Jasz Joseph: The momentum that we’re able to build is just unparalleled. Whenever we have all of this data is just. Here’s exactly what’s working from a sales and revenue standpoint, and here’s exactly what’s not working, let’s cut all of this out and move all of our efforts over to these campaigns that are working, that is huge.

Jeremy Balius: Welcome to Go to Market Playmakers, where we bring you winning go-to market strategies from the industry’s best. Each episode we sit down with B2B Tech and SaaS founders, executives, and industry Playmakers who’ve mastered the art of taking products and services to market. Whether you’re scaling a startup, refining your go-to market motion, or driving revenue growth through a channel program or partner ecosystem, this is where you’ll learn the plays that work.

I’m your host, Jeremy Balius. Today’s theme is HubSpot Marketing Operations, how to align your Rev Ops systems for Effective Go-to Market. I’m very excited because I’m joined by Jasz Rae Joseph today from Jasz Rae Digital. Jasz is a revenue strategist and HubSpot expert who helps B2B teams streamline their marketing and sales systems for real and measurable growth.

She’s got a decade of experience spanning SEO client strategy operations. She founded her consultancy some years ago to support scaling teams in getting more from the systems themselves. This is a fantastic conversation to really go deep into marketing operations and its role within businesses. The way that marketing operations needs to control how all of the teams and the data talks to each other as you are going to market together.

So really dispelling this. Marketing is doing this and sales is doing this and customer success is doing this, but really unifying and looking to understand how do we build a foundation of data with which we can get better visibility on our activity as well as spotting opportunity. We cover a lot of ground.

I hope you get as much value from this as I did. Let’s get straight into it.

Hey Jasz. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.

I am really excited to have you here. I’m really excited about what we’re talking about today. So, uh, we’re gonna be getting into HubSpot Marketing Operations. We’re gonna go deep on aligning rev ops and how to align with effective go to market. Before we dive into the deep end, I’d love to hear your origin story.

How did you get to where you are today?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, absolutely. So I spent my career working for big HubSpot Diamond platinum partner agencies and started my own marketing agency about four and a half years ago. And we were really a full-service agency for years. And as of the past year, year and a half, as you know, I don’t have to tell you, the market has shifted quite a bit.

With the rise of AI, the drop of organic reach, and I felt like we needed to shift to better serve our clients. We just weren’t seeing those huge wins on the content marketing side that we had been seeing four years ago. And where we were seeing wins was in this HubSpot support sales enablement, rev, rev ops world. So we really decided to lean in there. I always had clients in that space because it was my background. I worked for HubSpot agencies for years, but within the past year and a half, we’ve really decided to double down on that piece of the puzzle for our clients, and we’ve just been seeing these huge wins and we’ve been able to run and grow with it.

Jeremy Balius: That is awesome. Love the, reaction to, the shift in market. As we’re getting into marketing operations, I’d love to find out about your view on why that might be the unsung hero.

Jasz Joseph: Hmm. Yes. marketing operations is the infrastructure that really holds everything together. And so I like to think of it as that glue that pulls in marketing, that pulls in sales, that oftentimes pulls in customer services, the tech, the tech people, the developers, whoever needs to be pulled in to really get everything together. A lot of the times I’ll say, that should be foundational work. Sometimes it doesn’t happen at the beginning and it has to happen on the backend, but it’s that really foundational work for lead routing, attribution, workflows, reporting the things that you need to really be able to make good data-driven decisions, and so you’re not flying blind.

Jeremy Balius: Do you think there’s a common view held that that comes straight out the box? Or why is it misunderstood that marketing operations is its own thing?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, great question. So I think whenever you say comes out of the box, I think oftentimes we just assume that teams either will work together or one tool I. That kind of ties them all together is going to make it happen. But really there is that human piece of the puzzle where you need a marketing operations professional or a director of revenue, somebody high up to really say, we need to tie all of this together.

We need to loop in leadership and make sure that they have visibility. We need to make sure. Marketing is bringing the right leads to sales and tracking that and understanding that, and we need to make sure that sales is selling and then getting customer service. That information. There’s so much backend work that needs to happen that it really ends up needing to be it’s own defined role.

Jeremy Balius: You think that that role’s success is based on systems management and understanding, uh, how the business, uh, and its go to market ties together internally so as to make this work.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, 100%. So this is not a one size fits all thing. And that’s why a lot of times in my own sales process, you know, I’m going up against other HubSpot agencies and I struggle to call myself an agency. ’cause really I function as a fractional, embedded part of. A marketing or sales or both team, and to your point, I think that’s so important because this work is not one size fits all.

You really have to deep dive into what are we selling, who are we selling it to? What messaging do they need to hear? Where are they hanging out? How can we speak to them correctly? There’s so much backend that needs to happen to understand what you need from your sales process, and then you’re able to build the systems, the tech, the tools to support that.

Jeremy Balius: I love that. From your own personal point of view, you know, we, we tend to think of marketing as brand and campaigns and outreach and demand, gen and conversions. What is it about the ops side that inspires you?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, so I have always been super, super ROI driven. I mean, whenever I shared my origin story with you, your first question, I was like, my clients weren’t seeing the results that they needed, and I had to figure out how to get them those results. And so I

Jeremy Balius: Hmm.

Jasz Joseph: struggled with calling myself like a true traditional marketer because it was really hard for me to do the branding, the.

Content just for the sake of like sounding nice and looking pretty to me, I always was focused on revenue. I’m very financially driven, right? I think all entrepreneurs are, you have to be to succeed in this world. And um, so that’s really. My sweet spot in my own business with my clients is understanding those numbers and doing that backwards math to say, where are you at from a revenue standpoint?

Where do you wanna be from a revenue standpoint? What is your average close rate? What’s your average order value? How many leads do we need to bring in in order to make all of this happen? And really doing that backwards math to understand, here’s what marketing needs to contribute. Here’s what sales needs to contribute so that we can hit these growth and revenue goals.

Jeremy Balius: So you’ve got this financial mindedness, you’ve got this systems mindset. You’re ROI driven, you’re data driven, and you’ve got all this exposure and experience , coming into businesses of all shapes and sizes as you step in and, and either going through some type of, let’s say a HubSpot audit maybe, or as you’re a.

Assessing the lay of the land, what are some of the most common mistakes that you’re finding within either HubSpot platforms or in in go-to market teams?

Jasz Joseph: The number one is dirty data. I see it all day, every day. Um, it, it looks different for different teams, but it all boils down to the same thing. Oftentimes they’ll say, we don’t trust the data that’s in HubSpot. Oftentimes that looks like email deliverability issues because we’re sending to, you know, email addresses that we haven’t vetted. Oftentimes that ends up showing up in the HubSpot bill of we’re paying for all of these contacts that we’re not using because we don’t know which contacts are good and which contacts are bad. So we just keep them all in the CRM. So that is a huge mistake that I see all the time. Another mistake that I see, I always say HubSpot is an incredibly robust tool, which is a blessing and a curse.

So oftentimes I see clients in one of two boats, either they are barely scraping the surface in HubSpot, so they have this amazing, robust tool and they’re using it as a glorified, you know, email marketing platform. They’re sending a newsletter, they’re sending some sales emails. They’re just not using it to its full capacity. Or the flip side of side of that bit off way more than I can chew, and I’m trying to use all of the bells and whistles inside HubSpot, and now I’m overwhelmed. I’m not actually using any of them correctly or appropriately, and I don’t really know what’s going on. So I, I generally see clients falling in one of those two buckets and really.

The ideal case is we crawl, walk, run, right? Let’s start by utilizing the features that are gonna get you the strongest ROI that you need right now, and then let’s allow HubSpot to grow with you and continue to onboard to new features and roll out new campaigns and become a more robust sales marketing, revenue operations organization.

Jeremy Balius: You tend to find, uh, uh. Potential difference in who owns HubSpot within a company, and do you need to have robust discussions around who’s gonna own this to ensure clean data and the systems are in place and are actively reviewed over time.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, 100%. Oftentimes there is one human being who owns HubSpot, and it depends. Sometimes that’s a marketing person. Oftentimes that’s a marketing person. I. Um, sometimes it’s more of a rev ops director role, but what I see a lot is they leave the company and now somebody new has come in and oftentimes it’s not even that HubSpot is a mess.

It’s just that, like I said earlier. HubSpot can be customized so much to meet your needs that if you don’t understand what’s happening in there, it can appear to be a mess to you. And then you have to understand, do I rebuild? Do I jump in and try to understand all of these jumbled workflows and custom properties and all of these things? And so that’s why not only setting up these systems and processes is important, but also documentation and full team. Onboarding and buy-in. The other side of that is oftentimes, again, I usually see HubSpot being owned by the marketing team, more so than the sales team, we need to be onboarding our sales reps to HubSpot because if marketing is living in HubSpot and we don’t have that closed loop reporting to understand what’s happening with these leads. What’s happening with these deals? Are they closing? Are they not closing? Are they big deals? Are they small deals? Then we cannot be as effective as we need to be. We need to have both teams actively working in HubSpot so we can have that closed loop reporting

Jeremy Balius: In that scenario, do you think that it becomes marketing’s responsibility to train sales or what’s the best scenario there?

Jasz Joseph: That’s a good question. I mean, I, I think best case scenario is you bring in an expert, whether that’s whether that’s a fractional expert, someone like me, whether that is more of a leadership role, like a director of Revenue operations, a head of revenue, a chief revenue officer, whatever title you wanna give that person.

But I think it needs to be somebody who can speak to and play to both sides. I don’t think it should be marketing, training, sales. I think it has to be somebody who’s one step removed, whether that is IE leadership or somebody who comes in as a fractional consultant, to be able to speak to marketing and speak to sales and understand the pain points, understand their roles, and then be able to bring that together into a cohesive strategy that works for everybody.

Jeremy Balius: That really resonates with me, particularly when the knowledge has left the business and it’s been taken over and it’s being used because it’s just always has been, but it’s only within one part of the business. Bringing the outside ability to guide it forward I think is fantastic.

Let’s say you’re stepping into the business to help unify your all of the go to market teams onto HubSpot. Marketing’s been using it. Sales hasn’t been. In what ways would you talk to sales team members about how they benefit and stand to gain from changing habits and transforming the way that they track deal flow inside HubSpot’s deals?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, so the first thing that I will say is a lot of this is able to happen in the background for you. So sales teams often get intimidated whenever I come in and I say, you have to onboard to this new tool. You have to start using a CRM. The truth of the matter is a lot of the work that I do is setting up their calendar, setting up their email so that a lot of their outreach and their work can be being tracked in the background so that they don’t have to constantly be inside HubSpot tracking all of these things, jotting all of these things down.

A lot of the sequences that my team will set up. Will actually help them do outreach again in the background so that they can really focus on prospecting and relationship building and true selling. So I always like to come in and position it in that way because really we are here to a, help the sales team and save them time. A lot of people will just tell me, I feel like I need to I feel like I need to hire for sales people. is maxed out and we’re not. Getting as many sales

And I always caution them, before you hire more salespeople, make sense to invest in CRM automation, sales enablement so that your salespeople can work better way.

But then from an actual salesperson standpoint, how does it benefit them? The visibility is huge because. Again with some of these new products that we’re talking about. I know Jeremy, you work with a lot of teams who are a new product into the market. And so with that, a lot of times we don’t have a deep understanding of the sales cycle, and you have a lot of pressure from leadership to sell, sell, sell, but that sales cycle might take longer than we originally anticipated.

When you have a tool like HubSpot Hub, able to really showcase that in a data-driven data, so you’re able to say, here’s all the outreach that I’ve been outreach.

Here’s what it’s resulting. Here’s the average time it takes from outreach to close deal so that you can build that and really extend that to leadership so they can better understand your, it takes off, pressure, especially a brand new.

Jeremy Balius: I really appreciate the way that you’re articulating that, particularly because despite HubSpot being fairly mature at this point and in the market, and you know, they’re advancing very fast with.

Um, uh, especially this year with, with the different directions they’ve taken with AI enablement within the system. But, there’s still, I find a view in the market that HubSpot is the CRM and that HubSpot is just the tool as you were talking about. but you’re articulating that this is so much more than CRM administration.

How do you educate and upsell that internally within a business to leadership who are made up of non-marketing executives?

Jasz Joseph: It really is an all-in-one tool. So the visibility is the biggest ROI that you get from HubSpot. So as soon as you know, marketing puts out a campaign that’s in HubSpot, you can see all the data on that campaign. I. That campaign starts converting leads. All of those leads are in HubSpot, and that handoff to sales is seamless because sales can immediately open up that contact record and understand exactly where that lead came from, what marketing messaging they’ve seen, so that they can understand what attracted them and how to start to have that sales conversation.

Right. A lot of times whenever we’re talking about a go-to market strategy, we have several campaigns running. We have several different pain points. We’re kind of, you know, for lack of a better term, throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what will stick. So whenever sales can come in and really understand.

This is the ad they saw that converted them. Okay, here’s the specific pain point that they are suffering from. Let me use that in the sales cycle to better sell to them. And then of course, from a leadership perspective, to have all of that visibility is just amazing. You can understand exactly what marketing’s doing, how many leads they’re driving. How they’re being passed off to sales, what sales is doing with those leads, and you can understand where those holes and bottlenecks are, what’s working, what’s not working, what we can double down on, what we can cut. There’s so much data in there from a leadership perspective that just helps you get ahead.

Jeremy Balius: Tell me a bit more about what it’s like with leaders who originally understand, Hey, we need to do something, but they don’t really understand what’s possible and. They go through a process of working with you and it you start unifying teams and centralizing data, and they’re getting more visibility.

Tell me a bit more around, once they start seeing what is possible at a foundation, uh, what are the, what’s a, the response like, and then b, where do they like to take things next in their excitement for what’s possible?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, the momentum that we’re able to build whenever we have all of this data is just. So whenever I’m able to come in and say, here’s exactly what’s working from a sales and revenue standpoint, and here’s exactly what’s not working, let’s cut all of this out and gen and move all of our efforts over to these campaigns that are working, these outreach sequences that are working, that is huge.

That’s second to none. And so that really is the biggest driver. I’ll give you an example. I was working with a client in 2024. They came to me and it was a very similar story to what I was sharing earlier. They were like, our sales team is maxed out, but we have big growth goals. We have big revenue goals, and. We don’t know what we need to be they originally came to marketing agency. They were like, I think we I think we need more marketing. I think leads. And I was like,

I was able to assess everything that they have going on in HubSpot. And I was like I was saying before, which campaigns were working well for them, which pain points were resonating with that target audience.

And then we to build outreach sequences because. They had all of this data in HubSpot. Again, I wouldn’t quite call it dirty data in their case, but they had this huge CRM full of leads and they didn’t really know where these people had come from, right? This is a company that is 20 plus years old.

They didn’t know who was marketing to these people. They, they just kind of had all these contacts. Sitting in there and their sales team was maxed out. So we were able to come in and build these outreach sequences, start nurturing all of these contacts that were already in their database, and those contacts started replying to those nurturing sequences.

We immediately passed them off to sales and it ended up resulting in an extra million dollars in revenue. For them in 2024, just from those sequences alone. So just from that background work that we were doing on the salespeople’s behalf.

Jeremy Balius: That’s incredible. And it really goes to show the power of, well, firstly follow up, but secondly, understanding. What is already in your sphere? You know, I think often teams are just so focused on net new that they don’t understand what is already within their, um, their opportunity, um, sitting in their database.

Jasz Joseph: Definitely. Yeah. I think we live, we live in this instant gratification culture, right? Where we just immediately want something to happen, and I think oftentimes as salespeople, we fall trapped to that. I. Where we try to sell, it doesn’t work out for whatever reason, and then we just consider them, you know, a dead lead.

And oftentimes that’s not the case. Oftentimes that need is still there. It just wasn’t the right time. They didn’t have the budget, whatever. But if we continue to nurture and speak to them and check in with them, enroll them in our outreach campaigns, those, that’s all potential revenue, that’s just sitting in your CRM not being touched.

Jeremy Balius: I’m gonna get personal for a sec. My absolute unequivocal favorite part of HubSpot is lead scoring. Tell me about how you approach lead scoring with, uh, sales teams and marketing teams. I.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, great

Jeremy Balius: Great.

Jasz Joseph: So lead scoring again is very, very personal. So it is not a one size fits all, which I think is what makes it so great. I. And it’s really twofold, in my opinion, there is the fit piece of the puzzle, right? So we’re talking industry, job title, size of company, whatever. Are they the right fit? But then the other piece that I think often gets forgotten is intent. So how many times have they visited your website?

Are they interacting with your email campaigns? Are they clicking on your ad campaigns? What’s going on with these people? Are they showcasing intent? I. so whenever you pair those two, it becomes a really magical way to lead score.

And kind of like what we were before, if we are lead scoring all of the contacts in your CRM, you would be shocked at the ones that will just randomly jump to the top, right? Somebody you haven’t sometimes years will all of a sudden they were a good fit. Maybe you tried to sell to them years ago, it didn’t work out. But when we have not only fit, but also intent as a part of our lead scoring.

Once they they’ve been on website times this week. Oh, they’re clicking on our emails all of the sudden, oh, they’re interacting with our social campaigns, whatever it they’ve jumped to the top of the list and we can tell sales, Hey, let’s prioritize this person.

Let’s reach out to them. Let’s give them a call. Let’s reconnect. Have lunch with them. Whatever it because they’re thinking about this.

Jeremy Balius: Absolutely. Um, tell me about how, and this is, I’m asking this because it’s always hotly debated. Uh, what’s your view on ascribing scores to actions or activities? And this is where I’ve seen, uh, uh, lots of discussion around should this be one point, should that be three points? Should that be, be keen to understand?

What’s your view on assigning scores to actions?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah. When you say actions, do you mean like what I was saying with like email opens,

Jeremy Balius: Totally. Yeah. Yeah. So how much is an email open worth against, uh, content Download Against Attend, attended a webinar.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, great question. So again, I think this is going to vary company to company, and this is where if you’re using your CRM, your HubSpot appropriately, you can look back on that data.

So you can say, let’s pull our top. deals from this year so far, and let’s look and see what did those people interact with, and then we can use that data to then inform our future data. Um, so that, that’s how I generally do it. I don’t think that there’s a one size fits all.

Of course, we can generally say top of the funnel activities, middle of the funnel activities, bottom of the funnel activities, right? Clicking on a social post is not going to weigh as high as. viewing the request a quote page, but also to your point, I think that we can tie in some of those deeper marketing pieces, even specific webinars.

Maybe it’s not a one size fits all for webinars, but this webinar actually scores higher than this webinar because we know that our top sales from last year all watched this one webinar.

Jeremy Balius: Totally. I find it so powerful in that, as you were talking before about activities taking place behind the scenes, enabling sales and non-marketing execs to understand that activities taking place without leads being spoken to or. Particularly individually pursued in ABM style campaign, but activities taking place that you’re currently not monitoring.

And the lead scoring to my mind really shifts marketing operations and HubSpot into that revenue enablement because they can, the conversations they start having based on those lead scoring means, as you said. Sales team, speaking to hand raisers to people who are showing intent, and it is so deeply powerful.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, and what a dream as a salesperson, right? Like you don’t wanna be talking to the people who have never heard of you and having to hard sell them

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Jasz Joseph: you could have a plate of warm leads just serve to you who have been on your website five times this week and are just dying to pick up your call.

Jeremy Balius: Absolutely. It’s so phenomenal. this is a, this is a really good point. You’ve said this before, and you were alluding to it earlier, the statement tools aren’t strategy. Tell me more about that. Yes,

Jasz Joseph: Yes, so It’s so important to have a strategy in place before you try to bring in your tools, and it’s also so important to customize your tools to meet your strategy. yes, you can use HubSpot outside of the box companies do it.

It works kind of, but if you want to really grow your business and have a sophisticated sales and marketing program, it’s so important to first figure out your sales and marketing strategy outside of any tools and then. Purchase the tool tools.

I, I even worry about saying tools because I think it’s so easy to kind of hope for a magic pill and purchase all of these different tools. So really try to create a lean tech stack that is customized to exactly meet what your team needs in order to market and sell in the best way that they can.

Jeremy Balius: Do you find yourself involved in that process or are you tending to, uh, come into an organization where they’ve already made the decision on the tools and you are assessing, okay, well, where to from here based on whether those tools are being used or not, and whether there’s a strategy in place or not?

Jasz Joseph: It’s honestly a mixture of both. It

Jeremy Balius: Okay.

Jasz Joseph: depends. I, I work on both sides of the fence. I think it depends on the age of the company. It depends on their level of sophistication and their needs, but both can happen as long as we’re leading with strategy.

If you already have a tool and it needs to be optimized to meet your strategy, and you’re trying to figure out tool to onboard to that strategy

I think the messiness play when you just trying to use that tool without first understanding how do we market and how do we sell to our customers?

Jeremy Balius: Is that where you would start? If the tools there, and we’ll start with a second, uh, example, the tools there. This is a HubSpot customer. They’ve onboarded, they’re doing stuff, but they also recognize shortcomings. How do you advise them to start? Is it, is it strategy first, always.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, so sometimes it’s just a matter of documenting the strategy that they already have in place

Jeremy Balius: Okay.

Jasz Joseph: overcomplicating it. I will also say, I think it’s really exciting when you have a robust and complex tool like HubSpot. To do all the things and use all the bells and whistles, but admittedly, that’s usually not the best way to go about it.

Usually keeping it simple is the best way to onboard your team to it, to make it work for you, and then once your team is using it regularly. We can optimize and we can iterate, but I think a stumbling block that happens a lot is, oh, we can have 10 deal stages, so we should have 10 deal stages, right? Like, let’s put every possible outcome that could ever happen with this deal into the pipeline. And then things get really messy, and then we wonder, why isn’t the sales team adopting this? Why don’t we have clean data? You know? We start asking ourselves all of these questions, and if we keep it simple from the beginning, have them onboard, have them start using it, and then have regular check-ins where we say what’s working, what’s not working?

We can always add and iterate on that.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. I love the focus on simplicity.

Jasz Joseph: Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Balius: Um, okay. Number of deal stages. Are there other signs of where a company’s over-engineered their process or their HubSpot?

Jasz Joseph: Custom properties is another one I see

Jeremy Balius: Okay.

Jasz Joseph: We

Jeremy Balius: Hmm.

Jasz Joseph: a million properties in HubSpot. Some of them are duplicate. I was in a portal earlier, earlier today where we had, I. Industry. And then we had industry name. Those were two different properties. Like why, why are we doing this? Um, so I see that all the time.

And oftentimes that can co stem from what we talked about before where somebody else used to own HubSpot. Somebody new came in. And now they’re everything. Or a lot of stems from, we created a form for an event that we had years ago and we had all these custom properties for the form, but now we’ve never used that form again.

We’ve never had that event again. And they’re all just still living in HubSpot, taking up space, confusing our team. And so that’s another one that I see all the time.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if there’s a. Uh, over engineering of admin as well potentially. Um, do you see where in, in the exuberance of wanting to control sales teams, that, that they suffer as a result of having too many tasks being generated within the portal for each contact?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, definitely. Oftentimes it can stem from that. Oftentimes you just need to make cleanup a priority,

Jeremy Balius: Okay.

Jasz Joseph: sometimes that means outsourcing it as well and working with, you know, a company who specializes in that, or a consultant, a team that can help you with that. Um, I know with all of our client retainers, we have regular data cleanup on a weekly basis just to make sure, because sales and marketing leaders admittedly, should not be cleaning up data, right?

Like their brains should be going to much bigger things. So if that means outsourcing that, if that means just adding it to your to-do list every Monday. Um, we have workflows in place for all of our clients to catch kind of the thing that regularly happened for them. It’s all unique to them, but, um, yeah, it’s, it’s data.

Cleanup is a beast, but if you can get your portal to a good place and then have honestly weekly check-ins where you’re regularly cleaning, it saves you so much headache in the long run, and it really does make. Everything just so much better. A, your HubSpot bill is lower. You’re not paying for a bunch of stuff that you don’t need. B, your sales team feel, and your marketing team feels incredibly confident in your data. They can open up a record. They can understand what’s happening. They can reach out to them. They’re not worried, is this the wrong phone number? Is this the wrong email? Is this person even still at this company? Like we’re not dealing with any of that.

We are just truly doing our job selling. I.

Jeremy Balius: That’s really good advice. You mentioned earlier in the conversation, uh, around, uh, lead passing, uh, from marketing to sales and having that handover process. How do you get the handover right, such that there isn’t pushback from sales, that marketing’s just shifting. Lifecycle stages arbitrarily, that these are meaningful leads.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah,

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Jasz Joseph: question. There’s a variety of different ways that we can go about that. One, which I know you brought up, is lead scoring. So lead scoring is fantastic. If we can to a specific data point to say this is why they are in your court, because they have hit these criteria. That we have mutually agreed upon, right?

If we can get sales and marketing in the same room and say, what does an amazing sales qualified lead look like? Great, let’s document that. Let’s get it out there. That’s always a huge win in my book. Um, the other piece is some of those automated outreach campaigns. So a lot of times if we don’t have automation and outreach campaigns into place, we run into that problem where marketing says, okay, it

This one looks like it’s ready. Let’s pass it off to sales. And then sales is going, eh, I don’t know. This one’s not like really ready. And there’s no middle ground. And so those outreach campaigns can be a really beautiful middle ground where in an automated way, the salesperson is reaching out to that lead and they’re being nurtured through the system, but the salesperson themselves is not doing any manual work to reach out to that lead.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, fascinating. ’cause that would immediately, I think, shut down this whole, we’ve had 200 downloads of our ebook. These are 200 SQLs and sales is saying. They’ve never heard of us. They don’t know. They don’t even remember downloading this. What are we supposed to do with this? And it sounds like your process has an engagement phase to further qualify, um, as effectively the handover, it sounds like.

Jasz Joseph: Definitely I want sales teams selling. I maybe a little prospecting, right? We’ll do a little prospecting and we’ll do a lot of selling. All of that middle ground, like, let me take that off your plate. You should not be doing outreach, you should not be doing nurturing, you should not be doing these touch points, these check-ins.

All of that should be happening in the background for you.

Jeremy Balius: That’s gotta sound like music to some of these teams. Awesome. hey, You mentioned before around tools and, next shiny object. I think you, you used the phrase, um. a, a magic tool. Do you think that within a HubSpot, that there is this continued looking for other plugins to drop in third party tools and that there’s this constant ballooning of types of tools that are plugged into the HubSpot that have been over-engineered?

Jasz Joseph: I think it happens. Yes. I think it happens less with HubSpot than it does with other CRMs. So is such a robust tool. I hate calling it a CRM because it’s a CRM, it’s marketing automation, it’s customer service. It’s your CMS, right? It’s all of these things. It’s, it’s its own beast. Um, but because it does so much, I think there is a less of a need for integration than oftentimes if you’re using other tools or if you’re using a separate CRM separate marketing automation tool, a separate CMS, and they’re not all speaking to each other, Um, it does happen and I definitely see it. A lot of times it comes from a lack of education. So if you bring in someone who doesn’t know HubSpot super well, but they know other marketing, sales service tools, their default is let me use the tools that I know and integrate them with HubSpot. Sometimes that works.

Sometimes it gets clunky. I will say HubSpot has an amazing app ecosystem you’re able to see, which are certified by HubSpot, which are not certified by HubSpot. You can see reviews of other people who have integrated those apps and so you can understand what the gaps are, what’s working, what’s not working. So they set you up for success as best they can, but of course it absolutely happens where, you know, sometimes you walk into a portal and it’s, it’s speaking to everything and it doesn’t need to be.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, right, exactly. Especially when the foundation isn’t even rock solid yet.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, exactly right. If we’re not utilizing all the tools that HubSpot has to offer, then I really struggle with integrating brand new tools and making them now speak to HubSpot. It just, yeah, it gets very messy very quickly.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, there’s been a massive shift within HubSpot and their own go to market around their AI integration and enablement, and I guess that reflects the broader market as well. And, the, the broader conversation that’s happening in the market. For teams that are asking you about AI and HubSpot, how do you respond?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, it’s all about staying ahead and understanding the AI tools, knowing what they do, but I think just like we talked about with the integrations, we have to be really strategic about which AI tools we’re onboarding to and why. Having that rock solid sales and marketing strategy in place and using that as our North Star to say, does this. Is this a bright, shiny object that we’re excited about testing out? Or is this AI tool something that is truly going to help the needle help move the needle toward our previously defined revenue goals towards our previously defined sales and marketing goals? Um, just like all. Really AI tools right now.

Everything needs to be double checked. Everything needs to be run through some kind of quality assurance. I don’t feel incredibly confident in any of these AI tools right now. Everything needs to be walked through a human right. If we’re having AI write your webpage for you, I think that’s an amazing place to start. I don’t think that we should immediately push publish if we’re having AI enrich your data for you. I think that’s amazing. But let’s take a peek at it. Let’s give it a gut check. Does that make sense? Is that where that company is headquartered? Is that person in that role? Right. Let’s you know we can’t just o onboard or off board, excuse me, everything over to ai, which I think it’s really easy to do because we’re all very busy. And at this point, nine times out of 10, it produces really great stuff, but it’s that 1% chance that it doesn’t, that can really tarnish your brand or really get you in a sticky situation from a sales standpoint.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, I think that’s really good feedback, particularly in the way that you’re describing the state of the data within the business. Even in the first instance not being clean, and I think you were really articulate around the rigor required to keep it clean, that it’s not a. Single project done and dusted it.

This is an ongoing, iterative priority within the business. And if you’re plugging AI into dirty data, what is it gonna be based on? It’s gonna be based on what it can find and, and, uh, uh, it will lead to disastrous outcomes, especially if you’re opening it up to the, to the customer or the prospect.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, exactly. No, that’s a great call

Jeremy Balius: a.

Jasz Joseph: I think it’s whether it’s inside HubSpot. Outside of HubSpot, AI is only as good as the prompts or the data that you give it, the information that you give it, and so I. In all aspects. Again, inside, outside of HubSpot. If you are able to provide AI with really strong data or really strong brand guidelines, really strong insight into what you want, it can produce really amazing results for you.

If you want it to be a magic bandaid, fix all for you. Unfortunately, we’re not there yet. Maybe, maybe soon.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah, I don’t know if we’ll ever at this point, I mean, I’m, I’m thinking of scenarios where Rev ops teams get so excited about automating lead sourcing by way of other tools and plugging that into automatic. Cold email and nurture streams. And then it turns out none of that data was valid anyways. And none of these people work for those companies anymore.

And it’s just outta control. But it’s that, it’s that magic bullet that, that keeps people trying to pursue this,

Jasz Joseph: No, you’re so right. Yeah, 100%.

Jeremy Balius: Shifting gears into getting really practical for people. I’m thinking about my business. I’m using HubSpot. I’m probably, I probably know that I’m not getting the most out of it. What’s your advice? Where do I start with starting to think seriously about moving into a space where my whole business is running around this platform?

Jasz Joseph: Yeah, it’s a great question and one that is really challenging for me to answer because it’s not a one size fits all approach. I think it’s really important for you to work with a HubSpot expert or deeply understand the tool. Take the courses, do the certification. And again, cross reference that with your revenue goals and your strategy to understand which pieces of HubSpot are going to help move the needle the most.

For me, I do talk for a lot of groups about setting up your HubSpot CRM and getting started, and I offer a checklist and I always say, look at this checklist, and don’t start with the first thing on the list. Review the whole checklist. And understand which of these is going to most deeply move the needle for me, right?

What is my biggest pain point right now? Is it that I’m not following up with people? Is it that I don’t have visibility into my pipeline?

That my marketing and sales are not speaking to each other enough? I don’t have the integration between my campaigns. Like, what is that big pain point that’s really back?

Figure out the corresponding HubSpot tool. Set that up. Get really, really good at that. Onboard your team to it. Onboard your content campaigns, whatever fully, fully, set it up, feel amazing about it, then move on to the next thing, right?

We don’t wanna bite off more that we more than we can chew, which is so easy to do with a really robust tool like HubSpot. And so if you can figure out your biggest pain point, figure out exactly what inside HubSpot is going to help with that pain point, set that up and become an expert at that. Onboard your team, get amazing at it. Then move on to the next thing. That’s really my biggest advice for people.

Jeremy Balius: That is incredible advice. It is, it is profound to me, because the, most common denominator is to have the, the checklist download and, and to work your way through, but you’re effectively. Advising to think deeply about what are we trying to do here? And you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re really having, uh, leaders look to getting through what their inhibitors and challenges are, and then using the tool as an enabler to get your way through that, I think is very profound.

Jasz Joseph: Thank you.

Jeremy Balius: Ja, this has been so awesome. I, I really appreciate the way that you’re thinking about this, the way that you’re talking about marketing operations, the way that you’re really championing , its power ,, and it’s,, opportunity within businesses. Thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Jasz Joseph: Yeah.

Jeremy Balius: Yeah.

Jasz Joseph: so much. The time has just flown by. This was so much fun. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.