Value-First Measurement - Mar 2, 2026

[00:01] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, good afternoon, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First Measurement with Danielle Urban. Uh, happy Monday, Danielle. Danielle Urban: Monday, so good to be back. Chris Carolan: It is good to have you back. Uh, definitely have missed you. Um, it's been uh interesting start to the year, that's for sure. Um, including, uh, I guess finally officially launching uh valuefirstteam.com. Not that any of the Value First team contributors know that I just did that. Um, but uh, starting on LinkedIn of course. So I'm hoping to pick your brain today about what at this point, given we're trying to measure things that matter in this new world of AI, uh social driven strategies that aren't email. Uh, I'm gonna pick your brain about what what we can measure, what is worth measuring? How are you seeing put people, how are you seeing people put things like this together? Uh, I think at the heart of this, you can capture almost all of this data that we're about to talk about in HubSpot. Uh, Casey and I did an unboxing with the scoring teams last week for lead and health, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of information about how to bring social into the mix effectively. So we're gonna dig into all that. Um, but as I presented that to you, you said that could be interesting, like what came to mind when I said I wanted to to talk to you about this? Danielle Urban: Well, it seems like at least once a month, we fall back on the like the points are made up and none of it really matters. And that was the first thing that popped into my head is like, I don't know, what do we even measure? What's worth it anymore because there's so much like AI slop that gets thrown around in social and on LinkedIn. Um, and so like, what what is the thing that matters? Is there any one number or how do you capture the sort of signals and interactions that are meaningful, but sort those out from the things that aren't. Um, and I'm curious what what other tools you've tested or or checked out or unboxed at this point because, um, I think like 20 people got tagged in a post this morning about capturing LinkedIn interactions, um, and pulling that into Hubspot and what tools are available for that. So I think in order to sort through what is meaningful and worth capturing as part of understanding a sort of buying cycle, um, and how people might go from learning about you to engaged and and potential buyers, um, you need extra tools. You need to build things, you need to really be intentional about how you capture that. So the points are made up and nothing matters, but also when you want it to matter, you have to build a lot to make it matter. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Now, I'm with you. And so like, to further the point of the points are made up and and nothing matters, uh, I'm gonna share my screen, like just because it's it's not hard to play the game, like right now, it's just are we gonna get any value out of playing the game, right? Uh, so this is LinkedIn, right? And like when I'm on weeks of just doing live content and not really posting a whole lot, like this post impressions number is like like 2,000-ish maybe, because the videos, the long form videos eat a lot less, a lot less play. Yeah. Right? Chris Carolan: But like, so this is 3X like normal week, right? But if we click in and uh, you know, take a look, it's it's like HubSpot, let's make a deal, talking to them about unboxing and this uh, so so kind of adjacent, right? To what you care about and what people know like from a personal brand perspective. But this this one that's just like, oh, a tweet from Sam Altman about like AI show, right? Easy that's easy impressions. Yeah. Right? Like everybody like the that's why, you know, um, uh, you know, selfies are a thing, like this is why people tell you to do the images and it's like are these impressions like better than like the 200 impressions we might get on this on this content. Danielle Urban: Right. Well, I just opened mine up because I haven't looked at it in a while, and I have I'm like up so much, I have similar impression numbers. Well, almost 6,300 of them came from a post I made about giving people with children in a blizzard grace because our lives got turned upside down when I was in the middle of my own stress tornado trying to navigate that. And I was like, please be nice to us. And apparently that resonated, but it has absolutely nothing to do with anything that I actually want to be known for. Um, but it was I was on vacation and it was the only content I posted. So it got attention, but like, I don't want that recorded in HubSpot. That doesn't matter for anything. Chris Carolan: Right. And that's like the difference between measuring and and recording and while still having like brand impact, right? In terms of, oh yeah, Danielle is a normal human being and she has normal. Right. Like there's value in that, but like and that's where just this this whole thing gets usually messed up where it's like, okay, what are your goals, Chris? Like, and then we talk about what we wanna launch, right? And like, so I would think that a normal path would be like, okay, uh, you know, this is official launch because actually changing stuff on LinkedIn and trying to create intentional conversion paths for people to take like during these, during this whole go-to-market machine that's already like in motion. But it's hard like as soon as I start talking about like any goals specifically related to these two things, these three things, it's like, okay, then everything like starts to backfill and just like bad decisions start getting. Like, because then it's like, oh, we don't have time to be human because we're trying to drive like, did we get impressions on the AI Native shift post? Danielle Urban: Yeah. Right? Yeah. Chris Carolan: And it's like it's you just lose the big picture. Um, I don't know where you want to go with that, but I'm also interested in like helping like company page versus personal pages. There's also like there's stuff there to talk about. Danielle Urban: Yeah, I feel like in the olden days when I was actually running marketing in-house for teams, we would just use our company page for like product announcements and like, we're gonna be at this conference. See us there. And I couldn't even tell you what the reach was. I don't think it mattered. But there wasn't as much of a focus on the personal branding. Like it was still sort of a company first platform where people were were concerned about who they worked for. And it was very focused on companies and how you were associated with companies. And I feel like that has shifted dramatically in the last like five to 10 years. So now it's more personal branding that's more important. And so as you think about launching this business and how it gets branded and how you actually reach people to get them to to know what it is because like day one, you just need to work on branding, um, and awareness, then it's really about who can you get talking about it? And how I'm not even gonna say how those people can reach impressions because it doesn't matter. Like impressions are just impressions and you don't know how much really resonates with people. Um, but increasing that reach is kind of the best guess you can make. Um, so like how many people see those conversion paths and how do you get known for that one referrable thing that's gonna resonate with someone? Because Value First does a lot. Even just in that that description. You showed us three different ways that people could get engaged today. And that's great. Like that that is the conversion path that you want people to follow. You want them to sort of step into their. But as you tap people like me who are involved or Casey and have us share that information, the thing that will resonate with my followers and my audiences will be something that I'm known for and we're now translating that into a a product, a system, a company that I'm endorsing. And so how do we get that connection for like that one memorable thing. And I in sort of personal branding and talking about becoming a consultant and freelancing, I was always like, what's your mental business card? Like, what's the the two to three words that people will know you for and come back to you for because they know you can help with that. And I think that's where you sort of need to land from a company branding perspective, too. But I also feel like I'm totally out of the game on this. Like I'm making this up just as much as you are at this point. Chris Carolan: I mean, but somehow you're still on the money. Danielle Urban: Hopefully. Right. I think what's interesting now and again, like everything has changed. Um, and it's still a challenge like to get help from AI on things like this. And I'm gonna I'm gonna show you what. Like this is where the human domain expertise is still like highly valuable. Um, and as I was asking for help to update uh this page, right? Tagline options: AI Native business transformation, HubSpot platform architecture. Clean searchable, covers both lanes. Relationships over transactions, architecture over work arounds. Philosophy forward, differentiating. Your business isn't broken, your operating model is, we fix that. Challenger positioning from the SAS apocalypse work. And I leaned, and so Claude's saying, I lean toward number one for LinkedIn since it's where people search by capability with the philosophy living in the about section. Uh, when I read that, I was like, while this may be true, are they searching for these capabilities? Like in these words? Like, probably not. Right? So before I went off, um, I I said like, you know, take the let's look through the lens of expected outcomes when making the choice. Uh, because I am biased in terms of thinking like, I'm throwing searchability and organic like out the window. I want through everything to give people resources like you like you said, like conversational. If you and Casey have the page to share with a post on it, Yeah. I want to I want to serve that moment because the active conversations moments are are what uh I think everybody needs to serve right now. Like that should be everybody's go-to-market strategy. Like are you in the place where the conversation's happening and can you add value? Yeah. Like when it's and when it's your turn to add value. Right. Right? Not just throwing at people. Um, so uh he he caught the drift here. Um, the expected outcome here is discoverability. Someone searching LinkedIn for HubSpot architecture or AI business transformation would surface this page. How often do people actually search LinkedIn company pages by capability keyword? Most discovery on LinkedIn happens through content in the feed, not company page search. Right? And I think it's super important uh to see these two different things like that we're trying to have conversations through our personal feeds. and this is kind of like a one confirmation that the business exists and is like real and doing things. Danielle Urban: Real, yeah. Chris Carolan: Like, you see the name over here, like, all right, let's click on it. Okay, they've got some posts. All right, yeah. Danielle Urban: Yeah, exactly. Chris Carolan: They've got employees. There's people following. All right. Like I'm not gonna dig dig much further. Yeah. Um, so the way I'm starting to explain it to folks is and that's the difference between like trying to build followers and like how you do that and like if you think about it like your email list, not saying that you should, but it is once you build up a follower account, it is like a, you know, as close as owned as you're gonna get like on a social company um related assets. But in the early days, like it organic and maybe ever unless you're one of the really, really good ones, like organic's not gonna drive anything. Um, so it's kind of like if you're trying to drive conversation, bring people back to your personal posts. Yeah. But if it's like if it's informational in nature, that's when you can share stuff from the company page because then they might click follow, but you're not trying to get comments or likes. And the challenge is when we don't like the lack of control over the personal profile pages, we try to get we try to post here and then like force anybody to share the company page posts. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Right. And it it's it doesn't it doesn't work. Danielle Urban: No, it doesn't because it doesn't show really what you stand for. I like thinking about the company page through a lens of validation because I I can only speak for myself and how I navigate LinkedIn. Like I'm not on their user experience team, but I scroll my feed, I interact with things on my feed. If I'm searching for something, it's probably somebody talking about something specific because I'm already working on it and I wanna interact with the person in sort of a collaborative work way, or I'm looking for a specific person or specific company. I'm not searching like HubSpot agencies. Like it's just not a thing I will do. That's not how you use LinkedIn. Um, and maybe someone I would love for someone to challenge me on that and say like, no, I found my best partners on LinkedIn. Like we found all these companies that we work with now who've been fantastic, but I just don't think that happens. So the best thing that you can use your company page for is let it exist as validation. Show your posts about case studies or what you've worked on, but that really should just be the personal stories of people that do it, too. Like it's it's a showcase page. It's just a second web page for you. Like your website is essentially the same thing. I know once I get to most company pages, I might just like scroll the employees to see who else I know there and then click over to their website and that's really all it's good for. And like you said, is it real? Like, is there anything posted there? How long has it been there? And it's just validation. And so if we let the value adding come from the individuals, then it's it's legitimate, it's not AI slop and it's a genuine attempt at adding value because like you were saying, if it's personal, if it's timely, um, if you're actively engaging in conversations and not just pushing out, you know, engagement bait, then that's how people get to know you. It's that sort of genuine growth of, you know, getting to know the people first and the problems you solve, and then it's very easy to build on top of that and build the brand awareness. Until you get a whole lot of money and then you can just go nuts. Chris Carolan: Um, for those that don't have a whole lot of money. Which is us. Chris Carolan: Yeah, it's it's really embracing like how social works, right? Like it's right it's right in the name. And when people are searching for help on LinkedIn, they're posting to their feeds. Right. And like if they do post and like, hey, anybody know who can help me with Hubspot, guess what? You're gonna get 182 comments. Avalanche of individual profiles and maybe sometimes company from what? Like and and we saw this early on and always made it a point like profoundly and I'm I'm so glad we stuck to that. Like, yeah, there's a bunch of different forms of help that you can get in the ecosystem, including everything from individual like coaches and consultants to elite agencies. And there's a reason that a big old business would wanna work with an elite agency. You just can't show up as a logo on the marketplace. Like that marketplace already exists in the HubSpot solutions marketplace. Plus we're trying to like people want other people Yeah. like to to help them even if it is in this big, you know, bigger format of help. Um, so that's what you see. And so when people are commenting on the feed or tagging everybody else, like the click is on the name of the person that was tagged, right? So that brings, you know, to their personal profile. So it's just not, right? Unless it's like a additive share um, or like you mentioned, a bridge to the website as like in this validation step, like it's hard to um, you know, you have to measure the page like completely differently. And almost for me, it's from an output perspective. Like, is the information there that we could share from the page like or not? Right? And so right now this week, um, like, I've got some some posts that are already used on the website. I'm going to make them post just for like an from an evergreen like content perspective, right? Which is completely different from how most people think about uh, you know, social. Um, so as I was sharing just like, I wanna get your thoughts. Um, as we unbox the scoring app last week, right? We've got these two things. And we were mentioning early on like earlier today, like custom events is now at pro. Yes, I'm so excited. Um, buying groups is coming down to pro. The prospecting agent is getting smarter and being able to use stuff like intent signals. and going find people. Like it's never been I don't wanna say easy. Uh, that the the whole picture of your buyers and your prospects, your audience, people that you want to build relationships with. It's never been more accessible. Yeah. Like to to get that data and then bring it into your system and paint that picture, right? But it it takes work and this is why I have the screen up, right? Like this is in the social or in the the scoring tool. Yeah. Um, where, you know, I have uh a social score, an event that I've chosen and then I've chosen social interaction and now we can get like interaction type, direct message, mention, share, comment. Yeah. Uh conditions score individually, right? Intense signals. If you click on this, there is a ton of stuff within these things. Danielle Urban: Wow. So like, I guess look at all these signals. Crazy. Where would you start somebody? Like if they came and they were showing you like, look, we've gotten this far, we know that there is gold inside of like it's on social, the intent signals are coming into HubSpot, help us make sense of it. Danielle Urban: Yeah. Um, that's a good question. I think there are a lot of options because you can you can build this out and refine this all day long. I think what you have already is a good baseline and then you just tweak and refine and go from here because the output of this is you get a number assigned to some names inside of your HubSpot. So you can focus on this for weeks and come up with the perfect scoring model, um, that will never actually be perfect because people are people, and you can't put them in boxes. And then the sort of next step of using that, I'm going through this with a client right now, is like, let's get this as good as we can and then understand what the next steps are and what we're trying to accomplish with this. And what my client wants to accomplish is just efficient sales outreach. They wanna make sure that the people they're reaching out to are the ones likeliest to close at the highest revenue amount. And so in order to do that, we have to layer in other pieces like who also has purchased previously, what was their purchasing behavior? Um, and then filter that out so that we can sort of group those people separately and and tier them, um, or potentially build that back into the model in a a different way than we currently have it. But there's still sort of a research step that needs to happen next because if you as a business owner trying to now sell these sell services to the people that are popping up with high scores because they have high intent, because they've interacted with your social content, the next step is like who are they? Because they still could be someone who wants to work for you. They still could be a competitor. And so there's a step and that's maybe where I have a bit of a blind spot on like, could we use prospecting agent? Could we use some kind of uh an AI research tool within HubSpot to give us some of those answers? Like what what could this person be to me? Are they actually a potential client or are they something else? And that that's very difficult to discern and sometimes you even just need to get into the conversation to see what happens. Um, but nailing down what those next steps are like, is it, does it mean that you have a an outreach email that you trigger? Is that something you want a human in the loop for? Because you wanna do that research step manually or do you want the research step to happen by AI and then have a message that gets customized based on that research step and then it sent automatically. Personally, I'm more people biased than AI biased, which works against me in some cases, but I think in this one, like, it gives you that moment to pause and say, this person could be ready to buy today or they could be trying to work for me and I just need to figure out how to discern that and then what I wanna do with them. And it's probably just a conversation. Chris Carolan: Yeah. Um, yeah, I think AI is just like, I don't think we can get away with individual like metrics and scores and like I was just talking about social specifically in this in this conversation, but like when trying to do that outside of the larger context of the whole story that you need to be looking at. This is a sneak peek of uh presentation I'm about to jump over with Casey and give. Um, but the end of the presentation is like, we try to build stuff. We tried to build so much complexity like into the scoring. When really the complexity comes from the views. Yes. Right? So in terms of the unified customer view and you don't have to figure it all out at once. Yeah. Like, when we're looking at those at these these scoring options, it's literally like, can we sit in a room and be like, which one matters to you guys? Yeah. Right? Like, and it can be one at a time. Right? So like what if you saw like regular regulatory approval right next to like a social comment about that regulatory approval right next to the the uh, like the web website views, right? Like instead of trying to, you know, beast meal this all together in here and then put it into like this number, right? Which is gonna be like, guess what the team does anyways. They click into that number to try and understand all of these things. Yeah. Right? And if you just put it like this is the magic of Hubspot right now. Like if you can get here, all of these things can exist, like insights from these things can exist on a single pane, single pane of glass, right? It just takes a bit of strategic work and understanding, conversation with the team to get everybody in the room and aligned on, you know, who's a fit and who's not, all the classic conversations. Um, but I'm pretty excited. Never in my life would I've imagined doing a presentation about scoring. But here we are. I guess this is how how we move the needle is is um, you know, again, get involved in the conversation. Yeah. Uh, but um so thank you for helping me think through uh some of these LinkedIn LinkedIn metrics and uh make me feel not crazy for trying to push things differently. Um, still the same that the points are made up and none of it matters, but. Chris Carolan: Right. Which is like there is a comment on like a post awake up customer platform uh last week that uh I have been having tech issues and had not been able to like use the the theme song at the beginning and end of the show. And somebody posted, I missed the theme song. I love waking up to that every day. Like measure that, okay? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so those are the moments that that I'm working for here and I think everybody else should be, too. Um, uh, so until next time, we're gonna we're gonna keep after it. We're gonna keep helping you tell this this measurement story. Um, so thanks so much. Glad to have you back, Danielle. We'll see you next week. Danielle Urban: See you next week.