The HubSpot Help Line - Feb 4, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: I don't know how to follow up that intro song, but I'll try my darndest. It is Wednesday, February, uh, the something, it's crazy, it's already February. I'm joined by four of the smartest people that have ever worn orange. Uh, Casey Greyhound of the Helpline Hawkins is in my bottom right. The man, the myth, the legend, George B. Don't ask him what the B stands for, Thomas. Chris Must Carolan. He's uh season out of style with that name. And the OG HubSpot Evangelist, Kyle Jepson. How are we doing on this Wednesday?

[00:44] **How Are You Doing?** Casey Hawkins: We're doing well. I think I like that we don't have the video for the um song because then you get to bring us in at the end. I don't know, it just the timing was great. Good job, Chris. Nailed it. Chris Carolan: Yeah, it was nice. Casey Hawkins: Thank you. Figuring it out.

[01:01] **Evolving Roles** Chris Carolan: He is evolving in his role. Uh Kyle, how are you doing today? Kyle Jepson: Great. Happy to be here. I don't know. Should I have prepared a speech? Chris Carolan: Ideally, yes, you would have, but that's why we have George. George, how are you today? George B. Thomas: Uh no speech here. I'm doing uh peachy Keen. I'm glad to be here and see uh what we can do uh to help humans with HubSpot. Chris Carolan: Great. Chris, same question to you. How's how are you? How's the beard? Chris Carolan: The beard is good. Beard is good. Helping me stay warm down here in in Houston, Texas. Uh, so, we're good. Chris Carolan: Love it. Uh, uh, one of the benefits of remote working, especially streaming, is that you can interact with and do live shows with colleagues, friends, officionados while you have the flu type A. On unrelated news, I might have the flu, but luckily for you, I'm not getting anybody sick because I know we're close to any of you. So shout out to remote work for enabling productivity and community even in the throws of influenza virus. Kyle Jepson: I think that's pretty similar to the reason we all started working this way. Chris Carolan: Not to, yeah, not to contract the flu. Let me just clarify that point, but to, you know, to be able to still, you know, be maybe contagious and then uh still contribute to humanity. Um, speaking of contributing to humanity, I feel like I should ask a question that was in the green room before the show. I have no idea. I have not been sleeping, uh, at all, but definitely not under a rock. Uh, but you guys were talking about some announcement or something that came up before we got on. Can can somebody fill me in on as to what that was before we dive into voicemails and and bringing people in?

[02:31] **HubSpot Blog Post** Kyle Jepson: So yesterday, I saw a LinkedIn post from Dharmesh and he was being Dharmesh. He was talking about agents and AI, which is what Dharmesh usually talks about. But then he said, this is why Yamini recently published a blog post. And uh, that was news to me. I had no idea this was coming or happening. But yeah, on on the official like HubSpot company blog thing, uh, Yamini has a post about how agents are the future and context is the thing that matters most and HubSpot's vision for how we're going to adapt to the changing world. George B. Thomas: I love so many of the words that Kyle just said, but official blog thingy um might be my favorite uh that he he just uh stated. Yeah, it's it's it's very interesting where we're at, where we're going, um what people are talking about and uh I'm I'm excited. Listen, I've been a fan. Chris has been a fan. Many of us messing around with AI have been a fan of context, uh, data, structured and unstructured uh in many different forms. Um, and maybe forms that people aren't even thinking about yet. Um, it's just it's going to be very interesting to see where Hubspot goes, especially pointing in that direction. In a good way, by the way. Casey Hawkins: I think I found like for me, I was using Chat GPT for a really long, for a really long time, for months or whatever. That was my preferred method and then at some point I moved to Claude, but it took me a while to move to Claude because Chat GPT had the context. Like, I had these threads and things like that. And then I when I finally started paying for Claude, it was because of projects, which then could group my context in like a bucket. Um, and just recently, I created a new Claude project for parenting, where when I talk about kid stuff, I talk to that Claude, and just yesterday I was on the way back from the bus and I had a meeting at school coming up and I wanted to prep for the meeting at school. And so I just had my AirPods in and I was just talking about the things I was thinking about on the walk from the bus back to my house. And then I got home and I sent it and then it like made a little dock. I looked very scary to the administration coming in because I had my little pack of papers. Um, but that's all like context based and like all I did was I just literally dumped all the context I could think of in that during that walk into Claude, and then I let Claude make that into something helpful. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Kyle Jepson: So this is, this is all really interesting to me. And I would love to know anyone who's watching, chime in in the comments. Uh, Casey just did a great job explaining it. But prior to listening to Casey just this very moment, did context mean, the word context in terms of AI? Is that a thing you all are thinking about? Is that a thing that is on your mind? George B. Thomas: Oh my God, yes. Kyle Jepson: Like I know for this group, yes. Oh, oh, okay. But I wonder if for the average person watching us on LinkedIn, if that has even crossed their mind. Because a week ago, at the behest of the product team, I published a LinkedIn post saying, asking, where are we falling down on context? Where do you expect HubSpot AI to have access to something it doesn't? And we have like 150 comments and I would say like five or 10 of them are on topic. Chris Carolan: Yeah, yeah, most of them are asking like basically big post that you did before. Kyle Jepson: Which is fine. Give feedback. If you have feedback for Hubspot products, send it to me. I'll I'll I'll find the right place for it. It's never wrong to give Kyle Jepson feedback about the Hubspot platform. But it just occurred to me, maybe part of the reason Yamini is publishing this blog post and Dharmesh is talking about it is I think a lot of folks don't know what we mean when we talk about context and why it's so important. George B. Thomas: Oh, that just made me so sad. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Casey Hawkins: I think Yamini posted it because she saw the comments on your thread, Kyle. Chris Carolan: Well, let's take a look. Let's take a look at her post because there's also a really good visual on the uh, on the blog post as well. So, every leader I talk to says the same thing about AI. They're excited by the potential but disappointed with current results. The gap isn't intelligence. It's context. In the past, your tools brought you the data and your people applied judgment based on the context they know. They know which campaigns will convert best because they understand the audience. Which deals will actually close based on prior patterns. Which customer escalations to prioritize based on conversations they are having. But that context is buried in people's heads, scattered across systems and hidden in how your team actually works. Without that context, you get output from AI, like emails, research, summaries, uh, but not better outcomes. Our point of view is this, for AI to drive outcomes, it needs shared context. And shared context is the combination of data about your customer, knowledge about how your team and business actually work, and the ability to learn. That is what will help humans and AI agents to work together as teammates. Chris Carolan: Thoughts before I bring up the visual. Question. Casey Hawkins: I have a couple of like context examples, but bring up the visual first. Chris Carolan: And I want to, sorry, I want to highlight this part, right? Where customer understanding lives. When when people started talking about uh hiring for context engineers last year, uh, specifically AI context engineers. I and I think it's still in my uh LinkedIn like headline, like human context engineer. Right? Like we're we were bringing in like, oh, let's solve this with AI. Meanwhile, all of your humans in the organization, that's where the context lives and they could all engineer that context if you asked them to because they're forced to do it at every step of their process uh to serve their internal customers or their external customers. And the biggest challenge of CRMs in general is trying to pull that context into a system so that everybody can use it. And now it looks like, thanks to AI being such a possible value creator, people are are they want that thing more than ever, but it very clearly cannot provide it without, without the context. So it seems to be like finally front and center as far as, um, because very recently, like unified data context, right? Has been uh, has been a phrase I think I've been hearing since inbound and I've heard leadership teams talk about it as a goal that they know they need, but they still don't have any like idea on what it's actually going to do for their business. Like what does that mean to have unified data context and what are we supposed to do with it?

[16:18] **Naturally Building AI Context** Casey Hawkins: I I found for myself, the more I use AI, the better it gets because I start just naturally as I work with it, giving it context. Um, which is great because I mean I tell people all the time like just start using it. Just start using it and the context will just start building. Um, but the downside of that and is I sometimes just assume that AI has the context it needs. Um, and it doesn't always and that's because I've gotten so used to like I just use it for everything so it knows everything. Um, most recent example being when I was trying to buy my new laptop and I went to Claude and I said, what laptop do I need? And it said, get a MacBook Air, you're good. And I told Chris this and Chris said, you need more than a MacBook Air. What are you talking about? And I said, Chris, I asked Claude and Claude said I need an air. And Chris was like, does it know that you do a lot of streaming? Does it know that you're using Claude Code now? Does it know all this stuff? And I said, Chris, I use Claude for everything. Of course it knows. So then I poke over to Claude and I say, fine, Claude, do you know that I do a lot of streaming? And it said, absolutely not. This is the first I'm hearing of it. In that case, you definitely need more than an air. Um, so I think there's just like a little, I just want to like call out like a little bit of a trap that I feel like I have found myself in recently where once you start trusting AI and you use it enough that it you just like feel, you think it has all the context, always, always check. George B. Thomas: You you have to be you have to be proactive about this. Like, like, listen, um it's funny because when usually we talk about onboarding, it's like we're going to onboard these new employees to our organization and part of onboarding is we're going to teach them how to use Hubspot. Um, but have you ever onboarded Hubspot to your organization? Because we're in the world where that needs to happen. Like it needs to have all the context of your organization and the context of your humans inside of your organization and the things that happen in their daily life. And and trust me when I tell you, if you're proactive about this context building, magical things happen. Chris, I'm going to use content as an example if you don't mind. Um, I'm going to share my screen. And I have been a um context junky um for a while. And what I mean by that is I create a lot of content over the last 10 to 12 years. Um, and I have a very interesting life over the last 54 years that has stories involved in it. And so one of the things that I did a couple years ago is I did a interview with Nate Brown, who is a uh premier voice when it comes to voice of customer. And I have this interview, I have this transcript lying around, but it's not really doing anything and I'm like, hey, I need to write an article about that. Let's use the transcript just the foundation to build an article, but I'm going to use my AI assistant to actually write that article. But AI assistant, can you do me a favor? And I can only ask this next question if I'm being proactive and building like a story bank. Um, and giving it things like for instance, last night, um, it scraped the George B. Thomas.com website, the spiritual side of leadership.com website and the sidekick strategies website so it could start to build a story bank out of all three websites. Ladies and gentlemen, that's context on a different level. But this article, the reason I want to use this as an example is I said, hey, I want to write this article about voice of customer. It's very important. It's important moving forward in a world of AI. Like listen, customer feedback is context. Oh my God. It's like we're in a like loop here for a second. Anyway, I said, can you please just pull in a relevant story about why voice of customer or why listening to what you're being told matters? And this is where it went. It says, I know what it's like to think you've got the full picture when you don't. Years ago, my wife's aunt Nancy, this tiny woman who exudes quiet power, made an observation about me. She told my wife, he's filled with anger. My response, no, I'm not. Now, it pulled in a life story around the importance of feedback into a voice of customer. I didn't write that ladies and gentlemen. It added that in. I tweaked a little bit before it goes live. And it even calls back to the Aunt Nancy story at the bottom of the blog article. But this is because you have context to tell those stories. I want you to think about your CRM, your unified data, your team, the people that you're helping, what story bank needs to be in there? What processes need to be in there? What mission vision? Like that's why Hubspot is trying to build all of the tools. Like, if you haven't gone to like AI data and settings and like done your personas and your company and your products and your, um, by the way, everything I'm listing, your context and your context and your context. Like they're giving you all brand voice context. They're giving you all the ways for like the last six, 12 months for you to get your context into Hubspot. Yet we're sitting here having a conversation of like, I don't know if many people out there know who. Hubspot Academy, please, create a context or the importance of context uh course for humans to be able to go through. That would be helpful. Chris Carolan: Yeah, context is uh king, queen, whatever, very important. Um, can you, George, can you rattle off really quick what all that would look like as far as you just named a bunch of things but very specifically the problem with not having it. I I accidentally distracted myself with a uh a quick cloud prompt about context, which may or may not have ruined my life, by the way. Um, but we can get to that in a second. I I just want to know what what else context might look like because you said a couple of times, it's you the org providing the context, whereas what we really want to help understand customers and be able to help them is their context. George B. Thomas: Well, and and they're giving us their context. By the way, if you're watching this, you're listening to this and you're not using calls that are transcripts that are bringing being brought into Hubspot that is unstructured data that can be associated to a human and multiple calls can be associated to the organization to which then you can use Breeze to actually pull that context into something usable, then you're missing a beat. Like if you're if the if any object or any information that you could have is not being stored. Listen, there's a roofing company. Now that uh we can do custom object, there's a roofing company that have a whole side of their business that they manage who has that computer, who has that truck, who has that thing. And now because that's a custom object and because they can engage with custom object, now they have breeze that they can actually just ask it questions and speed up the process of when they're looking for things, they're trying to do things. Like it's almost like I want people to think about how you would create and use objects, records, properties, associations almost differently now that it it does it used to equal data. Now everything, data is context, data is communication, data is conversation. Like, I don't I don't know how else to like say that but Rob, it's like go ahead, Chris, go ahead. Chris Carolan: Yeah, I was trying to highlight this statement here, like context where customer understanding lives. Um, and we're at a point now where I well, I think it's always been important. Like we talk about storytelling and bringing people into the story and you got to do that by knowing their story. But it's been very hard at scale, right, with actual customer data to to keep track of that. AI helps with that now. And like where customer understanding lives, like I want to go in there and AI needs to go in there and see the story. Like, who is this person? Like, where are they in their journey? What do they care about? And those are the things that we know as humans, I think a huge part of why people don't think about context in a direct way is just because it's it's inherent, right? Like when we show up and talk to each other, we're understanding all of these indirect communication signals that give us a bunch of context without asking for it and we're built to process that. When you try to put that into a system, like it's pretty much impossible to bring that level of metadata right into the system alongside it. Now that we have transcripts that and and we're at the point, some some are doing this with videos and audio, like understanding tone and all of this stuff to where I'm super excited and Casey and I have been talking about this a lot where like health scoring and sentiment analysis, like we're going to a place where yes, please do all that AI. Like human I could never understand all of the nuance of like hundreds of hours in some cases of conversations between all of the people that we're trying to serve and we can get some really great insights now if we have all of that that in here. Um, is that when you're thinking Kyle, like when George says uh do a do an academy course about context. Um, like how do you guys think about that in terms of like if we were to say like context is the story? Like should it be a course about building the story or like building the context? Kyle Jepson: I it's been a long time since I built academy course. I've been off in my own little world doing webinars and social posts and things. Um, but it's interesting you bring this up because uh as of, I don't know, January 1st or whatever, I'm no longer the only evangelist here at Hubspot. Uh Crystal King and Aaron Schmaltz have have joined me and Crystal's heading is to help businesses make sense of AI. Um, and she wants to speak specifically to like business owners, executives, decision makers, not about like how to uh, you know, implement Hubspot's latest AI features, but like how do you think about AI generally? What can it do? What can't it do? What what do you need to give it to do its job well? Uh how do humans and and AI interact? What does that ideal world look like? How is this evolving over time? And I'm really excited to see some of the content she's going to be creating as opposed to like a six hour long Hubspot Academy course that you sit down and take in a go and we make it once and we update it once every two years. Um, this is just going to be like shows and podcasts and things that Crystal is making on an ongoing basis interviewing people. And so like you don't just like get certified in AI context as of February 2026. George B. Thomas: No, no. Kyle Jepson: Because that's going to be useless in March 2026. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Chris Carolan: Exactly. Kyle Jepson: You sit down with with Crystal and you listen to her or you watch her interview an expert and you you just constantly stay up to speed with how this space is changing. So that's yeah. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Kyle Jepson: You got to be nimble so, I love that. I love to hear that. Kyle Jepson: I mean Hubspot Academy is going to continue making courses. Don't worry about that. Uh there are always going to be things we can talk about and state emphatically that are true for a year or two at a time, but AI is just not one of them, right? And to have this be Crystal's full-time job, I think is going to I think it's going to unload a huge amount of of value. George B. Thomas: Yeah, that's exciting. That that's actually very exciting. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And Rob, I would love to tie that in to uh delivering on the promise of this show. Uh because we have a couple of comments and uh that are asking for help. Um, that I think we could bring in and afterwards, like I want to like the real time help, right? That's available for people. Like this whole like let's just get into the uh, the the questions and then I'll I'll share my thoughts. Um, is the default Hubspot Salesforce connector compatible with Salesforce person accounts? Chris Carolan: Shout out John. Casey Hawkins: Thanks John. Casey Hawkins: So does anyone else have an answer? Is maybe where I'll start this or is this going to me? Kyle Jepson: You started talking first, so it's you. Casey Hawkins: So this is the first time I've heard of Salesforce person accounts. Kyle Jepson: I was going to say the same thing. Casey Hawkins: Transparently, this is the first time I've heard of that. Um, I have done some research. Um, and it does seem like it's possible, um, with the native connection, you just need, you need to have the problem, the problem I've learned about Salesforce person accounts is they are looked at as both contacts and companies in Hubspot. Like Hubspot doesn't, a person account is like I think, I think like a single person company, like me. Like I'm I'm a person and I'm a company. I'm both. Um, and I think they're meant primarily for B to C, right? Like if you're not selling to a company, you don't care about someone's account record, right? You just care about the individual human. George B. Thomas: Right. And it literally says, um, by the way, I I Googles Google's this junk because I need to learn more. Uh person accounts, person accounts store information about individual people by combining certain account and contact fields into one record. That's what, that's what this thing is. Casey Hawkins: Um, my understanding is that you would need both the contact and company syncs enabled. Um, and it my understanding is it can be a little tricky on making sure which properties are mapped to the contact and which company which properties are mapped to the company. Um, John, I'm I will follow up with you though because I don't think I have enough information. I I just don't know enough about this. George B. Thomas: And it feels too like there there'd be a good hackathon. So like for instance, if you did use the Salesforce integration and you had some properties going to companies and some properties going to contacts, but you wanted just to be able to look at one record, let's say the contact record, then all of a sudden it's like a a universal degree in sync properties where you're just taking all because maybe you're not paying attention to companies, you're just using it to hack the data into Hubspot. Anyway, yes. Yes. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Um, so many thoughts that I'm going to leave for a different uh, different show. Um, because a person account was created uh, because that data model over in Salesforce is not built around humans and they need to like identify. Can I, can I Chris? Can I? Chris Carolan: Please. Humans. Chris Carolan: Right? And so it's a person and somehow are finding a way not to sync it with contacts. Like just maybe we could simplify the situation. Kyle Jepson: I'm going to do something that's really uncomfortable for me and and try to defend Salesforce in this regard. Chris Carolan: Wow! Take him off the screen. Kyle Jepson: No, like I I kind of get it, right? I I I I suspect that in Salesforce on an account record, you have like separate billing and shipping addresses um that a contact wouldn't have. I'm not convinced that you need to like take account fields and contact fields and put them together into a new sort of record to accomplish this. I think what we would recommend in for anyone in Hubspot who's in a B to C context is just create some custom properties for the contact and call it a day. Um, but I don't I don't think it's crazy to think that there are things that in a B to B context would live on in in Salesforce and account record and in a B to C context would live on the contact record. Um, I I will say I I don't I've never been inside Salesforce. I've never used it in my life and so uh to me, my intuitions are with yours, Chris that there's probably a simpler way to do this, but I suspect that underlyingly there are some some nodes that are being connected that maybe if you do B to C and B to B both, it's nice to have them all rolling up in the same way. But I don't know. Chris Carolan: I understand why Sales force is kind of built around the account and the opportunity objects. So lots of superpowers like built into those things. Um, but on the Hubspot side, it's pretty easy to say, okay, if this is a one man or one woman show and it's uh, it's like coming from e-commerce. This comes up a lot. Like the Shopify integration creates these issues where um, it's since it's revenue related, it's like trying to tie it to an account, but it's just a Gmail address, right? And now that we have really robust associations and this is where we go data model like if they need if there's addresses to ship to, that's in the, you know, company object and that's associated to the contact, the human being that you're trying to deal with. Um, so but I imagine there's extra complexity because we're trying to bring it over from Salesforce and it has specific properties and. Kyle Jepson: Sure. Yeah, the sync will always be the complicated part. Um, but it's interesting to hear you say like historically Salesforce was very focused on accounts and opportunities. Historically, Hubspot was very focused on contacts, right? Like we started with, that was the only object we had. Um, as a marketing platform. And I I think it's interesting that it sounds like the the Salesforce solution is like we'll take a piece of this and we'll take a piece of that and we'll put them together into this new thing. Hubspot solution in recent days has been, we're just going to unlock all the functionality for all the objects, right? That is the arc we are on and we are getting and if you want to use contact or if you want to use a custom object or if you want to use some other thing, like they're all going to work in workflows, they're all going to work in reports, they're all going to be able to be associated to each other. You can create custom properties, you can customize your views and whatever and I that to me is a very exciting direction to move in. Um, but I'm sure it will complicate integrations with other systems, Sales force in particular. George B. Thomas: I'm sure, but I'll be the guy who's going to defend Hubspot on this podcast. Uh, use Hubspot. Then it won't be difficult. There is no, there is no sync if you use Hubspot. Now, here's the thing. What I really want to say is, Kyle, I know that we've reached the promised land, um, when I open up my Hubspot portal and tasks is an object, then all of a sudden, oh, like the clouds will part and there'll be like angels singing. Like but I have loved over the last six months, eight months of like, this is an object, this is an object, this is an object because it just unlocks the freedom to do so much more and give you so much more power based on what I think was a firm foundation is, we're going to focus on humans and then we can build from there. That's amazing to me, but that's just me. Chris Carolan: Chris, when this is over, send me a clip of George saying that and I'll send it to the product team and we'll make task a full object. We'll we'll make it happen. Chris Carolan: Uh, we'll do. Um, any way to make the campaign name smaller? Uh, I don't know if anybody has access to this specific post. Casey Hawkins: Oh, I do. Chris Carolan: There's weirdness in StreamYard where sometimes it can't see people's names because of permissions in LinkedIn. George B. Thomas: That was a long UTM parameter. Chris Carolan: Five different people streaming. Um, oh, but I can copy that URL and just open it in a new window. So. I got I got Casey here. My address. I'm to be I think the answer is no. Um, I think he's asking about this where it kind of starts to get cut off. George B. Thomas: Oh. Casey Hawkins: And like the autosave text is much smaller, preview and test is much smaller, but this is a large. That's the way I'm reading this. George B. Thomas: Interesting. George B. Thomas: Yeah, it's funny, I never really complained about that, but I have run into where like man, can I just see the rest of what I'm looking at here? Casey Hawkins: So is that is that the, am I right? George B. Thomas: Is that the question? George B. Thomas: Cuz it cuz the font size could be a good bit smaller right there and we'd still be able to read it. Chris Carolan: Yeah, the question is anyway to make a campaign name smaller. George B. Thomas: Yeah. George B. Thomas: Well, I mean also does the campaign name need to be all those words? Chris Carolan: My immediate reaction is naming convention. George B. Thomas: Yeah, and I think they're just proving a point in because this literally says in this box is very large and gets truncated, which is. Um, I will say this, um usually when I'm teaching anything as far as workflows, campaigns, um when it comes to a naming convention, I try to get people to use like a tagging convention with it. Um, and so it can be like smaller like awareness, whatever. Kyle Jepson: For campaigns specifically, like historically Hubspot wisdom has been have very long names. Do a naming convention with pipes in between like what region is this? What what what product is it supporting? What what team is it for? And because campaigns didn't have custom properties, right? But we fixed that two years ago, three years ago. So by all means, like make region a property, make make owner a property, make make all the different properties. And then yeah, hopefully the title can just be the title. Chris Carolan: Yeah. I was going to mention the custom properties too. Um, you've got a, we've got a couple more questions, but I wanted to throw one on here that we skipped over and it's uh, interestingly enough has some context clues from Alan Parley. Can you throw that one up there, Chris? Does anybody know what between 480 and 510 terahertz means? Casey Hawkins: I Googled it. Chris Carolan: So don't answer it, but really quick, Chris, George, Kyle, what does this mean? George B. Thomas: Oh, did you look it up too? George B. Thomas: I I didn't I didn't look it up, but for some reason I immediately thought of like back to the future and like the 1.21 gigawats. Chris Carolan: That's what my brain went for some reason. I'm like, what is going on? Uh, I have no idea what this is. Chris Carolan: Your best guess based on context clues, bringing context back into the forefront. Chris, do you know it or have you Googled it already? Chris Carolan: No. No. Kyle Jepson: Only electromagnetic spectrum. This is the area that corresponds to the color orange. George B. Thomas: Oh jeez. Kyle Jepson: Oh wow, Alan. Nice, nice. Chris Carolan: Shout out for the comment of the day in my opinion. We were talking about context and this is