Welcome to HubShots Episode 285: HubSpot Form Options, Paid Channels Overreliance, Custom Report Builder

This edition we dive into:

• Old school channels - should you still use them?
• Confusing HubSpot Form options - explained!
• Using the Prospects tool
• Tickets created from forwarded emails - best practices
• Workflow unenrollment feature
• Are you relying on Paid Channels too much?
• HubSpot Custom Report Builder - intro series
• Reminder about Phishing attacks
• Do you need help with your HubSpot portal?

You can watch this episode on our YouTube channel (or just listen to it on our YouTube audio channel)

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Recorded: Wednesday 24 August 2022 | Published: Friday 02 September 2022

Table of Contents

• Old school channels
• Confusing HubSpot Form options
• Using the Prospects tool
• Tickets created from forwarded emails
• Workflow unenrollment feature
• Relying on Paid Channels
• HubSpot Custom Report Builder
• Reminder about Phishing attacks
• Do you need help with your HubSpot portal?

🌱 Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

How do you connect?

Over the past few years I’ve reduced my connection points down to just a few key inputs/channels:

• Email
• Twitter
• SMS
• YouTube

I’m hardly ever on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, Snap, etc and I almost never answer my phone if I don’t recognise the number…

Why do I mention this?

(Well, it’s not just to highlight that I’m out of touch…)

Because, whilst I’ve limited my channels, I still look after a healthy software spend for our company each year - in the order of $100K across tools and platforms. So for many software vendors we fit their ideal customer profile - and reaching me is important.

I suspect I’m not unique here. There are lots of business owners, with health budgets to spend, who aren’t on the usual channels.

Here’s the question for your marketing and sales efforts: are you still catering for the ‘old school’ (or perhaps ‘distraction protective’) contacts with your activities and processes (or have you neglected them chasing the latest shiny objects?).

When I think back over just the last year of new platform spend, the biggest influence on my awareness of, and purchase of them has been:

• Awareness: Twitter recommendations (mostly for awareness of new tools that people I follow mention)
• Consideration: YouTube by far (not ads, but seeing people using the tools) followed by Knowledge Base articles on the vendor’s websites
• Decision: Email follow ups and easy access to demo/trial accounts

A few (obvious) notes:

• It’s easy to assume that everyone is on LinkedIn (especially in B2B discussion), but that’s not the case (and in our experience the costs of lead generation and nurture on LinkedIn can fluctuate wildly for companies - it definitely needs careful review)
• Examples of recent tools include those related to our podcasting and YouTube activities (including Riverside, Streamyard, vidIQ, etc)
• Most of the new apps I install on my phone come from Twitter recommendations
• I hardly ever use Chat on website

One final point - it’s easy to fall into the trap of availability bias and  assuming that everyone else’s behaviour matches what comes to your mind first. (And then develop a confirmation bias to it)

Part of analysing your own behaviour needs to include listing the things we don’t do, so that we are prompted to test whether other people do them (eg I don’t use Facebook, but let’s test it to check if other people do… etc)

✨ Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:

• You can now Customise the Right Sidebar in CRM Records
• Starting on September 21st, users on HubSpot Professional accounts will be required to set up two-factor authentication (2FA) before logging into their accounts for security purposes.  So get ahead of this!
• Improved property history for data sync changes where the property history will now show the actual Data Sync app's name that was responsible for property changes!

🚀 Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

HubSpot Form Option: Always Create contact for new email address

This is probably one of the most confusing options on any HubSpot page:

When you first read the setting description you might think ‘of course I want to create contacts for new email addresses!’...

However, this setting is relevant to a known contact who returns to your site, but then submits a form with a new email address (perhaps they use their personal email address this time, versus their work email address). In this situation what do you want to happen? Do you want to create a second (ie new) contact - OR, do you want to update the existing contact (ie with an additional email address).

We’ve recorded a quick video walking through this with a worked example.

Aside: this option used to be referred to as ‘Obey cookie settings’ (or similar) many years ago…

In most cases you’ll want to leave this unticked (as per the screenshot above).

Exceptions are when the form is used in a browser page that is submitted by lots of different people (eg a computer in a common area that is used by lots of people) or as a common device (eg iPad signup at a trade show).

💰 Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Using the Prospects Tools

2 parts to remember

1. Finding prospects

In this example we are looking for Australian Automotive or Building Material businesses.

2. Turning on prospect notifications

HubSpot has a good Knowledge Base article with further details.

👨‍🔧 Shot 5: HubSpot Service Hub Feature of the Week

Dealing with Tickets created from forwarded emails

This option can be good or bad depending on your situation…

For example, if your team are often forwarding on client emails they’ve personally received, into a generic support inbox, then turning this option on can be a huge benefit.

However, for other scenarios (eg if a client forwards on an email from another company) you wouldn’t want this enabled:

If you need to cater for both, it might be worth setting up two Conversations Inboxes - one for staff to forward emails to, versus a second that you provide to clients.

🔧 Shot 6: HubSpot Workflow Feature of the Week

Workflow Unenrollment and Suppression

This is a feature of workflows that helps keep out contacts (or deals or tickets etc) that meet a particular criteria at any point in the workflow set of actions.

This means it could fire straight away (eg a contact enrols because they meet the entry criteria, but then immediate unenrolls because they meet the unenrollment criteria), or can come later (eg a contact meets the criteria after a few workflow actions have completed - such as booking a demo after receiving a nurture email).

You can find it in the Settings tab:

We build specific Suppression lists that we use in Workflow enrollments. We cover Suppression lists in more detail in episode 280.

When to use Unenrollment criteria

A suggestion:

• Consider whether you can make your Entry Criteria simpler by moving some ‘negative’ criteria (ie ‘is not’ conditions) into the Unenrollment criteria to make your Trigger criteria easier to read/maintain.

Notes:

• Unenrollment is similar to Goals in Contact Workflows (but note that Deal and Ticket workflows don’t have Goals)
• But Goals have an advantage in showing showing in the workflow actions list after they are met (you can visually see after an action if contacts met the goal)

On a side note: I really wish the Lists tool worked with Deals, Tickets and other objects (ie not just Contacts and Companies) - I’d love to be able to prepare lists of Deals that could be unenrolled from Deal workflows, rather than having to build the criteria in the Deal workflow.

💡 Shot 7: Insight of the Week

Reliance on paid traffic channels

It can be stressful if you rely on paid traffic channels as your single source of leads.

In this example we see over 75% of new contacts are from paid sources:

This is concerning as if things change then you essentially have little to no business.

It is important to evaluate and build your assets like content (be it pillar pages, videos and other assets) so you can attract the right people to your business.  

If not you will most likely find you live in a world that’s feast or famine and you are often worried where your next contact and conversation will come from.  Not to mention the quality of that contact and understanding where they are in the buying process.

So we want to encourage you to start looking at other sources of traffic to your business.  It could be as simple as a partnership to begin with or street/location signage.  Don’t forget that not everything is online and some practical things can help too!

🏈 Shot 8: Reporting

HubSpot Custom Report Builder Basics

We’ve started recording quick videos about using HubSpot’s Custom Report Builder tool.

The first 3 are available on the HubShots YouTube channel.

[1] Building Your First Custom Report

We start with the simplest possible report - a bar chart of contacts created per month, and then how to filter:

[2] Using the new Date Part feature

Next we look at using the new Date Part feature in Custom Reports:

See also this HubSpot Knowledge Base article on using Date Part

[3] Using the  ‘Break down By’ feature

And the start drilling into details using the Break down by option:

📚 Shot 9: Facepalm of the Week

Reminder about Phishing Attacks

In a moment of brain-fog, I fell for this:

A quick look at this should immediately highlight that it’s bogus, so why did I fall for it? Here’s why:

• I’d been in meetings all afternoon and was rushing to catch up on messages and notifications after my last call
• It was late (I was tired)
• I’d been expecting an important delivery that day…

The last point is probably the most relevant - I was primed to be on the lookout for a delivery, so this just slipped right past my usual scam filters… their timing was perfect.

Fortunately though, Chrome saved me:

As soon as I saw the message I of course did this:

Why do I share my gullibility with you? Simply this - a tired mind is easy to trick.

A reminder to myself for when I’m reviewing attribution reports at the end of the day, looking for insights - it’s easy to believe things you are expecting to find.

✍️ Shot 10: Quote of the Week

“What’s the difference between a novice air plane pilot and a veteran? Ask any expert and they’ll tell you: A beginner relies on sight and gut feeling, while an experienced professional relies on instruments.”

― Perry Marshall, Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords: How to Access 100 Million People in 10 Minutes

🏋️ Shot 11: Training of the Week

From HubSpot Academy

Reporting in HubSpot

Covers approaches to reporting, and then dives into the tools.

🏋️ Shot 12: Need help with your HubSpot Portal?

HubShots HubSpot QuickCheck

Our new HubSpot QuickCheck service has been popular with companies who are looking for a quick review of their HubSpot portal to understand:

• Are there parts of HubSpot I’m not using yet that I should be?
• Am I using best practices in the key parts of HubSpot (eg Workflows, Forms, Emails, Landing Pages, Lists, Deals, Reports)?
• Are there any ways I’m using HubSpot that are cause for concern that I need to address?
• Are my processes efficient (eg qualifying new leads, creating tickets, managing Marketing Contacts, etc)?
• My renewal is coming up - is my HubSpot subscription giving me good value?
• Should I consider upgrading my Hub or adding new Hubs into my portal (eg I’m using Marketing Hub, should I consider Service Hub)?

If you’re asking yourself any of these questions, our QuickCheck call might be ideal. Here’s the details:

• We organise a 90 minute Zoom or Teams call with you
• On the call we start by getting a brief overview of your business, your goals and how you currently use HubSpot
• We then guide you through our 50 point checklist through your portal, to gain a high level understanding of how well you are using your portal
• We provide recommendations for improvements, features to use, and processes for increasing efficiency
• Pricing is available on the site

You can view more details and book in your session here.

🧲 Shot 13: Follow Us on the Socials

Connect with HubShots here:

• HubShots YouTube channel 
• HubShots Spotify channel 
• HubShots iTunes
• HubShots Facebook group 
• HubShots Twitter 
• HubShots Twitter Show Notes
• HubShots Instagram 
• HubShots LinkedIn 
• HubShots HubSpot Coaching
• Sales and Marketing Scorecard ⇐ you should try this

Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn 

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems and XEN Solar.

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

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