Lauren Kennedy | Coastal Consulting
HubSpot and Salesforce are two of the most common platforms in the revenue stack, but while they’re often used together, they’re the subject of countless complaints by frustrated marketers who can’t get them to play nicely.
Having clean data is foundational to a successful inbound marketing strategy, which means solving the HubSpot-Salesforce challenge is of top importance.
Coastal Consulting founder Lauren Kennedy has dedicated her career to helping marketers optimize their HubSpot and Salesforce instances, both on their own, and in the way they sync data and work together. In this episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, Lauren breaks down the most common challenges she sees when it comes to the HubSpot and Salesforce integration, and outlines how she solves them.
Check out the full episode to hear more.
Resources from this episode:
Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn
Follow Lauren on Twitter
Check out the Coastal Consulting website
Lauren and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week's guest is Lauren Kennedy, who is the founder of Coastal Consulting. Welcome to the podcast, Lauren.
Lauren (00:28):
Thanks for having me. Looking forward to our talk today.
Kathleen (00:30):
We're going to talk about something that I feel like so many marketers have opinions and feelings about, which is HubSpot and Salesforce and how they do or do not talk to each other. But before we get into that can you just introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you, your background and what Coastal Consulting is?
Lauren (00:54):
Sure. So I'm a marketing automation expert self-proclaimed, but I do have certifications to back that up. I started Coastal Consulting in March of this year and I've worked in the marketing automation field for several years, primarily in HubSpot and Salesforce, but I have dabbled in pretty much every marketing automation platform out there until I decided that HubSpot was the spot I wanted to be in. I have, I guess, a history in logistics, marketing banking all over the board, as far as industries go. And this year I decided that I was ready to work for myself and that I had knowledge that was really valuable in the marketplace and getting HubSpot and Salesforce to work together and having the technical knowledge in both systems, as well as that embark on marketing expertise to actually make it work. So I took the leap. And now here we are with Coastal.
Kathleen (01:48):
I love that you are sort of niching down into how do these two platforms talk to each other because I'm in a lot of online groups that are full of other CMOs. And there's a lot of conversation about this topic. And it's funny, like you wouldn't think that that would be the thing that so many marketing leaders are talking about. And quite honestly, it shouldn't be the thing that we're all talking about, right? Like this shouldn't be such a pain point, but for whatever reason, I feel like it's a major challenge for teams. And I don't know if it's that there's a lack of expertise out there to solve it. Or if it's just that these platforms like don't talk well to each other. I don't know. Why do you think it's such a big problem?
Lauren (02:32):
I think there's a few reasons. So one reason that is consistent across the board is sales and marketing misalignment. So deeper than like the technical side of it, just having teams that are not aligned on what the mission is on what we're supposed to be doing in systems. Like I talked to a new client yesterday that has their sales team and outreach their organizational data in Salesforce. And then marketing is implementing HubSpot previously Pardot, but they're migrating. And the challenge is they don't like, marketing's not really sure when they're supposed to be emailing them because sales is emailing them. And then they feel like they're spamming them because they're not communicating on what stage they're supposed to be emailing one another. So whenever we work with someone, we always say like give each system, you're using a job description. And if it's not in that system's job description to cover that contact at that stage, you're not communicating with them.
Kathleen (03:25):
I need to understand that more. Tell me what that means.
Lauren (03:28):
So on your team, everyone has a job description, right? Of the different things that they own and do. And you wouldn't step in on somebody else's job unless they've asked you to, or they need a favor or something like that. So there's really clear definition of roles and responsibilities. And whenever we have all these tools, they can all do different pieces. Like they have some overlap in skill sets. So when you look at how do you use them internally? I like to give them job descriptions. So Salesforce's job is to assign leads, to store, deal information. All of that outreach, his job is to build a relationship with a warm contact. Once they've indicated interest and HubSpot's job is to send marketing information like capture leads via forms, and then nurture customers once they've already closed the deal with sales. So if you give each system an actual job description that says like, whenever lead status is new, like it's marketing's role, whenever it switches to marketing qualified, then it's assigned to sales and Salesforce and the sales team was able to do whatever.
Lauren (04:32):
So HubSpot knows that whenever the status is sales qualified lead, like their job is paused. Like we don't need to touch it at this point, like sales is working on it. And so when you set those clear job descriptions per system everyone kind of understands that we all understand the concept of the job description. So when you're trying to get alignment from teams internally, it's helpful to share like a unified frame of reference. And it gives you something to like refer back to a lot of teams, call it like a marketing and sales SLA. I like to use job description because SLA is kind of a gross term. Nobody has a positive view of that term. So I've found that to be really successful and getting teams aligned.
Kathleen (05:14):
That's an interesting way to think about it. So, so I want to start with, you know, we're talking about HubSpot and Salesforce talking to each other. And is it your experience that in most cases that when that comes up, it's companies that are using Salesforce for the CRM and HubSpot for their marketing? Correct? Because HubSpot has a lot of different modules as to Salesforce. So with that, as our baseline, then presumably sales is the primary user of Salesforce or the owner marketing as the primary user or owner of, of HubSpot. One of the, I guess my first questions is, cause I've heard different people talk about this in different ways. You know, you can, they're the way that these two tools can integrate, gives you a lot of options for how you set the integration up. One of the first choices you have to make is do you connect everything or do you limit what you're syncing back and forth? And so I'd like to get your perspective on, I've had some people say that HubSpot, we keep, we keep anybody that comes in like through a lead or through a form fill like, so marketing leads come into HubSpot and and only get synced over to Salesforce when a certain trigger happens. And then there are other people who say, Nope, we're syncing everything. We want to have our HubSpot instance be like our replication of our Salesforce. Like, what's your opinion on this?
Lauren (06:40):
So there's different ways to achieve that. But, but typically it really varies by business model because there's some organizations where there's like HIPAA involved. So it's healthcare. So once HIPAA data is added, then it's no longer in HubSpot and it's just in Salesforce. And we use selective sync to hide certain pieces of data from HubSpot. Then there's inclusion lists, which is more common, which is what you were talking about of like once lifecycle stages, marketing qualified. Then we send it to Salesforce. I usually think that it's helpful to have some sort of threshold where it's not an exact mirror because everything that comes in through a form isn't valuable, but guaranteed they're spam emails, there's fake entries. There's people who are completely not qualified. So my perspective on that is if there's never any potential for them to be a sale, then they shouldn't go to Salesforce, like no potential future, no value.
Lauren (07:34):
The best way that I see to do that is HubSpot scoring. So you can use the stage marketing qualified, but I, I think that that stage is kind of abused by some companies. For example, a lot of people say, a lot of people say, if they submit any form, then they're automatically marketing qualified and they can pass through, but anyone can submit a form. So using a combination of scoring where you're saying, if they do X, Y, and Z, they are now a marketing qualified, lead and syncing at that point, I think it's helpful. But if they are a viable lead and like have some potential in the future, I think it's okay to think at that point. But there is some sort of threshold where it's like, we're filtering out free email addresses if you're in B2B, which is what we specialize in.
Lauren (08:15):
Or if you've just filled out like a blog subscription, maybe they're not ready to go. We don't know enough about them. So waiting until you have data where even if they're not ready for sales, they're going to be at some point for sales to start to feel out because the benefit to your sales team, seeing people that are in the funnel before they're writing to talk to them as maybe they know that person, or maybe they've seen them at a trade show or something. So them seeing a certain level of interest that has been indicated can really help your sales team with your inbound approach. So tapping into those relationships they may already have. So,
Kathleen (08:50):
So next question, which I know there's a lot of controversy about, at least amongst the people I talked to is, let's say you, you decide what you're going to sync and you send it over to Salesforce within the marketing circles. That I'm a part of. There is a lot of discussion and opinions over whether you should have and use the lead object in Salesforce, or just get rid of it altogether. Marketers, I talked to seemed to say, delete that lead object, get rid of it. It's more of a problem than anything. And then salespeople tend to want to keep it, what's your opinion on this?
Lauren (09:34):
It's a tough one because I'm very much focused on marketing automation and also sales enablement. So I argue both sides of that quite a bit. I think from a systems integration perspective solely from HubSpot and Salesforce, it's easier to just have the contact object because if you've used the two systems, I'm sure you've run into duplicate issues before. Just like an asterisk on that. If you're using HubSpot and it's integrated with Salesforce, make sure auto create an associate companies is turned off. That is where a vast majority of duplicate issues come from. So just fun tip. Other than that using the lead object is very valuable to sales teams because they can then see the conversion. What in an ideal world, what I kind of advocate for is if we are, we're starting from scratch with no historical data in Salesforce and HubSpot, I would just use the contact in Salesforce and sync with lifecycle stages and HubSpot.
Lauren (10:30):
Something I set up for every client is adding lifecycle stage to Salesforce and keeping that in sync. Even if they're not using it themselves, I'll set it up in the backend. So it's still tracking because that funnel graph, but the life cycle stage report will show you in HubSpot where it's converting from stage to stage is like the most valuable report that I can see across the board because it's actually showing you full life cycle conversion, obviously per the name. But I think that's a lot more valuable than like X leads, converted and Salesforce. And so from scratch, that's what I would recommend. However, for a lot of organizations it's really challenging to get buy-in from sales and everyone to use Salesforce and do all the things they're supposed to do and have the system and salespeople not to make a generalization, but they want to be talking to leads.
Lauren (11:21):
They want to be in their process like making sales. And so having continuous system shifts and things they have to learn and like readapt to you is really frustrating on their end to try to like pick it up and figure it out and whatever. So if you're really into Salesforce and have been in there for years, making a big data model shift, like that can be really disruptive to your team's productivity and your sales success overall. So in a dream world, just the contact object with lifecycle stages. In reality, I usually try to patch life cycle stages and in the background. And then I recommend using in cycle on in addition, you have spot in Salesforce to help with that ongoing duplicate management. That tool has been the best in my opinion, from my experience on managing data quality and duplicates between the two systems
Kathleen (12:07):
Yeah. That you made some great points, especially about like change is tough for sales teams. The argument that I've heard them use the most about why to get rid of the lead object is pretty specific to B2B sales, which is that, which is that when you're selling in B2B, you're selling to a company and, and when Salesforce is set up with a lead object, it really makes your whole database around selling to an individual. And so the, the argument is that it's like harder to get a full picture of the buying committee and to understand how a company might be kind of moving down funnel, if you're setting your CRM up to focus on individual people. So I don't know. What do you, what do you think about that?
Lauren (12:48):
I agree with that argument. I, because you're not like leads, don't natively associate with accounts in Salesforce. Like you can patch it with a lookup field, but they don't like natively connect and contacts do. I think that HubSpot solves this on their side by syncing life cycle stages up to the company. So you can see overall what's happening in their new sequences. It can unenroll people whenever somebody else at their company takes an action. So I think that HubSpot set up is actually more conducive to B2B sales than Salesforce is for that reason. And you can kind of hack the same thing in Salesforce, but I agree that I think the lead object is not the best. I spoke with HubSpot's product team recently and the person who chose lifecycle stages over separate objects and like he explained his rationale and it was the same thing cause they came from Salesforce over to HubSpot.
Lauren (13:39):
And they experienced that and decided to change it when they created HubSpot, obviously. So I support that. Having one object is nice because several reasons, like one big thing that's a frustration is when you have a new lead come in, that's a different email address with the same person and you go to convert it into an existing contact in Salesforce, you lose all the data from that lead it doesn't port over like it's, it just takes the fact that they have an additional email and converts them into the existing contact. It doesn't bring their timeline history or anything like that. And that's really challenging to just have the data loss on that side. Whereas in HubSpot, when you merge two contacts, you get everything. And in Salesforce, when you merge the two contacts, you get to pick which people, but converting a lead into an existing contact, you lose it all. So it's really just like a placeholder object until you become a contact. And if you use contacts instead with statuses and then the lifecycle stage field or something like that to show conversion I can keep everything a lot cleaner.
Kathleen (14:38):
Yeah, I, okay. So cleaner. This has been my biggest gripe of all, about the integration and you, you said there were duplicates a few times and it really is like the bane of my existence and I, not, my experience has been that there's a lot of duplicate creation as part of this integration and the issue I've run into. And maybe I'm just not, I'm not aware of how to solve it is that there are plenty of tools out there that can dedupe. But my understanding is that when you have the integration turned on, at least in HubSpot, for example, if there's duplicate companies that won't let you merge them because of the integration. So how do you handle this issue? Because this is something that's been driving me nuts.
Lauren (15:21):
So that's what that auto-create and associate companies, things solves is not creating those companies, never a form is submitted. So like whenever somebody comes in and their domain doesn't match one-to-one to the domain that exists in HubSpot or something like that. And then they create an additional company that's where you have those duplicates. And the challenge with that is like, say, you're working a deal with the company. You have three existing contacts, one new one comes in and it creates a company. Sometimes those existing contacts will re associate with a newer company and HubSpot and all of the deal activity. All of the email activities stays on this new fake company. So whenever you need to get rid of it, we essentially just re associate the contacts with the company we want to keep and then delete the like fake company. Something that we do on a monthly basis is create like a deal view in HubSpot that says like zero associated contacts and not associated in Salesforce, like no Salesforce account ID and just delete them like.
Kathleen (16:17):
That's a good idea.
Lauren (16:19):
Just to like keep them away basically. But the, the biggest people who struggle with that is when they have their sales team using sales hub, as well as Salesforce which is really great for sales enablement to have the sequences and all of that. I usually recommend a sales hub for meetings and sequences.
Kathleen (16:36):
So that was us. That's what we did.
Lauren (16:39):
But then your sales team has access to log and track in their email. And that's what creates the issue because the default setting to log and track in your email or outlook is to auto associate, to company deal in contact. And so if you don't change that, which has to be changed on a user level, you can't change it as an admin, if you're emailing and they don't have a related company in the system, or they haven't already been created with a related company, it'll create a duplicate. So whenever we enable spills hub, I always meet with the sales team individually. And I'm like, okay, let's share your screen. And we're going to change the settings on that because creating a new contact is fine. Creating a new company can be chaotic.
Kathleen (17:21):
So, yeah, and this gets us into another part of the conversation that I've really kind of thought a lot about, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure that I've figured out the answer, which is you're right. And I agree with you that HubSpot actually has a lot of great sales enablement tools built into it. But you know, when you're using both Salesforce and HubSpot, in theory, like you don't want to have your sales team like splitting efforts between multiple platforms. Like you want to simplify their life as much as possible. So, you know, in a perfect world, if you were going to set something up from scratch, what would you have a sales team do in Salesforce versus, and HubSpot?
Lauren (18:02):
I usually only recommend Sales Hub if there's a case for the sales teams to not need it to log into Salesforce. So in those cases, it's honestly best for the company to just not stop using Salesforce and just transition to HubSpot fully,
Kathleen (18:16):
Which is exactly what we wound up doing.
Lauren (18:19):
Yes. Yeah. Because HubSpot's easier to use. And we're also a Salesforce partner. So I do believe in the value of the system. However, I think most companies over complicate their system when they get into Salesforce because Salesforce office offers limitless customization, which is great. But the problem with limitless and too many options is we are people and we get distracted by the shiny things. So it's, we often over-complicate because of the system. So there's a lot of companies where Salesforce makes a lot of sense, but for the majority I've seen, like HubSpot is fine. And it's so much easier. So anyway, the biggest use case there is sales moves out of Salesforce, completely uses HubSpot, but Salesforce does maintained by accounting, internal systems and account management. So it really depends, but I try to keep them in one or the other.
Lauren (19:08):
Sometimes they use Salesforce for invoicing and stuff like that. Like if they don't use the native HubSpot quoting tool, they use that for that stage of the deal process, but they'll keep the vast majority of everything they do in HubSpot. So whenever I add sales hub, I may get the primary or on the, on the contrary, it's just used for meetings links to book with them and in email sequences and templates. So when you can open it up in Gmail or outlook and have a little HubSpot plugin that says, use the sequence so it becomes part of their day-to-day life without actually having to log into HubSpot. So those are the two use cases.
Kathleen (19:45):
Yeah, that's interesting. I think where the first of the two, because we started out really with sales and Salesforce, but we were having too many, too many like issues with poor adoption and data hygiene. And so we moved them over to HubSpot and they love it as a system. But we're, we're keeping Salesforce because we had a delighted integration for C-SAT and there are certain accounting integrations there. And so it is like, it's, it's, it's not a perfect system by far, but on the data back and forth is making me crazy. But it is nice to have gotten like the sales team really into one system as opposed to straddling two.
Lauren (20:25):
And usually whenever you can get people to use it, it's worth the integration troubles and like making it work because your people are actually using it. So it's like, you can either have different systems that are being used kind of, or one where your marketing ops people unfortunately are tasked with just like maintaining it for the, like, I guess the greater good if you will.
Kathleen (20:47):
Now. So we talked a little bit about sales from the sales point of view like how to set it up. I want to shift over and talk about from the marketing point of view, because I do think that there's a lot of marketers out there that know HubSpot really well. I mean, I'm certainly one of them. I was a HubSpot partner. I owned a HubSpot partner agency for 11 years before going in house. But maybe they don't know Salesforce as well.
Lauren (21:10):
And so for the marketer who's primarily living in HubSpot. What are some things that you think it's important for them to know about how they set up? Not just HubSpot, but, but Salesforce, so that, so that campaign effectiveness can be tracked appropriately and attribution and things like that. I think one of the biggest things that marketers confuse when they get into HubSpot is the definition of a campaign in HubSpot and a campaign in Salesforce. A campaign in HubSpot is a collection of assets and somebody has to submit a form or get an email to be included in that campaign reporting. And in Salesforce, a campaign is a collection of leads or contacts that then convert into opportunities and all of that. So whenever you're integrated, I highly recommend that marketers add to Salesforce campaigns whenever they get to a certain point. So if there's an event, make sure you're adding into a Salesforce campaign.
Lauren (22:06):
And you can do that really easily through HubSpot workflows. There's like an action whenever you enroll them to add to a Salesforce campaign. And the benefit for that is all of your campaign reporting can be in Salesforce and accessed by the sales team or accounting, whomever it's reporting on that system. And they can pull broader campaign metrics that you can actually add someone to, rather than them being like auto attributed through a HubSpot email send or something like that. So those are really helpful ways to track things over time. Like I used to be in trade show management and we would have like a trade show master campaign or parent campaign. And all of the trade shows for the year were sub campaigns. So we could roll up trade show reporting and then sell mastery campaign in sales.
Kathleen (22:49):
Okay. So yeah, I was just going to ask you to give me a real world, real world example of this so, like let's play this out. So you have like your master trade show campaign, and then you will have all your individual shows as sub campaigns. So can you like dig in a little bit for me into if you're the marketer, like at what point in HubSpot would you you're auto enrolling people in Salesforce campaigns through workflows? Like how would you set that up? And at what point would you have that happen?
Lauren (23:19):
Will they be added to the campaign?
Kathleen (23:20):
Yeah. Yeah. Like in your case with events I'd love to just hear your perspective on that.
Lauren (23:25):
So with events, we would get a attendee list of who was going to the show and we would match that with foods in our database. And so for our customers or existing leads that we knew were going, we would add them to the campaign. So we, we didn't really add net new leads because of data quality. And I'm really big on that. But when the leads we had properly permissioned, we would then add to HubSpot workloads of, Hey, we're going to be there to here's X, Y Z event. You could attend and like collect their registrations to go to our, I dunno, happy hour, whatever we were doing. And we'd add them to the Salesforce campaign as sense. And then after they would go to the show, we then have our sales team. That's like logging events with them on site.
Lauren (24:05):
And all of that for our trade shows, we actually had a HubSpot landing page for each person, so they could submit their leads and then track that interaction when it happened at the campaign, at the show. And then when you go in Salesforce, they've been added to the campaign, any opportunities that come out of that are already set up for the sales team to attribute to that opportunity and you can see holistic performance and then you can roll it up into the parent campaign and see that reporting throughout the year. So it's really valuable as a trade show manager. One of my clients does a lot of webinars, so they have a master webinar campaign, and then whenever they register for a webinar, part of their confirmation workflow is they're enrolled in workflow. When they register, add to Salesforce campaign, send the confirmation, email trigger three reminders or whatever. So it really becomes part of your confirmation workflows of like, when an action is taken, that's relevant to this revenue driving activity, then add it to the Salesforce campaign.
Kathleen (24:59):
And you're in this case, you're really using Salesforce campaigns solely for attribution reporting.
Lauren (25:06):
Correct. Yeah, attribution reporting and then like revenue reporting.
Kathleen (25:09):
That's really helpful. So what are, what are some of the other like biggest issues or stumbling blocks you see for, for people using these two systems together?
Lauren (25:23):
A really big one that can have a pretty detrimental impact is using the different fields. So if you're not aligned on what marketing is using to mean something and sales is using to mean something, it can be really challenging. Like one of our clients had two different lead status fields and Salesforce used one and HubSpot used the other. And obviously it's a challenge if you're both working off two different lead statuses for where things are in the funnel and like who's getting the emails. So it's helpful to create like a field dictionary between the two departments. But like, this is what this means. These are the options. One of my clients has a playbook that they use and we try to create these for everybody else that says, these are the objects. These are how you use them. These are the key fields.
Lauren (26:09):
This is what we'll do. This is what you'll do. It's really built out. So a lot of people don't invest the time in that documentation, but it really helps. And being able to just define, like, this is what this means, and this is what will happen when you get there. Because if you're not very open about the fact that you're using automation and that you're engaging with these people and letting them know things at certain stages, it can be confusing to sales when they finally get on the phone with them. And they're like, oh yeah, I received XYZ email. Tell me more about that. And if your sales team isn't aware that that's happening, that can be really jarring to them on the phone and also a poor customer experience when they have no idea because the customer just use your company, not the individual departments.
Lauren (26:47):
So not understanding the fields in summary is a big thing. And using stuff that sales is not updating for really important communications that are probably to the wrong target audience, if they're not in sync. Another like issue that people aren't aware of sometimes is the sync settings. So it's important to set an owner and you can use the job descriptions that you've set up to know who is the owner of the most recent data on a field. For example, lead status or lifecycle stage, are those important fields like should HubSpot be overwritten by Salesforce or should it be two way in both of them are updated with the most recent that can cause a lot of issues if you don't set an owner. For example, if Salesforce is the default, unless blank and HubSpot is the one who's actually updating that field, it'll just retain the first value you sent to Salesforce and not keep that field up to date from HubSpot. So if you're sending information about their progression on like qualifications and stuff like that, it won't be overwritten in Salesforce and then you don't have accurate data.
Kathleen (27:53):
So, so you have to do that on a field by field basis, right?
Lauren (27:57):
Yeah. So whenever you set it up, you can essentially, it's like, I think I think when you turn it on, it's default two way, configure it as far as the same settings, but whenever you add new fields and go through that, like it's important to define who the owner is. And another good show that a lot of people don't know is whenever you create a field in HubSpot or Salesforce, it's not automatically created in the other system. Sometimes people think that like, if I create it in HubSpot, it's in Salesforce, it's thinking that's not true. You need to add it to both systems and then add it to the sync. I have a lot of people who don't realize that until they get in there and they have data that they don't know why it's showing in Salesforce. And it's because you have to add them.
Kathleen (28:34):
Yeah, that's a big one. So this is getting us into an interesting area that I, I, most people probably find boring, but like, I think that this is where the devil's in the details, which is you talked about having a field dictionary, which I love. And I think that makes a ton of sense, but then there's this whole other area of like, like what is really happening in these systems and what automation is, is living and, and going on behind the scenes. And we just had this question come up at my company because you know, you, you get far enough down the path with HubSpot, for example, and you've got like, you could have thousands of workflows and a ton of smart lists and so many different forms and like call it, call it marketing automation, platform, hygiene. Like how do you, do you have a solution for tracking what is happening and what all the dependencies are? Cause like this question came up, we wanted to fundamentally change the conversion experience on our website and make it more self-serve. And like, you know, all of a sudden you start thinking, well, this is like a house of cards. Like if I change this one thing, what are the 20 other things behind the scenes that could potentially break? So I'd love to hear how you, how you work with your clients to set them up so that they have good visibility into that and can manage it.
Lauren (29:55):
There's two different hygiene processes that we work with. Our clients, we work with clients on one is just straight data hygiene of like every year we do list cleaning and we make sure that we're like deleting contacts that are invalid and all of that. That's pretty standard people do that. They know about that. As far as systems maintenance, my personal experience. In my previous role, I worked at a financial institution and I was the marketing automation tool owner. We had a Salesforce owner and then we had the rest of our systems owner, like our core banking system and all of that. And we never communicated whenever I started, like those functions just didn't communicate, which seems completely illogical. So we created the three of us, a master document of like, this is what triggers this, and this is what it affects.
Lauren (30:37):
And so every time we made a system level change, we agreed the three of us to keep that up to date. And then we met quarterly to talk about, Hey, this is planned on our team. We're going to be making these changes. And so we were able to keep those systems in sync and avoid those crazy messages that can come from that, especially in finance, it's really important. So you're not confusing your customers and your people who bank with you. But I found like that to be the best for that organization. What I normally do for clients when we sign off is create a big process doc. So I use Miro, that's my favorite virtual whiteboard tool. And I go in there and basically say like, here's your lead status breakdown like that progression that you see at the top of Salesforce and from each stage, this is what's happening in both systems or if we're using outreach and all systems, and it's a super painful document to put together.
Lauren (31:25):
And as you know, it can become outdated and useless in a matter of seconds, if you could go into HubSpot and change everything. So in order to actually stay on top of that, you have to have people that are committed to understanding what's happening in their systems and committed to keeping it updated. So I usually recommend quarterly that you'd go in and look at what has changed. And maybe you're not putting everything in there. Like if you have certain like low impacts workloads and HubSpot that are just like keeping the lights on with some things that's not super important. But your core communications, like when we have a new customer, when they convert to the stage, like the communication driving workflows are the most important, in my opinion of like what is impacting something that's triggered from a customer facing perspective. And just keeping that up to date and HubSpot actually makes it really easy to do that because you can export an image of the workflow. So if you just create a document at the top and you say lead status is XYZ, and then you export an image of the workflow and just put an arrow to it that it's easy to just create that update of like, this is happening here.
Kathleen (32:29):
That's interesting. I didn't realize you could export the image of it.
Lauren (32:33):
If you go to your workflow and open it at the top, right it says export and you just click that and it downloads like a PNG of your workflow.
Kathleen (32:40):
Oh, that's awesome. You have also like naming conventions that you tend to use within portals to keep everything clean. Cause I know like in my team now we've really moved over and the sales is using HubSpot. Marketing's using HubSpot. CMS is using HubSpot product and engineering are using it, which is great that we're all in one portal, but that it's like too many cooks and there's so much going on. And so we've started working with different naming conventions for files, for lists, for workflows. Like how do you handle that?
Lauren (33:09):
Yeah. I, I tried to set that on the front end. I'm, I'm a HubSpot partner and we do a lot of implementations. So that's something I try to set from day. One of like these are how these emails are going to be categorized as how we're going to do lists. And so I set it up that way and then work with the client on, this is where we're at. This is what the naming convention is. What are your thoughts on that? And kind of set an agreement from day one on what it's gonna look like. If they maintain that long-term or not is kind of on them, but from the start, I always recommend it because it, it makes it so much easier to stay organized. And I am such an advocate for folders in these systems of creating folders of email.
Lauren (33:48):
From there we have marketing, then we have one-time versus automated and like breaking it out the folders because one of the hardest parts about being in marketing operations is turnover because so much of what we know and what we do in our job, it just lives in our head. And so if we leave our job, if we're fired, if we get sick, if something happens like the system, it, somebody else has to figure it out from scratch. So I always try to set up a system where if somebody else had to hop in and my place, like I can reduce the learning curve as much as possible. And naming conventions and folders really helped with that.
Kathleen (34:22):
Yeah. That makes sense. Now, speaking of marketing operations, I feel like there's also a lot of talk within the marketing world and amongst marketing leaders about how important that role really has become because our tech stacks have gotten so complicated and they're so intertwined. I'd like to get your perspective on, at what stage in a company's evolution, do you think it's important to have a person who holds that, that role of marketing automations, like when or when is a company big enough to warrant that?
Lauren (34:56):
I think it has to do with system complexity more than size. From what I've seen, if you're integrating, like if you're integrating HubSpot and Salesforce, like check, you need it immediately. Today you need that function. But it's really, as soon as you complicate your systems, you need it because there's two different types of companies. One is people who go in and invest in Salesforce and HubSpot and have these more enterprise level of platforms that they're integrating. But it's all in one. Everything is in one of these two systems. There's other companies who try to like cost save. I'm doing that in quotations by using all of the cheaper platforms and integrating them. And there's no cost savings in that because then you have to have someone that's managing, full-time how those are working together because one system can just give tags to MailChimp.
Lauren (35:45):
And then another system has to consume that and actually trigger an automated email. And the way that all of those are synced is costing you more time and figuring them out then the enterprise platform would that could do it for you. So if you're using a high volume of systems that have to talk together in order to make your marketing work, then you need that role. And if you're using enterprise systems, do you need that role? I don't think there's many marketing operations or marketing teams with marketing that don't need a marketing operations function at this point, because I think that marketing operations is laying the foundation for your business to have revenue. Because I mean, I obviously believe in the inbound methodology and the inbound is like the future when it comes to marketing, it's time in the future, it's the president. And I think that marketing is synonym as synonymous words, synonymous with technology. And if you're not using a heavy tech stack on your team, you're very quickly falling behind any competitor because they are. And having someone that understands the tools that are on the market and the best practices and how to get them to work together, to set you up for success is like a huge revenue driving asset at this point. So I use, I honestly think that the majority of companies need it. I think if you have a team size of five and you're very new, maybe not, but,
Kathleen (37:01):
But I also feel like, and I, I really feel like when you're small, you have such an opportunity because the bigger you get and you kind of alluded to this when you said, like, if you have a team that's really entrenched in Salesforce, it's hard to change, right? Like when you're a small and, and you don't have a lot of people, it's much easier to rip the bandaid off and start over than it is down the line. And so if you miss that opportunity, you're stuck with whatever you Frankenmonster of a system you've built.
Lauren (37:30):
Yeah. And I think that startups often say like, okay, we need to invest in marketing. We need to get somebody in here to write content. And so they hire a bunch of entry-level marketing roles to help put together their brands. But what would be a lot more effective is if they hired a more senior or marketing operations person to put together the systems and then hire freelancers to support the individual marketing teams, since they have somebody that's driving the ship and then as they grow, they bring in these people full time and can support their marketing engine. But if you patch together different pieces of marketing from siloed sources or people who are not not even senior enough, but not, not knowledgeable enough in the whole big picture of how the technology is going to work, how are we going to distribute everything, all of that. You then have to bring that person in later and change those systems. And it's easier if you start from, this is the architecture of how this is going to work, and then you start filling in the people who are going to execute.
Kathleen (38:23):
Yeah, that's a great point. All right. We're, we're coming to the end of our time. So one of my other questions, and we can do this rapid fire style is like, you've already mentioned outreach and in cycle. There there's a whole universe of other tools that integrate with HubSpot and Salesforce. What would be like your top three to five integrations that if you are building your tech stack from scratch, that you'd want to have installed?
Lauren (38:49):
Hmm. So I would say project management tool, whatever that is for us, it's monday.com communications tool. We use slack, so slack or teams, something else that's keeping your team aligned. And then email those are all really basic, but I try to build within the systems we have. So I always recommend upgrading to get the features you need more so than integrating because of how much easier that is for your team. And then for both of those systems, just integrating it into all of your communication platforms to keep your team in sync is my biggest recommendation.
Kathleen (39:22):
Okay. That's that is a good suggestion. Anything else that you think is important to add that I have not asked you?
Lauren (39:31):
It's okay to ask for help. I think a lot of us get overwhelmed when we're doing Salesforce and HubSpot and where my team really comes in. And so I guess this is a selfish, but it's really helpful to find someone that can teach you HubSpot and Salesforce can be integrated in seconds with a click of a button, but if you do that without preparing correctly, it can be really awful for your business long-Term so it's okay to look for resources. It's okay to ask for help and to get help with implementation and fixing things. It's so much better. If you get somebody to help you start correctly, then fix down the road from a cost perspective and like a stress perspective.
Kathleen (40:07):
Amen. I totally agree with that. All right. Well we're going to transition over now cause I have two questions that I ask all of my guests, and I want to hear your answers to these before we wrap up, the first is the marketers I talked to, a lot of them mentioned one of their biggest pain points is really just staying on top of everything. Like there's marketing is evolving so quickly. Digital's evolving, you know, there's new platforms, there's new regulations, there's new tools, there's new, you know, tactics you can use. How do you like to stay up to date? Are there certain sources you rely on to stay educated?
Lauren (40:42):
I'm really involved in the HubSpot partner community. We are a super-helpful community that likes to help each other. And HubSpot itself obviously is a knowledge source. I'm also in women of email on Facebook. And I think that group is just incredible as far as sharing information
Kathleen (40:55):
Yes! I'm in that one too. I love it.
Lauren (40:58):
I'm also a lifelong learner, so I'm, I'm just looking for people saying, Hey, this isn't working, this is changing. And my clients honestly come to me all the time with this is a new thing. Have you heard of it? Or this is changing and we need to prepare for it. So I'm kind of in an ecosystem where I'm surrounded by marketers all the time. And so I I'm getting new information constantly on what should be changing. And I also look across industries. So I try not to look at my own industry for inspiration on marketing trends. I look to others because I think consulting as a whole is pretty boring. But just looking across the industries other than your own to get some inspiration, what could be working or what to try.
Kathleen (41:35):
Yeah. That's, that's great. I love that. Second question is this podcast is obviously all about inbound marketing. And I define inbound marketing as really anything that naturally attracts the right audience to you. So is there a particular company or individual that you think today is really setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer? And you can't say HubSpot?
Lauren (42:00):
Ah, that's a tough one. I, we always look at hinge from like a messaging perspective, but I one doesn't come to mind because I think that there are really great companies with ad campaigns, but I kind of look at ads as outbound marketing in a way.
Kathleen (42:20):
Well, if you have one that you needed to mention for ad campaigns, who would it be?
Lauren (42:26):
Everyone who's currently targeting me online. I'm being attacked. I think that Pink Lily specifically is a really good advertising company. I think they're doing a really good job. But yeah, inbound, I think word of mouth is honestly really important. I think currently TikTok's doing a really good job of that. Just naturally occurring in people's lives by popping up on different platforms. So we'll go with TikTok.
Kathleen (42:51):
All right. Well time for us to wrap. The last thing I wanted to make sure I asked you is if somebody wants to learn more about you or connect with you or ask you a question, what is the best way for them to do that?
Lauren (43:05):
You can find us online at coastalconsulting.co. Me personally, you can find on Twitter, I'm at @CMNCoastal or LinkedIn. I'm super active on both platforms.
Kathleen (43:15):
Great. I will put those links in the show notes so head to kathleen-booth.com if you want to connect with Lauren. And if you enjoyed this episode and learned something, and I hope you did, because this topic is, is an important one for anybody using HubSpot and Salesforce, which is a huge part of our community. Then please consider heading to apple podcasts and leave the podcast a review. And if you know somebody else doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thanks for joining me, Lauren.
Lauren (43:47):
Yeah, thanks for having me. This was great.
