Value-First Commerce - Feb 25, 2026

[00:06] **Introduction** Bill Barlas: Good afternoon. Happy Wednesday. LinkedIn Friends, Value-First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value-First Rev-Ops with Zach Hushin, talking about time to value today. Uh how you doing, brother?

[00:30] **Gloomy Weather** Zach Hushin: Good. Good, good, good. You know, it's uh gray skies, uh gloomy, cold. You know, what's what's not to love about this time of year?

[00:43] **Seasonal Depression** Bill Barlas: Are you did you uh get some snow?

[00:47] **Snowfall** Zach Hushin: Yeah, we didn't get hit like uh like Boston or New York City did. We got a couple inches, but uh you know, I'm just it's just time of year, man. I'm I'm I'm ready for, I'm ready for Spring. It's I I know I have some time to wait and it's uh it's it's my own fault for living at upstate New York here, you know, just like it comes with the territory, so.

[01:14] **Acceptance** Bill Barlas: That's fair. Awareness is is key. Um, so I won't talk too much about my 80 degrees.

[01:20] **Envy** Zach Hushin: No, no, it's okay. I love it. I'm happy for you. I I this is at least there's not like a lot of distractions um in terms of like wanting to go outside and and have fun and do anything. It's just like, you know, sit here with uh incandescent lights and work as much as possible until the sun comes out. And then I don't want to be, I don't want to be doing that as much.

[01:51] **Finding the Fun** Bill Barlas: And try to have some fun while we do that. Um, which I think we're getting a ton of help from AI and doing that, but we also need a ton of help from the humans um to do that too. Uh, and that's kind of what we're going to talk about today. Um, this onboarding conversation. Uh, I love it when you jump into slack and you're like, bam, idea, like this is what it because I just get to say it like, why? Why Zach? Why is this on your mind today?

[02:41] **Onboarding Challenges** Zach Hushin: Well, you know, uh I think it primarily was on my mind because I'm like, we need to talk about something other than the customer agent. As much as I am excited about that and still want to talk more about it down the road and getting to prospecting agent and some of these other things that help with uh revenue. Um, and there's also just a lot of talk about those things lately too and a lot of interest from prospects and clients. Um, but no, it's like it's as I've been working with more, you know, uh, more clients, uh, different types of clients, you know, you start, you know, developing these kind of, you know, uh, your Spidey sense for when a team is going to have like a really I think positive experience and uh, you know, get the results that they're looking for and uh, go through the transformation in a positive way and like and it's going to work, right? And it's not going to take forever. Um, and then you know, you can also usually see pretty quickly the teams that are are going to take maybe a little bit longer. And um, you know, you have to just approach them a little bit differently. Um, but it's like there's a there's a very clear difference in what determines how long it takes you to onboard to a Hubspot hub, whether it's marketing hub, sales hub, service hub, you know, you name it. Um, it's it's not me, it's you. All right? It's uh, it's it's 100% I think, not 100%. I mean, obviously there's accountability on the partners that you're working with. But so like the real big difference is is on your internal team. Um, having the right people in place, having the right mindset, you know, having the right budgets, having the right time, right? The right attention for these things. Um, so yeah, that's that's kind of what's on my mind because it's like I I have uh, I'm seeing more as I'm doing doing it more that some some some clients are just, you know, lapping other ones, you know, I guess if we're talking about the big relay race here.

[05:44] **Prioritization** Bill Barlas: Yeah. And it's interesting because it's another moment of different than the way that, you know, we've been taught or you know, the way that things have been done in terms of trying to make it easier to move forward by having less people involved because you don't know how to deal with all these competing priorities and all this stuff. Um, and like or just being ready and just listen, you know, show up and listen, don't prescribe like whatever, but we're coming across some some real power in being able to prescribe enough like up front to get the right people like leaning in, right? And what I'm talking about experience again today because it's you got to fight this like the whole concept of like don't give the prescription until you understand the problem, right? It so happens when people show up and they say, I need to get more out of Hubspot. The the source problem usually has nothing to do with Hubspot.

[07:26] **Root Causes** Zach Hushin: Nope.

[07:26] **Root Causes (cont'd)** Bill Barlas: Right? It's it's a no communication between teams, like it's dysfunction, it's it's humans, right? That aren't just they're finding whatever way possible to get in the way of their own success, right?

[07:40] **Peeling Back Layers** Zach Hushin: Yeah, and and you have to like kind of peel it back more and say like, well what's really driving this? I need to get more out of Hubspot. Okay. Why? Well, you know, the teams aren't using it and I'm not, I feel like I'm paying for things, okay. So what? Who cares? Really? It's like, all right. What is that, what does that really mean for the business? Well, that means that when people aren't using it, then, you know, we don't have transparency into forecasting and then manufacturing is have. Oh, okay, now we're getting somewhere. Or it's like, oh, you know, like our, you know, we're private equity, you know, uh, owned and and and we need to hit this revenue goal and we're way off target. Oh, okay. You know, so it's like it's always going to get, you know, there's there's usually some kind of revenue, some kind of time saving, some something else is driving that. It's motivating that more than just, yeah, I, you know, I I I lay there staring at the ceiling all night because I have a, you know, 10,000 duplicates in my system.

[08:57] **Tool Usage vs. Human Interaction** Bill Barlas: Yeah, right. Yeah. Um and coming up with, I think it's it's valuable now and everybody should give themselves permission to be okay with some prescriptions when they don't mean tool usage, right? And so what I mean here is the concept of unified customer view, right? It is a way to just shortcut right to buy in an alignment in a way that I've never seen before, right? In terms of like it's not tool dependent. Every team needs it, right? Like almost all requests relate to them relate to not having the visibility they need, right?

[09:59] **Simple Words** Zach Hushin: Yeah.

[10:00] **Simple Words (cont'd)** Bill Barlas: Yeah. So when you can say things like simple words like unified customer view, you don't have to explain. Yeah. It's not a hubspot thing.

[10:11] **Alignment Over Software** Zach Hushin: Yeah. It's not a Salesforce thing. It's not a Dynamics thing. It's not a whatever, you know, it doesn't really matter. The software doesn't matter. It's it's all about alignment, right? It's all about ownership. It's all about being able to make a decision, right?

[10:30] **Enabling Better Decisions** Bill Barlas: Right. Yeah, which is what they'll say, like, we want the system to enable us to make better decisions. Great. Right? And so, um, are we ready to share a screen here?

[10:43] **Slides** Zach Hushin: Uh sure. I mean, yeah, I can, I got a couple slides here. I mean, um, really it's like in this is in an effort uh, well you're about to say it, so I'll just let you go.

[10:57] **The Platform is Not the Key** Zach Hushin: Yeah. It's right, it's like it's it's like we just said it's not the it's not the platform, it's not the tool, it's not the ERP, it's not Hubspot, it's not, right? It's not it's none of that. It's really like I said it's it's alignment, it's ownership. It's like being able to make a decision. So you say, oh, we want to be able to make informed decisions. Okay, great. I'm going to give you option A and option B. Make a decision on this thing so that we can get to the point where I can actually allow you to have that unified customer, you know, view and now make an informed decision on that, right? Um, so it's uh, like I said, it's it's not the tools. It's the same tools that people are using. It's it's teams. It's the different teams and uh, and the accountability there. Um, you know, it's like when you look at like what what should like an ID day onboarding kind of, right? What should it be like? And you know, and and and what are the ones that go really well for us and for the client, right? It's like there's there's a clear executive sponsor. Typically, you know, when you have the CEO involved or a president involved, it it works a lot better because they, you know, they can make it part of the culture, you know, that they can hold people accountable. Um, no one else can hold every other person in the company accountable other than that leader at the top, right?

[12:46] **Importance of Executive Leadership** Bill Barlas: You got to have it. Like you got to have it. Yep. And this is where it's like, it's so I understand like, well, you know, our kind of product, our kind of like it's not their job, right? Like and I get it, like Hubspot is not their job.

[13:05] **Supportive Buy-In** Zach Hushin: Right.

[13:06] **Supportive Buy-In (cont'd)** Bill Barlas: Right? But that doesn't mean you can do Hubspot without them being bought in.

[13:14] **The Role of the CEO** Zach Hushin: Right. Yeah, like the CEO, he they don't have to have like have intimate, you know, knowledge of how every little thing works in Hubspot. Like at the end of the day, you know, they need to be involved in the conversations, they need to understand that this is like a tool that's going to help with their growth strategy and the people need to actually be held accountable and use it. They're paying money for this thing, right? So, um, and we need them to help with the direction of the strategy so that way we can go build everything out to go follow that and that we're all aligned doing it, right? Um, you know, it doesn't work well when, you know, uh, Melvin from the uh, you know, uh, customer support team says, hey, you know, I heard of this tool Hubspot and I think we should all use it. It's like, okay, great, may, you know, if that floats up to the top and then they just say, yeah, good job, Melvin, but it's like if Melvin is the champion here and owns Hubspot, then you have like 100 people who have titles above Melvin that are going to say, Melvin, stop annoying me with this stuff. I got more important things to do than to chase your dreams of CRM perfection. Uh, but if the the president is saying, listen, you know guys, like I'm investing in this, I'm investing in these tools and these people, like we're this is part of our process. I'm paying you to, you know, this is part of your job. You don't want to do this, that's fine. We'll find someone else who will.

[15:00] **Responsibility** Bill Barlas: Yeah. Right? And is it fair to like include in the sponsorship a level of a responsibility that they're they have responsibility whether or not this onboarding works?

[15:10] **Accountability** Zach Hushin: Absolutely. Yeah, because like you could have uh, you know, uh Ted the sales rep who says I I I don't, you know, you're not, you're not going to record my emails, you're not looking at my contacts. I'm not tracking my deals in here. You know, Big Brother is going to, you know, I'm not letting you guys in. You know, I'm keeping it all tight to the vest. You see that a lot, right? Um, it's not every every team, but a lot of them have, everybody has their Ted. And uh, it's like, okay, well we can either decide that we're going to give him a free pass. He's different, he's special. He's, you know, been here for 30 years, so like go ahead, let him do whatever he wants.

[15:59] **What Does that Show the Rest of the Team?** Bill Barlas: He's still closing business.

[16:02] **Still Closing Business** Zach Hushin: Still closing business. But you know, what does that show the rest of the team, right? And so it's like that just slowly grows and uh, so it's like you have to be able to say like, well, I, you know, I am accountable as the owner of this company to make sure that I'm enforcing this. So if people don't want to follow the process, then you have to be committed to say, then there there's not maybe a place here for you. Like if it was any other process that you had to follow that someone just said FU to, right? Um, and this has seemed, you know, to me, maybe I'm a little biased, but it seems to be a pretty damn important one to to make sure that like you get the whole team on board with, right?

[16:55] **Confused Sponsorship vs. Excited Leader** Bill Barlas: Right. And this is where the difference between, like I think the trap here is to confuse sponsorship with an excited leader, right? Who who's who knows Hubspot does lead gen stuff. So let's go get Hubspot guys, yeah, let's buy it. Like I'm gonna go buy it right now.

[17:15] **Leadership** Zach Hushin: Well, so that's a good point that you're bringing up because then like the the flip side is like, okay, you have you have a leader who is like, they're aligned, they understand the value that this thing's going to do and they have enabled the team to go execute and do it and right, they're they're involved and in in in an appropriate way. And then you also have like the excited, you know, leader who's like, okay, like I am kind of removed from our, you know, maybe our process a little bit. I, you know, I'm not in the weeds with what every sales and marketing and service team is doing and I'm going to come in with big ideas and shake it all up. But like I don't have all the context. And so like I start saying, we should do this and we got to do that and you know, and it's like, okay, those are like 10 steps down the road, but like the the team is now torn between, well what's Zach recommending that we're doing? What's what's my boss telling me that we should be doing. Yeah. And so then you can also kind of, right, you can you can muddy the water there as well. So again, that's why he says, you know, clear executive sponsor, you know, with authority and I would also add in there, you know, some context as to what the hell's going on. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Um, you know, making sure that uh, it's, you know, revenue process first. So, you know, process over platform, right? So are we are we kind of, um, planning it all out well before we go and build it all. So, and how does it all tie back to revenue?

[19:11] **Creating Space** Bill Barlas: Yeah. And this like man, uh, just this morning that I my first client call of the day, like sometime towards the end of the conversation, it's like, if I can create the space for you to be able to ask for what you need because one of my least favorite things to hear when I was inside of businesses was when I would ask, well why do you do it like that? And they would say, well we we we'd like to do this but our system won't let us. Yeah. Right? And it's so easy. This is why hopefully these are tips to have the right kind of conversation. Yeah. So that you don't get buried in that, well, Hubspot's supposed to work like this, so we got to our process. Like no, not at all, right?

[20:29] **Using Best Practices** Zach Hushin: Yeah, I mean there are there's a framework that you need to work within and best practices that you need to follow and, you know, you don't want to bastardize the system and start using objects inappropriately and like, you know, and this is something I talked to the team about too. It's, you know, the client may say, we don't want to do that. We want to do it this way. And they're not thinking about six months or a year down the road when this is going to become now a problem that we're going to have to really work our way out of. So, um, yeah, it's there's there's there's something to be said for like, let's plan it out, let's talk, you know, and and and, you know, our job is to make Hubspot work for you and match your business process, right? a good business process that we've vetted, right? As close as possible. And there are certain things that there may be some compromises, right? There always are, but you need to try to like match your business process to the Hubspot kind of framework and best practices as closely as possible. And when you do that, like things work really magically. And the the more that you're trying to just kind of like fit these, I always say, you know, I'll just fit the the square peg or the round peg in the square hole, it just comes to bite you back. Your total cost of ownership is more. So, um, again, it's like and and why are we doing these things? If we're not doing them to try to impact revenue or customer experience in some way, it's like should we be doing this thing or should we be doing it right now? Are there other priorities, right? Yeah. Um, another thing that we see that that uh, is really helpful when you're, you know, want to kind of get through your onboarding efficiently is that you have a single owner. Um, you know, you don't meet with the marketing team today and then the sales team tomorrow and the customer service team on Friday and have three different conversations about three different things or the same thing three times. You know, it's like you want to have make sure that so who owns Hubspot? Right? Who owns your revenue operations process there? That person needs to make sure that they are aligned with all these teams are doing. I'm not saying that you have to have like every team on every call, but like somebody has to understand like the blueprint of how this thing is working, right? Um, and making sure that all the teams are kind of working towards these common goals. Yeah. Um and if you can't have a maybe a committee if not a single owner, I guess would be okay as well, but like somebody needs to have ownership of this thing because it's not going to be us, it's not my company, you know.

[23:52] **Need an Internal Champion** Bill Barlas: Right. Right. We can't, yeah. Like the whole idea of like checklist, like we're going to get these things done in this amount of time, right? And like, so I think an important tweak here because AI enables things to happen very quickly, right? And usually the reason you need this owner of deadlines is to make sure there's trust. Like trust has been achieved because if we if the thing is so easy and everybody agrees it's so easy, and why haven't we done this yet, right? Like time is not what's in the way, it is like something is happening behind the scenes where trust is not there, right? Where all it takes is like that person that can bring that other person into the room and be like, this is happening.

[24:56] **Agreed** Zach Hushin: Yep.

[24:56] **Agreed (cont'd)** Bill Barlas: Agreed? Yeah? Cool.

[24:59] **Agreed** Zach Hushin: Yeah.

[24:59] **Hit It** Bill Barlas: Let's just going to hit it.

[25:00] **Golf Trip Analogy** Zach Hushin: Yeah, it's like uh I just uh here's a good analogy. I went uh I was in Chicago the other week doing a two day workshop with a new client. It was awesome. We had a we had a great time with the team. They were the team that's like, I have a lot of confidence in your team and getting this thing done, right? Um, right? Um, and I and I still and I still do. After that, uh I went to Florida and played golf with a bunch of friends and uh my cousin for like four days and we had a, you know, we had a a good old time. Uh, but like we had talked about this golf trip for like years, right? And it's kind of like when a bunch of people in an organization talk about this thing that needs to happen, but like nobody actually has ownership of it and says we're going to do it. So finally I'm like, all right guys, like we've been talking about this for years. I I booked an Airbnb and I booked three golf courses and my flight. So like everyone said that this week works, it's all good. Let's go. And we all and it all happened, right? But it's like because I took ownership of it and it was like, I'm responsible for making this thing. Here's the itinerary, this is our plan, this is going to happen. You know, we would have just been talking about it again and another winter would have gone by with us saying, why aren't we golfing down in Florida right now, right? So same thing. Um, and then like fast decisions. So you know, it's kind of like uh, you can you could you can wait forever to be perfect, right? Or it can be good enough. Like those are your two options. Or it can be actually really shitty. I guess that's your third option, right? You can like rush through it and make a hasty decision and, you know, produce some shitty results uh, if you're too fast. If you're too slow, you're just not going to do anything, right? So like it's like there's this middle ground of we need to be able to, you know, make fast decisions, you know, right? Fail fast, iterate. But like we can't sit here with like analysis paralysis and spend four weeks talking about whether or not we have, do we, do we do an SQL stage or not? Right? You know, do we do, you know, like it's like, well, how many stages do you guys need? What are you doing with that? Like, you know, it sounds nice. I know you you've seen it like talked about a lot, but in reality, like you don't even have an SDR who's going to do this kind of qualification. So it's like, no, you're just going to go from lead to opportunity, right? Or lead to MQL basically, you know, so it's like, is that okay with everybody? Well, let's go talk about it now and get six people to. It's like, well, no, like this should be a five minute conversation, you know, pretty, you know, pretty easy go no go. Um, but if you don't have the right people in the room and you're playing a big game of telephone, that take, you know, so, you know, make fast decisions and I would also like throw on there like timely feedback, right? It's like, I ask you, I give you option A, I give you option B. Let's go, right? Uh, because we only have, you know, four, four days before our next meeting, right? Right. Um, and we need to get some stuff done in between, otherwise we show, you know, you we show up to the call and say, hey, we talked about this for the last three weeks. Right?

[29:43] **Every Internal Management Meeting Ever** Bill Barlas: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, every internal management meeting ever.

[29:49] **Lack of Decision Making** Zach Hushin: Mm-hm. Right.

[29:50] **Lack of Decision Making (cont'd)** Zach Hushin: Um, and then what happens eventually is that if people start don't make decisions then you know, people start questioning, well what's the value here? And that that doesn't end out end well for most people, right? So. Yeah. Oh my god, this is so great. Like I I'll let you do the the last one. I'm going to walk it back. Like it's so simple.

[30:15] **Weekly Cadence** Zach Hushin: Okay. Yeah. And then just like weekly cadence. You can't go, like these things, these projects gain momentum and, you know, momentum kills everything. It kills deals, it kills projects. What, you know, all of a sudden two weeks go by, we haven't met. It's like, I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday sometimes. It's like and now I have to go back through all the notes and say, okay, uh, what, oh yeah, this is where we are now. And if I'm doing that, they're doing that. Uh, it's like golfing, you know, you you have a nice round of golf. I I love these, I guess, you know, I still have golf on the mind. Uh, you you show up to the tee box and you tee off and you play, next tee box, you tee off and you play. It's like, great, you know, we have this rhythm, I'm feeling good. The second that you get to hole three and now you sit there and wait for 20 minutes for the guys in front of you to go, and now you just lost all that momentum and you go and swing the club and you take a big divot out and you're all pit, you know, it's like, you know, I just I lost it. Now I have, you know, so it take me a couple holes to get back into it and I'm frustrated because it's like at the, you know, just listen to me, you know, it's like it would have worked out okay. So it's like keep keep the weekly calls going, um, twice a week if you have to, you know, every other week depending, uh, you know, on where you're at in your project, but certainly in the beginning, you should probably be meeting weekly and make sure that the real people that need to be on the call who are making decisions and doing the work are there and that uh, folks do their homework, you know. Again, you show up to every call and you haven't done your homework, eventually it's like there's no like the value is not there and someone's going to start saying, well what are we paying Zach? And what do we what's it what's he doing? You know, what's going on? Why are we doing this? You know, uh we don't need to pay him if if you guys aren't showing up and doing anything, I can pay nothing to show up and do, you know, for you guys to do the same thing. So, uh and then it becomes not about the the again, it's not the tool, it's not the consultant, you know, a lot of times it's like, okay, let's you got to look in inside.

[32:26] **Key Takeaways** Bill Barlas: Right. And like, and so when we look at this picture together and I think like key is like 90 day boarding, 90 day onboarding, it's just a framing to help you like this can happen quickly, right?

[32:41] **Reasonable Timeline** Zach Hushin: Yeah, 90 days is like a, you know, stick your finger up in the air and see which way the wind's blowing. Like, you know, you try, but it's it's really hard.

[32:51] **What We've Experienced** Bill Barlas: But what we've experienced and like when I've looked at feedback about uh Net Suite, Sweet Success, right? It's like this 90 days somehow ERP is going to be implemented in 90 days. Right. Like surprise, like nobody likes that plan. Uh, but once you start like, okay, we've got to get this done in 90 days, right? Where do we start? We start with how often are we meeting? We're doing this weekly cadence, right? But we haven't done anything else like up front to enable these other things. So we sit on these calls. We don't make any fast decisions because we don't have this any framework for how we're going to decide, right? Nobody owns anything, so nobody can decide a framework to even make any kind of decisions. Mm-hm. We get buried in the tech. Yep. In how it's going to work. We don't talk about process and there's nobody to write the ship. Yep. Like in in an executive in an executive way, when you're enabling multiple teams who are excited, like they signed up for the weekly cadence, right? But as they experience that weekly meeting, like that this is why people think meetings are a waste of time, right?

[34:53] **Meetings Should be Productive** Zach Hushin: They are if you just meet to meet, right? And you don't have, right? If you do it in the wrong order.

[34:56] **Don't Make Decisions, Waste of Time** Bill Barlas: not making decisions, they are a waste of time. Sure. Right? But you need them. You need this consistent communication to move quickly. Mhm. Right? So thinking about how all these things stack up, right? This is why it's been so powerful to say to to do the intake of somebody wants to invest in a better way.

[35:33] **Simple Solution** Zach Hushin: Right.

[35:34] **Simple Solution (cont'd)** Bill Barlas: Right? That's why we're here. And but when you don't let the leaders delegate getting that done, which it becomes easier when you can detach it from the tool and say unified customer view, because I think it's another piece of balance that is harder to strike. It's like, okay, if it's not the tool, what is it about? And we like, oh, we got to grow revenue 10%, right? Like all right, everybody's yeah, everybody's involved in that, but what does that even mean for my team? And where we've gone with it is like, okay, marketing's going to get some leads. Sales is going to do a faster sales process. The customer service is going to have higher response times and now everybody has different outcomes.

[36:33] **KPIs** Zach Hushin: Well, and and they're like, okay, great. Like thanks for the um, you know, really vague KPI. Um, how are we going to do it? Right? Because it's like you're telling me I need to, you know, reduce my response time by 50%, right? With the same Excel sheet that we're using or like with what, right? With the same tool that we've been complaining about that's not working, you know, So it's like you can't give me like a, you know, do, you know, year over year improve this thing and just, you know, figure it out. Yeah. Right?

[37:20] **AI** Bill Barlas: And and that's happening a lot with with AI right now specifically. Sure. Like going to teams saying like, all right, we got to figure out how to use AI. Use it, figure out how to use AI to get your job done. Right. Right? And instead, this is how simple it can be folks, like you can get an executive sponsor, no problem at all for a unified customer view, right? Then and and they don't have to do anything else. They don't have to participate because they really can't. They're not in the weeds. They can't tell every user what their customer customer view needs to be, right? But then when we get there, you can talk to users and say, okay, what does the process like need to look like to have this piece of data in this place at this moment. Mhm. Right? That has nothing to do with which which tool, right? That's where it can be a spreadsheet and like, okay, like we know that it's over there, right? How do we enable it to be over here?

[38:30] **Typing in The Same Keystrokes** Zach Hushin: Yep. It's like you're typing in the same keystrokes, like just do it over in this place now and do it in a way where everyone can see what's going on. And like there's like a downstream like next step like when you're done with your thing, it goes to somebody else because it's it's it's a team, everything is done with the team, you know, sales,