Value-First Measurement with Danielle Urban

[00:03] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, good afternoon, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First measurement with Danielle Urban. How you doing, Danielle? Happy Monday. Danielle Urban: I’m good. How are you? Chris Carolan: Doing good, doing good. Always like uh episodes like the one that we're about to have. Um, we've been talking about getting to building the stuff out in multiple shows that I do. Uh, you know, I'm planning something for next week. Um, but interesting have interesting happened last week with Casey, we just started getting into the CRM card library and I was like, oh, let's do this and let's do this and oh wait, we put these two things together. Oh my God, so much context for a rep if they were looking at the screen right now. Uh, so we're going to do more of that today and um, if we need to, probably we don't need to try that hard to tie this in, uh, but maybe um, if you think you're supposed to be doing measurement in reporting and dashboards and other places, uh, I think you're about to be surprised at what you can do on an individual record, uh, which happens to be where frontline teams spend most of their time. So I look forward to diving in uh, with you today and just, you know, seeing what's what.

[01:55] **Tabs and Value First Stages** Danielle Urban: Yeah, well, this stemmed from last week when we were chatting with Casey offline, not live streaming, which we probably should have just because it's always interesting when you get the three of us together. Um, but thinking through now that the tabs feature has come down to the pro levels, how do you set it up? Like you have all these tools now available to you to see all of this context. And in thinking about the value first stages that we're working from, do you make each one a tab? Do you I don't think we have section headers yet inside of a single tab. Um, but you know, how could we sort of emulate that and create different sections where, um, you know, depending on what stage they're in, we have all of the answers and things that are relevant to us for that stage. Um, and you were sharing a story, I think, where you had done that for one of your clients. You had created multiple tabs for sort of their stages. Chris Carolan: Yeah, we're we're bringing in the whole of operations, uh, basically ERP light, uh, inside of HubSpot. And, um, you know, the client was having a hard time visualizing that this was even going to be possible in HubSpot. And I was having trouble, right? Danielle Urban: Watch it blow your mind. Chris Carolan: Right. Well, even there I was having trouble like, it's hard because you don't want to, um, like compromise on what's possible in HubSpot, uh, but the first gap you have to cover is how it's always been. Yeah, right. And when you're working on systems like Quickbooks and ERPs and just shit shows basically for for your customer teams at least, they're not designed for customer teams. Right. Um, it's a, it's a long journey to go from like, oh, this pretty view from like what I'm used to where I have to, I have like one object that I just rename into all the things that I needed to be and then everything happens offline, right? Uh, but what happened was once I compromised a little bit and said, okay, we're going to take a little bit of your existing process and bring it in, I think I can do that in a way now that's not going to wreck HubSpot. And as soon as I labeled those tabs, right? It made everything click in terms of like, oh, I can just see the process flow on top of the CRM record now. And it was really insightful for that to happen. Um, because I am very guarded when it comes to like the value of HubSpot is keeping it customer focused, not internally process focused. Yeah. Um, but doing this helped, you know, get to the point where I do coach, like, when you can create these records where an individual or a team can own that record type or that instance of that record, right? And they know that they can make changes and they're not going to mess with anybody else, nobody else is going to get mad. That's when you start to see so much progress in the direction of clean data, maintained data, and just efficiencies start showing up all over the place. Danielle Urban: Right. And that's our link to measurement. is like when you actually make this a tool that everybody wants to use because it's easy and it has everything you need laid out for you, then you're creating cleaner data for the measurement that everybody else wants to do on top of it. Um, so yeah, when you get it all together and help people do their jobs easier. I like your focus on, you know, this is to enable a customer relationship, but at the end of the day, that customer relationship is what keeps us all employed. And so if we need to do our jobs along with this person that we're looking at, how do we nurture the relationship and have all the context we need to ensure that that is a true genuine relationship, uh, but then also do all of the stuff that we need to do to keep the company running on the back side. Um, and when we make all of that easy, then like, yeah, everybody wants to live in the CRM. We all want to log in there every day. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And that's like where I was going to go and I lost track. But like connecting this to measurement, right? Measurement gets better when people can see it. Yeah. Right? When it's visible and that's where we got on, you know, value for scoring Monday today and Riley mentioned like the usual, you know, like the reaction or like, oh my God, we're going to let reps like uh edit the data that that messes with the scoring. It's like, oh, that's not allowed. It's like, well, when you let them do that, all of a sudden, like, oh, this score is not great because uh it says this industry. But I know that's not the right industry. So I'm going to just change that and now watch this score be right. Right. Right? And when you enable folks and that's really like what we're going to show is like putting the context together like on a record. And like in the system, right? Because they always have this context internally somehow, but there's never good like constructive opportunities to share what's working and what's not. Um, and if we can move to this place where it's on each record, now we can create this cadence where instead of just this big bang like three month, six month activity, it's always happening and just that kind of cadence can just I mean, you have to get there, honestly, right now. AI is allowing you to get there and it's your choice whether or not you want to try and and and do this. Danielle Urban: Yeah. So I'm curious because there's to get really technical and bring us into a screen share in a minute, um, I there's still so much possibility for me that sort of the frameworks that I operated from previously generally apply, but in thinking about how you use cards within tabs, there's so much that you could do. You can have sort of the life cycle, the journeys that people are taking and have each tab represent a stage of that journey. You can sort of consolidate that so it's maybe three three subsections or three macro sections of that journey so that you don't have a million tabs across the top. Um, and I think that's the path forward uh, because you need different context for different engagements, different levels of engagement and and how they're interacting with you. You care about different things and that's still only the center column card. Uh, so we still have the right and the left, which I think I still stand by what I said like a year and a half ago, maybe even two years ago now, where left side should be about generally, middle section should be action and then right section is associations. I think that still stands pretty solidly because the action that you're taking is related to what stage they're in and what you need to know about them to do the next best thing. Um, so we're just further refining that action section to how do we make it the most relevant for where this contact or this company is in relation to our company um, and our processes. And then the cards within that sort of define the things you need to know. I think that's my working. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Yeah. And so I'm going to take two minutes to hit theory real quick before you dive into actual HubSpot. Do it. Um, because I'm trying really hard like that half the battle here, the majority of the battle here is people don't know what's available like in HubSpot, right? Um, the whole ecosystem, customers like everybody, right? The team has been working so fast to just give us all these tools, right? Um, so I've started creating some, you know, interactive like record builders, like one for each type of object. But I'm having success with with leaders specifically understanding the importance of like a customer view, a unified customer view as a tangible outcome, as a measurable outcome, not usually measured, right? But it is a yes or no answer. Yeah. Either we have it or we don't. And if we don't, how do we get it, right? Then you start to create this team accountability, right? And like you mentioned, we've got who is this person? So this is a contact record. Who is this person on the left? What's happening in the middle and what's the context? What's kind of connected, right? Um, as we think about unified customer view, unified revenue views, right? Things start to change as far as what's important. Yeah. Here's business context, like signals, what's happening in the market. Um, how are we segmenting these people, right? And then team enablement, like are we delivering anything, uh, you know, post sale stuff, project associations, you can see over here on the right. But also, and this is more where we're not going to show the UI extensions today, but with UI extensions and customization, you can get to stuff like this where it's like, okay, I want to see this view now, right? I want to like make it visual for the team. Uh, as we know that there's different like learners on teams. Like so literally there's like a matrix here where it's like, okay, we can create these unified views, but then we can change them on whether or not it's the operations team looking at it, it's the finance team looking at it, leadership team, right? And you can start to connect these dots throughout the portal and that's what unification looks like, right? And as you go into HubSpot, there's so many out of the box, right? This is where it's if you don't let yourself just get in there and click around and just add stuff, right? You'll never going to know because even I think for us that are normally building, like I very rarely I'm just going right to like, all right, we're adding a properties card. Yeah. I'm I'm adding an associated properties card. I'm just going to go get this and just add the properties that I know are in there, right? There's so many good like things in the library now that it's uh it's worth taking a look. Danielle Urban: Well, and your your role-based thing just reminded me of a few other layers that we have options for. It's not only that we can build the tabs to have that and the cards within them, we have the team-based views. So we can build a view with very similar or very different tabs for each team. Um, and then we also I believe there's conditional cards. Yes. Right? Which adds another layer, um, of things that you can play with, but this is also starting to short circuit my brain a little bit. I'm like, if you were to thinking about this like we're building for say uh, a salesperson to understand the contact record in the context of the value first model. So if we're thinking in that lane at least for this exercise, then would we make a tab for each stage? Would we make a single value first journey tab with conditional cards for where they are in the journey? Um, or is that historical, you know, indicators of the journey still relevant? Should we make two where it's like current and past? Like there are so many options here that I I'm not even sure where to start. Chris Carolan: Yeah, I I think it has to start with the users and what's going to activate them when they're using the system. Like that's why I think it's important especially with um uh the conditional views. I remember when that hit in like August, like Sprous here like blew up. Yeah, it was amazing. I everybody was so excited. Um, and but having to understand because like unified customer view as an example, if you're using all of HubSpot, like to get to one view for everybody's pretty much impossible. Right. But if you're not sitting there, sitting down with marketing then sales then service, um, aka the customer team, uh, like they're going to give you three different answers for what a unified customer view is for them. Right. Right? And it doesn't mean you don't you get to pick one. Like now you can literally serve all three and that's where these decisions on like I I'd have a hard time like breaking up value path stages. Um, and I think I would be relying on other things to start to because the key is like, can I see this thing and understand the context of where they are right now in their journey? Mhm. What has happened in the past is probably like between those two like 80-90%. And then like the extra 10% is like the context of what might happen in the future like other people that look like this person, what are they doing, right? Um, so that extra layer of of context which you very rarely get to. Um, Yeah. is I think the other, you know, 10%. Danielle Urban: Yeah. I I'm like itching. I wish I had a whiteboard because there's so much that you can do with this. One thing that would be really interesting would be like conditional order. So if you could order the cards based on something so that you can just sort of push something to the top that's the most relevant at this point in time but still have everything else below. So it's not show hide. It's like this is just the most important thing right now, so we want it at the top. Um, and when you think about, you know, how can we get to that with a workaround, then you get into some of the data architecture because that's always like the next step below this is how do we get it to display in the way that we want? It's building like a property card. Um, and so would that be would we need to categorize the signals or the um the data that we're capturing at each of the value first stages into some categories. So like, do we have and I don't like any of this actually as I'm talking through it, like it would make for a really convoluted property situation in the back end that I don't want to build at all. Um, but just sort of thinking through the possibilities and and how you can operationalize this, it's still like if we were to have the, you know, audience signals sort of in their own world and then we had an audience signals card that we could bubble up to the top when they were, you know, in the audience stage versus like the hero stage, we want to see very different things. Um, but we don't necessarily want to hide it, we just want to make it more obvious. Um, Yeah. So you can't do that. Chris Carolan: Right. And that's where like I was so sad when it there was like a a March. It was like a March admins Hug when they showed this like customer record. Mhm. Um, and like the admin community just like they were having none of it. It was different, it looked like a social media profile. And like everybody was like up in arms, but it was alluding to this possible future where everything was modular. Mhm. And the context of any given both situation that the data was showing but also who was watching, who was looking at it at that moment, there was no standardized record format, right? Literally, you would use the AI layer. I think we're still going to get here at some point to to do that thing that you're describing where like this signal comes in from random spot and all of a sudden they're in the they're buying today. Right. Right? How are you I do if they give you that signal, are you in a position to react and handle it accordingly? Like if you have to dig for the data that you weren't expecting, like when they give you a call, right? You're a lot less likely to, you know, move the relationship forward, right? But when the system can like kind of adapt for you, you just get to be the human just saying, hey, yeah, we're ready. Right. We're ready to go. Danielle Urban: Well, and I think I've seen some of those. I've given some like product feedback to the team in the latest and greatest ideas they have for the uh record views and I'm very loud about disliking it because a lot of it is AI driven and I'm like, I need to know that I can trust this. I need my team to have something reliable. Uh, and it just doesn't quite land for me yet, but I was kind of clicking into this Breeze record summary to see if you can customize it because if you were to be able to write a prompt for a card, which can you? I don't even I haven't tried. But if you could write a prompt for a card that's like summarize the latest signals looking at this, this and this and you write a really complex prompt to define the latest activity that, you know, leads you to whichever stage they're in of the value path, well, then you've just saved yourself a whole lot of work. Uh, you've probably done that work in other ways like scoring and, you know, systems to make sure that your team is actually seeing this context record. Um, but at least then you don't have to build that really convoluted data structure I was just brainstorming out loud, uh, that I don't want anything to do with, then you don't have to do that. Like you don't have to build that. You can define in that prompt that these are the stages or these are the indicators of audience stage, these are the indicators of researcher stage and then you have this Breeze record summary or some AI summary say, I've seen these things, which means they're in this stage. And you can build that in scoring, but you're still sort of limited to what HubSpot thinks is important in that description card. Um, but it would be super cool if we just had like an open-ended AI prompt or like a system-wide AI prompt card where you got to define what that is. Let's see if that exists. I'm guessing. Chris Carolan: I've found the uh intelligence tab for me. Danielle Urban: This tab isn’t customizable. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Um, but I'm going to take you into the company record view actually, but before we go there, I just want you to grab a card that like everybody should care about. Like go ahead and cancel. Let's add a card. And let's get one out of the card library. And it's customer lifetime value. Danielle Urban: So many in here. Where even is that? Chris Carolan: I know. There it is. Middle page. Add card. Yep. So this is one of those cards where like people should know the answer to this question for their business. They often don't. And as soon as you add this and you put it front and center, it'll tell you something, right? And likely it'll tell you how bad your data is, but either way, it starts to tell you how bad your data is. Right. Instead of you wondering how bad it is, right? And a client that I started with a couple months ago, that was one of the first things and I I didn't even know it was there. It was just like they were bringing up things that they wanted to know, right? And I was like, oh, let's go into the library here. I I've heard things like let me just check. Oh, there it is. I bring it into the record and all of a sudden like mind's blown. Yeah. How and how long ago could they have had this level of insight, right? So so this is what when I say things like use the data that you already have. Yeah. Right? This is the kind of stuff that I'm talking about. And if you can actually go to a live company record of any kind because I just did this with Zack Kashan uh last week. Um, and the ability to uh let's go to intelligence. Right? So exactly what you were asking, let's create a smart property, right? Yeah. And this is where like below this, it gives you prompts, right? So if you're struggling to know what to do with your 3,000 or 5,000 credits, which I know a lot of people are, this is a I I'm somebody who doesn't like using the words quick wins and like easy buttons and low hanging fruit. This is it because there is one template there in that um, in that data that is uh it showed on mine. Apparently this is designed for the user. But what it said was like, give me the resolution of the last ticket. Ooh. Right? And if you've ever been in sales or if you've ever served sales people, you know that they want to know the answer to that question. And a lot of times we don't want to give them access to the tickets. Either we don't want to cluttering up them the view or we're protective of our post-sales relationships and we don't want sales like butting into what's happening with our ticket resolution. Right? But when we don't give them access, they're calling us. They're calling and emailing before they make the next call, the next visit like, hey, what's going on? Rightfully so because the last thing they want to do is show up at the door and have like mid crisis situation going on and they're trying to upsell. Right. Right? And for that to be yeah, like now this creates a data situation where you don't have to give them access to the tickets. Right. But it again, it does come down to trust. Like will they trust the answer? And that's where if you can get the level of trust and enablement required for a salesperson or any frontline member of the team who's in a record to just be able to spin up one of these and say, man, this thing is happening like five or 10 times in a row. Let me just make one of these to see if it's a thing. Now I can escalate it or we can discount it. Like there's so much opportunity to like use unstructured data to get to really clear like much clearer insights than the structured data would ever be able to give us. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Because you could just ask questions. I wonder then if that card I was describing can be a smart property like a really detailed prompt. I haven't played with that yet. I haven't done much with the data agent. Chris Carolan: Yeah. I would imagine. And this is where like I have played with the Breeze agents and being able to serve up notes or tasks or any kind of notification whenever any signal comes in. Like I envisioning a world is possible where instead of like the categorization and the bucketing that we were talking about, which is all we've had up to now. Danielle Urban: That’s Right. That's So we don't fall past that. Right. It it's we've had to have some structure or else it's meaningless, right? else we end up in these meetings where it's like he shed, he shed, marketing said, sales said. Right? But now I I've been working on an agent that's like the value path like um value path finder. Mhm. That like every time a signal comes in, can it re tell the story? Like did anything change and right? And that's where the whole the concept of scoring like kind of goes away if you can always understand the health because that's going to go up and down based on signals, but over time AI is going to learn like much better than us because there's there's so much data coming into the portal right now. Yeah. Right? That we could and should be using. Um, but something that came out of the last session with with Riley and Casey was like, you got to find a way to start giving feedback to either the system or the RevOps team around you on a on a daily basis, right? Can we put our teams in a position to where if they see something doesn't make sense, they can either tell Breeze and it's going to get back to somebody. They can leave a note, they can do something where in that moment because otherwise we're waiting until the end of the week or end of the month or the quarterly review of our scoring. And by then it's like it's such a mountain first of all, but the chances that we remember, right? That's what causes measurement to be so like separated from reality. Yeah. When you can put this in front of people right where they are, like and make it so easy to just be like, I mean this is where like you get really good at the thumbs up and thumbs down stuff. Like the AI companies are using the hell out of that kind of stuff. Yeah. Right? Yeah, it's funny you're talking about that that constant conversation, like that constant improvement cycle. Um, I remember when I was at Mopsa Palooza, there was uh a session to build your first agent. Um, and some people were shouting out ideas of what we could build live because Corey was amazing and decided he was going to build something on stage in that moment. Um, and someone was talking about a an idea to um, like streamline or build a bot to ingest requests to marketing operations. Um, and if someone or if there was like an unstructured way for whoever's interacting with this data to just go dump that thought into some kind of agent and then have that agent consolidate, make sense of, prioritize all of this and give a daily digest back to the team and even implement some of it, maybe if we want to go that far, then that conversation is happening. It's like it just exists at that point. Like there's no there's not even that much human involvement that needs to happen to make sure that those improvements are made as quickly as possible and that they make sense. I think that's where we still need the human layer of like, you know, zoom out a little bit, know what is happening and know what the road map is um to help with that. But even that you put into the the project knowledge and then it can help prioritize things. But it still like I I feel like that can be a big unlock. Of course then you're across multiple systems because you can't do that within HubSpot yet. Um, but if your sales team was able to say like, hey, the score is super high, but it doesn't make sense and sends a link to the record. Um, and then you get five other complaints about scoring in the same week, well, now your project can help you figure out what that looks like and maybe you can even take those records and use the HubSpot MCP to, you know, ask Chat GPT what to do with those. Why are they wrong? How does that analyze against our documented scoring? Um, and all of that AI assisted work is just so much easier. Chris Carolan: Yeah. That's what we talked about. I mean this stuff doesn't like the the debate was like the advice we should be giving right now as far as how often you should be like evaluating your scores. Yeah. Right? And like when it's just humans only, like it's a lot of work to do it in a statistically significant way. Yeah. In a structured way for it to mean something on three or six month intervals and that's why it's rarely done that well. Right. But now AI can do that part. And if you just allow it to do it, right? I'm very interested in how Breeze is starting to work across like like this layer that's talked about, right? Like Yeah. if you and I are both giving feedback to Breeze over the course of the week that something's not good, like is that going to does that still need to be seen by a human or will Breeze be like, yeah, there's like four other users. Right. in the portal, right? Um, and it's very I would be very impressed. Uh if anybody's out there and and you've experienced that, please let us know. reality. Right. Even in the world of like without it being able to look at notes, Yeah. that's where like but even that, right? So if the uh if the process is like you see a score or something that's out of place, Mhm. and you just let Breeze know and if everybody's using a certain type of you know, assistant that you've built and and the motion is you give give the feedback in a certain way and Breeze always adds a note like to that record, Yeah. now you start to capture that stuff in a way where Breeze is going to be able to like look at the landscape, right? Then you can even create agents that are doing it proactively. Yeah. To say like, all right, whenever this word hits like level 10, whatever that means, right? We can already do things like this in calling transcripts and meeting transcripts by the way. Yeah. Right? It's you just got to decide decide you want to do it this way, folks. Like technology is there. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Oh man, that makes me want to I like have all these ideas for custom cards I would want to build now. It's like, can we build like uh an operations bot reporting button that sits in every single record and, you know, opens the starting prompt and asks you questions to get that into the marketing operations bot. Um, and then the the sort of summary card, this stuff is is very cool and this gets us a lot closer. I think I would want to try to do it as a smart property. Um, and just build out like a really massive detailed prompt to be that smart property and have it be like a multi-line text property, um, to get exactly what I want out of this because I I love all the AI that HubSpot is providing, but it's very rigid to what they want you to do with it. There's not a whole lot of flexibility and how do I create my own prompt. Like this smart property and this Breeze summary are kind of it, but you're even provided with a starting point here and then it tells you ask ask follow up questions. You're not creating your own prompt here. And this is kind of the only spot you can do that. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And that's why I moved to like we got to find ways to enable our teams to have these conversations like with AI. Um, because there's so many ask a question. And I guarantee if people were clicking that button and actually asking questions, like your Breeze would get trained so much faster. Yeah. Right? Um, that's the difference between like before inbound and after inbound was, you know, Breeze went from basically this siloed assistant across the portal to like one layer across the portal. Um, which meant it can train on your data much more effectively because it can see everything versus like every time you hit it, you'd be like, oh, yeah, that's just not me. That's coming from the rest of HubSpot's customer base. Right. Um, Ooh, maybe you can build a assistant. This is another thing. I have not HubSpot AI tools the time of day, clearly. It's been tough. I mean Yeah. if I'm not in the mood, like it's a specific mood, right? Like we've built some stuff out here. I've built out some agents like when I was getting excited around inbound time. Yeah. Every time I think I'm going to be able to move off Claude. They do something like drop Opus 4.5 and it's like, okay, maybe not ever, now. Yeah. Um, but there's a ton of opportunity. I mean, I am working on some Claude skills that might help me build Breeze uh agents because what where I'm going right now is almost any SAS tool, I think you can reproduce to some extent, like thanks to Vib Coding. Yeah. But probably the hardest thing to do is build uh a relational database with integrity that's not just a bear to maintain and that's what HubSpot has done. Yeah. Right? Like it is by far one of the say easy in a it's easy to maintain and it's so affordable compared to the other solutions. Right. That do what HubSpot does. Yes, it does take work up front to understand your own damn data model. Yeah. To actually build it right so it can do things with that. But once you get that part right, which is why I'm so adamant about all the different objects in HubSpot. Yeah. Like you're giving AI a chance to understand your data, you're giving your humans, your leadership, your customers a chance to understand your data and and participate in the maintenance of that data, right? Um, when you cram everything into contact companies and deals, like no. It's not going to work out for you. Right. Um, so I'm excited. We haven't nailed down a time next week. I'm hoping we do that today. Yeah. But we're going to get into the hows and I think Q1 is going to be all about how uh to build this stuff out. Um, because the team they kind of delivered all this stuff uh at inbound and since then they've been like closing just gaps like everywhere. Yeah. Uh, so I'm excited to see, you know, what we can do um, you know, next week and and moving forward because the technology is there. Like folks, if you're paying for professional level HubSpot, like it's harder and harder to make excuses that your data is unclean and you don't know what the system is telling you and, you know, all these things. Um, uh, let the system you're paying for, right, work work for you. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Well, the sun is chasing me off camera, so it's probably time for us to shut it down. Chris Carolan: All right. Universal Universe signal uh accepted, received and understood. Um, Cool. Well, this has been fun. I look forward to doing more like this with you. Um, hope this was helpful for everybody out there. Uh, it was helpful for us uh today scenario. we get some nuggets. Um, so everybody have an amazing rest of your Monday. We'll see you next time. Thanks, Danielle. Danielle Urban: See you next time.