Value-First Data - Feb 3, 2026

[00:02] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good afternoon, good evening. LinkedIn friends, Value-First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value-First Data with Chris, Casey and Klemen. Uh, happy Tuesday. How are we doing?

[00:19] **Unified Views and Automation** Klemen Hrovat: Happy Tuesday. Doing good. Excited. What are we learning today?

Chris Carolan: Yeah. Tell me about one conversation you've had, uh, since our last discussion on automation, uh, related to unified views.

Casey Hawkins: Why do we even have a pre-show, Chris, if you're just gonna like ambush us?

Klemen Hrovat: I don't think like Klemen is the right, it was directly related to unified customer view, but I had a conversation with a company asking us to help them clean up their portal with currently 5.8 million contacts. We'll see where we land but I expect to have a pretty tough conversations on the road.

Chris Carolan: Yeah.

Casey Hawkins: Um, I have two newer projects, um, that I've been working on in the last week, um, both where unified customer views have come into play. One with lead scoring and figuring out like which data, um, actually just today having a conversation with that team. They were kind of like we have scores, like we know, we know already. Um, and so a lot of the conversation there was around like do we? I maybe, maybe we do. Um, but often we don't. And then I have another, um, fairly new, like a younger company, um, that and when you work with younger companies, a lot of things get kind of fast and loose in the early days, people are just putting data where makes sense for them and then trying to kind of get that offloaded. So.

Chris Carolan: So the uh, the do we or don't we, was related to the scores or related to a view?

Casey Hawkins: Um, the, well, I think the view can answer the do we or don't we.

Chris Carolan: Yes, I agree. Um, and maybe this is, are we getting to the bottom of why scoring is so uh, detrimental.

Casey Hawkins: Why is that detrimental?

Chris Carolan: Is that we have thought that we could get a unified understanding of a customer by just looking at scores, uh, and then taking action. I think that's what we're about to get into, um, today. And as we start to dig more into this playbook, um, if you could zoom in a little bit Klemen, that would be helpful. Um,

Chris Carolan: uh, making sure, uh, we're doing what the team that we're serving wants us to do, uh, is a super important part of this process. Um, and it's making me rethink the ordering of these of these steps, right? Uh, because today we're going to go into notification workflows. Alert your team when context changes. A unified view is only valuable if the right people see changes at the right time. These notification workflows ensure your team is proactively informed about important customer signals, not scrambling to find information after the fact.

Chris Carolan: What are we seeing here, Klemen?

Klemen Hrovat: A huge potential which is often buried in the somewhere in the CRM. Um, at some point we were internally kind of joking around the data potentially you can either, you know, a gold digger uh, but you know, it's with potential bad connotations we gave up on that name but this is what comes to my mind when you know you have data and I see more and more companies start realizing that the first party data is, you know, your gold mine. But because it was not perceived as that in the past and then many companies felt it's easier to get five more contacts new leads into the CRM than, you know, do something as you should with the ones that you already have a relationship with. A lot of company especially the SAS VC funded companies were just running hey we just need, you know, 10 more demos next week. Now I see companies coming back to that first party data and that notification and and and all that is just a way how to bring that to the surface and to inform the right users to just use that.

Casey Hawkins: I think that's a really good point and what you were kind of saying at the top Chris too when most of the times when people are coming and asking me to build a score for them, it's really because their team wants to know what's changing and when, which to your point, the score often doesn't really answer.

Chris Carolan: I mean it only can if we've done a ton of work to understand in this in this context vacuum or reviewing all the data that we do have and then making assumptions and building models and doing all this stuff that says like this score points to all these things that we know to be true. So like it will be enough. Like I think most of the time we're just uh, you know, putting scores together. Um, and

Chris Carolan: Yeah. Why is this so hard?

Chris Carolan: So the question.

Casey Hawkins: Because I'm at a loss for words on it.

Chris Carolan: Right? Like of course, account health drops to red. Uh, you know, value path stage progression. Um, celebrate wins and ensure smooth handoffs. Uh,

Chris Carolan: Like what do you think about these message templates? Let's let's dig in there. Uh, like is this I think we're flirting with like noise, like creating noise, but also we've got to notify. We want to notify the team, especially when they're not, they're trying not to come into the CRM often, they're using other channels, understandably to communicate with others in the org or in um like communities, uh, or um you know, customer specific uh channels. How do you guys think about these these kinds of notifications?

Casey Hawkins: I've set. Klemen Hrovat: I think you go ahead guys.

Casey Hawkins: I've set a lot of these up. I have gotten a lot of feedback that people are like people want more to what you're saying and where I always go back to is like you got to look at the activity feed because like it kind of just is there and it's nowhere else really in a reliable way that people are asking for it. I want a better option. I don't know one.

Klemen Hrovat: To me it goes down to you know, data question. If those signals really represent the right accounts, contacts, companies, whatever uh, that really need you know, review immediately action then this is not a noise. Then every such will be read, you know, with with with the right attention. As soon as the receiver of that message will start doubting that this is really a high alert, they will start ignoring it and it will become a noise. So as someone who is setting it up you really need to think what this is asking the one receiving that message? Are you really delivering that at the right time? Because if the first five when they received that message, they they try to rescue that account, will they feel it's just a waste of their time because they're not that you know, bad, they will start ignoring those messages and it will be pure noise. So when you think through that it's it's really a think about the the context and the readiness for that alert. If that is not the case, it will be ignored in a week. The same goes for all the notifications on HubSpot. I just turn off all of them because it's just too much of them. And then I, you know, if I if I get notifications every few seconds or a minutes or or hours even, I stop looking at them. So then it's better to just be that turned off and I find other ways to figure out what I need to do.

Chris Carolan: Why do you, can you head on again? Like why do you turn them off?

Klemen Hrovat: I feel there are too many and many of them are not as important that they would deserve to be a notification. So then I stop looking at them, which means I ignore even the important ones. So every notification becomes a distraction. So I just turn off all of them. So that I I keep my focus elsewhere and find other ways how to figure out what's, you know, super important or or what I need to pay attention to.

Casey Hawkins: I have said before and I said earlier today actually, I think my entire purpose in life is to get to inbox zero. So I think when you're adding notifications, for me they're just like they're preventing me from fulfilling my full purpose, which is clearing my inbox.

Chris Carolan: What would it take for you to not turn them off?

Klemen Hrovat: For me, it's really have only the the really necessary ones where I need to stop doing what I'm doing and focusing on that one. Otherwise I would rather have a dashboard at least whatever when I when I block time to go and review let's say deals, this is where I need to have that, you know, red alert icon somewhere. But to get that notification, it really needs to be something that is worth interrupting whatever I'm doing at that point. Uh, if that's not the case, if that can wait for three hours, I I don't want to have that as notification. The same I have email notifications turned off. all the time. I I don't want to have notification. If someone is sending me an email even if that is a hot lead, I will get back to you when I get back to you. Uh, it's not, you know, worth my attention immediately because nothing is, you know, there's no fire. I do check regularly my email. I'll get back to you if it's important. But not I I don't want to have a notification because for every email, if you get a notification, you just stop looking at those notifications, so just bip bip bip bip bip and just a noise at the end of the day. Uh, so every notification I have I want to have it for really important things.

Chris Carolan: Casey?

Casey Hawkins: Um, I want the notification. I work from my inbox basically. Like my inbox is my task list. Um, so and that's not everyone, obviously. Um, but so from a like overarching perspective, I'm okay with these notifications, um, from there because if I need to take action then I know that. Where I would turn them off is like do I need to take action or like are a bunch of these like false positives, which is something I see come up a lot. And then if you have enough false positives and you start distrusting all of them.

Chris Carolan: Yeah. I think this is probably the sneakiest place where trust is lost uh, in a new system. Like when a team gets excited and you know, you start clicking into these notifications and it's not like you immediately regret having clicked into the notification. Um, so what I'm hearing is like clear understanding, uh, that probably like understanding of do I need to do this right now or or can it wait? And if it's wait if it's wait then to Klemen's point like we probably shouldn't be notifying at all. It's like go, we know it's in this dashboard somewhere. But if it is, if it does create urgency, like is clicking through to it gonna help me like actually take it next action, which I think is like the difference between these clicking into unified customer views versus not like a dramatic difference, right? Um, so a fine line but even, you know, between the two here like talking to the users and understanding, you know, the preferences, it doesn't mean that uh, you know, each person gets exactly what they want, but when you create some team alignment, right? Uh, and then it makes us come back to what you mentioned Casey like the distrust. Like if we can't find a way to trust the signals, like you put everybody in a position to just get the job done however, however they can in ways that they trust like what they're going to do, um, is going to uh, create the visibility that they're not getting in these other these other mechanisms, visibility and context. Um,

Klemen Hrovat: And one further thought is if any of these would be triggered by my and and I being a user action, I really don't need to get that notification. If I was on a call which triggered someone to to move to to another value path stage, getting that notification after the call is a noise. I really don't want to have. So the alert should be for something that is happening without my knowledge and this is how you bring that to my knowledge. The same goes you know for for deal creation. If you have slack notifications for every new deal created, the person who created that deal that notification is is useless but the others, yes, they want to have that notification because they're not aware that a new deal was created. Um, So I would think how to avoid making notifications which are you know, related to the same user's action because again, it becomes noise.

Chris Carolan: Yeah. Um, so let's scroll down uh, and there's a note that we can recap avoid notification uh fatigue. Um, add more alerts only if the current ones drive action. Uh, such a key key point here. Um, and reviewing like review with the team. Don't just complain about people not doing the tasks. Like I mean every single Salesforce instance I've ever got into for the first time has like thousands of tasks like undone, like fill in your deal amount, do this. It's like, yeah, um, because those are the moments when that because this we're just talking about like scores here, uh, or like, you know, understanding what's happening with with the customer. If that's alongside um, these other notifications that they're getting that are process enforcement like oriented, and even though everybody wants that notification that we've decided together, like it's in the sea of other notifications and then they tell you they're not getting it and you do a bunch of like troubleshooting and they're like, oh, yeah, I have this rule in my email inbox that just sends all hotspot notifications over to this other folder. So, oh, that's where it is. That did happen to me once. I had a sales rep complaining that I set up a new notification he wasn't getting it and yes. Oh. Yeah. It's a thing. Um, anything before we move on to cross object visibility?

Casey Hawkins: Not to force us to stick around here as we are known to do. Um, but you meant I'm just spitballing here. But I wonder if there's is there value in like enabling your team to create their own notifications and I don't necessarily mean that in like building the workflow that triggers them, but I I do have a lot of hotspot notifications that send to me, um, a bunch that if a workflow I have a ton of workflows built where like there's a branch that's like none met send notification to Casey because branch should have been met. Uh, so and I see those and I like I said, I work off of my inbox, so I'm like, yes, want that need to know that, know exactly what to do. Um, That's all. Has anyone done that here?

Klemen Hrovat: Uh, we just set up for one of our users for the workflow which is kind of lead routing notification where the the branch not met gets a notification a second notification to the RevOps leader because if the criteria is not met, it means some data was missing. so we should understand why the data is missing? Why you know it was not qualified in any of the branches. Um, so I like those notifications to the process owner, whoever that is, um, because this is an important information for Hubspot admin or RevOps leader or whoever is owning that. Um, and those notifications should not be perceived as noise. Because this is indicating something is broken somewhere. Everyone should met their goals. If nothing else, at some point we realized you know, the workflow logic was wrong. That's why a guy got 100 notifications. So we just fixed the the workflow and there were no notifications when we enroll the same contest again and that goes to the same workflow. Um, so those notifications I think are important, but it's really meant for for the process owner more than you know, those types of notifications which are for any user which might be, you know, account owner or you know, contact owner or company owner. Um, So yeah, I I would suggest having those which are indicating something is broken somewhere.

Chris Carolan: Yeah. Similar to you know the customer facing team, like do I need to take action on this notification uh, right now. If not we need it in a different place to review. Um, I'm really anxious to get to the next page.

Klemen Hrovat: Then let's do it.

Chris Carolan: Uh, cross object visibility. Your Unified view is only valuable if team members can see it. Hubspots record customization lets you surface the right context on every record, so users see what they need without clicking around. So if we click on the notification and only get a piece of information and then we've got to open up this system and that system and uh, and maybe go back into the inbox, find a previous email, previous attachment, give Casey a call, see, see what happened. You saw that email but we can't see what happened in the interaction, so we're going to call Casey, um, make sure uh, we have all the context. This is where um, almost everybody's getting this part wrong right now uh, in terms of we we try to fit everything into contacts, companies and deals. And that makes this very difficult. This like cross object visibility. Um, so we end up with you know, like 20 deal stages because we need the context of of what's happening. Um, and then it's a bunch of noise and nobody can see what they need to see very quickly. Or it's we don't want to mess with the sales team. So we have six deal stages and a bunch of stuff is happening outside of the deal pipeline to help get that done and all of that is is context that we're missing. Um, so Klemen, if you can looking at different views. So uh, take us through what you're seeing here in terms of um, how you like to compose these views when thinking about different objects working together.

Klemen Hrovat: On the contact left sidebar, I like to group them into, you know, visual, I think these are called cards. Um, and really make visible the properties which are meant for the user to understand. Um, on the right side, I always like to customize which properties are shown directly without any clicks. Based on what information is important. You know for companies by default, I don't know you don't have number of employees or or something else. Um, I like to visua I mean bring that property to that right sidebar under the company card because that might indicate you know, how you think about that contact if you're emailing them. Um, the same way know for deals. Um, and when you're on a company record, you know for contacts, I always like to visualize, you know, employment status. So I think that customization of properties is is super important to really give the relevant information to the user when they're on that record. Um, and it it is different for every company. So you need to, you know, discuss with with different teams what data is important for them to make it visible immediately without any clicks. Um, Maybe there are some information which is not standard, number of employees or location, but there might be some properties which are indicating something specific to your to your company. So again, the discussion before implementation in HubSpot is important. Related to that I I had a call with with one of the customers and I asked them, so we started can you help us you know, build some agents for for specific data? And then I asked back, you know, do you know what is a good indicator at a company level for for the ones you know you're closing successfully and quickly. And the answer was, um, no. So then okay, so how can we help you surface the data if you don't know what what you need. let's first have a discussion about that. let's brainstorm with your sales team what they're looking for. If we know what they need, yes, we can bring that data to HubSpot. But if that is unclear, no matter how many customizations of the of the layout I will do, it won't be helpful.

Casey Hawkins: I like to start projects kind of taking a look at the record layouts. Um, because I am the most guilty of this as anyone of just constantly going into view all properties because things aren't.

Chris Carolan: Because that's where all the properties are.

Casey Hawkins: Because that's where all the properties are. And like every time I do it, I'm like, I should just customize this. And it's one of those things that's like truly not that hard, but it has to be done intentionally and that's what prevents me from doing it is because it's easy to just add to view, add to view, add to view. but then that suddenly becomes not helpful either because you have um, too many. So I think it's it really is important to configure this thoughtfully, but and I think I think this is a really great like starting point because it's really it's really not that hard.

Chris Carolan: Um, So why do you think it is hard for people to get here? I just think, yeah.

Klemen Hrovat: Sorry, Casey. Uh, just one sentence and I'll give it to you. Uh, often many users don't even know you can customize that. So they don't even think how to improve that experience. Uh, that's my experience.

Casey Hawkins: I think that's true and then I think if you know that it's possible, it gets challenging to look across your entire team. Um, although you can customize this as like an individual user. Um, usually if you're doing this like systematically, you're at least looking at team levels. Um, and I think it can feel a little intimidating to start to figure out what properties are relevant for the whole team. And I think it from my experience, it often uncovers a lot more of a mess than you necessarily even knew.

Klemen Hrovat: You might figure out that every user has a different process and then you're in trouble.

Casey Hawkins: And you realize you have five different job title fields and they all have data in them.

Chris Carolan: Because we're paying three different providers uh, and then still not doing anything with the data. Um, yeah, that part where you find out that there's a different process like for every user. Um, honestly folks, this is what makes this concept so good, this framework. You cannot like get buried because you will, you will get buried in that part of of the figuring out why there's different processes and who who knows what and where and why aren't we doing more training? How do we get alignment? Just all these things, if you decide that the unified customer view is going to be the outcome and again, this is what needs to come from the top, you start to remove these conversations of um, well I do it this way because uh, I I'm good at this tool or I'm used to doing this uh, or our organization makes it hard to uh, access things. So I just download everything on my local computer uh, so I have access to it. So I just bypass the whole whole system. And very quickly you start to get into other business problems. Um, So if we can get to like the unified customer view, it cuts through a lot of that. Uh, because if we're doing this for the first time, there inevitably will be like variation of process like pretty heavily. Um, but the other thing I want to surface as I share my screen is there's some different use cases, there's different scopes to pick earlier in the playbook, right? And I think Klemen picked um, sales and relationships or something like that. And I picked bull service uh, and you notice I have two extra objects here on this different use case. And this is a challenge for a ton of people right now because they are thinking of as a marketing and sales CRM and that we don't really think about what happens after close one. So uh, we don't think about even the option of bringing this data in. Or we know inherently that it's a good idea to track the information after closed one. So we ram it all in the deal and now we've got different pipelines or or more stages that go through payment and like invoicing and stuff like that. And if we're having this conversation with the team and they're engaged but then they realized you're not going to include. Like oh we're just talking to sales right now and we need to get it working for sales and sales needs data from you but uh, it's in your system and it like we're not going to bring it over like that like people start to opt out real quick. They cannot get to. Like they're they don't believe there will ever be a unified customer view. Um, and that's one powerful thing about Hubspot and its Grand State is that you can bring this data in. Like you can bring any organizational data into HubSpot now. You just like have to do it with intention. It doesn't mean HubSpot's replacing these systems. Uh, it certainly could in a lot of cases. But just showing people and this like to get out of the how conversation focusing on unified customer view and solidifying that's the answer. Like that's what we're targeting as an organization. Now it becomes, okay, I need to see active deals, active services, open tickets, upcoming appointments. And it moves us past the which tool should be doing what, when? And into uh, like okay, what work needs to be done to make this true. Right? And now we can have prioritized road maps and all of the things where it's not a question of which tool um, makes sense because we've decided that the data needs to be where it needs to be. Uh, and we've got to work together to to get it there. Um, Am I missing anything? Like is it too uh, again, why does this have to be so hard at all?

Casey Hawkins: I think the it's the foundation piece. Um, I think that's what makes it hard. Um, it's not this isn't this isn't hard when you start here, but very few companies are starting here. Most companies have to untangle a lot of webs to get here.

Chris Carolan: So do we try to untangle the webs? Or we just serve them a path without webs in it? I don't know. Uh,

Klemen Hrovat: I think we should help them untangle. Uh, going back to the value of first party data. Uh, it's better to untangle and figure out how to clear clean the dust rather than you know, start from scratch and you know, declare data bankruptcy and you go from zero and set it up as as you would as of today. Uh, I think it's better to I mean in either case you will need to agree on what is important. So when that is done, the you know, the foundation is anyway done. And then you know what you how to approach the existing portal to cleaning it up so you can use the data you already have. Um, so I think this is the the path.

Chris Carolan: So in your scenario, the tangled webs are inside of the tool.

Klemen Hrovat: Some of them. Okay. Uh, there might be webs around the right webs inside the hallways of the office that teams cannot get past. Uh, and I think that's where I'm going when I say like okay, can we stop going into this board room where we just come up with a bunch of good ideas, everybody nods and agrees like how bad the problem is and then we never do anything when we leave that room, right? Like so how do we how do we stop that behavior? Um, Again, most of this is just getting to productive conversations. Like how do we get the foundation in place? Um, so that we can have like actionable, you know, conversations. Uh, and I think it's going to be interesting next week looking at this uh, part four, uh, validations and milestones um, to know when this stuff is is working and done, um, likely not just uh, oh do we have 100 scores? Um, or like can the team see it? Are the notifications firing? It's like, well, yeah, but they're going into this folder that nobody looks at, right? Yeah.

Chris Carolan: So, that'll be an interesting one. Um, uh, shall we wrap it up for this week?

Klemen Hrovat: Yes.

Casey Hawkins: Until next week.

Chris Carolan: week. See you next week. Yes. for. Have a great week.