Maximizing Portfolio Oversight: How Private Equity Firms Leverage HubSpot for Growth + Transparency

Paul Schmidt (00:10)
Welcome to today's episode where we're talking about how private equity firms can leverage HubSpot for better portfolio oversight. I'm Paul Schmidt. And today we're diving into how P firms can overcome challenges like fragmented reporting, inconsistent data, and just a lack of visibility across their portfolio companies. It's difficult for most companies to piece together a dashboard for their own metrics, let alone trying to piece together reporting across multiple different organizations.

Back again with me today is Casey Peddicord, SmartBug's Senior Director of Channel Sales and HubSpot expert with deep experience helping businesses drive growth with smarter CRM strategies. Today we'll explore how PE firms can use HubSpot as a single source of truth to streamline the portfolio oversight and make better data-driven decisions. So whether you're struggling with siloed reporting or just looking to standardize sales and marketing across your portcodes, hopefully you'll learn a few takeaways from today.

Casey, welcome.

Casey Peddicord (01:08)
Thanks Paul. Thanks for having me. Excited to dive in.

Paul Schmidt (01:11)
Yeah. So let's jump in here in a sort of a high level. And for those of those of you out there that are unfamiliar with HubSpot beyond marketing, I just liked, can you just describe its role as a full CRM platform?

Casey Peddicord (01:24)
Yeah, sure. think HubSpot sort of gets a little bit of a bad rap sometimes because it grew up as a marketing tool, right? In a world where Salesforce was the big player from a CRM perspective. so go back 20 years, HubSpot's born, marketing tool kind of grows up in that space. But today HubSpot and Salesforce top two CRMs in the world is what I tell everybody. I think about the way that I always explain HubSpot is kind of like a big toolbox, right? If you've ever been to...

a home improvement store, let's take a Lowe's or Home Depot. You go into the store and you see the big red craftsman toolbox. And basically that big toolbox is HubSpot. It is the CRM. It has all these different tools and different things that you can use. And it basically has different drawers, right? You can basically unlock certain drawers. And just like how at home you have that toolbox, you pull it out, you've got all your wrenches on one drawer, all your zip ties on another, all your nuts and bolts in another.

HubSpot works the same way. Basically, it has a set of marketing tools, a set of service tools, a set of sales tools, a set of website tools, a set of operations tools, has all those different quote unquote hubs. But today its main focus is really that CRM platform space for sure.

Paul Schmidt (02:30)
Got it, yeah. I think my garage and my toolbox probably doesn't look quite like that, quite messy, but I see where we're going with that. But private equity firms, they oversee a multiple portfolio companies with different tech stacks, data in a lot of different places. What are some of the biggest data and process challenges you've seen when P firms are trying to scale their operations?

Casey Peddicord (02:35)
Hahaha.

Yeah, think, you know, the number one thing that I come across is that you're, you you've got these different companies that you, the different portfolio companies or portcos, and they typically come in with different tech stacks, right? They've got different cobbled pieces of tech together. Some of them are a little bit more streamlined than others. But in most cases that we see, sometimes there are, you know, five plus, 10 plus, 15 plus.

pieces of different software. so, you know, trying to consolidate those is just for one company is a huge task. Not to mention trying to do it for multiple portfolio companies, right? Let's say you're invested in 10, 15, 20 different companies trying to oversee that can really be a nightmare. so, know, HubSpot allows you to be able to streamline those. And there's a couple of different ways that we will talk about a little bit later on, but you definitely have some options with HubSpot, whether it's

you know, all the portfolio companies are in their own HubSpot portal or you combine them all. Well, again, we'll talk through some of those, but, I think about trying to consolidate those multiple tech stacks, you know, really trying to not diversify the technology, trying to keep it in as few silos as possible. And then the other thing too, I think from a private equity standpoint, that a lot of folks miss and VC standpoint is, man, when you've got those different pieces of software, not only are there hard costs to those software, but the soft cost.

When you basically have each of those silos and trying to transfer data in between those and report on it and get the right reporting, the soft costs are through the roof. So if you're able to consolidate that down and streamline operations, man, it's a improvement for sure.

Paul Schmidt (04:34)
What about, you know, for PE firms that are considering HubSpot or any CRM platform to help consolidate some of this information, what are some misconceptions that you see that some firms have about using HubSpot for portfolio management?

Casey Peddicord (04:51)
Yeah, I think of two things. One is, you know, there are some pieces of software out there that I've run across over the years that are PE specific or VC specific. And while in a sense, some of those are okay, most of them that I run across are really okay at one and not great at everything else. And I'll give me an example.

I ran across a piece of software last week with a private equity group and it did pretty well at like just managing their portfolio companies as far as like, hey, what have we invested? What do we have going on? What fund are they in? But outside of that, the reporting was pretty horrible. There's no, it's not very friendly to be able to use. They have to be able to have different dev resources to dive in and customize things. And so, I still have yet to run across one that is

as robust as HubSpot is and it's easy to use and is user friendly. I mean, it still gives you a lot of different options. I think the other thing is if you're not using, if you're in the PE or VC space today and you're not using a PE specific software, a lot of times folks, I see they'll default to Salesforce, right? And when you default to Salesforce, know, Salesforce is a great piece of software, but a lot of times you are starting from scratch, right? It's a blank slate. And so,

You miss some of that ease of use. There are certain other things with running those different companies where you might have to have, you know, maybe multiple Salesforce instances and that can get pretty costly. And I think with both of those, you've got a really good option to look at HubSpot.

Paul Schmidt (06:24)
Got it. Got it. So my last question before we go into more into the nuts and bolts of thinking about business units and several portals and things like that is, you know, we're really seeing a rise in CRM adoption within PE firms and, you know, really them taking data management much more seriously. Why is this becoming much more of a trend? Why is this so critical for these PE firms?

Casey Peddicord (06:49)
Gosh, I mean, I think about, you as a PE firm, you've taken this and you've invested all these dollars into these portfolio companies. You're trying to really maximize every dollar. mean, at end of the day, that's what it's all about. Maximizing the dollar, maximizing your investment, getting the most that you can for that investment. And, you know, if you try to keep it in all these different silos and you're doing a lot of manual reporting between them, you've got spreadsheets flying everywhere.

And at the end of the day, somebody ends up with five different numbers and you can't really tell which one's which to be able to streamline that and go, gosh, I should be able to log in and see a dashboard and view either all my portfolio companies or maybe the profit and loss of all my portfolio companies or how many deals are they creating? It's been upon what space they're in. You should have access to that. You should be able to see that in today's world.

You should have one or a couple of dashboards where you could quickly find that information and know Hey that that that reporting is correct. It's not You know, I'm not going off of five different spreadsheets and there's five different answers and I'm not really sure which one's which So you should have that set up today

Paul Schmidt (07:53)
Yeah, that spreadsheet jockeying is just so common in talking with prospects and clients of ours. there's so it just, they're constantly battling with, who it's the right source of truth, you know, and, and, know, HubSpot seems to really be a, a solution or CRM and just in general, seems to be a better, better solution than what they've been experiencing for the last several years.

Casey Peddicord (08:13)
Yeah, for sure.

Paul Schmidt (08:15)
So let's get it a little bit more into the weeds here. How does HubSpot actually serve as that single source of truth for a PE firm in managing multiple portfolio companies? Can you just talk a little bit more about how that centralized reporting works? Get a little bit more, go a couple levels deeper for those actually who wanna understand how this works technically.

Casey Peddicord (08:36)
Yeah, I think you've got, I typically see four main setups. And not saying one is 100 % right or 100 % wrong. It definitely depends on what your PE or VC firm is set up like and what your, at the end of the day, what goal do you want to have to be able to see, hey, how do we look at that reporting and how do we visualize that? I there are some other questions in there to be able to figure out which lane you live in.

But at end of the day, I think about four main setups. One is, know, HubSpot's really good for like our own PE or VC type firm, right? To be able to manage its own business, to be able to see the firms, the general partners, the limited partners, what partners do we have? How are those relationships tied together? It works great as its own CRM central database. When we think about adding in the portfolio companies, you've really got some options. The other three would be, you know, I sometimes will recommend that

the PE firm has their own HubSpot portal. And basically each portfolio company has their own individual HubSpot portal as well. And I think about, in some cases, while this is a good fit, if you're buying different portfolio companies that maybe one runs a B2B, another one runs a D2C, and they all have sort of those different processes, sometimes having their own individual portals makes a lot of sense. And I do have some...

private equity firms that actually will just switch between portals. It's kind of like a HubSpot partner, right? We work in a lot of different portals, hundreds of portals at any given moment, and we can literally just toggle between those portals to able to get that reporting. So that's one option. I think about another option is sometimes a PE firm is able to put all their portfolio companies into one main portal. I they use something called business units to segment on the marketing side and the workflow side.

So that way each business is kind of running its own thing. You have to do a lot of work around permissions and setting up teams correctly to make sure that you don't have, you keep that visibility down from like one portfolio company, be able to see another portfolio's company's business. But we do have clients that do that where they'll list five, six, seven portfolio companies all in one really big HubSpot portal. And the nice thing is from a PE firm standpoint, it's really easy to roll up all that reporting because it's all in the same portal, right? You're not sending information back and forth.

I think about the last option is really around separate portals, but treating another HubSpot portal like a mothership portal. So I've got a couple of setups to where, you know, each portfolio company has each individual HubSpot portal. So their own logins, their own little hubs. And basically that data can transfer up into, I call it a mothership portal.

But basically, whatever the PE firm's portal is, right? And so you're basically taking data. There's several plugins today that other partners or other vendors have built that send that data up and can do centralized reporting. You could also send it into some sort of data lake like a BigQuery or Snowflake or something like that as well. several different options. But at end of the day, usually HubSpot, with our help, we can help you define which one's the best lane to live in.

Paul Schmidt (11:39)
So let's go a little bit further into that. I, know, with business units versus doing multiple portals, it's a, it's quite a big decision and you kind of have to make it, you know, if you make, make the wrong decision, like you've got a bit of technical debt on your hands and it's kind of tough to unwind. So, you know, what do you think about, you know, based on, what is the right configuration based on how PE forum is structured and how they need to access data? Do you have any recommendations? Maybe, maybe you can kind of talk about how.

you know, who needs access to, to the data versus who needs to be doing, actually doing things inside the portal and, how do you get a better understanding of that?

Casey Peddicord (12:15)
Yeah, I think there are, there are couple that come to mind. so I work with one private equity firm that has a centralized marketing team for that private equity firm that basically helps market for all their portfolio companies. You know, in that instance, in having that centralized team, usually it's super helpful if, know, you can consolidate all your portfolio companies into one big HubSpot portal and segment them inside that portal because that marketing team can basically create one asset.

Let's take a landing page or a workflow or a marketing email. And it's so easy to be able to duplicate that across those different portfolio companies. So saves you dollars, saves you time, makes it really easy for that oversight or in this case, that example, that marketing team. But also from a roll up perspective, usually if they have that centralized marketing team, they also have other centralized teams, let's say around financial reporting. Again, makes it really easy to do that. I think about other use cases where maybe

not having them all in one portal is probably the best option. We run across all the time where a private equity firm purchases or helps invest in other, a certain company and that company already has HubSpot. They've already built it out. And maybe you have 10 different portfolio companies and three of them already have HubSpot. Sometimes it's more of a lift and harder on that business to pull them into a, like a one portal setup that's segmented versus just keeping

keeping them into their own separate portals. Also, I run across a lot of examples where the private equity firm maybe doesn't have a generalized marketing, right? Generalized marketing team. And usually in those setups, having individual portals does make a lot of sense. But I think no matter which way you go, having somebody that's really knowledgeable in that space to be able to help you, you're right, Paul, with the permissions, the user setups, the teams, what sort of visibility do we have?

And then really mapping out those processes because depending upon if you are a B2B or a D2C or a D2C type business, sometimes those processes can really play across each other. Especially if one of those portfolio companies has had HubSpot for a while, maybe has certain workflows built out. So there's a lot of different things to think about before you make that decision.

Paul Schmidt (14:24)
Yeah, you know, I think you make a good point there. know, if companies have been on the port codes have been each had their own portal for a number of years, like to try to unwind that and then try to consolidate onto a single portal. Like it may sound like it may make financial sense because you're just paying for one portal. But at the end of the day, the amount of lifting and shifting and permissioning and data transfer and everything like that may not even make sense from an ROI perspective at the end of the day. What about.

Casey Peddicord (14:47)
100%.

Paul Schmidt (14:50)
or portfolio companies that have a lot of different integrations. So you're thinking about NetSuite and QuickBooks and there is in Salesforce and you're thinking about all those different tools. What's something that we should be thinking about in that decision when you're setting up all these types of, if these port codes have different integrations, how are you thinking about structure of the different portals and whether it's multi-portal or.

or business units or anything like that.

Casey Peddicord (15:17)
Yeah, think it's absolutely a great point. And you really do have to consider, hey, what are those trade-offs? And you talked about that just a second ago, I think there are scenarios where folks will have lots of integrations. Maybe they've got like a NetSuite or QuickBooks integration. another one's tied into a Salesforce. There are some of those that, even though they have those built out, sometimes it does make sense to put them into one portal. If you're trying to streamline those operations,

If maybe the PE firm is going to invest in that top level marketing team across the board, maybe it makes sense. Maybe they're going to have multiple businesses living in, let's say a NetSuite instance or maybe in a Salesforce instance. I think the number one thing is to have somebody on your side that's walked through it before. really the possibilities or the different examples are endless. I think almost every private equity firm that we walk through with these type cases today,

They're all unique. Right. And I think a lot of them are asking the same sort of the same questions of like, Hey, what's your template? You know, do you have a template for this? And while in some industries, it makes a lot of sense to have a template. think the ones that I've been a part of, they're pretty, they're very different. Right. I think the template is try to lean more towards those standard HubSpot objects, you know, try to do as much as you can within the contacts, companies, deals, tickets, um, maybe have a few custom objects, but

I think each individual PE firm has a little bit different setup. It's so vastly different that we haven't at SmartBug also have a quote unquote template that we put in there. So having somebody knowledgeable, like somebody from our team that can walk you through, okay, if you did this, here's that pitfall. If we did this, you can't do this or you can do that. So it really is customized to each individual PE firm.

Paul Schmidt (16:58)
Yeah, that makes sense. It's like, there's not just one template for it really. You know, there's so many different configurations that you're mentioning. that makes a lot of sense. What, what about it from an automation perspective? What are some common or like must have workflows that PE firms should implement in HubSpot to improve visibility and inefficiency?

Casey Peddicord (17:19)
Yeah, I think one of the biggest misses right now in the P and PortCo space is, and I'll talk a little bit about automation, but I think of automation a little bit differently. For those of you who have been in HubSpot or have seen HubSpot, when we think of automation, think of workflows. I think there's a pretty big miss right now around P firms taking advantage of automation around AI. And HubSpot gives you

certain AI tools that you can really leverage across some of these portfolio companies. And even if it's only like one little sliver, man, it makes a huge difference. And a lot of times, again, you think about from a portfolio company's point of view, gosh, they've kind of been, lot of them, let's say have been successful despite themselves, right? They have all these different tech stacks. They're running across the board. We've got the PE firm that's come in to help us invest in streamlined operations. And for you as a private equity,

investor or private equity firm, if you could bring something to the table in those negotiations around, hey, we are leading in the AI space around transforming these companies versus just, we'll help you set up HubSpot, we'll help you set up some of those automations and workflows and we can automate some of that. Right. I think it makes it really attractive for those companies to come on board with you as a private equity firm to say, when you're able to say,

Gosh, we utilize HubSpot because HubSpot's at the forefront of that AI technology. Things like, you know, a sales agent that can prospect for your businesses. The service agent that can help triage those cases or those customer service issues. So that's where my brain goes a little bit with workflows. think, I hope that's okay, Paul. went more of a high level strategic automation versus like tactical, here's what the workflow does.

Paul Schmidt (19:02)
Yeah, I mean, there's so many different kinds of automation that can be done inside of Hubstab, whether it's whether it's external nurturing types of automation, whether it's internal types of things and automation that's that's triggered off of integrations that you have. So you can definitely go a lot of different routes with it. And then I like how you mentioned some of the AI agents, which are, you know, sort of in their infancy right now. And, you know, there's so there's gonna be so much potential with being able to make organizations more efficient and creative and powerful.

Casey Peddicord (19:31)
Huge, huge opportunity.

Paul Schmidt (19:32)
What about firms that may be worried about adoption across multiple portcodes? So how customizable is HubSpot when it comes to setting different permissions, views, and reporting structures given each portfolio company may have different ways that they think about leads and opportunities and deals and things like

Casey Peddicord (19:50)
I think it's one of the really, one of the beautiful things around HubSpot, you know, is, and HubSpot sort of said this for a long time. It's, it's a crafted, not cobbled type of software. lot of the, and I'll use Salesforce as an example. know, Salesforce has basically acquired these other pieces of software over the years, right? And they basically bolt that on to their, to their core product. HubSpot on the other hand, is when, you know, when people are zagging HubSpot, zigzags or zigzags, whichever way you want to go.

And so HubSpot has built it all in one code base, all in one platform. And there's not all these different bolt-ons, right? It's basically like that toolbox that we talked about. You can just basically unlock certain tools to be able to use, but it's not like you have different logins or different things that you have to switch back and forth on. And so when I think about from a PE point of view, having the ability to make it really easy

for all of those users to be able to log in and one have technical support. So from a HubSpot standpoint, support's included. For those of you don't know or haven't lived in HubSpot world 24 seven, 365 technical support from HubSpot employees is available right inside your portal. You can literally click a button and chat with HubSpot right out of the gate. know, a lot of other software's out there aren't doing that or haven't done that or don't have the capacity to do that. So one takes a lot off of

You know, I think the PE firm to have some sort of like, I've seen where folks will set up a, or P firms will set up some sort of like technical team or like a SWAT team to be able to help with some of these type things. You can offload some of that to HubSpot. I think the other thing is from a, from a usability point of view, since it is that crafted and not cobbled model, man, they've really put a huge emphasis on like the UI, the UX, the,

the user experience, you know, inside of HubSpot buttons or certain places because it works that way. it's not something where you've created this Franken system where you're, you know, over the years, somebody has stuck a button right in the middle of the screen, right? It just doesn't work that way. If it's a beautiful type thing, I like to say it's, it's more Apple, Apple-y than some of the other platforms out there. It just, it just works. It just works really well and feels really good. Can you customize it? Absolutely. But you might not have to have all those like.

dev resources, maybe that had to have for another piece of software, or those of you who set up like a Salesforce instance before, where you have to have some sort of dev team to build out certain things. You could do a lot of that so easily inside of HubSpot with the, with the, with the right help for sure.

Paul Schmidt (22:23)
Yeah. Well, yeah, that's really helpful. So let's, let's move into our next section, which is just around, you know, the application and case studies and success stories. I'd love to hear just the actual learn a little bit more about how, you know, actual examples of firms being successful with this. Can you, can you just walk me through, you know, a P firm successfully using HubSpot and how they've unified their operations across multiple port codes.

Casey Peddicord (22:47)
Yeah, for sure. I'll share one specific example. So I was introduced by to a portfolio company or to a private equity firm with multiple portfolio companies. I think five different portfolio companies at this at this at the time inside of this fund. I was introduced to them by HubSpot and this was in I would say summer of last year. By the end of the year or actually probably within three to four months, we had basically transferred

all five of those portfolio companies into one main HubSpot portal. That portal is owned by the private equity group. They have their own marketing team. have their own like IT team. And so today, instead of having all these different cobbled text acts and what I mean cobbled man, were all across the board. Different sales processes, different marketing teams. They've really centralized that into one HubSpot platform to where that private equity firm can log in today.

go to a dashboard and they know boom, boom, boom exactly in one dashboard. Here are the five different portfolio companies. Here's how they're performing from a revenue standpoint. Here's how they're performing from a customer service standpoint. Here's how they're performing from marketing standpoint. And they don't have to do more than two, three clicks to get there, right? They literally, excuse me, they literally have it saved to where they go, see it every day. And I think that another beautiful thing of HubSpot is those folks.

Even if you aren't, there are some people, let's say in the private equity firm that maybe aren't using HubSpot, right? Or don't log into it or wouldn't be a user on a day-to-day basis. HubSpot is able to automate all those reports to those users on a daily or a weekly basis. So they can literally see those dashboards without having to log in and get just a quick snapshot. And I think about in the old school way of, you know, private equity management, you probably had a person or a team of people to build those Excel spreadsheets.

probably every single day or at least weekly, right? To give you some sort of like board meeting report. And in HubSpot, man, once you get all that in there and get it set up the right way, it works flawlessly. I'll say the last thing is, you know, it's not a small lift, right? Like it's not a small task to take five different companies, essentially six, five portfolio companies plus private equity company, put all those into one HubSpot instance.

and segment those the right way. There's a lot of work that goes into that and make sure that, let's say, portfolio company one doesn't see portfolio company number two stuff, right? Those companies are still operating independently of each other, but that private equity oversight wants to be able to have access to all that across the board. So today they're pretty much self-sufficient on their side, worked with us for, I would say six months, three months in initial engagement, three months of support after, but today completely self-service.

Paul Schmidt (25:25)
Wow. What, would you characterize those specific companies of five companies that came in and kind of consolidated everything into a single portal? Were those five companies, were they operating like out of spreadsheets or did any of them have any like sort of systems that were that you really had to kind of rebuild completely inside of HubSpot?

Casey Peddicord (25:42)
Yeah, it was really all across the board. So, one of them was a, e-commerce business. So they were using the Shopify e-commerce, had tried to tie it into multiple pieces of software. another one was a smaller portfolio company from a revenue and employee standpoint, where they were pretty much doing everything out of Excel spreadsheets at the time. one of the other portfolio companies was pretty well versed into different pieces of tech. So they actually had a different CRM.

They had a couple of different reporting pieces of software and you we, you can literally, on our side, we can literally move all that stuff for them. So it was a full white glove service of our team taking all that, all that data, plus all their processes and rebuilding that or putting that into HubSpot the right way. And then of course, segmenting and users and permissions and all that.

Paul Schmidt (26:26)
Timeline wise, what did that look like to move all that into one place? I imagine it was a lengthy process.

Casey Peddicord (26:32)
Yeah, I think the initial to move those few companies, the five companies in, I think was about three to four months, the first three to four months of the engagement. They did have some more support after, so it's very common for clients to start with us on a project basis and then end up with some sort of ongoing, maybe a support retainer, if you want to call it that, or support model or support project hours, where there's different tweaking and...

adjusting and report building and maybe more adding more automation to, know, to, really stretch HubSpot a little bit further. So it's almost like you get your base and really get that core set up and then continue to add on. Last thing I'll say is, you know, there's a lot of folks that go, Hey, when are you done? Right. And, and I think for those, those folks who are really good at HubSpot should tell you, or would tell you that HubSpot is like a living breathing thing. You know, it's never quote unquote.

Paul Schmidt (27:11)
Alright.

Casey Peddicord (27:22)
done. It's not that there's always work to do, but HubSpot's continually updating the product, adding more features, adding more functionality. And I think as your business, as your businesses grow, if you're thinking of talking about from a PE space, as those businesses hit different milestones, know, what you did at a million dollars is not what you're going to do at 10 million. It's not what you're going to do at a hundred million. HubSpot sort of that same way. You have to be able to adjust those processes to match, but man, it can really stretch to cover a lot of those use cases.

Paul Schmidt (27:52)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And seeing businesses grow over the years of being at SmartBug and seeing them start small as maybe a hub and then adopting the full platform and seeing how they've sort of re-engineered their systems just to be able to continue to account for the growth and all the visibility that they need to see as their organization continues to scale. So tell me a little bit about some of the, like, support codes have different sales models. So how might a B2B

versus D2C company be best supported inside of HubSpot. When you're thinking about, how does HubSpot support these different business models under like a single umbrella?

Casey Peddicord (28:26)
HubSpot gives you the flexibility to do, and I'll speak to just like the marketing and sales side for a second. in, of each other, I think HubSpot gives you the flexibility, even in let's say a one portal setup where I can have different processes for each of those businesses. So think about, super simple term, but let's, let's talk about like sales pipelines for a second. I can literally have a pipeline for an e-commerce team. I can have a pipeline for a B2B team.

I can have a pipeline for our, you know, direct to consumer team. you can build off those different pipelines and processes and augment it with the different workflows or automations and still segment. When I think about from a marketing or CRM standpoint, all of those different contacts. So whether those, you know, at end of the day, everybody's working with people. It's how you segment those people and companies, the right way. And so HubSpot gives you really great tools inside of one portal.

Um, things like what we call business units, which allows you to segment and give, think about, um, old Navy, Banana Republic and Gap, right? Um, I, I, say I'm a user or a shopper at all three of those brands. Let's say I go and I want to unsubscribe from Old Navy. don't like their clothes. I don't want to buy anything from them anymore. You know, HubSpot allows you to keep those three brands all inside of HubSpot. And if I don't want to do business with one, I can still work with those other two, right? I still work with Gap and Banana Republic.

And so having somebody that's well versed to be able to help you segment those the right way. Man, could, again, you can really stretch HubSpot, but HubSpot's typically a great fit for B2B. It's pretty good fit for D2C. For B2C it's good. It's rare that I run across something where it's just a really bad fit for HubSpot nowadays because it is so customizable and configurable.

Paul Schmidt (30:08)
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think to that last point you made, think companies that may not be the best fit if you're a PE firm and you've got several port codes that have like, you know, tens of millions of contacts and they and they're you're trying to market to all of them all out of out of HubSpot, it definitely becomes cost prohibitive, you know, as your your database grows. But I think that's why it's you know, HubSpot isn't trying to be the enterprise CRM for the biggest ecom brands and the

It gets supported, but it's definitely there's, there might be other types of tools out there that, know, we've seen clients be maybe more successful on.

Casey Peddicord (30:43)
Sure. Yeah. Some trade-offs to think about. Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Schmidt (30:45)
for sure.

So let's get to our final section today. And, you know, just wondering for PE firms that are new to HubSpot, what's that first step that they should take to assess whether it could be a good fit for their organization and their portcodes?

Casey Peddicord (30:59)
I think the first step that they can take is, know, if you're having, if you're, if you're in that space and you're seeing issues around your questions, some of your reporting, you're having frustration around the portfolio companies. You're hearing things from the different portfolio companies around, Hey, we want to help, you know, we want to help streamline those, or we're having issues around different tech stacks. And you start hearing those things, you know, usually a conversation with somebody who's done this before us at HubSpot, I think is a great first step.

At SmartBug Bug, we offer that for free. Myself or somebody from our team is happy to help hop on and talk through those different scenarios, whether it's an hour or a couple hours upfront. so there's no cost to that. That's a good, easy first step to just start having that conversation. especially after our folks have done dozens of these setups over the years, we can usually give you a pretty quick handle on like, hey, yes, this is...

This probably makes a lot of sense for you and we could help you here, here and here, or no, this is not a good fit.

Paul Schmidt (31:52)
on it. and yeah, just the last question I have is if, know, a P firm's interested in getting started with HubSpot, how can agencies like SmartBug make implementation, smooth and scalable? How does that work?

Casey Peddicord (32:03)
You know, it's a great question, Paul. You know, I think about for, for folks that are going to leverage just a smart bug, you know, I think about in Smart Bug doing all of those implementations, dozens of portfolio companies or dozens of private equity firms over the years, we really have a really well versed and veteran team around, Hey, this is possible and this is probably not possible, or this is probably not the best fit. You know, having that, that trusted advisor really be able to step in and go,

gosh, this is probably the right way to do it or maybe not the right way to do it. At the end of the day, if you're at that private equity firm and you're hearing these things in this podcast and some of those are resonating with you, definitely book time. Would love to just chat with you about it and help you figure out what's the best fit. And if we're not the best fit, would love to get you to the right folks that are. But at the end of the day, if you're having those questions, just know that there are people like us, the Smart Bug, where you can

fully white glove and hand that off to somebody else to do. I think about, a lot of times there is that, hey, we're going to either not change or the fear of changing is too much. It seems like there's a lot of work. It seems like there's maybe more cost there. I'll tell you in almost every scenario that we've worked across private equity, consolidating them or at least getting that visibility within those portals has been a positive ROI for them.

You know, they've seen a dollar increase because of it. They can see the right reporting. They can see the right marketing metrics. They can see the right sales metrics, right? Service metrics. You know, streamlining that is always I can't think of a negative one, right? As far as like, oh gosh, this didn't make sense for us at the end of the day, or this didn't turn out well for us. At the end of the day, they streamlined those operations. They saw a better return on their investment, eliminated the soft costs between those different silos and

you know, whether that's just help or whether that's smart bug fully doing that for you from like a white glove implementation standpoint, you know, we can customize that for you.

Paul Schmidt (34:11)
Got it. Okay, see, thank you so much for joining today. There's a lot of great tips for PE firms and report codes. How if people want to get in touch with you for additional questions, how can they get ahold of you?

Casey Peddicord (34:21)
Yeah, sure. email is cpeddicord, p-e-d-d-i-c-o-r-d at smartbugmedia.com. I think it's probably printed on the screen here, but feel free to email me. You can also catch me on LinkedIn too. So happy to help connect.

Paul Schmidt (34:34)
Casey, thank you so much for joining today. I really appreciate all the tips that you were able to offer the audience today. And we look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

Casey Peddicord (34:44)
Yeah, thanks Paul.