Value-First Data - Feb 10, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good afternoon, good evening, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First Data. Here with Klemen uh today. Casey's unable to make it, but I'm sure she'll be back with us next week. Uh, got part four lined up for the unified customer view. Uh, happy Tuesday, Klemen. Klemen Hrovat: Happy Tuesday. Uh, before we jump into the business, Slovenia just won first Olympic gold medal an hour ago. Chris Carolan: Awesome. Klemen Hrovat: So small country, huge success. Chris Carolan: What uh what event? Klemen Hrovat: Ski jumping at the Olympics. Chris Carolan: Ski jumping. All right. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah, finally. So yeah, uh good evening everybody. Chris Carolan: Yes, indeed. Um yeah, I think events like that are probably going to start to uh kind of raise in value again uh very soon as AI uh comes into our space. Um, I don't know how to segue into. You didn't need to. Klemen Hrovat: You don't need to. We'll just dive in. It was it was not meant to. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Um, unified customer review. This is part four and we are last week, we did some cross object, talked about cross object context. Um, and uh any any thoughts uh since last week? Any interesting uh customer conversations or anything like that? Klemen Hrovat: Um, not directly related. Um, but it's, you know, getting crystal clear that you should not skip the basics. If you want to make it as it should be, so you, you know, make it useful. Uh, if if you skip steps, um at some point you will struggle or even fail. Um, so take the time to to go through the basics. Uh, which I think also kind of a lesson learned with of our exercise here. Um, if you are aligned, if you know where you're going, then we can talk about implementation right away. Otherwise, it'll be just doing something that you think will help you but then it will break. Um, to that point, uh, what I keep seeing and and keep discussing is, you know, we we're often asked to help with the duplication, but this is often, I I think the last question on the table. Um, before that comes into discussion or what's your data model? How you want to have data structured? What's your business processes and and so forth. And if that is not clear everyone, um you'll struggle with unified customer view with adoption of Hubspot and and and so forth. So, um, yeah, business alignment I think is so important. Chris Carolan: Yeah. This is all feels like a game at times to try and figure out the magic formula for adoption. Um, and now it's for adoption by humans and adoption uh by AI, I'd say. In terms of like, you can throw a bunch of data in the system. It doesn't mean AI is going to know uh everything to go look at in the context of it all. Um, unless you're you're building around things like unified customer views. Um, and with that, I was feeling pretty good last week, uh, when Hubspot announced uh the agentic customer platform, um, which happens to be very much in line uh with our unified views and creating a space for AI and agents to come in and work alongside humans. Um, what were your thoughts if you had any as you saw that from from Yamini and Darsh? Klemen Hrovat: Um, that we are aligned was my first thought. Um, I I think I have a post going out tomorrow or or day after, um, where I even connected that to to a press release from um, from from Salesforce CEO from a month ago. Um, where it was know the the realization that hey, that you know, we'll need humans in the loop. Not that we just lay off everyone, uh, which was the press, you know, month ago. And now the the statement uh from him was, you know, we'll prioritize data, foundational data in the CRM as as the goal for for this year. Um, and then you know, the the context and and agentic CRM and and all that. I think, yeah, it's is is is this this is it. This is that. Um, so I I see how how things are going in in that direction that we are always talking about. Um, so to me it was, okay, uh we're thinking in the right direction and as as the leaders in the space are uh as well. So things will just, yeah, build on top of each other. Chris Carolan: Yes, they certainly can. And that's where I think the foundational elements and you can see here our first three parts like before you build, we talked about, okay, what is what licenses do you have and what what does your current state of Hubspot look like and what do we have access to? And then who's in charge of this whole situation? Like who's impacted? Have we identified people? Have we identified the time and attention and effort available to even like buy in, but also execute this effort. Um, and then what is what needs to be configured uh to support multiple levels of getting the data in and then leveraging that data in various ways. And now we're into the validation. um And I'm going to be interested here uh to we saw like during the automation piece, right? It's like start to get into the nuance of should this is this a score? Do we actually need workflows for this thing? Is that the right way to do it? Are we notifying everybody about everything? Um, validation like is often about uh, it says verify that all foundation elements are working correctly. Run through these tests to catch any configuration issues early. Um, I think I'm probably going to get what I want in the next couple sections, but I think in most cases, we end at this one, right? Especially if IT is is in charge of this journey. It's like is is it working? Like, yeah, I can I can input data, but it's not helping me do my job. Um kinds of conversations happen. So, we look at all validation tests, uh, value path stage is visible on contact records. Um, I'm going to love this. Uh of course, value path stage is our um, at the very least uh partners up with life cycle stages, might replace them in some circumstances. But tell me what visible what does how let's define visible that leads to being able to check this box off. Klemen Hrovat: It should be added to the default all teams left sidebar configuration, uh the contact information. Um, I'm not sure if you can enforce everyone's view to go to default. Um, I guess you can. Uh, but this is what I think needs to happen here. Uh, and it should be, you know, right next to first name, last name, job title, email, phone number, yes, no, if you use it or not, and LinkedIn, which are the the relevant communication layers, but right next to that I would and I put life cycle stage or value path stage. Um, because this is the important information you should have it really quickly visible. Um, and you should know where to look at. Chris Carolan: That's fair, I think. I'm going to go a little bit further and saying is it telling us enough of the story of where the person is in their journey, right? And again, the stages that we've described for value path, make this easier, just having that stage label, but as an example, if it says life cycle stage customer, right? Like it tells us almost nothing in terms of relationship information and the story of that individual as it relates to doing business with us. Meanwhile, we have CRM cards like customer lifetime value that just that alone, if you put that right next to the life cycle stage, right? And maybe it's right underneath uh the pipeline visual, right? In a moment's notice, you can like you have much deeper context as we talked about like from the announcement last week. Like context is everything and it doesn't mean we have to transform a bunch of data. Um, I was talking about snapshots uh with Maggie Filman from the Hubspot team. And like do we need to capture all of the all the time to understand full context and create like custom reports and just do all the things that we're used to doing or can we just put the data in this case the context together to create a really valuable like picture so that I'm looking at the record and I I have true visibility into what that, you know, person where they are, like in the journey, right? And I think as we think about the word visible, I want a challenge, you know, folks to think about it in that depth because leaders will tell you, and this is why they get on board with the unified customer view like very quickly. When they say I want to see, um, I want to see the status of something, they very very rarely is a like a label. Like going to sufficiently ask answer that question. Like you're going to get immediate follow-ups that say, okay, well, what did they do before now? Like what do we have planned for them after this? Like what is our resource requirements based on where they are, right? All this context is going to be asked for and visibility when they say I want to see it, like they want to understand um the data as well. Is that is that fair? Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Um, I got an email request from one of our customers earlier today, um, which is I think exactly that. We had a quick chat a week ago, them complaining they spent I don't know how many tens of hours if not 100 hours to prepare the the board overview of the deal pipeline. And they know they will need to do the same exercise in three weeks before the next board. Uh and and today we got a request, can you help us build an agent which will just, you know, structure that into four five properties in a way that we can just export that and this is what we need for status. Different properties, you know, one will be just, you know, next steps. It can be a task. Maybe that's enough or or just you know, a summary, a one liner what it is. Previous communication, um, and and this is what you need to make it visible, yeah, the full context. It's not, I would say you're right, it's not one property. It cannot be. This one property can be a good summary. Um, so that you even contextualize what you see in other properties or in other cards. Um, but all that together should be a compiled in a way that it's always clear. And then you don't need, you know, hours to prepare the report. You don't need hours to prepare for your next, you know, uh pipeline review with your manager is there. You just skim through all the records, is it contact or deal record, wherever, you know, you you start, but where you where you are, you should have that context visible synthesized. I can do that. Then we get to the first question, which is do you have the context in the CRM? Uh, but let's let's assume you have everything you need, the representation of that is, yeah, what you described, Chris, several properties, several cards, put together then we go back to to which properties are relevant for your business, what represents the right information you need to get that context. Uh but yeah, putting all that together right there in front of the user is when we'll be able to do that. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And that's right, like even if you don't have it, documenting that you want it and what it looks like is how you get there, right? Like, and if if you're thinking that this is a fluffy like promise to make to a leader, it's very much not. Like I'm having success weekly right now, getting leaders to accept that documenting a unified customer view should be the first quick win of any engagement because I guarantee you it does not exist already. And it it turns a very much like uh a conversation with no footing and you're looking for, okay, we all want time to value. We all want quick wins, like we all want to trust each other like as quickly as possible that you're going to do what you said you would do in the scope of work and but we don't want to wait three months to see it. We understand you got to do discovery, but we need something, you know, this this give and take at the beginning of relationships. And unified customer view like you might be only 10% of the way done with the data that you have in the system, with the context that you have, but the 90% is super clear, right? The gap, it's super clear that people this is where like you start to leverage internal resources to fill those gaps immediately because they'll have the context in their heads. Um, and when you can give AI guard rails like that, man, it can do some powerful work very quickly, right? Klemen Hrovat: We just had that discussion. Sorry to interrupt. Uh, with the CTO uh over lunch where he was saying, you know, AI is now at at a point and you know, cloud code and and and all that, where if you can clearly define a plan, it will do a great job of the implementation. If you let it just do something, it will not deliver. But if you are the expert providing the the plan, then the execution can be, you know, super efficient. Uh, so yeah. Chris Carolan: And on the other side, on the other side of that, if you go property by property, it will also not do a great job because it doesn't understand the whole plan and it'll get really focused like, yeah, let's do that. Oh, you want that thing? That property doesn't exist. Let's add that in so that I can add that information, right? And this is why this documentation of this outcome, unified view in this case, is so powerful. Um, because like you said, like that board meeting, those board slides, the outcome is a unified view, right? But it takes everybody working together and having conversations and hours and hours and hours of work to curate that context together to deliver a one point in time unified customer view, right? And so when you can position it like that, you get buying, you know, very quickly. Um, and it leads to when you when you look at the rest of this list, customer relationship status, you know, is editable, we've just like Hubspot just kind of detached life cycle stages between contacts and companies. Um, and account health, contact to company association, you know, works. Associations are always like an easy thing, like I find that always coming from audits I I watch other people do. It's like, oh yeah, we'll just make sure everything is is associated, right? And it's usually like the one to one rule, like obviously, if there's no contacts associated to your deals, you don't you can't prove you know who the point of contact is or the decision maker or any of that stuff, right? But when you put all that in the context of a single view, it becomes much less complex where we're asking, we really need the unified view includes their relationships with you as an organization, but also your relationship through them with the rest of their team, right? And when we just say it out loud like that, without showing what it could look like, it's like, man, that's a lot to keep track of. Like can we build some automation? Can we you know, and at the end of the day, it's very hard to automate that and so just having conversation with with um with Trish Miriam about data readiness, AI data readiness, right? And half the battle is picking the right data to get ready. Yeah, right? And if you think like I think one of the places that's farthest away and would take the most amount of work to be able to say, all right, AI, this is ready. Like we trust you to leverage it and make sure it's maintained. It's associations because it's all about relationship management. especially if you're trying to manage outside of contacts companies and deals, like a full life cycle of delivery and commerce and you know, financial, right? Like putting that all together is where the nuance lives. and that's why you have frontline facing employees, team members managing customer relationships, right? at the mean in the meantime, all the other demographic data, like that's the part that can be made ready like in collaboration with AI, but then get to that, like it's achievable to get to the 100% mark and then say, all right, this is going to be maintained, very clear black and white rules, it's objective data, right? And now even though it's in this customer view, the human doesn't have to worry about that section and they can focus on the association labels as an example. So that every time it's looking there first and not looking for uh, you know, spellings of names or emails that are formatted correctly or phone numbers, right? So all of this when you start to bring this together, it's it's it's hard to explain but just all of these moments of gaps in understanding and gray areas for misunderstanding to appear like starts to go away because we're all looking at the same view. And whether it's the data is there or not, we understand how it's supposed to be be composed. So as we look at this list, it can be a lot uh for humans and AI, if you just tackle it like one by one. But when you start to bring it together and that's the fun part of Hubspot in my opinion, it's all modularized to where you can bring it together and find some success, like very quickly in terms of buy in that you've never seen like before, right? And you don't people will suggest, oh, I can I can fix that. Like let me fix that. I'm the one that knows what that relationship is like. So why in the world would I ask somebody who's sitting over in rev ops to manage association labels? Like you're not even in the relationship. Yeah, right? Um, So, I think that's like validation is is this page working for the people looking at it? Not is it representing, you know, data like properly. Yeah? Klemen Hrovat: And and through that validation process, I think you you also see the data gaps or all the other gaps which are kind of blocking you to get. So you you will validate for your organization what unified customer view is, what you want to see there, you know what is missing to get to that. So then you can work on that in the next phase um to to really get to, yeah, where you can say, okay, we have a good overview. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And I think I say this every week at this point, like I'm sorry that the unified customer view seems to be the answer for every question that comes up. Uh like so as Uh Sunet asks, lots of companies can barely define stages. Let alone talk about progression. How do we help the people start defining their value in this brave new AI world. Put the context together like in front of them. You don't have to uh like we often try to figure out those definitions like MQLs and SQLs and like outside of the context of where it makes sense to decide what those things mean, right? And now even as you like hopefully we can give people confidence to use these stages like audience, researcher and handraiser. Uh, when you can put those inside of you and even put it right next to MQL and like handraisers. You don't have to explain it anymore, right? It's like right there. Like these words I know, that acronym I don't know. Right? I don't care that you've told me what it means 10 times. I yeah I got certified in our sales, you know, enablement process class like that we had last year. Uh, yeah, maybe that's what it meant last year, but it certainly doesn't mean that now based on what you're sending us as a marketing qualified lead and the moment that like that stuff starts to break down, just trust like validation is is based on trust like here. Like we have to be able to trust the system that it's showing us good data, meaningful data, meaningful context when we're looking at this this view. otherwise we will have to create the unified view outside of the system because we've got to have it to take whatever next step is, whether that's uh, you know, making the next uh you know, technical discovery call for a prospect and they're bringing in their their CTO and you know, the other people that we're excited about to get involved. Um, or we're getting ready for the board meeting, right? Like these systems can be built to have all that context ready. Like at a moment's notice now with with AI. Um, and or as a sales ref thinking what to do in the next five minutes or getting ready for the call or you know, whatever the next sales action is. If you have a good unified view, you don't lose time checking the LinkedIn DMs, the the the transcribe call notes and and then you know, your notebook and and emails to figure out, oh, that was the relationship I had with know John. Now I can follow up with him. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And as we put these views together, that you can get people to talk about the context in a way that's productive and not marketing versus sales or Hubspot versus Salesforce or like all the reasons that teams cannot be aligned, right? Because their KPIs uh don't allow them to be or because their processes have to be different because Hubspot works differently from Salesforce. It's like a no win situation, but when we can create this framework of what do you need to see at your step in the process? Okay. Well, marketing literally cannot do that for you. So if you want to see that, that means you got to do it. Like, right? Sales? Right, same with marketing. Right? You start to show like, okay marketing, you say you need all these things. That's like 10 more fields for sales to complete and they don't even know how to do five of them, right? So throwing closed loss reason and drop downs that really most of the time it's just like the first one on the list or it's price every time. Like you start to see very quickly, okay, in the context of their workflow, I understand now why they're doing it the way they're doing it. We can all together see that that sticks out like a sort of thumb in terms of being incorrect or not giving us any value at all the fact that it's filled in. Right? And now we can highlight that and act on it like immediately, right? Yeah. So, I would love to move to the next um stages here. And but let's look at uh troubleshooting common issues and see how many of them we hit. Uh if you go back. Go back? Yeah. So on the bottom, there's that section uh for troubleshooting common issues. Property not appearing. Check that it's added to the record customization for that object type. Man. That's our that's like again folks, like there's so many reasons to take this approach no matter how many people are on your team, no matter how successful, no matter what point in the process you're at. Like documenting this, you will find value out of just taking this moment. Like the amount of times that there is misinformation because we've added a property and nine out of the 10 people knew about the property and the 10th one didn't and we all assume that that person just wasn't adopting the system. Like and it creates all this animosity. like this I've lived through it, folks. I'm not like making this up. Like make sure people can see what you expect them to see. Uh association not working, right? Um, this is where the complexity starts to creep in where instead of managing the system in this, you know, all data governance all the time, all compliance, like putting empowering people like with the training to be able to add an association label, right? When they need it in the moment of need and then make sure we bring it to the next call or next team meeting to make sure it was needed and now define it for everybody else. so that the next person doesn't create the next one, right? Like this team effort to maintain the system, I think is imperative in terms of it can't just be admin deciding what AI is going to do and then all of a sudden like systems are going to maintained, right? Um view not showing data. Uh I don't know if you've ever heard this, Klemen. Um, I can't see the company record that I need to see. I know it's in the system, but I can't see it. Oh, because you don't own it. Yeah, and we're super strift about who can see what. So let's to prevent the mess. some makeshift processes work around just so we can see the same records. Uh, or can you tell me who owns that so I can ask them directly. Uh, yeah. and team teams that can't see shared views. Uh yeah, this is what validation and verification looks like. It's are we sitting in the same room and we like, yep, you can see what you want, you can see what you want, right? and just move down the line. Yeah. Otherwise, all the good work will be just for nothing. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Uh all right, capability validation. Your foundation is in place, now verify that automation and working and teams are actually using the unified view. These tests ensure capabilities are operational. All the workflows, all the scoring. Yeah. Deal closed triggers value creator stage, right? Formerly known as customer stage. Uh makes sense. Um, yeah, like what we're finding right now, I'm doing a lot of project work with Ryan Ginsberg who's uh really an artist when it comes to UI extensions right now. Um, and what we're finding is that because you could look at this list and see a lot of work. Like a lot of effort into building out automations and record views and compliance across the team who can see what and when because we don't want to create accidental workflow firing and like if it did fire, how do we know fired? right? All these things come up which lead to people not clicking buttons because they're not sure what's going to happen next. Or they do click it and the best we got is like, oh, refresh the page. Yeah. Yeah, give it another minute. It might take a minute this time, refresh again. No, okay, again, right? Uh, those aren't great experiences. Um, and also create, you know, more data headaches. What we're seeing with UI extensions in Hubspot and really just this this mindset of how easy it can be to get to these views and a maintained system that that AI can use, right? Like if you have the data model correct and you have the team aligned with the uh the understood outcome that a unified customer view is good like for the org and we should like all be aligned in that all of our initiatives should be should be leading to that. Um, you have the help of AI and I don't know that it's specific to cloud code, but it certainly makes it easier because cloud code can access any any uh web interface module work that's ever been done ever, right? And then you have the extensibility of the Hubspot developer platform. We can make just about anything come true as far as a user experience in the middle of a CRM record right now. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Chris Carolan: To the point where I'm not saying yes confidently, but I'm not saying no to anything and last week what we had was like somebody asked uh because we made some like file management to do, like you got to add documents as you're like managing the project, right? And we we created the list of documents and it was like using the Hubspot file field that you'd click and then you add the file and what they asked for was something I'd never seen in Hubspot before, but at least in the CRM context was a drag and drop, right? Can we just drag a file over there? Which of course they're going to ask that because that experience of file management works like that in every other system and it was like, yeah, like immediately you have that moment where it's like, can't you just be like the this thing that you're already looking at is really amazing and then you immediately ask for the next thing. But instead within four hours it were built. Yeah. Right. And the ease of that I think comes from not only AI, but the data model underneath, right? Allows you to make very quick decisions to bring that into the view, right? And the views already been decided by the client. So you don't need to wonder like all right, maybe we're cluttering up the view because we also want to avoid like, okay, like if drag and drop means it's another button or it's another experience and it's going to get in the way other stuff, like maybe it's not as important, right? No, all that stuff goes away and you can just focus on um really innovating to create these views without a ton of overhead, right? Um, because what we're finding with the UI extensions on that foundation of unified customer view and data model, it is wiping out so much automation work that usually is required to support like stage movement and keeping things synced and like that's the data like so that I can look at the record and no matter which stage they're in, no matter which level the organization, no matter which team is looking at it, they can have it their way in terms of a view. Um, really powerful stuff that we're going to be I've already got a page up on the Valley First team website uh that I just need to start sharing more in terms of these experiences. Uh, but it's all underlying like this, this list uh can be very overwhelming. Like if you're not sure which tools to use, which order to do it in, and just like anything else there's a right way and a and a not so right way to execute. Um, and one of my favorite wins is like when you can build the habit of creating this view that people come back to, watch all of the notifications melt away as well, right? Um, and all of the tech debt that goes into that stuff. Man, I could just keep going for a long time. And then you know, the unified customer review becomes what you want it to be, the place where people start doing any actions. Before the call, you go there, before, you know, sending an email, you go there. Um, when you start your day, you go there. Um, And then that becomes habit and then you start trusting that view and then the adoption happens. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And the responsibility and like pride of that view. People like all of a sudden it goes from man, I got to this this these these association labels are so tedious. Like do I really have to do everyone? To like, yeah, I uh this one was out, I noticed it, so I fixed it. Um people who usually aren't asked to maintain systems in this way. because it's easy because it's just so easy and it's like wrong to look at it with it not being right, right? And like the things that like team accountability. All of these are challenging things that when you handle them one by one, it's all things that have gotten in the way of success with with Hubspot and some of our systems. And it just the dynamic changes dramatically. Um, so let's see what we got uh on the next page here. Um, Let's actually let's go back and let's uh measuring adoption success. Okay. All right, track these metrics in the first 30 days to gauge adoption. Uh probably hard to do some of this stuff uh depending on the systems you have. How often are saved views being accessed? Uh the user however, saying that the user experience in the audit, um the analytics related to user behavior is getting like very good, very quickly uh in the admin space of Hubspot. Um this will be easier. For now I guess you need to ask. Yeah. Yeah. These are the kinds of things like when you're coming at it from this perspective of the team expects a unified customer view and we did this for you and we did this for you and we did this for you. We're at the next call. It's like, hey, is everybody give value? Like out of that view? It's not are you doing? Are you looking at the view you're supposed to be looking at? Like, no, it's hey, are these things like we talked about last week, agreed, it got done. Are you getting value out of it? Right? Do you still miss something? It will be a yes or no. And then if it's no, is that because you haven't seen it yet or right? Are you actually are looking at it and you need something to change, right? So there are ways to get these. Again, this is why I push back on the expectation that the tool, the platform, the software is going to solve all of these things like for you. They just have proven that that's not going to be the case. AI is not going to do that. Um. We've got property population, workflow enrollments. Uh notification action rate. That's an interesting one. Do people act on notifications. Again, that's another conversation. We just said you don't need notifications. Right? Um But sometimes people will ask for specific ones, right? And it's to see like okay, did you open the notification emails? Did you click on it, right? Now it's another conversation where it's like That goes back to to to last week's discussion and kind of my point point of view for notifications. If each of them is actionable, you will pay attention. If you have, you know, 20 notifications per hour where only one might be useful or or one every four hours, then you just stop paying it the attention. Um, but if you have, you know, one or two notifications per day where this is, hey, you know, you need to act now, then yes, those notifications will be acted accordingly. Chris Carolan: Indeed. Uh as we wrap, let's uh click on this multiplication indicators. All right, this one gets its own uh session tomorrow. Because I think these are all of the true these are the moments where it's like, oh, can we do this too? Now like those questions that you get where you know that people are bought in, they're clearly using the system or else they wouldn't be asking things like that. And um, I think this is worth worth a deeper dive uh on its own. And um spoiler alert, it's based on trust. Like you got to find a way to get everybody on the team trusting in the data, in the system and that everybody else is using it. Uh, and it's a journey, but when you get there, it enables most of the goals that most teams have as it relates to these systems and now AI being leveraged uh in that way. So. Yeah. Good waiting for next week. Chris Carolan: Yeah, that'll be a fun one uh to have with Casey as I'm sure she'll be back. Um, and until next time, we hope everybody has a great week. Thanks so much. Klemen Hrovat: Thank you, Chris. See you next week.