a handoff for our clients.

Michael Hartmann: 48:42

So I am I'm playing around with it now where I've been very like feeding in transcripts from from conversations. And I I have I'm in the car regularly listening to podcasts anyway, and it generates this audio sort of summary that's like feels like a podcast. And I'm I did one, I'm like, ooh, this is kind of interesting to see that perspective. Um, so I'm kind of curious to see if that will work, especially for like the kinds of things you're talking about with those reverse demos. Yeah. Anyway, um, I love hearing these new stories about how to use these tools because it's really, really fun. Danielle, so much fun. Enjoyed it. Um, if if I'm sure we could go on for hours, actually. But uh, if folks want to continue this process or want to connect with you or understand what you're doing or what's going on with cartographer, what's the best way for them to do that?

Danielle Urban: 49:29

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. Um, you can reach us at cartographerconsulting.com. Um, I'm Danielle at cartographerconsulting.com if you want to email me. Um and then I'm in like a million Slack groups, obviously, including the marketing ops one.

Michael Hartmann: 49:43

There you go. And you say you're speaking at Massapalooza 25?

Danielle Urban: 49:47

I am. I'm speaking with a good friend of mine, Brian D'Andrea, on executive reporting and how to do that in HubSpot. It's called peeling the HubSpot Reporting Onion.

Michael Hartmann: 49:56

Nice. All right. Well, hopefully I don't I'm not sure if this will get out before then, but I think it will be close. It'll be very close. So anyway, well, hopefully that'll drive will traffic to yours. So thank you again, Danielle. Thanks to our our our audience for continuing to support us. If you have ideas for topics or guests or want to be a guest, you can always reach out to Naomi, Mike, or me. Till next time. Bye everyone. Bye.