Unified Views Wizard Walkthrough with Danielle Urban

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, good afternoon. Happy Monday, LinkedIn Friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First Measurement with Danielle Urban. How you doing, Danielle? Danielle Urban: Pretty good. I've been starting on my calls today with happy not January. We made it through. Chris Carolan: We we did. We made it through. Uh can't wait to see what's in store in February. Uh yeah, it's we are through January already in 2026. [00:48] Chris Carolan: Um, and it's going fast and doesn't look like it's going to be slowing down. Danielle Urban: No. Chris Carolan: Uh, so I really enjoyed our our our uh conversation last week. Um, enough to the point that decided to build a uh tool, uh Unified View Wizard uh to help hopefully help somebody, including me, probably figure out uh how we're actually going to get this done uh for clients. [01:48] Chris Carolan: So, uh, you have it ready on your screen. Um, I'm curious if you said you have a specific client that you're excited for to create muses for. Um, how how like when you've talked to people about like unifying views or creating views, like what what usually resonates in those those conversations? Danielle Urban: Well, this one that I have top of mind is a unique case because they're migrating onto HubSpot. So, I'm usually the person to come in after they've made a mess of HubSpot and try and clean it up. Uh, which is really fun and I'm very happy to do that. Um, also reinforcing that I never want to do another data migration. It's horrible. Especially when like it's just not Apple. It never is, but this one was okay, we got to dig through everything and figure out which column belongs to which object. Chris Carolan: Right. Danielle Urban: Um, but anyway. Chris Carolan: So you mean you did a data migration the right way. It sounds like. Danielle Urban: I I did. It was incredibly painful, as it should be, but I don't like it. No one does, but. Chris Carolan: Right. Chris Carolan: I think that's the hard part about all this, um, because usually unified view has not been systematized, has not been even defined and like whether it's HubSpot to HubSpot or some other place to HubSpot or or like spreadsheets into HubSpot, like there's always this balance between it's usually not balanced at all, like our current there's a reason we're purchasing HubSpot and it's probably because our processes and our data or some combination of those things suck. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Chris Carolan: So we need HubSpot to not be like 100% foreign. Danielle Urban: Right. Chris Carolan: So we try to find some naming conventions that are the same or some some structure that's the same. But in reality we're doing like process improvement and updating like real time. Uh, and I'm guessing that was maybe some of the painful part that you're alluding to. Danielle Urban: Somewhat, yeah. It was it was peeling apart what should go where. I mean, HubSpot has exploded in the objects available to you. This is a a pro account that I'm working in. And so even without custom objects, there's still so much for us to build into. And so we were remapping, um, like basic contacts and companies, um, the system they were coming from, kind of glommed it all together in single spreadsheets, but then also mapping, you know, multiple contacts into companies, took a lot of pulling apart and fixing. Um, and then we still are are working our way through payments. And so shifting things from, you know, a a spreadsheet that was the system into deals and translating that and getting that imported, uh, and then next up doing payments and linking to that and getting them onto the subscriptions object. Like it's amazing. We built something that will really work for them that will scale with them for years. Uh, but the painstaking process of like you take this raw export that you don't really know what it is and it's different across the 15 files that they gave to us. Plus there's some other thing that they, you know, reinvented every single time they did this event and they have six events a year. Now I'm like trying to figure out how do I map these columns and get it into a format where it's actually going to import the data structure that I want it to be and that I can tell that story and stitch all these pieces together in a Miro, of course, uh, and explain it back to the client who's used to a very simplistic system. So they, they get it. We have training coming up very soon once we figure out our our payments processing then, uh, they're all very excited, which also really helps. Chris Carolan: That's us that does help and we're I have a feeling we're going to come back to that uh creation and like addition of deals uh into the process uh as we go through. Um, because I've got some stories as well. Uh, uh but let's dive in if you don't mind and we'll share your screen. Danielle Urban: Perfect. Screen. Chris Carolan: And ultimately, this is going to sound always sounds too complex, like for everybody, but at the end of the day, like everybody agrees that this unified view concept makes sense and is a good idea for the business. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Chris Carolan: And the way that you've gotten close to it, like in your spreadsheet or in Quickbooks or whatever, it's very simplistic, so you can enter data very quickly that to then create the view. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Then everything you want in terms of a business, in terms of visibility, in reporting, and we need to know where to grow and like all of that stuff like, nope. You're not going to get any of that. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Yeah. So as we go through this, uh we'll we'll add some of that commentary in, but uh yeah, I'll make it specific to deals when we when we get there because that's an interesting conversation I think. [06:02] Chris Carolan: Uh, and so this is something that really I'm just looking for ways to like facilitate this conversation in productive ways, right? Um, when you're coming out of spreadsheets into a system of like it's just so easy to go everywhere in terms of what could be better, what's working, what's not working, and we got to find a way to I think structure the conversation. Danielle Urban: Yeah, definitely. I think this helps. I love these quotes because they're they're conversation starters. Um, and these usually, you could have pulled these from my call transcripts in our discovery. Like it's truly when we go through our discovery process, it's like, why don't you like this? Why is it bad? And you get so much. And you can sort of talk people down certain paths like, okay, walk me through, you know, a new lead coming in or walk me through the marketing setup of a new asset. Like all of that you can get talk through. But then at the end of that, I love to leave like 10 minutes, feel like, all right, what do you hate? Like just open-ended, tell me what's terrible that you wish you could make better. Um, and you get the most interesting like road map concepts out of that. And you understand where people really struggle with the processes that they're doing or where the processes are bad. It's not just what they're doing, but really taking that step back and be like, why isn't that thing that you're doing working? I've seen a lot of cases, not a lot, but I've worked with people who have done just like a lift and replace of marketo to HubSpot and they always come back like a year or two after that's happened and been like, I this isn't right. We got to we got to rework this. I don't know what's happening here. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Chris Carolan: And it's such a conceptual shift. And why I love HubSpot is the same reason this makes it challenging. Like all of the other systems are likely built around an account or a deal or opportunity. Danielle Urban: Right. Chris Carolan: And HubSpot is built around the contact and it changes the way that everything, you know, gets architected. For good reason, like that's why you're buying HubSpot is to make it easier to see things and communicate with with humans and right? Um, but rarely can you just like bring in the old way and and bring it in. Danielle Urban: Exactly. Yeah, I'm running through this with my client in mind. Um, they're they're like a low level membership, which is their business model. So like it's an annual membership and it renews and then they also have their events where they have sponsors on top of that. So they have two deal pipelines that we set up, well three technically. Two deal pipelines, one is new subscriptions and the other is events, sponsorships. Uh, and then we have their renewal pipeline. So they know like brand new, not new logos come in through one process and then we've got it all automated to make sure that their renewal happens the way that they expect it to. Um, and they don't totally know how that works yet, but we'll get there. Chris Carolan: Right. Chris Carolan: Because I'm guessing deals weren't really represented prior. Usually it's like a quote or something. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Or a contract. Danielle Urban: Yeah. And that was like, okay, we send an email to someone who creates it in Quickbooks and then we just update date field. And the event side of things were the ones that were creating spreadsheets. So they had their like outreach spreadsheet. It had the date of last contact. It had a person's name, maybe three names in a single cell and then three emails in the cell next to it. Parsing that was way too much time, but we got there. Chris Carolan: Yeah. [10:21] Danielle Urban: This one. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Danielle Urban: Yeah, it's very sassy, but it's still relevant. Chris Carolan: Yeah. And this the visibility of what's happening and the ability to like improve based on what's happening. Like it's such a easy thing to say like, yeah, I want that, but then to understand that you can't just show quotes. Like and where I'm having some success, but it really takes like seeing it in action before people will like subscribe to it. It's like deals are for sales management, like managing a sale from start to finish and you can start to see like what goes up, what goes down, like what goes faster or slower. Right. Chris Carolan: You can't if you're just in a in a quote or an invoice or a contract, like yeah, it's a lot easier to just enter that, but you won't get any of the context. All of that is sitting outside in uh like not even in the spreadsheet. Like you have to go into the inbox probably. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Go look at emails and see, oh okay. Yeah, that's that's when this started, right? Um, so that's why I think like through this unified revenue view, um, like it's I think it's the answer. Um, to try and like uh just create a visible structure for people to understand that before they have all their deals or opportunities inside of the system at different stages because it takes it takes a minute, right? And this is where it's hard to like like this is where you get in trouble if you're selling Hubspot and saying it's so easy to use, can be so fast at the beginning in situations like that, it's way harder than adding a line to a new spreadsheet or like adding a quote to Quickbooks, right? So, like tempering expectations and saying, like, all right, this is it it is more complexity because it's more complex thing that we're trying to do and but guess what? At the end of the month, you won't be spending eight hours on a slide deck. Yeah. Chris Carolan: To understand what happened last month. Danielle Urban: Exactly. And the the connection between teams is going to be huge here. They they had manual input. Like their, um, their form to get started with the subscription was a PDF. So even that alone, building that as a multi-step HubSpot form and having that be all in the same system. That's going to cut like 20% of the time they spend out of their week. And they already know, but they they know that they need to be able to see those form submissions simply. Like the team that's handling the follow up for that needs to be able to see the whole thing. And I know that as the person building it for them. I know that transition and that like change management needs to be very carefully handled so that they don't feel like everything's everywhere and they can't keep track of it. So now I know, I'm basically going to build the, um, the staging view that we were kind of talking about back in December. So like each team and each phase that a potential subscriber or subscriber is in is going to have a different tab. So we'll have like the application tab or the the processing tab and then we'll have the membership tab where it has all of the information that the various teams need to service that contact, though in this case it'll probably be more of a a company focused because it's a a company relationship. Um, that having that laid out so plainly for all of the teams to see, it used to be in really siloed platforms, um, is just going to blow their minds. So I'm so excited to build it. Chris Carolan: Yeah. No, and like also as you watch teams start to get in and like just even before it's built, like uh just last week it's like those moments where it's like, okay. So will this person who spends a ton of time on this super manual thing. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Will we be able to automate that too? And it's like yep. Chris Carolan: Yep. Yep. And I've got you. Like you're hooked, like that's what I needed to hear and but to get there through explanation or like not seeing like things in Hubspot where it's like, oh look, contact data right next to company data, right next to deal data, right next to the order. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Chris Carolan: That's the the the proximity of everything together creates so much like process innovation. Yeah. Chris Carolan: That is very hard for us to do from the outside, but when you can get these teams together. Because this was for a post sales like repair, you know, we're bringing repairs into like ticketing, help desk. We're bringing that into Hubspot. And that at this point, we're talking to the sales team and the account managers who have to manage that process, who are used to going into all the different systems. Yeah. Chris Carolan: And I was like, let me just we just need to talk about it. I know you have no idea what Unified Customer Review means, but if we could just get together because all of the questions and concerns you're asking right now, it's like just once you see the view, it's like, oh, oh. Right. Chris Carolan: Okay. Yeah, I won't need to worry about these 10 things anymore just because it's all right here. Danielle Urban: Right. I think I I also tend to work with teams that need to zoom out a bit. So as much as I'm excited to build record views, the, and that will be unbelievably valuable to the team that I'm working for, there's also the reality that they need to manage the volume. Like marketing needs to understand the context of multiple contacts or multiple companies and the account management team needs to understand all of the renewals that are coming up. And so in addition to building these single record view and helping them maintain that relationship on a one to one basis, I'm also really excited to be building out their like renewal dashboard and help them understand what's coming up, who's coming up next month, who's not taking advantage of it. I have dreams of getting them on custom event tracking so that we can see who is taking advantage of the various, um, benefits offered with the subscription that they get. Like how much are they really using it so that you can have a complete conversation when the time comes for renewal or we're one month out from renewal, which is all built into the system that I've got going for them. So they've got a leads view, they've got dashboards, they've got subscription views, they've got deal views. They have everything they could possibly want. We'll probably end up cutting some of it once they use it and decide what works best for them. But we've got everything built so that they can jump in to any of these multiple screens, but I I bring that up because you're talking about, um, team repairs. And if I were a marketer, I had a prior client who sold, we'll call it large assets that often needed repairs. Um, and so they would they did not have their repair system connected to HubSpot. We didn't really have a way of doing that. It was incredibly frustrating to me and hopefully maybe someday we can come back to that and fix it for them. But if their marketing team or their sales team had the context in one to one or in volume views, then they could know, you know, if marketing sees someone has or creates a segment with a filter that's like, they've had more than five repairs logged in the last three months, then we're going to segment them and give them a message that's meaningful. But you need that all in the same place and you need to understand on a one to one context what that actually means to be able to zoom out and use that in the volume context. I feel like rambling, but hopefully I got my point across. Chris Carolan: No, I think like you reminded me of like the other part of the conversation for Friday. It's like a part of this because we're so used to separating the back office stuff. Yeah. Chris Carolan: But it's like important for a unified customer view, for revenue, for business context, for team enablement. Like it's important for all those things and anybody who is customer facing, like needs to know the whole life cycle, um, if we got to if we're asking them to show up and be relevant and valuable and timely and uh what's happening in that portal, you describe the large assets, right? Before bringing the back office data in, there's no like asset record. Danielle Urban: Right. Chris Carolan: That usually sits in like the inventory management or the ERP or whatever. Yeah. Chris Carolan: As we were showing that and talking about that, it's like, oh, so this spreadsheet we can bring into HubSpot and this spreadsheet and we won't need these spreadsheets anymore. Right. Chris Carolan: Like it's like, yep, that's exactly why you remember when like six months ago when we were worried about how complex this was going to be, right? That's why we're bringing this in because yeah, this is for repairs, but this kind of asset serves the entire rest of your business and we could start entering that data like from marketing forms. Right. Chris Carolan: Right? And it's super powerful when the teams start to it opens the door for teams to like collaborate in different ways because they're not spending all their time like transferring data and and transforming data everywhere. Danielle Urban: Yeah. And we're we're beating a dead horse at this point, but the visi ability across teams really opens that inspiration into like they marketing team may have never thought to create that segment or target someone in that way. But if they happen to be clicking through a couple single record views and they see that all that data is in there and they're in there complete. Well, there's your next campaign and that inspiration is just going to crush it for you because it's so relevant. You've got all these signals in there and it really comes together in a way that you can super serve your customers. Chris Carolan: Yes, indeed. Danielle Urban: Um, I want to see what happens next. Let's say we want to work on one of these. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Let's bite off just enough. Danielle Urban: All right, let's start there. Ooh. All right, current state. See support tickets? No. Remember joins? How do they learn about Keith? They don't. Yeah. Danielle Urban: Trial and error with customers. That one's pretty bad. Let's hope it's not that bad. Maybe you can talk to their teammates. Yeah. Danielle Urban: Uh, sometimes context. Let's do that one. Where does your organization track? Yeah, it's yeah. You know what, we're going to go with that one. It's pretty bad. Danielle Urban: The they see it as a problem? Absolutely. Danielle Urban: Oh, I like this preview. Is leadership committed to the investment required for transformation? Yep. Danielle Urban: Do they have an internal? Yep. Yep, yep. All good things. Chris Carolan: Cool. Chris Carolan: Right, readiness score of 89%. Ready to go. Danielle Urban: And here's what we do. I couldn't scroll up. Severe red, very bad. Danielle Urban: That's cool. Chris Carolan: Getting there. I'm curious if it actually gives us a prototype at all. I don't think so. It looks like this is the end of the the line here. Chris Carolan: Yep. Uh, we will keep working on that for sure. But this like the the readiness stuff, like that conversation, finding a good way to to make it clear on where they are in the process so that they don't come in thinking like, oh, Spot's going to fix everything. Danielle Urban: Right. Right. Chris Carolan: Right? Um, when like we can get very clear on yeah, these hand off problems, these communication problems, these data entry issues, like those are all people and process problems just as much as the tools uh usually. So, Yeah, the most successful projects for us are always the ones where we get buy in. That example that I was talking about with the um repair visibility not being able to push into Hubspot in the way that we want to. They were like, well, it's always been separate and you know, if we import a spreadsheet like, I don't know, every other month, that's probably enough. I was like, I can't. I can bring a horse to water. I can paint the picture for you of how great this could be and how much value it could bring to your sales team, to your marketing team, but I can't force you, especially because your system doesn't play nice with Hubspot, but that's another issue. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Chris Carolan: And I'll I'll be a broken record on this for a while. Um, but unified views and the concept of unified view, especially unified customer review. Like it's such an easy yes to get from a leader who doesn't want anything to do with Hubspot. And once you get that yes because it's not HubSpot specific, you can get them to take some responsibility for like telling the rest of the organization that they got to do it. Right? If it's like if we're asking them to tell the rest of the organization to use Hubspot, it's like, well, that's sales team's got to like it and we've got to train them and like if it gets in their way, you know, they got to they're like we're paying them to bring in business and bring in money, not use Hubspot, right? Yeah. Chris Carolan: It's like, yeah, that's a good point. Uh, right? And that's not helpful because then it goes to the admin or the marketer or the single person who has no authority to make change happen. Um, so we can get to buy in, I think a lot easier than than people think. You just have to again, it's what find what the leaders care about. Yeah. Chris Carolan: They usually care about customers and and revenue. Uh, so this is like a kind of a structured way to to have that conversation. Danielle Urban: Yeah, I've definitely given this example before, but we had a client who had previously used HubSpot and then moved on to another system and then came back to HubSpot and hired us to implement it right this time around. And it was amazing to see the mess they made. And then it was amazing to see how quickly they adopted it and how happy they were after that point. Like that first maybe month or so, we were kind of troubleshooting and training their team and we were on call to make sure that everybody got comfortable in there. But we haven't heard from them since. They're thrilled. Their pipeline is exploding. Everybody's happy. They're probably not doing everything that I wish they were doing. Like I had to force them to um, I had like mandatory contact associations on deals so that all of the like communication could roll up to the deal. Uh, but after we we crossed that that speed bump and now everybody's doing great and they love it. And that was the case where I had to create CEO's dashboard. Like I created the or CEO's homepage, which was a dashboard that we set as the default page after they logged in. And that was the moment where they were like, we can't do anything else. Like this is exactly what we we've always needed. I was like, yeah, you just have to build it right. Yeah. Danielle Urban: It really works. I promise. Chris Carolan: Man, all they want is that visibility um, so that they can stop asking everybody questions. Yeah. Chris Carolan: And getting all these customer reports built. Um, yeah, no, that's an awesome awesome story. Uh, and that's why we one of the reasons we like Hubspot. Like if you do set it up right and team's using it, like you don't need a whole army of people to keep it maintained and like uh, you know, um be constantly developing and fixing and then Yeah. Chris Carolan: All these things, right? Uh, that's the baggage that every person has. Yeah. Chris Carolan: And it's been a little bit sad like as I've as we've launched profoundly, like we're getting exposed to everybody comes in. Okay. Uh, we're ready to build Hubspot the right way. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Or like the last person, we don't know what they did, but it's not working. Yep. Chris Carolan: And it's like, man, that is all over the place. Um, so that is a lot of what's driving this is that finding ways to have productive conversations so that we can do it. Do it well and and correctly, like so powerful. Um, Yeah. Chris Carolan: So, I appreciate you uh test driving the wizard uh today. I think it's going to be a useful tool. Um, and if you're out there liking the idea of unified views and wondering how to get in your organization, I'd love to chat and you know, maybe we can we can help you out. Danielle Urban: Let's do it. Chris Carolan: Until next time, Danielle. Thanks so much. Danielle Urban: See you next week.