Making HubSpot Work Better by Understanding How People Work Best

Casey Peddicord (00:14)
Hey everybody, welcome to Smart Bug on Tap, where we dive into what's driving smarter, more scalable HubSpot strategy across marketing, sales, and rev ops. I'm your host, KC Petticord, and today we're talking about a topic that gets overlooked, I think way too often, how people and processes impact the success of your HubSpot system. You know, you've probably heard about it and seen about it, right? We've all run across beautifully built HubSpot portals that maybe ... could fall apart in the real world, right? Sounds great in principle, but in practical sometimes doesn't really add up. And it's not because the tools don't necessarily work. It's usually because they weren't designed around the way that people get things done. So joining me today is somebody who thinks deeply about the intersection of people, process, and platform, Sam St. Moore. Sam, ⁓ is it okay if I call you Sam? Or do you like Samuel? All right, perfect.

Sam St-Amour (01:04)
Hello. Absolutely. Absolutely. Now

Samuel is, it scares me a little bit. Like I feel like my mom is trying to tell me something.

Casey Peddicord (01:12)
I like it. like it. Well, if we get really really into it, we'll Samuel. Sam, so glad you're here. Why don't you kick us off by telling everybody a little bit about you, who you are, and the work that you do.

Sam St-Amour (01:16)
Yeah. Sure. Well, I'm happy to be here, Casey. Nice to have this chat with you. Basically, I am from the kind marketing operations background. I have a mixed bag of like development, graphic design skills, but basically I've just done a lot of marketing things over the years and gradually got into more of these kind of operations, marketing systems, platforms like CRMs and HubSpot. And basically what I do today is I pretty much, you know, work with companies and help them understand, map their process, and how to align this with platforms like CRMs like HubSpot, and how the platform can support their process, and how sometimes it can also question or rethink their process a little bit to make sure that it aligns perfectly with what the platform can do and vice versa. I've seen a lot of cases where the platform and what people are trying to do doesn't quite add up like you're saying, and that can... cause some frustrations and things like that. So it happens.

Casey Peddicord (02:23)
What do you think are the most common reasons HubSpot implementations, let's say start strong and maybe stall or start to break down? You know, like I think about what are the early warning signs that the system was designed or where it was designed around the tool, not necessarily the team.

Sam St-Amour (02:42)
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of things that we're going to talk about in the next few minutes for sure. But the expression that comes to my mind is losing steam. You're starting something, there's energy at beginning, and at some point you're like, that's not picking up the way I was expecting it would. And there's different reasons for that. The ones that come to mind are cases where the end users are rushed in their new CRM. So let's say they have to opt off of another CRM, for example, right? And there's a deadline. And in a lot of cases, we don't have enough time, right? People don't plan enough time for that migration and we have to be out and people are rushed in and like, use this, go there, do that. But the platform...

Casey Peddicord (03:23)
Yeah, there's not enough buffer time in between those two. Is that right? Yeah, it's huge.

Sam St-Amour (03:28)
Exactly. Exactly. So people have to be in there, right? And start using it. And the platform is not necessarily ready or configured to make it easy for them to use it and that kind of thing. Or in other cases, I feel like it's kind of somewhat the opposite where let's say the platform admins will spend a lot of time kind of configuring little things, working on preparing the platform with the idea that it's going to be amazing. But then they haven't really taken the time to wonder how people work. how people will actually use that platform enough. And then people get in and it's complicated and there's a lot of hurdles and things like that that weren't thought about. So those, there's a different reasons why we can see that happening.

Casey Peddicord (04:07)
Yeah, I want to dig in for just a second around the runway time, because it's something that I see quite a bit as HubSpot folks will bring us into different opportunities. It really varies wildly across the board, right? Like sometimes I'll get folks that'll say, our sales source is cutting off the end of this month. Like I have to move into HubSpot or, hey, our pipe drive or keep instance, I've got three or four months. What do you feel like is an ideal time? Like I know I have my thoughts around it, but I'm interested in yours.

Sam St-Amour (04:22)
yeah. that's a good question. And I'm not sure I want to commit on an answer to that Casey. Are you trying to, are you trying, you're trying to trap me. yeah. So typically multiple months for sure. Right. Keep that in mind. So it depends on the amount of data you have existing, right. And the amount of customization that you have in the platform that you're leaving, depends on the amount of exceptions or maybe.

Casey Peddicord (04:36)
At least give me a range, give me a range. what do you think about, what do you think is a best case scenario? 

Sam St-Amour (04:56)
integrations that that platform had with others. So there's a lot of things coming into play right now. And let's say you were another CRM and just started, let's say like a month or two ago, you didn't have that much time to actually build things in that other CRM. And you're like, no, that's not the one for me. You switched to HubSpot. That's going to be quick and easy probably, but it's rarely quick and easy like that. We typically have a lot of kind of legacy data, history exceptions. We need to understand data to migrate.

All that stuff. So multiple months for sure. Like, I would say six months maybe or something if we can, right? If that's possible. It's not always possible, but...

Casey Peddicord (05:28)
in a best case scenario. wow, okay, all right. Yeah, I think so too. The more runway, the better. And that's not to say that we can't help you really quickly either. If you're listening and you're in an instance where you're like, my gosh, have my Salesforce instance and it cuts off the next 30 days, talk to us. We definitely have options for you out there. We can definitely help guide you on, okay, we should do this, we should try this, we could go this route. But I agree with you, the more time, the better. I always say three to four months is ideal in most cases.

Sam St-Amour (05:42)
yeah. Yeah. That's fair. I mean, we've worked with crazy timelines for sure. I try not to think too much about those cases, but we can do it. sometimes we're going to find compromises, right? We're going to get the data out while we do some other things and kind of work on that. It's going to get that ready so that we at least don't lose anything and are able to fix things afterwards. But it's not the ideal situation.

Casey Peddicord (06:20)
That's right.

Yeah, I know I've worked with some folks who have it as little as two weeks time, right? You do run across those emergency scenarios. And I would say the best thing is to reach out to us, get somebody involved who knows what they're doing, because we can definitely help guide you. And you do have options there. When you talk about the people, like the people focus, where do you see the friction between the way that teams work and how HubSpot is set up?

Sam St-Amour (06:46)
That's another great question, by the way. I see a few things, again, there's a lot that we could explore and talk about for sure, but one of the things that I see often that is a little bit surprising, but not at the same time, is that people, some concepts are not understood the same way by everyone. If I tell you, for example, the word campaign, the word campaign can mean anything, everything and nothing.

Casey Peddicord (07:04)
Yes!

Right.

Sam St-Amour (07:12)
in HubSpot, has a very strong and logical and clear meaning and what it should be and all that. Or if I tell you...

Casey Peddicord (07:18)
Yeah. I think about workflows.

Workflows is a good example too. Like it seems like workflows is a different thing in all these different systems, but means a very specific thing in HubSpot world.

Sam St-Amour (07:22)
yeah.

Yeah, and if I tell you contact lifecycle management, right, what's SQL, what's MQL, how do you know that a contact is at a certain point, right? So for a lot of my clients, these things are not clear and then they get in HubSpot, they see some words, they see some tools, they start using something but with an unclear understanding of what that is and they expect something and it's not what it is, you know? So there's a misalignment sometimes there.

Also, another thing that you've probably seen a few times, but when teams or some people are coming off from other systems, they expect that when they're going to get into that new system, they're going to do things in the same exact way. In that past system that was built in 1997, I was able to drag and drop an email directly from my Outlook into the system, for example.

You know, you got to be ready to change a few things on how you work for a lot of different good reasons. But that has been an issue. People expecting to work the exact same way as in previous systems.

Casey Peddicord (08:34)
Yeah, think of, use, I'm an analogy person. So I think about, and I tell clients this a lot, like sometimes you have to slow down to speed up a little bit. You know, like just be like, yes, sometimes there is a little bit of an impact to the business, but most of the time it's so minimal and you can really recover it over the next, let's say 30 to 60, 90 days. And it's just sort of a reset. You know what I mean? Is that fair? You agree with that?

Sam St-Amour (08:57)
Yeah.

yeah, so much, right? If you go too fast in the wrong direction, you might as well slow down and find the right direction and then speed up, for sure.

Casey Peddicord (09:08)
Yeah. Sam, why is it so tempting to, I think of the word like overbuild without thinking about humans behind the process?

Sam St-Amour (09:19)
Yeah. I think it's in our nature, isn't it? Like you think about, this system's going to be so good. You know, I'm responsible of configuring and preparing that system for people. going to be so, we're going to have automations and reports and templates and rules, and it's going to be so powerful. And you do all of that and then people get in and they're like, I have no flexibility. I, that's not what I was expecting to do.

Casey Peddicord (09:44)
So rigid. Yeah.

Sam St-Amour (09:45)
so rigid and I don't like using it because it forces me in a certain way that that is not how I was expecting to work and that doesn't make sense. You know, so this kind of case happens definitely.

Casey Peddicord (09:58)
Yeah.

And actually, and I'm sorry to interrupt you there. I think about like, I always feel like, and I tell folks this HubSpot will give you three, four, sometimes five different ways to get to the same place. It's kind of like, I can hop in my car and take the highway to get to the town, or I can ride my bicycle, maybe a little bit slower, a little bit different way, but I still get there. Or maybe there's three different routes, right? And sometimes they're all the same sort of, sort of route to go. And I think that's where.

Sam St-Amour (10:10)
Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (10:25)
like from a smart bug standpoint, not to like totally plug smart bug here, but you know, we've got really smart people here who can go, Hey, you know what? HubSpot best practice says this, and I've seen this implemented 15 different times with other businesses. And here's the caveats in the real world of like, okay, we should do X instead of Y or we should do Z instead of A. Is that fair?

Sam St-Amour (10:43)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Personally, I like the twisty country roads, because they're fun and more picturesque. But maybe sometimes the highway is just the best option because of the overall landscape and everything that comes into play. So we have to make these choices, but we do have them, which is good. And something else also kind of related to my previous point that I wanted to mention is that we want to build all these things because we feel it's going to be so awesome. We really focus on the output that we want.

Casey Peddicord (10:50)
Yeah, they're beautiful. Yes.

Sam St-Amour (11:14)
of the platform, it feels. But we easily forget how can we remove friction for people that are going to input stuff in the platform. And we think about that maybe later. Once we start to have friction and feel that things are not working, then we start thinking about that. in a lot of cases, we should kind of reverse that a little bit. How can I make it easy as much as possible to start with?

Casey Peddicord (11:24)
Yes.

Sam St-Amour (11:39)
and then that's building, the kind of slow down to go faster afterwards, right? It's kind of connected to that.

Casey Peddicord (11:45)
Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any key takeaways? Any key points that you got for folks there?

Sam St-Amour (11:49)
Well, it happens that I do, Casey. Thanks for asking. Definitely, there are two takeaways here that I think make a lot of sense. the first one is that even the best workflows or automation will fail if they're not aligned with how people actually work, right? No matter what the platform, no matter the platform, it comes from the heart, Casey. You can be sure about that. That also, of course, start simple, but do it well.

Casey Peddicord (12:05)
Gosh, felt that man. yeah.

It does.

Sam St-Amour (12:16)
and have a general idea of your next steps, right? Where do you want to take that platform after? What do you want to build after? Does it make sense? Is it like coherent with the overall thing that you're trying to do? But start simple, do it well. People will jump in and then build on top of that.

Casey Peddicord (12:31)
Yeah, 100%. And I think about the human centered approach to like a process design. And I guess in the context of HubSpot, what do you feel like, not to use like a bunch of buzzwords, right? But what does human centered design mean to you in the context of HubSpot?

Sam St-Amour (12:38)
Yeah.

Pretty much literally human at the center of design probably means that in all cases, but here literally just sit with the team, right? So you're going to have a platform that's going to be used by them, a platform that is beneficial for the company, but we have to make it beneficial for the users also, right? It's not just, it's not one additional thing or multiple additional things you have to do in your day. You're already busy enough, right?

the sales guys or strategists or a lot of people, we don't have a lot of free time, let's say, so we don't want to add things. So sit with the people, ask them questions, right? Ask them to show you their screen, right? So do what you do generally, the tools you use, show me, and then you take screenshots, right? You record videos and then you just kind of understand and feel, getting a little bit like a...

Casey Peddicord (13:27)
Yeah, so powerful.

Sam St-Amour (13:40)
mysterious, but I can feel and understand how they work, see the fields, the information that they have to enter, all that stuff. And once you understand that, you're in such a better position to offer them a platform that makes sense for them.

Casey Peddicord (13:53)
Yeah.

Yeah. I think about a client that you and I worked together on a couple of years ago that was basically moving from a paper process into HubSpot. And they had a system, quote unquote, that was an on-premise AS400 system. It was literally like a server that's set in a closet. And this was a fairly large company, almost a hundred million dollar company and had, I think 30, 32 sales reps.

Sam St-Amour (14:04)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (14:19)
And at the end of the day, were still working off paper. was 2021, maybe 2022. And their sales reps were literally like filling out pieces of paper, sticking them into boxes. And I think when I was on site with them, one of the most impactful things, and it wasn't like anything extraordinary, it was like, hey, I just want to sit with your salespeople for a half a day or a day. Literally had like pen and paper just walking through some of those things. And sometimes, again, slowing down to speed up, but be able to take what you can see from a rep level and just translate that and make the simple next step. It doesn't have to be this over engineered, all right, beautiful work of art. Like let's start with just a drawing. Let's just get your folks like walking. And I know we talk about like a crawl walk, run perspective, but just get your folks in there and let them start working and then give them the flexibility to work. A lot of times if you do that, that goes a long way.

Sam St-Amour (15:11)
yeah. Can you imagine with them going from a system where, I mean, like Post-its and things like that, right? Someone would take a paper and get it on the desk for someone else, and that worked for them for a long time. But taking them from that system into a computer interface, some of these guys were not necessarily...

Casey Peddicord (15:18)
Yeah!

Sam St-Amour (15:32)
overjoyed, right? Some people were definitely happy and excited, but some other people were like, you know, it's been working. Why are we changing? ⁓ So especially in a case like this, like with your example, Casey, start simple, make it easy, no friction, please. Just start little things. And then when they see the value, then go ahead and build further.

Casey Peddicord (15:35)
For sure.

Right.

Yeah, Sam, can you walk us through a framework or an example of how you map process around people instead of tools?

Sam St-Amour (16:01)
Oh yeah, that's something that when I joined SmartBug five years ago, whether you believe it or not, this is something that I was really pushing hard to just have the time to sit with the clients and understand how they work. And there's one tool that people are probably tired of hearing me mention, but there's a tool that I love. It's called Miro, or Miro, I'm not sure how pronounce it in English, but it's basically an online collaborative whiteboard, right?

expect that or think about that whiteboard in your mind. Just imagine different people online just meeting in front of it and then having virtual post-its or diagrams and flows and mind maps and all that kind of stuff. for a session, right, like a mapping session, I'll open a board in that tool, a space for the client. And then we're going to have different workshops sometimes or different things we're trying to do, right? So what we're going to do is invite the client, invite the relevant

parties, relevant stakeholders for whatever we're trying to map. And then again, we sit together and our role is to ask questions and take notes pretty much. So we're going to ask them, what are the steps? What are the documents? Who else is involved? Are there approvals? What are the important milestones? And then what? And then what? And what else?

As they tell us about how they work, they sometimes will show their screen, that kind of thing. We're taking screenshots, taking notes, and just kind of preparing that nice portrait or landscape, if you will, of the things that are important and how we can afterwards make sense of all of that. So we've got all that mapped in the tool.

Casey Peddicord (17:41)
Yeah, I think about, you know, I talk with clients all day, day. And I think about it as almost three, three mappings really, right? Like, you've got your current process. Hey, what do we want that future process to look like? Like assuming that you're not talking about HubSpot just overall, hey, what does the future state process look like? And then usually I think we kind of merge those together in a real world scenario and put them together in a third mapping of, Hey, here's how we should put this into HubSpot plus whatever other tools you've got.

And I'll say this too, like we like Miro, I say Miro, but you can do this in pretty much anything, right? Like we like Miro because it is an online whiteboard. There's a lot of cool tools in there, but you know, start out, if you can come to the table, especially if you've got, let's say you're moving off a Salesforce, moving off a pipe drive key, you know, active campaign, whatever that system is, trying to move it into HubSpot or connect it to HubSpot, even if you're able to scratch pad it out, right? Like even like a Google deck or a...

Sam St-Amour (18:09)
Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (18:36)
Excel sheet of like, you know, pluses going to the next stage. Like you can use pretty much any system, but Miro is a great one.

Sam St-Amour (18:42)
Yeah, there's whimsical that other colleagues use. There's Lucidchart, like whatever tool, like pen and paper, write, sit at a table and just take notes if you want. That's perfect. The digital is better in my opinion, because then you can copy, paste, search, all that stuff. whatever makes sense for you and kind of works getting this moving forward, absolutely makes sense.

Casey Peddicord (19:02)
Well,

it helps you. It is. one of those slow down to speed up type things. And really, it helps you understand how the client works. And I think it's interesting to talk about here for a second where sort of the model that SmartBug works and not to give away our secret sauce, but that strategist is embedded with that client. they typically say, that strategist is with us for life and the client is with us for life, that strategist gets to really know that part of the business.

Sam St-Amour (19:19)
Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (19:26)
You specifically have clients that you've been with for years and years and years, and those people look at you as, Sam's a part of our team. We trust Sam to do X, Y, and Z. We trust Sam's perspective on those certain things. So it's like truly understanding how the clients work on a day-to-day basis truly helps you devise a better plan and a better process to put into HubSpot, right?

Sam St-Amour (19:29)
yeah.

Yeah, and with that mapping, that's typically where you're going to start. You have to force yourself to understand and know the client. And by the way, with these mapping sessions, there's so much benefit that can come out of it. We're talking about aligning the process with the tool. But if you knew how many times at the end of a session, we mapped all these things with a client, and the other client is like, gosh.

wow, I didn't know that this is actually what I'm doing or how our activities are organized, right? And we're like, exactly. Sometimes they don't know how they, like their flows of work, they are not aware, right? And we take the time and show them like, look at that. And then we can say kind of like what you said, well, here's the current status and here are suggestions that, you know, we could tweak that process here and there a little bit, we're a bit more.

Casey Peddicord (20:20)
Right. You surface things that they didn't even know. Yeah.

Sam St-Amour (20:43)
so that it's gonna make it easier for you, it's gonna make it easier for your clients, and it's gonna make it easier to align the platform and you to the platform, the platform to you, basically.

Casey Peddicord (20:53)
Yeah. How do you balance like user preferences with a need for standardization and scale?

Sam St-Amour (20:59)
Yeah, that balancing act is something that is not personal or individual, but kind of per project a little bit. But there's part of the system that has to adapt to you. And that's usually what people see. I'm getting this CRM. It has to work for me, which is true. But by default, HubSpot cannot create a CRM that is exactly.

perfect from the get-go for every types of business. It works really well and it's, in my opinion, the best, but it's not tailored necessarily from out of the box for you. So you have to also adapt to some of the standards and best practices, which in the end will benefit your team and your company, but also would make it easy or easier to align with what the platform has to offer. But in the end, it's kind of, you know,

working on something as a platform and working on some things for you to balance how much one can figure and change into the other. ⁓

Casey Peddicord (21:58)
Yeah, it's really

like a, I think it's really a mix of science and art, you know? Like the best practices in there, like be ready to go off the beaten path, break the rules sometimes if it makes sense, but it...

Sam St-Amour (22:03)
Absolutely.

Exactly. That

is something, by the way, that I think comes with experience, right? ⁓ You're going to have someone that maybe is just working on that for the first time and you don't think about these things, but at a certain point, you become comfortable saying, normally we should do it this way, right? But in this specific case, it makes sense to break that rule because in the long run, it's going to be the best option.

Casey Peddicord (22:13)
Yes, 100%.

Yes.

Yeah, push the boundaries of HubSpot a little bit for those specific use cases. Yeah. I think about, you know, key takeaways, like, man, you know, don't, don't be afraid to sit with those users, take the time to understand how they work. And, and I would say great HubSpot systems are designed for the end user, you know, ⁓ right. or designed with the end user, maybe not for them. Yeah. There you go. Love that. Love that. So let's talk about enablement for a second.

Sam St-Amour (22:37)
Yeah, yeah.

100%.

Yeah.

Design with them to make sure that it's designed for them. Absolutely. Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (23:04)
I think about enablement that actually like sticks. We hear the word enablement all the time. But what are some of the ways that teams can improve adoption of HubSpot without overwhelming the users?

Sam St-Amour (23:04)
Okay.

Yeah. It's kind of important, isn't it? It's kind of a big investment and kind of important for a company. So how do you make that change work? And then we know every case is a little bit different, but there's definitely certain things that we can kind of focus on or keep in mind. start small, start with baby steps, kind of connects back to what you've been saying since the beginning of this podcast, but it starts simple.

Casey Peddicord (23:19)
It is.

Sam St-Amour (23:42)
Trying to show value right away, right? There's typically a lot of little things that are very simple, very direct, very straightforward that we can do to show value immediately for users. some of you that are familiar with HubSpot, just connecting their email, connecting their calendar is something very simple. It takes like, I don't know, 10 minutes if you have like little hiccups, which we rarely have anyway. So just take that little bit of time. And what that's going to do is, without even changing how they work. They can not even think about it. It's still gonna start providing value for the business. And in general, if they forget something, they can go there. So just simple things, show value right away and try to do things that will not impact how they work right away. And then they'll be more willing to come in and check what else they could get, right? And that leads me to finding...

Casey Peddicord (24:32)
What else?

Sam St-Amour (24:33)
the one ha ha feature, right? The one thing that gets you excited.

Casey Peddicord (24:37)
Ha ha or aha.

Sam St-Amour (24:39)
I searched actually and it's AHA, isn't it? So, aha. ⁓ I'll have to, ⁓ I'll have to practice that for sure. ⁓

Casey Peddicord (24:43)
Aha aha. Okay. I thought you said, haha feature. There's some haha features in there too. For you HubSpot product

folks, there's no haha features. It's all really great, but yes.

Sam St-Amour (24:55)
But basically one feature that really gets people excited, I'm going to change the way I say it to make sure that I don't fall in that trap again. Casey, I see you. There's multiple times where I told people about the meeting scheduler, for example, right? Kind of simple tool, very easy and quick to use, very easy to set up, and it's very versatile. You can use it in lot of places and it just works.

In a lot of these cases, you can see in the eyes of the users, they're like, oh my gosh, is that for real? True. Yeah, I can do that. Like right now, I can do that right now. Like sign me in. I'm in. Then you start with these little things, and they see value, and they want to get more, or they're more open to changing or adjusting. Next thing, you've mentioned it, but some users are just overwhelmed. So they're too much.

Casey Peddicord (25:29)
Right.

Yeah.

Sam St-Amour (25:47)
too many menus, too many options. I just want to click on that thing. Why is there everything else? So definitely. Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (25:52)
It's one of the number one pieces of feedback that I get.

And it seems like a lot of people don't know that they can lock that down. Depending on your Hubstance subscription, you should be hiding some of those things they don't necessarily need.

Sam St-Amour (26:05)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. had a case recently where there was a team member that was like, I just need these three sections. The other ones are bothering me. They kind of overwhelm me because I'm not sure then if I'm supposed to click on that thing or not. So very simply, just go and hide these sections for these people if that can make it easier for them. You don't have to. And maybe not everyone wants that, but you definitely can. It's definitely valuable for some users. And one last thing also that I have in mind.

Casey Peddicord (26:17)
Right.

Sam St-Amour (26:32)
to just make kind of adoption easier is if you're the system admin, right, if you're the person kind of pushing that project forward, make sure that you set time aside for like office hours or something like that, right? So maybe just block a little bit time in your week and just tell people in your team like, hey, I would like you to spend some time in the platform and then let's reconnect on Thursday morning with a coffee and kind of talk about what you're seeing, what you're liking and what you're not liking, and then we're going to take back and make it better. But make sure that you keep that connection, make sure that you keep that availability for the team if you're expecting them to jump.

Casey Peddicord (27:02)
So good.

Man, so good. How do you coach marketing leaders or like rev ops leaders to train and involve and train and evolve their systems over time?

Sam St-Amour (27:20)
Yeah, that's not easy. And it can vary depending on the kind of business you have, the kind of platform that you've built in the end. But there are basic things that I think are always valuable for these kind of questions. So the first one that comes to mind is try to leverage the built-in tools as much as possible. So linking us back to what we said before, it's really easy to go custom and you want to build the craziest, best,

most powerful thing ever. But like refrain from doing that as much as you can and leverage the built-in tools, leverage the

Casey Peddicord (27:53)
Yeah, there's a reason why HubSpot has went so far in the tools from a UX and UI perspective. And you should trust some of that, right? Doesn't mean you have to use everything, but there's a lot of work behind the scenes that's gone into that.

Sam St-Amour (28:00)
Yeah. yeah, and like you said, usually there's different ways you can achieve a similar result. So if you can achieve a result that is good for you with built-in tools, definitely do that. And I say this, like it's easier, it's easier for maintenance. A lot of tools work with other tools. So if you just use the built-in system, they're just gonna work right there with whatever you're doing, right? So that's super important. Kind of related to this, one example comes to mind is when you,

And that's something that I had to do a lot of work with a client to help improve. But in a workflow, for example, you're sending notifications, right? You're sending emails to internal team members, for example, right? And what you can do is either say, I want to send this notification email to Casey, or I want to send this notification email to the senior director of channel sales, right? Which would be another property that kind of indicates who is currently the senior director of channel sales. So as much as you can, try to go with these variables, I guess, versus actually specifying individuals. And that's a very little detail. But if there's change in the team, in the structure, in what we do, and your role changes, whatever, then I need to go through all of my workflows, make sure that I change the name everywhere.

Casey Peddicord (29:11)
yeah, that's a great point.

Sam St-Amour (29:29)
for that workflow to keep working perfectly. Whereas if I use a variable like this, I just let it run. I make sure that my data is good and that's it. So.

Casey Peddicord (29:35)
Right? Yeah,

I call them HubSpot ghosts. I see where clients will get an email and it's like, this SQL, if this is not qualified, talk to Ryan. And then we're like, who's Ryan? Ryan hasn't been here in two years. Yeah.

Sam St-Amour (29:40)
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's so easy to forget all these little details if you're not a genius of writing down and mapping everything. So yeah, definitely that helps. Something...

Casey Peddicord (30:01)
Yeah. If they need a genius, by the way, we've got some geniuses on staff. I think of you as a genius, Sam.

Sam St-Amour (30:04)
for sure. For sure. thank you. I was thinking about a lot of other people, but thanks for that. Also, if you're expecting to build another maybe big chunk of what you want to do, develop a new part of the system or something that you want to start using, go back to that nice mapping software or whatever you were using and map it. See it before you actually build the thing in HubSpot. I think about chatbots.

for example, right? There's new AI chatbots and all that, but the chatbots where you decide of the script, for example, visualize it first in a mapping tool or something. That's going to help you avoid pitfalls. That's going to help you just prepare better, building that thing, just so that it makes more sense.

Casey Peddicord (30:43)
Yeah, think of, a hundred percent. think of, you know, I'm going to sound really old here for a second, but I think about the house analogy, right? Like your house is only as strong as your foundation. You really need to lay a good foundation. However, I think of HubSpot today, a lot of people get, and I'll use the same analogy for a second. A lot of people get hung up in, hey, I'm building the house. And we usually, once you build a house, you get to point to where you're finished.

And CRM is really more of a living, breathing, always evolving, always changing type thing. So it's like, hey, not only do you build the house, you need to mow the yard. You need a landscape. You have to continue to pressure wash your house to get the mold and the dust off, right? Like you need to clean your house. There's all those things. It's not just like you build it and you're done. And I think a lot of people sort of fall into that trap of, hey, we built it and it should be running. It's not running. It's like, no, you really need to give it the love. You got to give it some TLC, you know? I could probably could sing a song.

on some of that stuff, but it's, we're running out of time, Sam, we're running out of time. So not today. Karaoke session next time. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I think about too, like as much as possible, avoid trying to create those custom systems on top of those systems, right? It's essentially what you're saying, you know? Like keep that, keep that standard mapping, you know, and the key takeaway I think is, you know, enablement is not, it's not a one and done type thing.

Sam St-Amour (31:36)
I would love to hear it.

For another time, that's okay, we've got it recorded. Nice.

Yeah, pretty much.

Casey Peddicord (32:02)
It's always an ongoing conversation. It's always some sort of loop. Is that fair? Just like the house, right? You got to give it some love.

Sam St-Amour (32:06)
just like the house, just like the house, Casey. By the way, first time that I hear that, perfect analogy for sure. If you build a custom patio without kind of seeing how you should probably build it, it's gonna be tricky to maintain it and yeah.

Casey Peddicord (32:18)
Well, yeah, and I think about things too, like not to go too deep into this rabbit hole here, but, know, hey, things are going to happen. You know what? And you need to be prepared for those certain things. Like, just like in your house, your air conditioner is going to go out at some point. You might have a water leak at some point. Like no matter how good your house is built, there's going to be something that happens along the way. And it's how you respond to those in a lot of cases, but having some sort of plan, having some sort of backup, having some sort of, you know, hey,

Having somebody at your side that's walked through those things before could just make it so much easier, right? Instead of it being like, my gosh, the house is on fire type thing.

Sam St-Amour (32:48)
Yeah. yeah, yeah for sure. First time a house is on fire it's kind of hard to know exactly how you should react.

Casey Peddicord (32:55)
So let's. It's hard. It is, it is, it is. For those of you who are looking for a house on fire, funny video, my treadmill, I walking treadmill and it did catch on fire one time. It's a great LinkedIn video if you want to dig that up. Sort of get into our wrap up here for a second. You know, the role of rel ops in human centered systems, like Sam, how do you, oh man, how do I pose this question? How do you spot when a system is becoming too complex, or like more complex than it needs to be.

Sam St-Amour (33:27)
Yeah. One thing's for sure is I'd like to have this red, bleeping light or something that would tell us, like, hey, this system is getting too complex. Do something about it. But we don't have that, right? So yeah, how do we see that? So again, there's a lot of little things. A few things come to mind. But for example, if when you're working in your platform, you notice that you start to have to work with a lot of exceptions.

or long manipulations, right? A KC change role, and then I need to spend 10 hours just going through everything and kind of, that's a sign. That's a sign there's probably something there to do. Similar to that, like issues that become very long to troubleshoot, right? This thing is doing that, and I'm not quite sure where it comes from. yeah, that's a sign also. If you need a big...

Casey Peddicord (34:12)
Yes. Takes you forever. Yeah.

Sam St-Amour (34:21)
massive document for CRM onboarding. For example, let's say I'm joining your team. They're like, welcome to the team. I'm going to give you this 100 page document that you should be familiar with. You're like, oh.

Casey Peddicord (34:32)
like the book, the book hits the desk and dust goes everywhere. Yes. Time to probably take a look at that.

Sam St-Amour (34:36)
Yeah, we'll see each other again in six months. So if you have something like that that is required, that is potentially a sign. Then something else, like I talked about the built-in functionalities before, right? So if at a certain point you see new functionalities come in, because HubSpot keeps evolving, right? This platform keeps improving all the time. It's crazy. That's such a good sign.

Casey Peddicord (34:40)
Yes! 100 %

gosh,

Sam St-Amour (35:03)
But basically, if you have built-in tools that you cannot leverage because you've created custom stuff kind of around it, and then this new nice thing that would work really well comes out and you cannot use it because you've got this thing here that is separate. That's another sign that maybe, you know, would be time to kind of reconsider how much custom you want to go with. Yeah, exactly.

Casey Peddicord (35:25)
Right, right. Sounds like you're starting to make a Franken system, which we see a lot

in like Salesforce examples, like folks that just over-engineered it and it's just, you can't use it anymore. Or you can't, it's not flexible enough for you from a change perspective. Any other red flags that would signal a disconnect between like process design and team needs?

Sam St-Amour (35:35)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, frustrated users is probably a good one, right? When they knock at your door and you say, your system is crap. Yeah. It's kind of just general user adoption, right? So if, like people will not necessarily always take the time and say like, hey, Casey, you know, I don't really appreciate how the platform is not helping me do my job properly. You know, they just won't.

Casey Peddicord (35:48)
Yeah, 100%.

Right, that would be awesome!

They did though.

Sam St-Amour (36:09)
That would be awesome, but they probably just won't talk to you, or at some point, they'll send you an email with things that are probably not said properly. But if you see that they're not talking to you, but they're not using the tool, that's a pretty obvious sign, I guess. But other more clear signs are if you've started to use tasks in HubSpot, for example, like one of these tools.

Casey Peddicord (36:16)
Right,

Sam St-Amour (36:30)
And they're just spying up. And I go and check Casey's tasks today. Like, look at that. There's like 500 tasks that were complete and overdue and all that. That's a good.

Casey Peddicord (36:39)
Don't go looking

at my task right now. Just don't do that.

Sam St-Amour (36:43)
I, okay, I won't I won't. but same kind of similar, right? We've talked about, notification emails earlier, right? So the system might be sending notification emails to the, to the team saying, Hey, you've got this newly to check, blah, blah, blah. If there's, or if somehow you see that these notification emails become ignored, that's a sign that the system is losing value for the people that it should serve. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (37:02)
Ugh.

Yeah, they're getting overwhelmed. Yeah.

For sure.

Sam St-Amour (37:09)
Or you go in the deals section, right? And you look at the pipeline, you're like, this deal didn't have activity for the last four months. And it's just like sitting there in the second stage of the pipeline and nothing's happening. And there's a bunch of them in the pipeline. Like, yeah, this is not a good sign.

Casey Peddicord (37:24)
Well, Sam's looking at my pipeline again. I get it. I get it, Sam.

Sam St-Amour (37:27)
I'm using any example, Casey, not anecdotal examples. Yeah.

Casey Peddicord (37:29)
Anecdotal examples. Sure. Sure, Sam. Thank you. Make me feel great.

Make me feel great, Sam. I feel like the preacher's preaching to me. It's starting to blush a little bit. Sam, key takeaways for this as we start to wrap up.

Sam St-Amour (37:42)
Yeah, for sure. So rev-ops or system usage, I guess, is not just about optimization, but it's about empathy, communication, and strategic restraint. So that kind of covers or link everything that we've been talking together since the beginning of this podcast.

Casey Peddicord (37:58)
love that empathy communication. What was the last one?

Sam St-Amour (38:01)
Strategic restraint. Start slow, know what you want to do, and then build a top of that and go further. And then also another one that is super important is, again, kind of related to this, but listen and be open to readjusting some configuration that you have done since the beginning of your HubSpot project, for example. Because with as much goodwill as you might have in the time you've taken and did your homework,

Casey Peddicord (38:03)
love that, I restraint.

Sam St-Amour (38:27)
maybe it wasn't 100 % on the bullseye right away. So just be open, be ready to adjust a few things and keep learning, keep listening and evolve from there.

Casey Peddicord (38:30)
Right. my gosh, so much good stuff, Sam. We could keep talking for hours, I feel like. But, you know, such a good... It would be nice.

Sam St-Amour (38:41)
Yeah. Wouldn't that be nice if our days could be spent talking together? I would love that Casey, like anytime.

Casey Peddicord (38:47)
would love that, would love my inbound roomie here. Sam, seriously though, it was such a good valuable conversation. If there was one thing that I hope everyone takes away from this episode, it's that HubSpot success doesn't just start with the tools, it starts with people. We heard some incredible insights from Sam today. We're rethinking about process design and how the actual user behavior, how that comes into play to creating enablement and strategies that stick. Sam, thank you so much for being here.

Sam St-Amour (38:51)
Hahaha

Casey Peddicord (39:16)
Where can listeners connect with you or learn more about what you do in your work?

Sam St-Amour (39:20)
Yeah, for sure. So on LinkedIn a lot, we have a lot of HubSpot community questions and posts that we try to get to just share some of the things that we're working on. So LinkedIn is definitely one place. My email, I think we're supposed to share email or a LinkedIn link or something. So definitely hit me up if there's anything, any questions you have, I'd be happy to chat and share any experience or whatever I can to provide some quick value there. And that's pretty much it. Start there and I'm sure we can connect.

Casey Peddicord (39:49)
That's awesome. And to our listeners, if you found any of this helpful, be sure to subscribe to SmartBug on Tap. Sam, thank you so much. Appreciate your insights and I'm excited to have you on next time as well. You can also check out our blog and our resource center at smartbugmedia.com for all of the HubSpot strategy tips, guides, real-world use cases. Thank you all for listening. I'm Casey with SmartBug on Tap. We'll see you guys next time.