Setting Up HubSpot for AgeTech Organizations

Tonia Speir (00:14)
Welcome to SmartBug on Tap. I'm your host, Tonia Speir and today we're diving into a topic that's especially important to organizations in the age tech space. How to set up HubSpot the right way from day one. From parent-child company relationships and data hygiene to managing multiple buyer personas across locations, there's a lot to think about before you start hitting publish on forms and workflows. So I'm joined today by SmartBug's Director of HubSpot Strategy, John Suarez.

John is a certified HubSpot expert with over a decade of experience helping companies get the most out of their tech stack. Before joining SmartBug, John led marketing operations at several high growth SaaS companies and worked directly at HubSpot where he guided onboarding for hundreds and hundreds of customers. John's background span strategy, CRM architecture and rebuffs, making him the perfect person to talk about how to lay the right HubSpot foundation for complex organizations.

and those in the H-Tech space. So let's get into it. And John, before we get into the thick of it, can you share a little bit about your background and how you started helping those organizations at HubSpot to get the most out of the platform?

John Suarez (01:24)
Yes. Hi, thanks, Tonia. So at my current role, being a director of HubSpot strategy, I lead a team of HubSpot experts who are managing our clients and getting them onboarded, implemented, migrated and set up inside of HubSpot to increase operational efficiency, have a through line from new contacts and leads coming in to ultimately seeing that revenue from those leads.

And just making their HubSpot instance work well for their operations, whether that is a SaaS company, a B2C company. HubSpot, think, has a lot of flexibility in providing operational efficiency, no matter what your business type is.

Tonia Speir (02:04)
So John, that's so, from your perspective, why is that important? Why is it important for these age tech companies to set up HubSpot the right way from day one? I know what I tell people all the time, like if you don't do it right, like adoption can fall through the cracks. And if people aren't adopting it and using it, then it's all for naught, right? It's an investment down the drain. But tell me your perspective and why that day one setup is so important.

John Suarez (02:32)
Yeah, so I think it really, it all starts with data and data leads to insights and those insights can trigger a lot of different business decisions. First and foremost, setting up your HubSpot instance or really any CRM for that matter correctly from the beginning involves creating a process diagram of all of your different operations, how data comes into your CRM, how data is manipulated or modified in that CRM.

what it's used for, and then if it leaves the CRM, what it's used for there and how it exits. So with creating a brand new or getting set up on a new CRM or HubSpot from the beginning, if you are doing that correctly from the jump, then your automations will work correctly, which means your communication strategy will be sent to the right leads and the right contacts. It means that your reporting will be

full circle in that you can see whenever somebody is coming into the system, how they got there, and if they are converted to revenue, ultimately what brought them there. You can see different adoption and usage rates. It's really about just having good data in the CRM. And if you're not setting it up correctly from the beginning, then you're already starting a few steps behind and you could be working with incorrect data or you could be

sending different communications to the wrong people or ultimately you could be making business decisions based on data that is incorrect.

Tonia Speir (03:57)
So I'm gonna put you on the spot and ask you, John, have you had a client, like, and we of course don't wanna mention any names, but a situation where somebody didn't do it right or was sending information to the wrong people, like how did it impact their business? How did it happen? What could they have done differently?

John Suarez (04:15)
I mean, it's probably it happens more frequently than you would probably think it is. Somebody starts by setting up their HubSpot instance and they don't paint the full picture or at least map out everything they want their serum to do. And what happens is they start putting together these piecemeal processes. And then when they look back at the whole thing, different

automations, different processes aren't talking to each other. So for instance, a couple of weeks ago, we had somebody come to us and say, Hey, I need help kind of reconfiguring my whole HubSpot instance, because they were having multiple marketing emails being sent not only to the same prospects, but they were being sent to their customers because they didn't have their CRM set up correctly, which meant that segmentation was broken, which then funneled into

communications being sent to the wrong people, which ultimately raised a lot of question marks in the eyes of their customers. If their CRM and communication strategy isn't working correctly, what does that mean for their software?

Tonia Speir (05:17)
Absolutely. And one of the things that we've talked about, particularly in previous episodes as we focus on age tech is how sensitive this buyer is to trust and building trust with a brand. And a simple mistake like that can completely break down trust. Like, hey, I'm your customer already and you don't know that I'm your customer and you're sending me this communication and it kind of, you know, it leaves people with doubt. And that's definitely something that's a higher sensitivity for this market.

than others. Another thing that I know that you focused on and where I think CRM setup is so important is when you think about the data and the analytics, where people can go through a great setup and say things are moving through the pipeline just the way they want to, but maybe it wasn't set up to report on every single stage that they wanted to.

And then when you start to say like, why can't I have visibility into this in my reporting? And you realize, well, we left out a step or we left out a mandatory field for moving, you know, one opportunity to the next stage. And now we can't report on this. So do you recommend thinking through at stage one what you want to report on, what needs to be visible, whether it's to your leadership team or if you've got third party funding from investment partners, what they need to see reporting on?

Do you recommend that people think about that first?

John Suarez (06:38)
Absolutely.

So whenever a client comes to us, we have a set of discovery questions that we ask them, which kind of get to the heart of what you're asking. We ask them what data do they need to make business decisions, which is typically manifested in the form of a report inside of HubSpot or elsewhere. And beyond that, we also ask about the sales, the marketing, the customer service processes, because all of those are linked together.

and they all need to be talking to one another. And a tool like HubSpot allows you to put all three of those operations inside of HubSpot, have the automations all synced and working well together. And then at the end of that entire funnel, all of the data is flowing correctly into your reports so that your leadership team, you, or whoever is looking at the data can make intelligent data-backed business decisions. So.

Those are all questions that need to be answered upfront, whether you're doing it yourself or hiring somebody to implement your HubSpot instance.

Tonia Speir (07:38)
Great advice. Now, let's get a little bit more into the specifics. And one of the nuances that we see, particularly with age tech and kind of marrying our experience as an agency with what we've done both in senior living and also in our B2B SaaS companies. But what's unique to this age tech audience is that a lot of times they operate in ways where they need to track or manage a parent-child type relationship because they could have

someone coming in that is the senior themselves shopping, particularly for older adults that are our senior seniors, right? Like I think that the people that are in their early 50s, they're our freshmen seniors. So they may be perfectly capable of doing the shopping themselves, but as you graduate in those older audiences, you may have a child, an adult child that is helping you shop in this process.

John Suarez (08:10)
you

Tonia Speir (08:30)
And it's very important that you manage both of those relationships. Number one, because the communication could be different to each as it should be because they're going to have different priorities and how they're shopping and going through the buying process, but also so you don't have duplication in your data. So what is your take on associating contacts, deals, activities with the right relationship?

John Suarez (08:53)
So this goes back into, first of all, mapping your business processes before you start implementing a tool like HubSpot to make sure that you know how data should be talking and interacting with itself inside of HubSpot. with respect to parent-to-child relationships, HubSpot has an object around context. And within the object, they have different association.

labels, which is a fancy way of saying you can link one contact to another and label or tag or categorize them differently. So HubSpot has a built-in solution for that in that you can have a segment of adult children and then you can have your actual customer tagged or labeled differently inside of HubSpot and then have them linked together, which then does a few things. One, you

database is clean and you know how these different contacts are linked to one another, but it also allows you to trigger different automations. So you can make sure that you are sending one type of email communication, right, to your actual lead. And then the adult child might receive another type of communication. You can create different reports to see how many adult children or how many seniors you have in your database. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. And

following that thread to deals, it works the same way. So you can have a deal associated to many different contacts. So you can have a deal associated to that kind of senior contact and the adult child. And then from that, you can pull all of the data, all of the activity, if you will, from both contact records into the deal so that a salesperson can see that, okay, we talked with Mary at, you know,

two weeks ago and we talked with her son last week and this is what we said. And that just allows you to first of all understand what was said and what was communicated all in one central location. It allows you to, as I mentioned, trigger different automations and then really intelligently decide what is your next step. And that's just that, you know, kind of a really in the weeds flow or view. And then from there, if you zoom out, of course, you can create different automations, different reporting, different processes.

based on the bigger picture.

Tonia Speir (11:06)
And so let me add a third component to that. Also unique to this audience is that you could have referrals from physicians or someone in a care network. How can you add that layer to it just from a tracking standpoint?

John Suarez (11:22)
Yeah, another

good question. So HubSpot has standard objects that just come out of the box. You get a HubSpot subscription and you have these standard objects, which are things like contact and deal and company. For more unique, I circumstances or situations where you need to report on something like referrals, there's a few different ways you can do that. But HubSpot allows for you to create custom objects to

be able to track and report on different processes that may not necessarily be out of the box within HubSpot. And things like custom objects are very easy to set up. You just basically create your own little object. And within that, grouping of properties. For instance, if you're having physicians refer, you could name the custom object physicians or referrals. And then within that, any data you need to track under that physician record.

you can track as its own individual property and then following this to the associations or linking different objects, you could associate that position to multiple contacts, to multiple deals. So if you have some sort of commission program, you can make sure that that is tracked or if you just want to understand which physicians are referring you the most business, whether it's new deals being created, whether it's contacts, whether it's closed revenue, that is all possible in a CRM like HubSpot.

Tonia Speir (12:41)
Got it. And if people need to operate, let's say they're operating and I'm thinking about maybe our physical therapy or orthopedic partners, right, that are operating across multiple locations or maybe in a franchise type model, is HubSpot conducive for that? Is that the right platform for them?

John Suarez (13:00)
Yeah, so it depends is the short answer, right? So if you have multiple locations, it depends on how you want to manage or what data you want to see at each of those locations. So HubSpot has a feature called business units, which basically create independent HubSpot instances and CRMs for each business unit. And it can create tailored account settings around branding.

around messaging, around the different assets like website pages and emails. So those can live in distinct portals. And that might work for you if those things are required and you need to isolate the different business locations into specific buckets. Or you could create a custom object or custom property that then distinguishes your contact and deal records based on the location.

So it depends on what you're looking for, the depth of information that you need, and importantly, the amount of silo ability that you need to have or segmentation you need to have between your different business units or your different locations and the data that lives in them.

Tonia Speir (14:08)
And so just to, from my understanding and fully correct me if I'm wrong, but for our novices out there, like some of the things that I've seen, you know, just to kind of explain it simply is that if your brand can carry across all entities and all locations, it's less important that you have business units. But maybe where business units become important is if that, you know, they carry maybe a different name or a different logo and the data needs to be siloed because maybe there's different investment partners in some locations, but not others.

and it has to be truly segmented and less shared across the portal. Is that a fair statement?

John Suarez (14:45)
I think that's fair. Your checklist is yes, are branding elements the same or different? And does data need to be siloed or restricted in some way between different business units?

Tonia Speir (14:54)
Excellent. Any other pitfalls, John, that we should know about before we move on to the next segment here, which is going to be about clean data.

John Suarez (15:02)
Yeah, and this is probably a good segue into clean data, but you started by asking how or why should somebody set up their CRM correctly to start? And that's really where it begins and ends because if you're creating your or configuring your CRM instance for the first time and you're not documenting your processes, you're not talking with different stakeholders to understand how data should flow from...

one step to the next, then you're basically setting yourself up for failure. So just making sure that before you actually set anything up, you understand what you're trying to get out of the system, both in terms of data and reporting, as well as automation throughout the customer lifecycle.

Tonia Speir (15:47)
Fantastic. so when it comes to starting with, a lot of times, scotch in, scotch out, right? So what are the tips for keeping HubSpot clean, especially when you're working with maybe multiple teams? They may have different ways of seeing how data should be managed or where they're even pulling it from.

Some could be bringing in stuff from Excel spreadsheets, others could have handwritten notes that they're manually entering. It can be a plethora of places. So what are some best practices there for starting off right and keeping it clean?

John Suarez (16:21)
Yeah,

we've seen all that ⁓ spreadsheets, handwritten notes, everything, just an email inbox. My information lives somewhere in there. So I think for keeping data clean, I've mentioned this a few times now, but that process diagram should actually be a visual diagram that you and different stakeholders can look at and understand how HubSpot or your CRM is working for you.

Tonia Speir (16:23)
Ha!

John Suarez (16:47)
And if you make any changes, that diagram should be updated. And it should reflect what is current or perhaps what changes you are about to make. in doing that, you understand that, OK, if I'm going to make this change here, how does that impact the different automations that I've already created? Because so many times I see somebody create that diagram and then forget it.

and people can come and go from companies or they just don't really ever look at it. And then through that, they create a new process and they forget that, yeah, in creating that new custom object or updating that property or creating that segmentation list, it might trigger some sort of other automation. And unknowingly, they might be triggering something, whether it's an internal or external communication or property updates.

just making sure that you're knowing what you're changing and also looking for existing solutions. So if there is an existing place to house the data inside your CRM, then you don't need to create another property. If you can house all of your different data for contacts inside the standard data or contact object, do that instead of creating a custom object. So simplicity is best and then trying to build from there.

And then I think the most or one of the other most important things is probably creating different internal alerts for yourself and your team whenever data falls out of place, if you will. So whenever something is not updated accurately, whenever a huge batch of contacts is updated, which might be, you know, kind of out of the norm. So you can create in a tool like HubSpot different internal notifications to trigger to send to you or your team whenever certain events happen.

for you to understand that, some sort of event, abnormal event happened, I need to look at it and make sure nothing big changed. And then from there, just kind of doing your due diligence into the system. And if you unknowingly made a change, the good thing about a tool like HubSpot is you can revert if you update a huge swath of context, you can revert to a previous version. there are some...

some course correction tools at your disposal with things like HubSpot.

Tonia Speir (18:55)
And I think too, it's important to note that like you can over-engineer it too. So be cautious with over-engineering because one of the words that you said that is so foundational is simplicity and keeping it simple. And a lot of times when you have a lot of stakeholders who have an opinion and a passion about what their team needs and the information that's needed, I've seen systems get over-engineered to the point that they're no longer simple. And that's

difficult and challenging for the team that's using it to use it. And the more difficult it becomes, the less they're adopting it. so maintaining simplicity and really going through that exercise of deciding what information is important, what is relevant, what's a must have versus a nice to have, you know, when comes to these things, particularly when you're putting parameters around them or requiring them to trigger other events and actions. So.

John Suarez (19:38)
Mm-hmm.

Tonia Speir (19:47)
As somebody who sets that up and is an expert in building not only the plans and the architecture, because I know some teams that come in and say, hey, I don't know how my data should flow. Help me, help me with the process between marketing and sales and how this data should flow. Other clients come to us and they've got their map and they just want us to spot check it for strategic advice. But if you were

John Suarez (20:09)
Right.

Tonia Speir (20:12)
doing this yourself, if you were the founder of an age tech company and just getting started, what are some of the tools of the trade that you use, tools to do the mapping, to create that documentation, tools to avoid duplication and messy properties? Like what are some of the things that you keep in your toolbox, John?

John Suarez (20:30)
Yeah. So to start, if I were opening up and owned my own age tech company and I were coming onto HubSpot for the first time, ⁓ yes, you would hire SmartBug, right? I would come and help you out with this. where I would start is, again, Process Diagram. I use a tool called Limsacool. Other people at SmartBug use Miro. It's really just a process diagram tool online that'll let you, you know, map out your

Tonia Speir (20:38)
And you'd hire a spare truck, right?

John Suarez (20:57)
your process in a diagram form. And the visualization component is really important of that because, okay, you can see what is happening within your system, but it also allows you to quickly bring other stakeholders into the conversation and they can more easily understand that to say, okay, new contacts are coming in all the way up here at the top of the funnel. Here's everything that's happening all the way to these reports being generated or whatever data we need on the bottom.

bottom end to make business decisions. So creating that with a tool like Whimsical is always the first step. And then let's say you have different systems that are integrating with HubSpot. HubSpot has a lot of native connectors to different systems. It also has pretty public and easy API builder and documentation to be able to build your own API to port data in or out. So.

If you have data coming in or out from different systems at HubSpot, also making sure that that's included inside this diagram. And you know how it's manipulating and modifying data inside of HubSpot. Again, I can't stress how important that is. I open up winds of cold every day for my clients to make sure, okay, just to make sure we're all on the same page, right? Nothing has changed since last week and making sure all the stakeholders, I get an affirmative from them that, yep, this is still what we want to build.

And then at that point, it's about understanding what you need to build first. So oftentimes that's going to be first up is making sure that the different buckets in HubSpot, if you will, exist to house your data. So that could be your different contact or deal objects, your different properties that exist inside the objects. So do you need to create a custom property or is there different properties that can serve?

that purpose for what data you're trying to collect. So, okay, that's all set up. You're good to go. Now you can start building the automation. HubSpot's main automation tool is called Workflows, and you can do a million and one things with HubSpot's workflow tools. One of the primary things is manipulating, linking, adding data to different contact records and properties. Or you can send out different

in notifications, internal or external, know, marketing emails, sales emails, internal alerts, into your system. So, so that's the next step as far as actually building and configuring the thing. and within that configuration, I mentioned, you know, keeping your data clean, having different automations to alert you if something doesn't look right. But then after you build it, testing, like testing is the most important thing because as you build, I built, you

hundreds of these or helped implement hundreds of these for clients. And there's almost always, because each situation is unique, there's almost always either a situation that changes, that's most common after they see how data goes through, or maybe something got missed in the process if it's a really complex setup. But I think just testing and actually going through the motion of, okay, I'm a new contact that gets added through this form and then gets sent marketing emails, then gets pushed to sales, and then gets a deal attached and then

might have another contact associated with it for like an adult child. And then that deal is closed. Okay, along the way are the right automations working? Are the right people getting alerted? And then are the right reports also getting populated with the most accurate data? And earlier in the call, you mentioned that, you know, at the end of the day, somebody might see a report and say, actually, I want more data in here. And that's probably the most common thing I see in the QA and the testing phase is,

wait, can actually we report on this? Well, yes, we can. And it's best to set it up now before everything goes live to make sure that, you know, it's there historically for you.

Tonia Speir (24:36)
Yeah, data is definitely addictive. That's for sure. Once you start seeing, you know, like where you have gaps or, you know, where you can't see or don't have visibility, and then you start unwiring that, well, how do I figure that out? Right. Like, how do I plug that hole? And if you don't have it tracking along the way, then you're left without those insights. The one thing I

John Suarez (24:40)
It is.

Yeah. And

one thing, sorry, just to add on the reporting piece too, is if you are adding different data to be collected and reported on, always know what question you're answering with the report and make sure it's a business decision related question. Because I've seen a lot of times that this is over engineered. You are creating different data in the system that

you're actually not even looking at. It's just more, this is interesting to me, right? You're not making decisions based on it. So just making sure that you're not over-complicating or creating too many reports that don't actually impact any business decisions that you might be making.

Tonia Speir (25:31)
That's a great point. If you highlight anything in this whole segment, pin that one comment, why? What are you, what problem are you solving? What is the business case for this? Because you're exactly right. That is exactly how systems get over engineered so many times. One quick question I want to ask before we move on to the structuring it for personas and things like that is as you're bringing data in, what are you using for

duplication to produce duplicates in your contact records just to make sure that you're starting off with a clean set of information.

John Suarez (26:04)
Yeah, so HubSpot has some native deduplication features already built in and they exist at the object records. So I'm talking like contacts and companies. So with specific contacts, they duplicate, HubSpot deduplicates based off of the email. So no two emails can exist in separate records, right? A single contact record can have multiple emails if they have a work and a personal, for instance.

but johndoe.gmail.com can only live inside of one contact record. So that's the deduplication field automatically. And then with companies, if you are reporting on companies inside of HubSpot, the deduplication field is going to be your domain. So acmecorp.com, right? There can only be one company with that domain. Now I will say there, you are able to turn that off. So HubSpot does let you customize that, but

It is very rare that I would ever recommend that. But the reason I mentioned it is just because while HubSpot does have these native functions built in to deduplicate, it also allows you to make the tool your own if there is a really specific situation or need to turn some of this native functionality off. Wouldn't recommend that for 99 % of the people though. So for the records, that's how they deduplicate. And then there's also, if you find that, you

You have a, this came up earlier today for a client, they had, for instance, Jane Doe at gmail.com. And then that same person had typed in their email, Jane Doe at gmail.co. So they missed the on one of their form submissions. So you can create workflows that will automatically merge the two. You can create lists that identify those, and then you can manually merge the two.

Or you can kind of mass merge through a one time deduplication push. So there's a few different tools inside of HubSpot that allow you to deduplicate. Now that's at the contact level. You can create the same flow for company records as well.

Tonia Speir (28:08)
Now, one misconception here, you said native and a lot of people will ask me oftentimes, well, do I need OpsHub? So is that native in HubSpot or where and when do you recommend bringing in an addition like OpsHub?

John Suarez (28:21)
Yeah. So OpsHub for those that don't know is just another product or another skew for HubSpot that attaches on to the rest of the suite. Right. And OpsHub is one of, is the tool instead of HubSpot to be able to create more advanced or complex data manipulation. it's a tool that allows you to work with your data in ways that might be non-standard.

And the way that it does that is you can create basically a custom coded workflow that allows you to reformat different strings or different data. For instance, reformatting URLs to www instead of no www or to identify deep duplicate, identify potential duplicates from the example I mentioned earlier. So my opinion of Opsub is it's very powerful. I would say for most companies that are just starting off.

on HubSpot, the go no go decision on OpsHub. OpsHub depends on the size of your database. So if you have tens of thousands and certainly if you have hundreds of thousands of contacts, you probably want to explore OpsHub and its features to make sure you keep your data clean. If you're starting out with like a couple thousand, it might be worth it to trial it and see how you like it, but it may not be necessary for you. It all just depends on

Again, your contact size and how you're trying to use or manipulate the data inside your CRM.

Tonia Speir (29:48)
That's good advice. Definitely good advice on the size, because I know that's not something that I've heard recommended that way before in terms of how you look at your contact size. So thank you for that, John. Now let's talk about personas, and looking at multiple personas. In the age tech space, as we've talked about, the sales process can span the family, the patient themselves, a care coordinator, so many more.

So how would you set up your HubSpot to support these distinct personas?

John Suarez (30:20)
So the first tool I would use or the first system I guess I would use inside of HubSpot is their persona properties. you can create, there's a built-in feature inside of HubSpot to allow you to segment your contact database based off personas. And that tool not only gives you a persona name, it can give you the identity, the background of that persona, what their title might be.

adult child versus parent. And there's a lot of ways to make it your own and make it work for your processes. So personas, HubSpot's already solved that with that persona property. And then that allows you to segment. And then if you needed more information for whatever reason, I think the persona property is already pretty built out. But if you wanted just more firmographic demographic information about that contact record, you can always create custom properties that allow you to further segment.

or analyze or understand different data points about your personas or your ICPs. And then that can then allow you to tailor your communications using like smart emails to send this email to this persona segment and this email to that persona segment.

Tonia Speir (31:31)
And you're giving us a great open door into the next question that we had for you, which was around that buying journey, right? And your take on how you manage multiple buying journeys in that singular HubSpot portal. But we'd love to hear some real world examples of what's worked for you, like maybe what were some of those custom properties or ways that you applied that methodology and how would you do it to manage multiple buying personas?

John Suarez (31:57)
Yeah, I think probably a good example to talk about is when personas, and we had this earlier in the year, two different personas for a SaaS company, they had different buying cycles and deal stages. So what we needed to do is first gather the information about what persona they were. And what we did is use progressive form fields, which is a fancy way of saying, if we already have the information,

through a form submission, don't ask it again, ask a new set of questions to gather more information. So that was just, you know, getting the initial information. we use data enrichment, which is a feature inside of HubSpot, their Breeze intelligence tool to then append that contact record with more firmographic and demographic and information, which allowed us to first of all, segment them into different personas. So that then allowed us from the marketing level to tailor our messaging to them.

But then whenever they went beyond the marketing level and were put into the sales team's hands, we already knew what their titles were, a lot about their personas, and we were able to funnel them into specific deal pipelines. And the deal pipeline inside of HubSpot is just a set of deal stages or it follows a deal process for new business, renewal business, or in this case, different personas.

that the salesperson knew for this pipeline, okay, we have four deal stages that require these properties. And for this other pipeline or persona, we have this pipeline with five deal stages and a different set of required properties. So it just allows you to create different branches and to triage your marketing and sales processes in a really streamlined way. And then on the back end of it all report.

Tonia Speir (33:39)
And reporting again, when you're splitting things like that, are there any nuances to the reporting if you've got multiple pipelines or can a leadership team go in and see that collectively as a whole if they wanted to?

John Suarez (33:50)
Yep. So HubSpot reporting allows you to report at the highest level of each of these objects, like all deals, no matter the pipeline, right? Or it allows you to split your reports up inside the same report or different reports to segment and look at data by each pipeline. So there's a lot of ways to dice up the data based on what you and your leadership team needs to see.

Tonia Speir (34:14)
Are there any John Suarez reporting tips, tricks under the hat that you would recommend or that you help to keep things organized and actionable for people?

John Suarez (34:23)
Yeah, the main one is whenever somebody asks me to build a report or describes what they're looking, what data they're looking to see, I always ask them, what question are we trying to answer? And I've even gone so far as for a lot of reports that I'm building or that I'm training, you know, either other smart bugs or clients on, I will have them name the title of the report to the question they are trying to answer. Right.

Tonia Speir (34:48)
Nice.

John Suarez (34:49)
So

how many deals are coming from social media, right? How much revenue is coming from organic search or AI summary traffic? And those are just kind of like top to bottom reports, but always know what question you're answering or asking. And just make sure that that question actually leads to a business decision so that you don't hit your report limit, right? You don't create a thousand reports and 900 of them.

you only look at once and then they're throwaways because that takes up your time. takes up, you if you hire us, it takes up our time and we're happy to build them for you, but we want to provide the most value and building a lot of reports takes a lot of time. And if you're not actually going to use them, then that's probably not the best use of our time or the best value we can provide you.

Tonia Speir (35:35)
Exactly right. And down to the end user too, like something that I've seen work, like particularly in a sales team function is, you know, sales teams always have reports of, you know, what's happening in the sales process, how are things moving? But then there's also reports that sales teams have to rely on for like, what do you have to do? Right? Like where are the leads? Like who you need to contact? What's your activity metrics? What are your accounts? And so, you naming them as simply as

John Suarez (35:56)
Mm-hmm.

Tonia Speir (35:59)
What are you doing? How are you doing? Right? Like, what do I need to go tackle and do on this dashboard? And if I just want to leisurely see how we're doing and how things are progressing, then that's on this dashboard over here, but really making it actionable for people so that they're not having to sort through a bunch of reports on a dashboard and know like what they need to go to.

John Suarez (36:18)
Exactly. if your email and all of your communications are ported and connected into HubSpot at the individual record level, that can be seen and then you can build reports or tables or different daily action items based on that. For instance, if a deal hasn't been touched in 30 days and it's past the close date, okay, let's trigger a reminder or bring them to the top of a table report for a sales rep to do this today. Does this need to be actioned on?

Or you can create a report that surfaces the hottest contacts by lead score or contacts that have opened three or more sales emails, right? It just allows you reports and other tools inside of HubSpot, the ability to surface where is from a sales perspective or other teams, right? Where is my time best used at this particular time in this particular.

Tonia Speir (37:08)
Yeah. So making the most of time. If someone, you know, we, I'm sure there's plenty of people listening that are just at the beginning stage, right? Like getting ready to set up HubSpot and at the early stages. But for those that have maybe set things up and they don't feel like it's optimized, like where's the best place to start with fixing it?

John Suarez (37:27)
I might be sounding like a broken record here, but mapping out your processes. okay. Understanding two things. This is whenever somebody comes to me with a not new system, right? They already have their configuration and HubSpot set up. I asked them to walk me through what their current process is, or if they don't know, I've done a lot of audits where I'm actually going through the entire system and, and mapping all of that out for them.

But let's say however we get there, we get an understanding of the current processes. And then we go through, okay, what do we need to change to get to future state, to get to our desired process map? And that's just an exercise in a lot of conversations, a lot of questions. If you're doing it internally, make sure you're involving the right stakeholders for each department, marketing, sales, CS. Make sure you're all on the same page.

about the impact and the implications of your changes. So it's just figuring out where you are today and where you need to go, and then bridging the gap through conversation and involving the right people. And then once you have that, it becomes pretty clear if you've had the conversations correctly of what you need to change. Okay. These grouping of workflows or automations need to be turned off. Okay. We need new segmentations, lists or reports. So we need new data.

to come into HubSpot. just stick to a process, involve the people you need to, to make sure that nobody's blindsided after everything has changed. And then after you make the changes, make sure that anything new in the future is documented. So you're not in the same situation again in three, six, 12 months.

Tonia Speir (39:06)
That's right.

So that said, and being our resident expert, having seen both sides of the world, both B2B and on the senior living side, do you have one favorite for our age tech people? Do you have one favorite feature, one super quick win or one go-to that you would say, it were me, hands down, do this? Like what is the one thing that is your favorite recommendation?

John Suarez (39:31)
There's so much good stuff inside of it. Yeah, you're really putting me on the spot here. So I think that association labels, sounds, this is the link that I was talking about earlier to associate contacts to companies and contacts to contacts and be able to say this is an adult child or this is a parent or these contacts are attached to this deal. It opens up so much green field for you to create different automations, for you to create different.

Tonia Speir (39:32)
So many, right?

John Suarez (40:00)
And it always makes sure that the different people in forms of contact records that are associated or that need to be associated with any particular deal or company are always associated. So you have this clean view. So your marketing team has a clean view. So your sales team has a clean view. So they're always operating with all of the data and not just a partial set of the data.

Because if you, those association labels, those links allow you to connect Mary and Jane to each other so that you're not, someone's not only messaging Mary and someone's only messaging Jane and you might be telling them different things. It just creates a much more cohesive and fluid customer experience, which only helps your bottom line at the end of the day. I mean, there's just so many efficiencies and positive impacts that come from making sure that

Your different records are linked together as they should be especially an age tech for for For you know sales processes where you have multiple people involved adult children parents so on and so forth

Tonia Speir (41:03)
Perfect. Well, that's a perfect way to bring us to a close, John. That's a wrap on this episode of SmartBug on Tap. Huge thanks to you for joining me today and sharing such actionable insights into what makes that HubSpot setup a success, especially whether in this ever-changing age tech world. So if you're managing different buyer types or just trying to keep your HubSpot portal from turning into a data swamp, just don't hesitate to reach out to SmartBug.

Whether it's John or one of our other experts, we're always here to help you scale smarter.

You can reach us at smartbugmedia.com or email us directly. Our contact info is in the description. We're always happy to help answer questions or point you in the right direction. And if you found today's episode helpful, go ahead and subscribe to the show so you don't miss future episodes that are packed with practical tips and HubSpot know-how. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch you next time.