When Pipelines Break: How Misaligned Stages Create Chaos (and How to Fix It)

In this episode, Chris and Zach unpack one of the most pervasive RevOps issues: overcomplicated pipelines. They explore how deals get bloated with unnecessary stages, why teams accidentally misuse objects, and how leaders can rethink their CRM architecture to enable clarity, alignment, and better forecasting.

What you’ll learn

• Why most pipelines become bloated and confusing

• The hidden cost of mixing sales, onboarding, support, and revenue tracking in one object

• How to decide what belongs in a deal pipeline vs. tickets, orders, or other objects

• Why unified revenue views break when systems rely on hope instead of real data

• How AI will reshape call structure, data capture, and CRM hygiene

• How strong meetings shift from status updates to coaching and strategy

• The role of RevOps in creating clear ownership across teams

In this episode, we cover

00:00 — Why Fridays feel different & the need to “touch grass”
02:15 — The psychology of nature, rest, and avoiding CRM overwhelm
04:10 — Why pipelines get cluttered with qualification, onboarding, and delivery stages
06:40 — How messy processes create messy CRMs
08:30 — Cross-team alignment: sales, success, marketing, and operations
11:20 — The real purpose of pipelines: clarity on “where we are”
13:10 — When teams skip stages or misuse required fields
17:55 — Why deal pipelines aren’t a catch-all for all revenue
20:15 — High-volume, transactional work vs. managed sales cycles
24:30 — Why leaders need unified revenue views (and why CRM data often can’t provide it)
28:10 — Rethinking deal vs. order objects
34:25 — Creating shared definitions across sales, CS, and marketing
38:45 — Example: manufacturing lifecycle and how visibility should really work
44:00 — Why deal “stages” can’t represent customer reality on their own
48:00 — AI, call transcripts, and the future of automated data capture
53:40 — Training reps to speak in ways AI understands
57:20 — Building CRMs that remove busywork instead of adding to it
01:02:40 — HubSpot HUGs, in-person enablement, and community learning
01:05:00 — Next week’s topic teaser: commerce vs. revenue

Tools and ideas referenced

• HubSpot CRM

• Lead, deal, ticket, and order objects

• Shopify → order object shift

• ERP systems for revenue reporting

• AI note-takers (Fathom, wearable recording devices)

• Call transcripts and AI-driven property updates

• Process mapping: current state → future state

• Unified revenue view vs. siloed data

• Lovable and Cloud Code for prototyping teaching tools

• RevOps process governance and required properties

• Lifecycle stages, buyer journey clarity, and stage definitions

Key takeaways

• Pipelines should only track sales management — not onboarding, delivery, support, or accounting.

• The biggest CRM problems come from unclear process ownership across teams.

• Leaders want a unified revenue view, but you can’t build one on messy or incomplete data.

• AI will radically change how call data enters the system — but teams need to learn how to speak with “AI-ready” clarity.

• Meetings should shift from reporting status to reviewing insights, coaching, and role-play.

• Clear definitions of objects (deal vs. order vs. ticket) reduce friction and restore trust in CRM data.

• Great RevOps work starts before HubSpot — with alignment, process mapping, and consistent language.

TRANSCRIPT

Chris: Good morning, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First Revenue with my buddy Zach Hushin. How you doing, man?

Zach: What's up, bud?

Chris: Good. It's Friday. We don't usually talk on Fridays, so it's an exceptionally good mood kind of a day.

Zach: Yeah, we're getting it in. It means I have a whole bunch of things on my honey-do list coming up here for the weekend.

Chris: There you go.

Zach: Uh, got to get it in some time.

Chris: Uh, well, you know, every once in a while it's healthy to just kind of turn hub spot off for a couple hours and, you know, get out there into the, into the world. Touch, touch some grass as my buddy. Like, yes.

Zach: Well, I'll just listen. Have you ever heard of, um, the podcast, uh, the hidden brain?

Chris: I have not.

Zach: And it was Shankar Vedantan or I always struggled with his last name. Uh, it's, uh, It's a good podcast. They talk a lot about human psychology and behavior and things like that. And the one I listened to yesterday was all about how being in nature is really, really healthy and healing. And so that's what we'll do this weekend.

Chris: Yep, that's a good plan. We have to heal from all the chaos that we deal with every week as we're navigating these overly complex sales pipelines and ticket pipelines, which I know is our topic of today, overcomplicating the heck out of pipelines.

Zach: Yeah, and it may be hard to believe, but we're trying to build CRMs. for our teams that allow you to take time to go and hang out in nature and not in your CRM.

Chris: There you go.

Zach: As opposed to these, oh man, these deal pipelines that have just all of the stages from first touch to, you know, delivery and customer success, like everything's in there.

Chris: Everything's in there, yeah.

Zach: All of these required properties that we,

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: Doesn't work out so well, does it, man?

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: Yeah. I see a lot of common kind of mistakes in these pipelines…

Zach: One of them being bringing things into the pipeline too soon. So like taking what really should be part of your lead qualification pipeline and bringing that into your deal pipeline. So I see things where it's like, lead qualified or prospect identified or some of these pre-deal activities showing up as early deal pipeline stages. I see that a lot.

And then on the back end, same kind of thing it's like you have all these kind of customer success onboarding steps in your deal pipeline after you receive the po and after you've kind of closed one the deal that maybe should be better suited as a ticket or something like that um and then everything in between which is usually too many too many steps um steps that are not buyer centric unnecessary steps that like, it's just like, yeah, it's obvious, you know, of course I'm going to do this thing. Why should this be a stage in the pipeline? It doesn't, you know, this is unnecessary for me to even track this. Like, you know, of course I'm going to send the quote.

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: We got to make sure you send the quote, Zach.

Chris: Right.

Zach: And you do it in the right way and not outside of the CRM, even though I can't work within the structure. So I'm going to send it outside of the CRM because that's how I get the deal done.

And a lot of these messy pipelines are kind of reflective of just a messy sales process or service process that the company has itself, not necessarily just HubSpot being the culprit. Although you could have a relatively simple, straightforward process on paper and then make it overly complicated in HubSpot and vice versa, right?

But I think that that's why it's really critical to kind of make sure you map out that process first. You know, what should it be, you know, and kind of have those meetings with the stakeholders who are going to be accountable for this. And it's, you know, it's not just sales. It's not just marketing. It's not just success. It's like everybody's got to get together to talk about how know the customer flows through these three different customer facing teams and part of that is going to be a deal pipeline part of that's probably going to be a ticket pipeline part of that's going to be a lead pipeline you know they all need to fit in their uh in their areas um and you know everything has a home right it's supposed to be there not somewhere else.

Chris: Right.

Zach: That's been the most powerful thing that i wasn't anticipating when i started working on data models and making sure Like, let's get you out of the deals. Let's manage this like in other places. And the first thing that like the true innovation was allowing other teams to own the object, to own the record view that they were in without worrying about sales seeing it. And can we name things the way that we need to? Or is that going to confuse the sales team?

Chris: Right.

Zach: So I'd like to level set here to make sure we all understand why the pipelines are important in the first place. And for me, it's helping leaders like everybody honestly like common question of any day are is where are we with blank yeah and that's exactly what pipelines are are designed to do until you build them in a way where it's like i don't know what that stage means like right looks like maybe this is is this person responsible am i responsible for this part because i don't know what or

Or it's like we know what this stage means, but we've either forgotten to put some required properties in there maybe to make sure that we have some more context when we get to that stage, right? Or maybe we're... we're, we're still have some leaks in the bucket and some part of the process where people are skipping over that stage or, right.

So it's like, we may agree what this stage means, but then how do you get people to actually follow the process on the call? information that makes it's clearly not in that stage right right right so now we can't trust the stages that we're seeing even though we know what they mean so yeah that's a good point so but i think like this is a lot of the work that we're doing with value first is trying to unravel a lot of the um you know unfortunate practices that have developed based on the systems that we're trying to like fit everything into because like first of all give yourself some permission that your deal pipeline is the way it is because for a long time, it was one of the only things that had a pipeline in HubSpot that was in front of your team.

And pipelines and stages feel like you're supposed to, okay, if it's stage and gate, if it makes sense to manage in that way, let's get it in there because that's the only place that we can do that in HubSpot. So it definitely made sense.

The other thing that we're seeing is decoupling from, uh, you know, all the post sales revenue. That's just very transactional that when you like. deal pipelines are meant for like sales management management of a process when somebody just comes in and they pay you and get out like there is no sales process yeah yeah yeah and deals traditionally has been the only way to track you know revenue and dollars in hubspot and now we've got commerce invoices subscriptions orders all these other places to kind of like

Chris: Well, that's interesting.

Zach: Interesting that you bring that up. Cause this is actually, this is a recent, this was a recent conversation that we had this week. You know, of course, you know, you, you must be listening, I think to, to my conversations here, Chris, you know, the, the, the, the teams, you know, they, they,

I'm trying to think how I can say this the best way. I'm kind of losing my thought here a little bit. The reason I bring that up is because, again, we've been trying to help you think outside of the system. Don't let HubSpot or whatever tools you're using decide what your process needs to be.

And the challenge right now, as all these commerce things like immediately, like when they changed the Shopify integration to move from deals to orders right now, there's two places that are tracking revenue.

And unless you set up automation to recreate closed one deals, there was no way to report on the revenue like together.

Chris: That's where I was going.

Zach: That's where I was going. Yeah.

So the one specific example, actually there's two examples that came up recently, which is like, We only put deals in HubSpot that are over twenty five thousand dollars.

Chris: Well, that's right.

Zach: Or fifty thousand dollars. You know, these are real conversations or, you know, what you're saying is like we have these two different types of deals.

We have ones where we're moving it through the process. Right. Because there's all these steps involved and there's other ones where someone just says, here's a P.O. or I just want to order this thing.

And that's where I see some of the friction here is because the sales rep's like, well, I don't need to walk this deal through every stage of the process. Like I just got the PO, but now you're telling me I need to enter all this stuff that really is important to getting the PO. I already got it.

So either we have another deal pipeline that allows me like a shorter condensed kind of like, oop, I got it in there, right? Or using, like you had mentioned, a different kind of object. Maybe it's an order object. Maybe it's something else that we're tracking.

But what kind of thoughts do you have on some best practices there? Because I see a lot of friction with that specifically based on If it's a super easy deal, it doesn't require all these steps, then I'm just not going to put it in. Or if it's too small, I'm not going to put it in. Or I got the P already. I don't want to follow.

So what are you seeing out there a little bit?

Chris: Right. So the thing I'm trying to help people unpack is that this needs to come. It's so nuanced, right? Because it's pretty easy to get people aligned with, yes, unified customer view is a good thing. Unified revenue view. We have to have it.

We haven't been able to rely on any marketing and sales systems because it includes forecast revenue and deals and decisions like are even all the deals inside of the system because there are little things that just go directly into the ERP or the other system. So literally, usually we're piecemealing together, like the unified revenue view, but everybody wants it, right?

And so defining that, but as a leader, you can't say, hey, sales team. I need you to put all of this stuff. I need you to manage the CRM like in this way so that we as leaders can just have our fancy views. Right. Cause that's not gonna, they don't like that.

Because that, especially when it gets in the way of like selling and building relationships and building trust. Right. So if we can get alignment here, then it's okay. Can we understand the purpose of these objects as they've been built? Right.

And the deal is built for sales management. Right. So instead of trying to figure out like, cause this is where as teams come and they say, ah, man, our sales process is just like, it's not in good shape. Like there's not a lot of documentation.

If we can't start here where I'm suggesting, it becomes very easy. Like, well, what do you do? And then it's like activity, activity, activity, all right, stage, stage, stage, stage, right? Like that's how it's like designed to go when you, when you do discovery and ask questions in that way.

If before we do that, we say, okay, we've agreed that it makes sense that a deal is for sales management only. Everything gets graded against that.

So the orders that are just hitting hidden Shopify or ecommerce that there is no sales process to manage cannot be a deal, right? And the days of being forced to use deals and HubSpot to report on revenue are gone, right?

And that means that some additional complexity is needed for the data model. So if we back out here, And we see like, we've got commercial objects. We've got an order object now, right? Which in the systems that have traditionally done this unified transaction view, unified revenue views, they manage a lot of this through order objects, right?

Like what did we deliver what we promised and did we get paid for what was delivered? Right. When you think of that, that's why it's, we know we need to do that. And that's why we add it to deals because we need to keep track of that stuff too. And this is the place we've been tracking. So let's just add it in.

But then you see, like, it doesn't hit closed one until it's like delivered or, or at all, or just moves to the next process. Like. And then you lose all your reporting capabilities that people want.

So starting from these places, again, can we have shared language for what these objects are supposed to be doing? And as we get to invoice payments, this is where all of this stuff is in HubSpot now. You can have this.

And again, I think it can be very tricky when you don't boil it down to... Is there a sales process to manage or not? Right.

Because that means like if there's a renewals team, let's say, and it's subscriptions, if there's a lot of process to manage, but there's a different team to do it, like that's when you might just create a different kind of deal pipeline because they have to manage completely differently. Right.

Zach: And that's another thing i think we're unraveling right now is the uh quote-unquote best practice of trying to just have one deal pipeline and then figure out every other way to like report on all the like the different product lines the different business units the different people right and that's where the power of getting the data model right, getting the process right, understanding who's doing what and what they need to do that stuff.

The simple act of saying, all right, team, that's completely different from the new business team. You are in charge of this pipeline, right? And now because we've made that distinction, hubspot we can set up different views make sure nobody gets confused make it easier to collaborate on stuff effectively

Chris: Right.

Zach: right yeah i mean like if you're uh like let's say that you're a customer success or you know customer service team um you're gonna have you know maybe cross sell upsell renewal kind of opportunities that's a lot different than your new business development team pushing a deal through the pipeline

So you can't squeeze them both into that same pipeline. So it's like either have a second pipeline for that team or track it a slightly different way. Cause you don't, it doesn't have to be a deal pipeline. It could be some other kind of pipeline with a revenue tied to it.

you know, whether that's a, you know, you're, modifying ticket pipelines or coming up with custom objects and pushing those to their own you know pipelines um or just keeping it simple and using the deal object for a separate pipeline but you know giving people their own view their own process to follow and not trying to you know squeeze it all into the same box

Chris: yeah that's that's that causes so it's like either you're trying to have everybody do the same thing or do different things in the same pipeline or you have you know twenty different pipelines and you're you know just jumping from one to the next and then how do you report on on that really that's that's that's even like you export stuff from the CRM and you make slides and spreadsheets and you know infuse naturally some bias like as you do that you never have that unified view like you just don't get to it

And I've been saying a couple times this week especially with unified customer views, the only people that usually have that are the salesperson managing that account because they have a lot of stuff in their head. They're part of they can see they've built up their world, whether it's inboxes, LinkedIn, like some CRM, whatever system they need, or they're calling, they're constantly calling people to make sure they're understanding of status.

They are the only ones that have the customer view. We kind of know that over time. So we look forward to the Monday morning meeting where we're just saying stuff out loud to make sure, you know, everybody's aligned.

Zach: right and the power like when you get this stuff right the power of those monday morning meetings when instead of just bringing everybody up to speed everybody's already up to speed and now you're talking having conversations about it yeah yeah and they show up to the meeting and we're doing like oh, do you need help? We saw the insights that you can discuss.

When we're not talking about, is the dashboard right? We can't see all the data. Tell us what's going on, Zach. It's like, okay, Zach, we saw this happen. Here's a bright idea. And now we think you'll be able to close it this week because production's been working on something and engineering's got this ready. So man, we should be able to close this. No problem.

Zach: Yeah, there was a guy I was listening to. I was walking the dog yesterday. And it was one of the HubSpot podcasts. And they were talking about, you know, kind of going through your call reviews, your pipeline reviews, your meeting reviews, right? This kind of like that Monday, you know, whatever you call it, right? Monday meeting or that kind of that weekly meeting for the team.

I'm not a big fan of the Monday morning meeting. You know, maybe Monday afternoon. But it was like they would pick one person on the team and say, you know, you're in charge of bringing, you know, a deal or a meeting or an opportunity or something like that to the table, right, to discuss.

And everybody else on the team is going to review this information. And we're going to talk about the positives. We're going to talk about some criticisms of it. But we're going to give you the ability to stand up in front of the room and criticize yourself first. And I thought that was a really smart idea to have that person kind of criticize themselves first.

It really kind of lowers attention. You can kind of make fun of yourself a little bit.

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: and and then it when you receive that criticism eventually it's less of a blow and it's more constructive and you're probably more likely to to have a positive uh take on it versus you know feeling a little threatened and defensive yeah

um that's what like i see good teams doing is they're actually talking about well you know let's talk about how did we get this opportunity how do we move this opportunity to where it's at like what do we need to do to close this opportunity where why did we win this why did we lose this like let's talk about how we

And then having those conversations with the team versus what I see a lot of is just here's here's the morning Monday morning dashboard. And, you know, it's showing like leads in progress and, you know, maybe showing like some pipeline stuff. And it's just like, OK, guys, like this is where we're at.

And then, oh, you know, so and so looks like you're you know, your calls are low or, you know, and you're just kind of picking out a couple of data points and just telling them to do better.

Chris: versus it really should be more of a training and help, you know, let's like, let's help each other and talk about it. Let's dissect this thing and use that as the opportunity.

Zach: Yeah, no, exactly. That's what I was going to say. Like when you don't have to have the conversation, that's, uh, Hey Zach, how's it going with, with, uh, XYZ company?

Chris: great.

Zach: Well, I reached out last week, this and this. No, everybody comes with that context. And now we have the space to do role playing, training, strategy, coaching, all the things we all know, need to happen.

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: And now that meeting becomes infinitely more, more valuable. And it really starts with understanding, you know, the buying

The buying and selling process together. Sorry, guys. There's no shortcuts to this part.

Having said that, the shortcuts that are happening are when you build something like HubSpot correctly, that's automatically capturing and creating these insights to say, like, okay, last time deals very quickly, what was the same? What was different? And then you bring that to the meeting, talk through that? Is that data making sense? If not, why not? Okay, let's make the change necessary to make it to have it make sense.

Chris: Right.

Zach: And the reason that I like to start with customer view here.

So I'm working on this app, this kind of teaching app. We've got to find ways to help people understand the complexity without always being in the tool and making it about, well, we're just trying to build into HubSpot just because we pay for HubSpot. It's like, no, not at all.

But imagine this level of visibility, right? So this is an example of manufacturing company, like timeline, twenty two months. Right. And I guarantee like as we go through this, like don't even question every leader wants this level of visibility.

Right. They just don't believe that any one system can give it to them. And what we're saying is that they they properly built out and used HubSpot can give you this right so um two different stakeholders involved at two different levels of like relationship with us you know jennifer went through all of the life cycle stages as the champion uh but tom as plant manager was involved didn't believe what was going on But he's now an advocate.

But if you look at this relationship timeline here for Jennifer, extended warranty renewal. Oh, she did some stuff at the manufacturing quality summit. We should care about that because she's going to mention her time with us and things like that.

Application consulting system upgrade package. Uh, she agreed to a case study at some point. We, we love it when that happens.

Um, uh, some quality certification, some replacement parts, service call required, uh, service repair visits, consumables, subscription. So all this stuff, right.

And once we get that, and the reason it starts with the customer view, like, cause there's so much nuance and we want to learn about what things are working and what things aren't. And when you just pull accounting data and ERP data, it misses all of that context, right?

So that when you get to here, the unified revenue view, you've got that context, right? And in a traditional CRM, everything stops at closed one. And we know that that we have a feeling that this is happening, right? This extra hundred and sixty thousand dollars is somewhere in the ERP.

And unless we let the CFO like just download everything into his spreadsheet and break everything out based on products, that's the only way we get to the visibility.

But here's what we do in the meantime. If we know that this is possible, we start to put this revenue, on teams like customer service, customer success, without any of the tooling they need to handle this effectively, because we know that these things are possible and that the board is telling us that, hey, your competitor over here has twenty percent of their bottom line is services.

We need to go there. Like, we need to get that. And you have no idea what percentage of your bottom line it is right now.

Chris: right?

Zach: This is the path that we're talking about.

And something that was interesting, I wanted to share with you that I think you'll appreciate, I just discovered this yesterday. Like, this kind of breakout, based on so imagine it, like, okay, we close the deal. Once they get to these stages of adopter and advocate, they start asking for more stuff.

They're receptive to the service contract or the additional warranty. nobody's renewing warranty if they don't get to these places.

Chris: Right.

Zach: I wish that were a hundred percent true, but it's like the idea is if you want to fulfill like your maximum revenue potential of each account, we're making sure they get here and it's not just they're forced to get our warranty because they have our equipment installed and it's so hard for them to move.

Well, As soon as the new company shows up and provides a better experience, they're switching, right? So you want to avoid that.

But what's interesting is that we usually don't have this level of visibility in our systems of record. Yet we create things like lead value, like MQL value, SQL. We assign dollar amounts to hope.

And when we do that, That's what kind of destroys the credibility of the CRM and of the marketing funnel and sales funnel.

Because inherently over time, like CFOs and, and company leaders, they can't, they can't forecast and like plan business resources on hope.

Chris: Right.

Zach: I know that might sound a little harsh, but the key is, and I think we've said this a lot, like you have, this data exists. The data exists for you to be able to do that. We're just not designing systems, you know, that can do it for you.

Chris: Right.

Zach: But the visibility of like, of course, everybody wants this visibility of when things happened and how much it was worth and Like they gear up for this, right?

Chris: Yeah, yeah.

Zach: So this is, you know, it's a cool tool that you built here. You had mentioned, you know, sometimes we just need to kind of step outside a HubSpot to have the conversation.

And so do you, like, when do you bring it in? When do you bring the conversation into HubSpot so you can show, you know, because it's like it helps illustrate the challenge and the solution well, but it looks drastically different than what you see in HubSpot, right?

So do you feel like that, It helps clarify more or maybe adds a little confusion as you jump from what you just showed to, well, this is how it's handled in HubSpot. And it's like, you can do all this stuff in HubSpot. So why not show more of this stuff in HubSpot? So I'm just trying to challenge that a little bit to say, why not do it in HubSpot? What's the advantage to doing it outside like that?

Zach: Right. So this is definitely experimental in nature. I'll say that.

Um, but what we're seeing is, is it's so hard to go from very high level things like flywheel. Right. Which everybody's like, yeah, that makes sense. And then we go down to like stages and property levels of stuff in HubSpot.

Right. And because like, once you open up a HubSpot portal, it's challenging to one, like not go to that level.

Chris: I was just gonna say like this does not get too granular and go into the weeds and say, Oh, you know, look at this shiny object over here. Because even if you don't want to talk about it, and somebody sees it, like, what's that thing? Yeah, exactly.

Zach: And that rabbit hole all the time, because we love that energy. Like, it's hard to resist that energy. It's like, yeah, let's go there. That's, that's what the best HubSpot portals like offer.

But also, what I'm seeing is there is an immense amount of work required to understand your business and then, like, see it in HubSpot in a not, like, confusing or distracting way, I think is what I'm experiencing.

So can we, like, how do we bridge the gap between super high-level diagrams of lifecycle stages and flywheels and then business process diagrams? and then what's actually happening in HubSpot.

And when I first started creating this, I just asked for a show me what a value for a CRM would look like based on having these stages built out. And the first thing I got to is create a contact record. And I'm like, oh, I don't got time to build all that out, that kind of data that can get to this is possible, this view. where we've seen everybody involved, all the transaction activity, all of the touchpoints, right?

We need to believe, I think, that that's possible.

And over time, I anticipate we will be able to build out HubSpot, like various use cases. And I'm sure this is what the corporate sales team at HubSpot, I would imagine they have things like this. But even there, right?

if you wait to show the HubSpot thing to deal with the language differences between like even opportunities and deals, right? Like if you wait until HubSpot's on the screen and now you've got to have that conversation.

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: Like it kills the momentum.

So a lot of this is like, so I think it's, it starts to simplify when we can say, let's start here. We need some agreements on the big picture stuff that's not so fluffy either.

Once we can agree on this is an outcome, there's no KPIs here, it's do we have a unified view or not?

Chris: Right.

Zach: If we don't, and we say we want one, what do we need to do differently and how are we going to get there?

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: You know what would be kind of cool to take this tool to the next level is it's like, okay, we're going to use this to help educate you on why we're doing this, why it's important, kind of showing you what the future state can look like kind of a thing.

But that's like, okay, well, what are the steps that you need to take to get to that future state?

And so that's where you go with your, like, this is our current state process map. This is our future state process map. These are all the projects that we've identified. These are how we prioritize them. This is how we measure impact level and effort levels and ROI. These are the main KPIs that we're gonna be tracking.

you know, we've developed our ICPs, our buyer, you know, so it's like all these things that you have to do in order to get there.

Then it's like, well, this tool now could take you and start walking you through those steps to say, okay, you know, it's like, you know, it's kind of like what we do with a HubSpot onboarding.

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: But it's the stuff that you do before you get into the portal that's really important.

And I just had a client call this week where it was like, hey, time out. We can't help you achieve your marketing goals right now because we don't have sales and customer success aligned. And we haven't fully documented your process.

I didn't even know that data could enter the system this way. I didn't even know you had this in your tech stack. You hired me to help you with some very specific marketing challenges. And I'm sorry to tell you, but these are company challenges that need to be fixed before marketing can get any kind of transparency into what's going on.

So now it's like this tool here could be used to help educate those other stakeholders, show why they all have a little accountability in this, what they can all get to, but they have to work together to get there.

And so that's kind of be a cool step here just to be like, How do we start now using this to start capturing the information that we need in an organized fashion so we can have our whole RevOps?

Chris: And it's funny because I actually started playing around with Lovable and coming up with...

Zach: Was that Lovable that you used?

Chris: I started this on Sunday with Cloud Code, actually. And just yesterday, I got it on a real domain.

Because we've got to, we've got to find ways to tell this story in a more tangible, practical way, like you're saying.

And just as an example, being able to say, like, everybody knows this happens, right? attended a conference, what happened, why it mattered.

Like, this is the path where it's like, okay, what would have to be true in HubSpot for us to capture like this intelligence, right? We know what traditionally it looks like, right? Salesforce should show like this single entry, like from the campaign, like, oh, they went to this show.

Meanwhile, the true, uh, you know, context is in whoever had that conversation, you know, with, um, Jennifer in this case, and if it wasn't the sales rep, it's that context has probably gone forever.

Right. Because it's not going to make it in because the marketing team doesn't have a place to put it. And they're just asked to send the leads list over.

Chris: Right.

Zach: Meanwhile, we all know like this is where everybody in the room will, should understand how that, like that this is valuable information.

And again, like I think the challenge with SAS in general is a lot of promises have been made over the last twenty five years of what these tools are supposed to be doing for you.

But when all the work is on the teams having to fill out all these required fields and just so much like they're not doing it right now, we've got AI where it's like, no, just bring your conversation in.

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: And this stuff will populate like, yeah, that's where I'm at.

Zach: Like, I'm getting ready to throw one of those wearable devices around my neck and start recording in-person conversations. Have you seen some of those?

Chris: I have one.

Zach: You have one?

Chris: I used it at a trade show.

Zach: Really?

Chris: It worked.

Zach: Yeah.

I think this is probably another episode for us to talk about some of these other tools and ways that you can get the data in.

But it's like, how do you connect that into HubSpot?

Chris: Right.

Zach: That's where as we look at this, because I'm going to be using this throughout almost all the content I do, because we have to figure out how to ask HubSpot and AI, to give us this context without asking everybody on our team to do more work.

Chris: Right.

Zach: Yes.

More drop downs. Not going to equal more sales.

And can we let go as humans of thinking that we need to maintain the data? Because if we can, is there a world where the only human input is unstructured data?

Chris: Sure.

Zach: Well, you can get to the point where, you know, if you're getting all those conversations in consistently, right, and your team understands how it works, too, because it's like when you know that you're –

Chris: Well, there's that, but it's also – like, for example, when I have my, like, Fathom note-taker going, I will purposely – like restate problems, action items, you know, I will verbalize things that I know will eventually be transcribed and go into the system because it's now gonna be, but if you don't think about it that way, you know, you're missing out on some opportunities.

Not that it's not gonna do a good job capturing at what you're saying, but if you're a little more purposeful for like how you articulate it and how, you know, what you say and how you say it, your summaries and your call notes will be, you know, that much more actionable.

And so, yeah, I mean, I'd love to be able to get teams to the place where sales can just go have their calls, go have their meetings, send their emails, do their process, do whatever they would normally do on whatever, you know, wherever they're gonna do it.

And then all the data is just being fed into HubSpot AI is taking the unstructured data. It's automatically updating properties for you. It's automatically moving deal stages for you. It's automatically creating these things for you.

So you just do what we all are trying to accomplish, which is just focus on the customer, focus on helping.

But I think it's baby steps because you have to get... Initially, you're not going to be ready for that. So you have to get good data into the system. So you have to kind of go to the basics, good data governance. Here's our process for how things come in.

We do have required properties and conditional properties and stages and things like that. We're just not going to overly complicate it.

Zach: yeah right yeah

Chris: but eventually as we get better and better at this thing we're going to try to like our goal should be to start taking more of those asks away from you and feeding you more you know better data to do your job

Zach: yeah that's and that that's the dream right and i think like we're all struggling to figure out what the right baby steps are yeah right now but also a part of the value first, like one of the value first principles is transformation over optimization.

It's very hard to take the one percent better everyday philosophy, which is relevant and still super important in a lot of contexts. But like Zach just like said, what you just said was Okay, great. You're getting your call transcripts in. Do you know how to operate a call in order to help AI understand what happened on that call?

Chris: Right.

Zach: It's a different.

And again, it all connects, which is the hard part to if you have space in that Monday afternoon meeting to talk about this kind of stuff.

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: Right? It can happen like that. And every salesperson can be like, oh, so I just say it like that now?

Chris: Yeah.

Zach: Okay.

Chris: Yeah. Hey, guys, here's a great example of a call that Chris did. And I want to show you guys what data we were able to pull out of the call.

Zach: and compare it to this other call here, which was also a good call, but just phrase a little bit different. Now we can kind of see, wow, if you guys just talk a little bit differently or ask your questions a little bit differently, or just, this is how you run these AI, you know, note taker calls to help get, you know, look at what this, look at what this, you know, Chris can do now with all, you know, while you're sitting here on your lunch break, you know, just trying to fill in some stuff.

Chris is, you know, sitting there with his feet up eating a burrito, you know, watching some YouTube saying, I already, you know, I already got all my stuff in here.

Chris: you know, I can take a, I can take a break and think now and do a little strategy session while I'm, you know, while I'm munching.

Zach: Or even go, go touch some grass.

Chris: Yeah, go out and take a walk in the park and recharge your batteries.

Zach: Yeah, and if you want to see what that looks like inside of HubSpot, check out our unboxing that we did last week with the calls tool. Track terms, summaries, just data. When you get the transcripts in HubSpot, Like, man, AI can work for you, right?

So that's step one is knowing that that output can happen. And step two is like digging in. And this is the most value of these weekly, whatever weekly meetings, like if you just took five or ten minutes to understand the words that are being said, that means something to the business.

Chris: oh, man, these are the kinds of guardrails and systems set up that if you can accomplish for AI, the outputs and the feeling of the value that AI is providing, ten Xs, one hundred Xs, very, very quickly.

Zach: Yeah.

Chris: Right. Just needs a little bit of context. It needs some, you know, it needs a genie yet.

Zach: Not yet.

Chris: Right. But it needs some good old fashioned, you know, brain power to get it to work.

I'm actually doing the final, my final hug event here in person in Rochester. I think it's going to be probably like that maybe second week of December date, still kind of up in the air on the customer agent.

So I'm going to be putting some time in between now and then to, you know, kind of program things very similar to like the unboxing that we did but we're going to do you know some stuff in person um so i'm excited to dive in a little bit more and continue to set up my own portal in ways where i'm just doing what i need to do every day and the information is just flowing uh you know naturally

so i can you know get some good actionable insights

Zach: Yeah.

Chris: Well, good on you for keeping that hug going. So important, all the in-person education and the digital stuff.

Zach: We need some more people to show up, though.

Chris: Yeah. It's hard. I get it. It's hard work. It's a different world. It's a different world. But slowly but surely.

Zach: Yes. Enough food and alcohol usually gets people to show up. So we'll be doing that this time again.

Chris: There we go.

All right. Well, this has been fun.

Zach: Yeah, man.

Chris: And we'll be back next week with our buddy Bill Barless to talk about commerce, I'll say versus revenue, but commerce as compared to revenue and why it's important to understand the difference, I think. We're excited about that conversation.

Zach: Cool.

Chris: Yeah, just next week sometime. Until then, have an amazing weekend, Zach.

Zach: You too, brother, man. It was fun. Good convo.

Chris: Thanks, bud.

Zach: Yeah, bye.

Chris: See you.