Value-First Data - Feb 17, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Klemen Hrovat: Good afternoon, good evening, LinkedIn friends, Value-First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value-First data. We're here talking about, uh, unified customer views. Uh, and we're on part five with Clemen and Casey. Uh, happy Tuesday. Klemen Hrovat: Happy Tuesday. Casey Hawkins: Happy Tuesday. Um, happy to be back all together again. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Casey Hawkins: Um… Klemen Hrovat: Even indeed. So how should we fill in… Casey Hawkins: Yeah, [inaudible]. Klemen Hrovat: How should we fill in Casey from last week Clemen? Klemen Hrovat: For me the main takeaway was validate what you're setting up is available to the ones who should receive that information in whatever shape and form.

[01:19] **Validating Data** Casey Hawkins: So the validation comes from the people receiving the information. So the end user. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah, do they see the unified customer review that you designed. Do they see the same or the right properties, the right cards, the right things. If you haven't received that served in the right way, there's no point of you know, filling it up. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. And it reminded me of some situations in the past where it's like, people can make some assumptions about how users are or are not using the CRM after some big big project gets done or hearing certain people talk about it and other people not. And then you don't realize that that person has different permissions or you know, they they use they they execute the process, especially in Hubspot. Like they might start from a contact record and instead of the deal index screen. And all of a sudden that that changes the flow, changes the views that they might have, um and they might be willing. They might be like willing participants of filling in the data or making sure things work, but if they can't see it. It's really hard for them, uh, to participate. Uh, so yeah, confirm that it's working technically, uh, and like for user success. And I also like I like to differentiate and call on the importance of like who owns the process and who owns like CRMs or any tech, right? This is the difference between IT owning like the tech stack in terms of their their job is to make sure it's working.

[03:35] **Tech and Jurisdiction** Klemen Hrovat: In terms of like break fix, right? And most of the time they don't have the jurisdiction or, you know, the experience or the training or even the remit to say, hey, Clemen, like data is flowing, but is this actually working for you? Is this helping? You know, like, no, I put it in there like just because that's how I get the closed one, but it's really annoying like every time I got to put that field in. Casey Hawkins: Mhm. Klemen Hrovat: That not, that we never hear about in reports and right. And so that brings us back to like part one where deciding who's going to own this. Right? It's so important who's in charge of success for the users of a system like Hubspot is, is super important. Klemen Hrovat: So that we can get to this part, um which I think we always have stories uh about, um like oh man, we we we got them like like yesterday the the engineer or the person who's never using Hubspot. Like they asked, oh, can we can we build this in Hubspot too? Uh, and at those, at that point, you know that they're like they're in, they're bought in and it can be hard to um, you know, I think standardize or it has been hard for me to like explain how to get to that moment, like effectively instead of just hoping, you know, that it's going to happen across teams and across different users. Um, but I'm seeing it more and more when you start to unify like all the context together, people naturally get insights. Um, and so when we go through these multiplication indicators, and I'm open to a different phrase that describes uh what what we're talking about here, but we're really trying to um confirm that we have adoption by understanding what to look for beyond. Like, yeah, I go in there and I close my deals like because that's how I get compensated. Like moving from there to, yeah, I do that because at the end of the month I'm able to pull an awesome report and then coach myself about how like to do deal closing better, you know, stuff like that or we look at close ones or we look at at at close lost and we actually understand that as a team and then use that insight to then like add layers of value like into the process. Um so when you think about this concept like what what comes what comes to mind? Klemen Hrovat: To me two words, one is unlock and the other one is enablement more than multiplication. Um because I think this, you know really enabling users do what they couldn't or they didn't know what that they could do. And I yeah, I agree with you. This is when the adoption is way easier. Because then they see the point of using the system, of bringing context in. You go from the discussions of, you know, a CRM is is not helping me. It just takes more time from my day to manage it because I need to for, you know, for the reporting or to log how many emails I send or how many calls I made to hey, it makes sense to bring all that context in because of this and this and that. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, I think enablement, um, also alignment is something I'm like thinking about while I look at this. Um and even like under that why multiplication though without unified views work happens in silos. Um and this is a little bit just based on the type of work I do. But um that alignment piece feels like what I hear the most pain over um and what I work towards solving most of the time. Somebody knows something that no one else knows. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Klemen Hrovat: I think this uh this with unified view, this is the part that's so hard to explain. Everybody's going to want like we're going to go through the gains uh further down the page, but everybody wants to jump to those gains and and talk about like how those are going to be outcomes we're shooting for without really understanding the intangible part of what's described in the unified view here. Like full context everywhere, right? Like no gray areas to get misunderstood or miscommunicate or um, you know, not appreciate the context that is missing or be worried about it or all this stuff that comes up, right? Uh and this coordination, the automatic coordination that happens, like because we all see the same thing and trust the same thing, like guess what guess what's happening at meetings now. Like and that's where the multiplication happens. Like you can come together without having to spend the whole meeting talking about whether the data is good or not. Or whether we're missing a piece of data or hey, Klemen, um you know, you didn't get your call in, you didn't get your transcript in and we're missing that. So now let's let's get it in now and understand, right, that stuff happens in all of these meetings and if that's happening, people cannot be proactive. Right? It's so hard to be proactive. And usually when you when there is somebody that is proactive, they are seen as like the sales superhero that doesn't doesn't care about whatever else the team is doing and he's just going to like he or she's going to do their job. Like because they know they need to get it done and that's when data also doesn't make it into the system. Right? And it just furthers this this problem. So I think that's a good point like the fact that we've been tackling or trying to tackle alignment for years and not doing that is trying to handle all of these symptoms, right? Um So I'd love to get into uh some of these efficiency gains and get your thoughts. Casey Hawkins: I would love to get into this as well.

[13:45] **Efficiency** Klemen Hrovat: Faster time to context reduced. So we have faster time to context. Um and I think like we're moving into the world if we're not already there where the right context equals the right value, right? And the wrong context almost certainly equals the wrong like value. Um so team members spend less time searching for customer information, what to look for. Fewer who handled this questions in slack email. Shorter prep time before customer calls and reduce tab switching and system hopping. Uh measure by surveying team on time spent finding customer info before versus after. So I think the these three examples. One of them is measurable. Shorter prep time before customer calls is probably a little bit measurable. Um but the other two, I don't know how you get that unless you're you're talking, you're talking to your team. Klemen Hrovat: You should talk to your team, you should talk to your team's gut because gut feeling will tell you. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Klemen Hrovat: Uh but to that point, um I just had a a chat yesterday with with a lady, she joined the team. The previous Hubspot admin left a while ago. She's now on the customer service part of the company. Responsible for QuickBooks for HR and what not and then she's starting to feel that, you know, hey, there's a RevOps function out there, which might be super useful for our system and in our team. And and she was asking, you know, how RevOps should use Hubspot and and how to look at it. And she said, you know, right now I'm the only one who has access to QuickBooks, which means wraps are reaching out to me, is that invoice already paid or is it overdue? Should we reach out? Should we follow up? Should we? And then she's the only one who has access to that information. So, you know, to that full context, if you sink that data, if you have the same customer in your QuickBooks, link to to the customer in Hubspot, you can easily sink that data, so there is no back and forth information and questions, just have that and sales rep can immediately act on that without any lost time. Um so yeah, there there is definitely the opportunity, but how to measure it? I don't know. Klemen Hrovat: I think like towards the end we're going to get to like some things that you can do, but it all relates to much more like team intensive conversations right away. Like about how the system's being used and how they're feeling about it, right? Um So then we've got reduced duplicate data entry, information entered once, flows where it's needed automatically. What to look for, less copying between systems and spreadsheets. Fewer this record is out of date discoveries and a single source of truth for customer status.

[17:07] **Single Source of Truth** Klemen Hrovat: Um and I'll put a caveat on that last one. It's single source of truth for customer status for the user that's looking at it at that moment. Like yeah, if we had our way they would all be using Hubspot for everything. Um but when they're not, like if accounting is still in the accounting system, like that's their source of truth. Like whether we like it or not. So trying to find a way to avoid single source of truth conversations to where it's this system versus that system is often where, you know, you'll get in trouble because we get walled off and then we have no choice to start doing duplicate data entry, right? Because I'm not allowed in the other system, right? But I need to know that because I'm about to have a customer call and I just called up accounting to figure out what the status was so that now I'm typing it into Hubspot, right? And you know, there's a pretty good chance I don't type it exactly like correctly and why is this one like why have people accepted so much duplicate data entry? Like up to now? Casey Hawkins: I don't think people think there's a better, more reliable way. Full stop. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Klemen Hrovat: I do think it's as simple as that. Um, the two use cases that immediately come to mind are quote to cash. And just the way that these systems do not talk to each other at all. And places like customer name is different in the ERP because the gets built differently, which means it can't integrate with the customer name that's different in the CRM. Like as a as an example, and then event management. Like event planning and if it's not a spreadsheet, it's in some other like event management or marketing budgeting platform that's never been successfully connected into Hubspot. So it's uh yeah, it's my favorite part of Hubspot right now. There's a place for all this data. So if you can set the expectation that we should only have to enter data one time. Right? Um should be a simple one in most Hubspot use cases. And if you can start there, like this is one where it might take them a minute to feel it, but there's almost always little hanging fruit related to See this data you're putting in over here, if you move it over here then it solves all the problems that you're telling me about right now. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Klemen Hrovat: Um Team coordination. Um for the reasons I just mentioned, uh smoother handoffs between teams. Full context uh causes great handoffs, what to look for. New customers don't have to repeat their story. I think that's a spot where you could leverage AI to understand transcripts throughout the journey and just see how many times is the story getting repeated. I hadn't really thought about that as a use case until until right now. Um and this is Support knows about active deals and services and sales knows about past support issues. Klemen Hrovat: For the first one, at least in my LinkedIn feed, I keep seeing I had a demo with SDR and then I got another call with AE and I had to repeat the same story again, the same questions. Can we just live in 2026? Uh This is it. Casey Hawkins: Um, I was just working with a client on the last one actually, the sales knows about past support issues. Um they were working on getting more visibility into um into where the support tickets live from the sales team's perspective, I guess. Um for that reason exactly they they were basically like we don't want to wind up in these conversations that are like oh, we didn't know your system spent you haven't even onboarded yet and now we're calling you about a renewal but your onboarding hasn't even been completed or whatever, which happens. And it's embarrassing. Klemen Hrovat: Or or you try to reach out to record a case study where they just had five tickets complaining about something that is not working. Casey Hawkins: Mhm. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah, I've got a case study for you. Five tickets. Um this very much relates to this next one, cross functional visibility. Like one of the reason handoffs are are easier is when teams can see each other's work without asking. Um it again comes back to transparency, what to look for. Service team knows when renewals are coming. Uh sales knows about delivery, quality issues, finance sees customer health context. Uh this measure is interesting. Count cross team status check requests should decrease. And this is where we're all a little bit more optimistic. Um at least this can work if it everything is done digitally, right? But when you're like calling up other departments to see like status checks, right? Being able to count them. I I will say like if you can do closed one debriefs and close last debriefs effectively and ask questions like this instead of whatever, you know, other questions you might be asking, this will reveal very quickly and um this is why it's so important for me to say that unified customer view is an outcome that can be achieved by Hubspot, but you cannot explain it from a Hubspot perspective of like the tool or the platform. And just yesterday I was on a call and we're talking uh for a client, we want to integrate with a ticketing system. And the person in charge of integrations like there was a few minutes of confusion on the call because all he knew is about an integration with Hubspot. And so he comes to the call saying, oh, we use Hubspot for marketing. So I don't really know like what we're supposed to be talking about. I'm not the marketing guy. I could go get a marketing person. And then we're like, yeah, no, we're doing tickets in Hubspot too and you know, minute of clarification. Then he still asks so which help desk software do you guys use? Right? Literally like the word Hubspot just means, okay, we're only talking about marketing. Like this if we're only talking about marketing, how could we possibly get to unified customer view? Right? So if you start from unified customer view and don't worry about which system and the how, just decide what it needs to be and then you figure out, okay, this is how we're going to get the data there and where it's coming from and who's using what system like to get it there.

[25:56] **Proactive Intervention** Klemen Hrovat: Proactive intervention. Uh acting before problems arise. At risk accounts caught earlier. Problems identified before customers complain or churn. What to look for, red account health triggers, red account health triggers, outreach before issues escalate. Engagement drops noticed and addressed proactively, renewal conversations start earlier. Klemen Hrovat: This is the right way to prevent churn. Klemen Hrovat: I guess these are just too too obvious to even need explanation. Casey Hawkins: Well, I am like starting to think through when we talk about unified customer view like is like is this a this might be a customer health score, but a lot of this is probably is has to be powered by documentation in some way. Like great if to your earlier point like, you know, we would love for everyone to have Hubspot for everything. If they have tickets in Hubspot like sure, this is a little more native if they don't have tickets in Hubspot. If they don't have tickets, period, like then I think all of that to say like the entire team has to be kind of bought in and committed to this for this to work well. Um I just think about like my business, like my little baby business. I don't have I don't have I don't use tickets. Um most of the time I am all the things. So I am the person who would report the ticket, but I do have an assistant that I work with. If she can't if she had a problem with a client, there's really no way for her to tell me about that other than like telling me with words. Um so I just think about like if I'm scaling that into a way that the um unified customer view, I would need those pieces to be documented in some way that I can reference them. I don't know if that goes it's just like sometimes I think inside Hubspot there are pieces that people know should exist in Hubspot, but there I also think are pieces like oftentimes health triggers that people just don't think to put in Hubspot right now. So I'm just calling that out. There's roaming. Klemen Hrovat: And one of those reasons might be they think it has to relate to tickets. Casey Hawkins: Mhm. Klemen Hrovat: Right? Um and this takes me back to our conversation yesterday on value first scoring where like account health and relationship health like relates way more to engagement we are or are not seeing than it does how most people document it. And that's where like if calls and transcripts and everything are coming into the system, it doesn't matter how the data it it matters less about the data structure and more about can we see it? Like is it even visible for us or AI? And I wonder if this might resonate um or just speak to the challenge of email in Hubspot. Like traditionally, gray mail is to support deliverability, right? Like understanding how many how many emails have you gotten without opening? Okay, it gets to this many we're not going to send them to you anymore. Instead of as we get into full life cycle Hubspot emailing, if you're a customer and you stop opening stuff we're not removing you from the list. We're going to keep spamming the emails, but we need you to open the emails. Like there's something in the emails that's important for you to if you're going to renew, if you're going to have success like with the product, right? So are we triggering our teams to say, hey, five emails in a row and somebody checked a box somewhere that said you're going to get emails that are important to consume and this is why like onboardings, right, stuff like that. But then you stop, like that is a way to if we just see that and then we have the mindset of that could mean it's at risk, right? And if that does mean at risk, what are we doing to proactively prevent, you know, churn. I think as we get all these signals inside of Hubspot, these kinds of like designations are are super important and it's really hard to do them when they're all outside of a unified customer view because you don't have the context. No team has the context needed until it's time to do the monthly report or until it's time to look at renewals and see like, wow, this person hasn't been interacting with us at all for 10 months and now we're surprised that they're not going to renew, right? Um similarly expansion opportunities spotted. God, there's so much opportunity in every Hubspot portal to to tackle this, right? Upsell, cross-sell signals visible to the right people. Right? And I've seen this on both sides of like so what to look for, high engagement contract contact surface to sales, service delivery success leads to expansion conversations, advocate contacts identified for referrals. We were talking about that yesterday in terms of scoring, uh relationship health. But like the amount of signals sales and service collectively miss to create more value in the moment because they're not responsible for it or whatever, like it's all over the place. Yet these teams will often purchase Hubspot for the purpose of growing revenue across the system and we're not putting our people in a place to like even understand the context needed to do it. Klemen Hrovat: To your point, Casey, a conversation I had a few months ago comes to my mind with a guy where he was asking us, you know, can you design an AI process which is monitoring call transcripts and all the emails going back and forth between anyone in our team and our customers to listen for any features cases to to support through our system which might indicate, hey, this is part of our I know, pro plan. It doesn't need to be a ticket or if there are no back and forth emails if you're a service partner for them, if there is no active communication, this is a clear indication, it's a risk even though there are no tickets. Um or if you have regular calls, just monitoring for the sentiment on those calls can be a good indicator how someone feels about your business and and the relationship. And if you have that context, AI can now really help with just monitoring, understanding that and then a quick summary can be then used to to you know, put more or deduct score. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, I hard for me not to you know, look at this in the scoring context. Um, which whether this was on purpose or by accident, Chris, like I think scores fit into the deal in a way that is um is really interesting to me. Um, one thing I find whenever I build scores though is and this is I think the whole point of the unified customer view. Sure, I can see the number. I can see that the engagement for this contact is 100. That is good from like a ranking and prioritization standpoint. That is useless from a like understanding standpoint. Um so what I think is really important is kind of that you're not just building a score, you're you're not just showing someone 100, you're showing, hey, they have high engagement and this is what they engaged with. And this is what they currently own or whatever the case may be.

[35:01] **Imagine** Klemen Hrovat: I think I just came up with a brilliant idea. Imagine if the score was like at the top of the unified customer view looking at the view, right? Which could probably be AI or breeze assistant saying, hey, look at this customer view. And this is where the sentiment analysis score, the health score works very similarly to this, if not identical. I'm not sure all of what it could see, but that's really what we need to be scoring. Like is this a healthy relationship? No matter where they are in the process, whether they're leads, your customers or wherever, um partners can be valuable, right? Are they a human relationship that we care about if yes and we want a quick snapshot, right? That's what score is supposed to do. Now we could say like we could score the view itself, right? Which is really what the humans are doing when they're calling different departments and understanding like, okay, I see an 80 over here, but I see five tickets too. Like something's not adding up. I'm certainly not going to walk into a hornet's nest is a very common retort from the sales account manager. I want thing to call support to make sure nothing's happened as they go and talk to them about expansion and upsell and cross-sell, right? That's the last look they want to have, right? Um So maybe there's a unified customer score coming. I don't know. Um And again, we get to these last three of quality improvement, uh better customer conversations, data driven decisions, improve data hygiene. It's so hard to like separate these out, I think. They all feed each other. But I think the main thing to highlight is um like similar to how when I get access to my data in Amazon and it's important to me that I'm going to get the thing that I bought, I'm the one updating my own data, right? With these unified views when you put these things right next to each other like all of a sudden the team who you were begging to clean the data or you were you were incentivizing and trying to create all these situations where, oh, please if you just do this and then I'll help me do this. Like now it just looks out of place and it doesn't work. So people just they want to maintain the data. Like they want to fix it because they're clear on how it all fits together. And I mean the most common place that I've um, you know, fix data is when I'm about to share a link to a record to somebody else and I need to make sure they're not going to get confused or they're not going to, you know, have a misunderstanding. I want them to be excited about what I'm sharing but if they see this thing out of place, that's all they're going to focus on, right? When you get buy in and what you mentioned earlier, Casey, is like really hard to do this unless everybody's aligned, which is how we started, you know, the series. I think that kind of impact where people want when you have the buy in, people like appreciate and can be proud of what this view looks like and that leads to them participating in the process of maintaining data instead of pointing to rev ops and saying make sure it's always right all the time. Klemen Hrovat: So when to expect results. Um and so something we've started doing is saying like one of the first quick wins that we can have in any relationship is a documented unified customer view. It doesn't mean it's 100% accurate. It means it's documented and we understand whether it's 10% complete or 80% complete and we understand the difference between 100% and wherever we are. Right? So I don't think or I'd love to hear your guys's understanding of this timeline, but initial adoption, week one and two, team starts using views and seeing unified context, some friction as habits change. Uh, efficiency gains, week three and four, time to context improves noticeably. Fewer where is this questions? Number three, coordination improvement in month two, cross team handoffs are smoother notifications are driving proactive action. Or I'd say maybe you have a lot less notifications uh because people are just using the view. And then full multiplication indicators are visible and team can't imagine working without unified view. Klemen Hrovat: Strong shoes to fill up that one. Klemen Hrovat: What do you think Clemen? Klemen Hrovat: Gathering my thoughts. Um I think as a ballpark it's achievable as described. Klemen Hrovat: This is also why I don't like timelines. Like how many people are involved here is very important to whether or not this timeline can be achieved. But I think these stages, like these milestones are dead on. Like yeah. Right? And this is where if we spent a month before documenting unified view, bringing the right people in, which is everybody who's going to be impacted by the unified view, not just a couple people here and there, giving them a voice, giving them advanced warning that this is where we're going. You've got a leader saying unified customer view is important to the organization, right? So change is coming. We need everybody on board. All of these things come together. You have to have teams starting to use them so that they can even understand any of the efficiency gains. And efficiency gain gains doesn't mean less manual effort out of the gate. It's very likely to not be less manual effort. But something I was showing last night is when you have like the intelligence tab uh on a on a CRM record and you can link right to the person's LinkedIn profile and then you put some properties right next to that spot on the record that traditionally are like, uh, do I really have to, you know, fill out this source field every time, right? But when you put it right next to the action that they're taking right inside of the workflow, inside of the human workflow, like all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, it's just a couple seconds like I'm going to check that box after I send this connection request, right? Then they'll they'll see like more data will will happen in the system and it won't feel like more effort, right? Um as data starts to fill out cross team trust like happens, which I think at the end of the day is what makes handoffs smoother because we don't have to call each other, we don't question each other about the data, right? Uh and that's when you start to melt away all these obstacles that have traditionally gotten the way and teams naturally have insight and new ideas for how they start to use the system and the data and work together to serve, you know, customers. Um So in my mind right now goes to identifying the low hanging fruits for automating data gathering, standardization so that you can get to quick wins for the end user, the consumer of the unified customer view. So they don't get impatient. I we're now, you know, for a month talking and and and you know, designing stuff and and and documents. The sooner the better. You understand, I mean, it's a process to map out the unified customer review and say, okay, this is 100%. We are here. But as sooner you can start bridging that gap in in in even before you know what's 100%, if if you know somewhat where you want to go. These are the quick wins down the road will help you engage and keep engaged everyone that you want and need to before they just get lost in day to day work. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Klemen Hrovat: Can you scroll scroll down real quick? This is what we've been talking about. Um And I think like it can definitely happen faster than a month, but it's it's related to how fast can you get everybody in the room. In a room talking about what they need. And an example is I'm doing a workshop with a CFO, CEO, uh sales leader, marketing leader, delivery leader on company naming conventions, right? And using that as a way to start creating alignment because they all care very dearly about what things are named in terms of who's the account that I need to be going after or we're serving in this moment. And when you have an accounting system separate from an ERP separate from a help desk, separate from marketing automation separate from CRM, those people decide in those moments what the account name needs to be. And if you can't like bring everybody together to even agree and maybe it does have to transform because of like the customer's billing needs or whatever. But we can understand that and agree to that and not think it's because of like our own like systems and dysfunction and and all this stuff, right? Um And when you can do that inside of the first month, right? A lot of this other stuff starts to get easier, um so that we can bring people into the conversation. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Klemen Hrovat: So next week, uh we're going to be talking about common pitfalls. Uh that might prevent you if you can scroll down a little bit more Clemen and click on that button. Right, common pitfalls that are going to get in the way of the unified customer view. Uh any final thoughts as we wrap up ahead of ahead of next week? Casey Hawkins: Looking forward to it. Klemen Hrovat: Yeah. Klemen Hrovat: It's going to be another interesting discussion. Klemen Hrovat: All righty. Well hope you can join us for uh part six next week. Until then everybody have a great week. Take care.