Emily Nash (00:39)
All right, we're live with the Married to Marketing podcast. With us today, we have Charley Vlietstra, our Partner Development Manager at HubSpot. He's a growth-minded marketer with a passion for building businesses. Also with us is Sam Barth. He's LAIRE's HubSpot Strategy and Operations Manager, and he's passionate about making marketing and sales run smarter, not harder.
Our topic today is talking through HubSpot Inbound 2025. This is our recap and we want to talk about what it means for you, our clients and prospective clients. Today we're diving into the biggest HubSpot announcements from Inbound 2025. There were 200 plus product updates with a huge focus on AI, data and a new way to think about marketing with the debut of the loop.
Sam C Barth (01:30)
Yeah.
Emily Nash (01:30)
So
let's jump in for the 200 updates What do we do with that? What's the biggest takeaway that we want to run with the next few months?
Sam C Barth (01:42)
I think definitely everything, I mean, about inbound in general, this is definitely like the biggest lump of updates that HubSpot has done. ⁓ I think between like the stuff that they've done on the smart CRM side, the rebranding of data hub or rebranding of OpsHub over into data hub, I think is gonna be huge. There's all these different AI assistants that they're adding to it. And then,
they're updating a lot of the quoting that they have on the commerce side. And so there's a lot that's going on. I know that we've got like a list that we want to outline and go through. I feel like the smart CRM side is definitely probably going to be the most impactful just because that's going to be the thing that people will see immediately.
Charley Vlietstra (02:37)
Yeah, yeah, I plus one to that. And thank you for having me. This is exciting. And 30 minutes or however long we go, no matter what, probably wouldn't be long enough to talk about all the things. 200 product updates is insane. going back to the question about what was my favorite, it's really hard to narrow down. I'd say overall, it's the changes that we've made to data, like being able to capture unstructured data, for example.
and then how to manage that data, including like Sam mentioned, the launch of data hub and then data studio. And then the tools of course that you in HubSpot that you can use to maximize that, like thinking about being a growth minded in some of the things you can do to grow your business. The prospecting agent comes to mind ⁓ and just like any other AI tool, it only works if the data behind it is solid. And so
Sam C Barth (03:28)
Mm-hmm.
Charley Vlietstra (03:35)
I think we made some huge changes in ensuring that it is for customers.
Sam C Barth (03:41)
I've started to use the prospecting agent a little bit actually. And so it's definitely worthwhile and you definitely need to put in, you definitely need to put in information that you want in terms of how you want it to operate and come out. And so it's definitely going to be cool with different ways that people can start implementing it.
Emily Nash (04:01)
I want to see things with my eyes. I need to my hands in there on smart data. I heard the ⁓ introduction of it, how it cleans data silos, all the different pain points that people have. I'm just curious how it makes everything just people's lives simpler and data cleaner.
Sam C Barth (04:19)
Yeah, I know they've got the data quality. HubSpot always had data quality tools that were in OpsHub before. ⁓ I think now probably the biggest thing that's being overlapped on it is an AI agent that's specific to it. ⁓ Right now, one of the things that you can do with the Breeze AI agent that's in the... When you click into a record, you see it in the top right corner.
That summary and that overview, if you like just create a contact or a company record in HubSpot and you have it do a summary, it's going to be very general and not super helpful. But if you have like your call transcripts set up and connected, the comments that your sales team is making involved, and any of the other comms that you're wanting to log and connect together,
that Breeze assistant becomes much more valuable and especially day to day, you can go back and check it to see the updates that you have specifically on that record without having to like dive in and look through everything. I feel like that's the cool area that I've seen at least the direct implementation of.
Charley Vlietstra (05:37)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the the unstructured data piece. By the way, Sam, I always look at those AI overviews now, you know, just in my day to day looking at it like, yeah, for example, deals, right? I don't want to have to look at notes that the rep probably didn't put in there anyway. ⁓ Look through emails and put all the pieces together. Having an AI overview that takes all of that information and puts it into a paragraph or two.
Sam C Barth (05:50)
They're helpful.
Charley Vlietstra (06:06)
is so helpful and it's reliable too. Like I can always trust it probably more so than myself and trying to put the pieces together. then, yeah, and then just like taking a step back, the unstructured data part, I think it was honestly overlooked a little bit at inbound, but just knowing that, you know, like ⁓ 80 % of data that a company has comes from unstructured sources. So we think about like emails,
calls, support tickets, things that just happen in the background, you know, that we don't go in and manually put in. All of that information now gets put into your CRM and it's always been tracked before, but with the new smart CRM, it's going as far as taking, I'll just give one example. If somebody has their phone number and their email signature, taking that and putting it under their contact record to ensure that it's up to date. If there's already a phone number, it'll add another one.
And the tools really just improve them, like get better as like Sam mentioned, as you go, as you use it more. And that's man, that's just so exciting. And then we could also talk about a million different use cases for what that looks like. ⁓ being the first hub to have being the first smart serum on the market ⁓ really just makes for an even easier, you know, experience tool. That was always our big selling point, of course, is
ease of use, but it's even smarter now.
Emily Nash (07:39)
Glad you illustrated that. does seem... I wanted to hear too, is how it's about the first one doing it, and it sounds like they are.
Charley Vlietstra (07:46)
Yes, yeah, you can fact check me on that. ⁓ Yeah, we really are. sure more will follow, but ⁓ it is just so intuitive and yeah, just helpful.
Emily Nash (07:58)
I have not checked AI overviews too much. I see them there. I'm too busy focusing on a number metric. I see them coming together with unstructured data. ⁓ So that's pretty exciting. right. Well, there is one other theme. ⁓ What's beyond AI was the new loop framework, which stood out immediately that our clients may want to know. And to spell that out, it folded into express, Taylor,
amplify and evolve, are very high level words for a new framework.
Sam C Barth (08:32)
Yeah, the very much kind of following the little infinity sign. I'm watching it on a page right now. ⁓ I, to me, the, the loop is very much meant to be like, a sort of shift from the funnel. ⁓ I think definitely having like awareness consideration conversion are still important terms to have in marketing, but
it seems like that, especially with all the introduction of these AI assistants ⁓ and all of the different like connectors to other LLMs that HubSpot is starting to do, ⁓ there's a lot of focus on doing like this constant status of iterations. ⁓ And I think very much that's what the loop is meant to be. Where you're starting out, ⁓ you're starting out expressing
the initial message, you're tailoring it now on like a one-to-one scale with audiences, or on a one-to-one standpoint with audiences at scale. ⁓ Then you're amplifying that as much as you can through all the various channels that you do. ⁓ And then based off the information that you get from that, you evolve and then you start the process all over again. And so.
I know HubSpot in the past had the flywheel, which was like how marketing, sales and services, the services all meant to like function and flow together. And so I think that concept is kind of now being applied towards like marketing strategy in general. And HubSpot setting up the tools for that.
Emily Nash (10:11)
That's it.
I like your take, Sam. I was worried maybe the inbound funnel or flywheel that we rely on would go away entirely, but it does sound more strategic, like how to start with a new idea, express it into whatever AI you're using, and then go from there stepwise. So it seems like a guide for a moment right now where we're all being like, I've been using AI for how long, but like, do I have a framework? And maybe this is going to be something that can help, help solidify that. HubSpot's always really good at that.
Sam C Barth (10:45)
Yeah, I think you still have those goals. You still want to move people from, hey, you don't know us at all to, OK, they're aware of us and we're getting in front of the people that have a problem and they need to think about a solution for. And then you can then take the loop framework and try to move them from just being aware to actually considering you for a specific option. ⁓
for at least at the timings right. then, and then yeah, then converting it still, you want to try to, you want to try as many ways as possible to try and get that last sale. And so the, am very excited to get into the, implementation of that specifically. I feel like there's different ways that you can go beyond just like, you know, inserting a first name token into an email.
that really became the primary way that content gets personalized. ⁓ I think other than creating multiple templates, putting out all the different lists, or excuse me, putting out all the different segments now, lists are now segments, that's another update. ⁓ But I think that's where you can pull in the AI agents to look at all the information that you have on the company.
and then potentially even have a prompt where it says, okay, now apply the information that we have for this company to this specific nurture sequence that we're creating. What's a unique message that we can create for them? I feel like there is a process between all the different ways that HubSpot has the ability to automate those AI prompts with CRM data. ⁓ I feel like that's the path towards this.
towards really implementing the loop. Yeah.
Emily Nash (12:42)
Yeah, like breaks my brain a little bit to think about very individual messaging for a database of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. ⁓ But I go back to, and I listened to the podcast that Kip and Kiernan run, Marketing as a Grain, and it's not just strategic that you're talking about, Sam, with the data and how to run it in HubSpot. I think it's also like two marketers running it. So you have the creative iterative one who's doing the expressing.
Sam C Barth (12:50)
Yeah.
Emily Nash (13:12)
with the AI and then you have like what Sam just expressed, the ⁓ execution engineer type person and those two people work together. And that's where they were saying that marketing is going and these two generalist buckets, ⁓ one more general, one more creative, iterating, expressing, and then one being engineer. And I'm wondering if that fits in with the loop a little bit with some of the AI themes as well.
Sam C Barth (13:37)
Yeah, I think definitely so. It's the... What is it? There used to be specific team names for this, like marketing ops and then marketing ⁓ design or creative or something like that. But it's left-brain, right-brain people really coming together to try to implement this. ⁓ So yeah, I definitely see it that way as well.
Emily Nash (14:05)
All right, let's keep going. have plenty to get through. We had some initial excitement about the smart CRM. I'm going to prompt us with a couple more questions to go a little bit deeper. So what are the ways to leverage the new views? We had calendar, map, game, reports. How can we implement these in everyday workflows?
Sam C Barth (14:24)
Yeah, to me, like working with clients, one of the biggest things that they were always talking about was having some sort of like calendar view and having a master calendar to manage all of their meetings, to manage all of their, ⁓ to manage all of their appointments, to manage all of their different like timely opportunities that they had.
⁓ and so the calendar view, I think makes a lot of sense for companies because you've got, you can, it's mainly for the big four objects. ⁓ you can do it for like, it's primarily, I think going to be utilized with contacts or deals. ⁓ and then you can set the specific date that they're put on the calendar. And so if you have a deal and you want to mark a specific deal stage and the date for it.
like there's an appointment for something, you can have it managed on there versus what most people would probably have as a deal board where you then need to scroll down what's all in the lane to see the information that you have for when that next appointment is. So I think that is, I think that's gonna be the most impactful just because that's been the thing that I've heard clients talk about the most is wanting to use HubSpot as like a master calendar.
type of system.
Emily Nash (15:47)
Can I put my date on your calendar, Sam? Does it work across teams?
Charley Vlietstra (15:48)
and it's
Sam C Barth (15:52)
Yes, yeah, it's, so it's like, it works the same way that you can do like views on the, on like a table view or like a board view. So yeah, so you can see everybody's, you can be specific to the owners of the ones that you want to see. And so yeah, if you have your teams set up properly, you can have everybody see everybody or.
only have some people see theirs and one person see everybody's. And yeah, so it's like it gives them ⁓ a date type of view and adds like another need to like have another view, have another custom view up top.
Yeah, I think that's the most impactful one.
Charley Vlietstra (16:41)
Yeah. Yeah. And we were calling this to just like flexible CRM views. Like that was the announcement, right? ⁓ HubSpot has always been customization with guide rails. think early on it was there were more guide rails than there was customization. Now, you you work with people like you, Sam, and you can basically do anything you want in HubSpot. You can make it a, you know, a sandbox environment. ⁓
but you're gonna have some, you know, some guide rails to make sure it doesn't go completely off track and you don't get somebody who goes rogue in there and you know, doesn't make some changes where nobody can use the system. But the flexible CRM views is putting things into like tables, for example, chart, visual charge, custom views, ⁓ and just gives you more manipulation over the data that you have in HubSpot, which I think is, you know, a big win.
you know, just like everything else, you might want to look, you might want to look at it a few different ways. So yeah, I'm pretty excited about that. And then if we could segue this kind of segues into data hub, I would love to do that. Because I had touched on just the excitement around some of the things around unstructured data, what we can do there. And data hub first is a rebrand of operations hub. And I think it's been a long time coming operations hub.
just the name itself is confusing. It's kind of always been data hub, right? But now there are
Sam C Barth (18:12)
Yeah. It makes more
Emily Nash (18:13)
Mm-hmm.
Sam C Barth (18:14)
sense as data hub help, Yeah.
Charley Vlietstra (18:17)
Yeah,
and now it stands alone by itself. But then there are new tools within there too. You know, like Data Studio, for example, which I think really compares to some of the tools that you see, you know, in Tableau and gives customers the ability to, you know, use their first party data that's in their CRM, for example, which we know is so much more important now than ever, as you know, privacy and all these restrictions have, ⁓ have really
come into effect for third party data, but then blend it with third party data from other tools that you might be using like Zoom info and create your own custom reports and visualize all of that directly within your CRM. ⁓ So I think I should have answered Data Studio is what I'm most excited about out of all of the rollouts. But yeah, I think there's gonna be some awesome things we can.
do there and especially as we continue to go up market and think about comparing to other enterprise types of tools.
Sam C Barth (19:24)
I know that's where HubSpot Insights used to be. You put the domain in the company record and you get all this information from it. ⁓ I know that's where a lot of that functionality has moved towards. um I know there's increased different ways that you can merge duplicates together. You can create custom rules for them and you can even check them in real time.
⁓ and then I was also seeing that they have connectors now, ⁓ for Google big query. like, you can actually integrate that information directly in the HubSpot, ⁓ or into data studio, excuse me. ⁓ which is interesting because yeah, cause then that's HubSpot moving into like more of that, what you were saying, Charley, that Tableau space of being able to create like, ⁓
broader segmented databases that are joined together and you're able to create a lot of more interesting reports from that. And so yeah, I think this is a big step up in terms of what HubSpot has done on the data and reporting side. And so it's definitely gonna be super cool to see what ⁓ comes out from this and what we're able to do with clients.
Charley Vlietstra (20:45)
Yeah, just like anything else too. I mean, if you're using a tool like Snowflake and you know, getting a lot of your, yeah, managing your data in there, getting a lot of reports, for example, and you want to continue using that. We now just announced the integration or improved integration with Snowflake um and you can bring that into HubSpot, you know, if you so choose. So it's always nice to have that option to say, Hey, I want to, you know, I'm actually going to move off of this tool and build it in HubSpot or
Hey, our team loves this tool. We need it. We're not going to move from it, but we do want, you know, some of this information, giving customers that choice. ⁓ It really just enables them to make the best decisions for their company.
Sam C Barth (21:22)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, 100%.
Emily Nash (21:32)
It's like I have one more softball question on this. Let's see if it goes. What does cleaner, more usable data and better reporting decision-making mean for HubSpot users? What pain point are we solving?
Sam C Barth (21:45)
the, I'd say the biggest thing is the actual desire to use the CRM. Cause that's like, that always becomes the, when you're implementing a new CRM with like a sales team, there's always friction because they either have developed their own system with their own spreadsheet that they're doing, or if you're moving away from a CRM, they already have something that's involved. ⁓ but
like almost every system is going to have data issues unless you have something focused or you have everything standardized so that that can't happen. Or you have somebody that is focused on cleaning the data, um which I think that happens at most companies. And I think most people just don't realize that somebody is just taking that on to make sure that everything looks good. um And so I think
being able to automate a lot of that information, a lot of that cleanliness for it, is going to help with marketing and sales users um really onboard and adopt HubSpot better.
Emily Nash (22:59)
Whoever has a job cleaning the data doesn't have to do that job.
Sam C Barth (23:03)
Oh yeah, like that usually falls either on like an intern or um yeah that usually yeah somebody like very low on the totem pole and it's like look
Emily Nash (23:12)
want
to see marketing gets that job sometimes too, like on top of everything, we have to clean everything.
Sam C Barth (23:17)
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah, it can fall to, yeah, it can fall. basically, you know, nobody wants to do that. It's very, very monotonous, very boring.
Emily Nash (23:26)
Sometimes they don't realize they don't want to do it. I think I have clients that I ask them, how do they figure out MQL or how do they figure out this data is what? And I learned that they're doing very manual processes every week. And part of my, hopefully our jobs here is to eliminate that.
Sam C Barth (23:42)
Yeah, that's, I mean, that's huge for like businesses across the board. Like they don't realize the, the automation capabilities that they have and they're, they're still doing everything manually. There's still like the art of the sale that I think business owners want to retain. ⁓ but that's very much like having all this consolidated information is supposed to help with because you're not having to just like work off the fly with a client. You're able to see the history that you've had with them and go, okay.
I know how to handle this, know how we can move forward with them. ⁓ And having all of that information filled in and clean and accurate ⁓ will lead to much more successful results.
Emily Nash (24:25)
and adoption of the serum.
Sam C Barth (24:27)
and adoption, absolutely.
Charley Vlietstra (24:29)
Yep, you gotta get your team, team using it. I mean, if you can get your sales team excited about consistently using your CRM, you're doing something right. Because they're notorious for being like, I don't wanna update it. I don't wanna do anything in there.
Emily Nash (24:45)
Well, then they have smart CRM that has AI overview and they just put their own structured data in. Yeah. If they put notes in on top of that, it's bonus, but at end of the day, we have everything.
Charley Vlietstra (24:50)
There we go. Yeah.
And we know they won't anyway yeah.
Emily Nash (24:59)
Okay, we don't have to harp on Silicium. I don't think they're in the room. ⁓
Sam C Barth (25:03)
He did have some hot takes, I knew it.
Emily Nash (25:05)
Yeah.
Charley Vlietstra (25:05)
yeah
I told you.
Sam C Barth (25:09)
I think the honestly that alignment, the marketing sales alignment, that is something that I think, ⁓ I mean, the loop framework, having cleaner data, I mean, all of that feeds into the struggle of being able to make sure that marketing and sales are aligned because, because yeah, the sales team reaches out to somebody that was interested in one product, but talks to them about something else that's going to throw off the customer and be like,
what is this? It's gonna make them feel less comfortable versus them already knowing everything ahead of time. I mean like, yeah, so we're just picking up from where we left off. um It all like feeds into that. So ⁓ HubSpot is thinking, is thinking for marketers and salespeople to help with that.
Emily Nash (26:03)
Good take. I'm going keep us going. There's so much to talk about. We still have marketing content hub. That's kind of where the loop played in. ⁓ We could talk about how B2B businesses can leverage AI driven personalization. Sam, I think you touched on that a little.
Sam C Barth (26:19)
Yeah, the personalization side, this was just something that ⁓ Yamini had mentioned during one of the presentations that she was doing. And wanting to get to a place where you could do that increased amount of personalization. ⁓ I do think it's definitely important to incorporate like,
the lists or the segments into that so that you're not trying to do that for like a hundred thousand contact database, because that would be a lot. But it'll also be a lot of tokens. And that's the other thing with all the AI tools that are happening. In some way, this is being fed to Co-Pilot um or whatever LLM system that HubSpot is using. um And so that's where HubSpot credits and stuff comes in.
Emily Nash (26:57)
Mm.
Sam C Barth (27:15)
And so I know some of the things they don't use credits at the moment. I think some later will start using credits, but I don't know exactly which ones. So I guess on the segment, on the personalization side, I think those are important things to keep in mind. I do, I am interested in seeing the expansion of...
marketing hub and content hub and how they're turning it. Marketing studio is meant to be the culmination of the new content hub features that they've been doing. Content remix, all the different topic groups, you can put in a prompt and then it generates um the baselines for all the posts, landing page and web pages. um
I feel like they're wanting to bring in as many, as many of the different tools that people have used in connection with HubSpot over time. um They're wanting to bring all of that in house. And I feel like marketing studio is meant to be that. generating the content, editing it, scheduling it. um It's going beyond just tagging them to a campaign. um It's having like a whole setup and system for it um.
the there's a number of different oh yeah there's a number of different like email specific areas that they're wanting to implement and start utilizing but I think yeah I think marketing studio is huge um I think they ⁓ I one big thing too is that they moved so in target accounts there used to be a place where you could see
website visits and it would enrich that data and you could see the companies that were visiting your website even though they didn't fill out a form. They moved that to its own like app page. And I'm not sure where to find it without just typing in website like web visits or web traffic within the search app page. um But that will take you to there now. um And I don't know if that's across
professional accounts. I don't know if that's included in the Smart CRM piece, but I know that that has been moved over to that area, to its own web visit page. um
Emily Nash (30:01)
We geeked out about that internally when we discovered it and like in Slack. was like, look what you can do. It seems to arrival zoom info where you had third party information, uncertain.
Sam C Barth (30:12)
Zoom info,
Leadfeeder, ⁓ a lot of those tools that do the IP enrichment. You can technically figure out if you have the IP address and it's coming from a company's specific uh IP address or website, then you can really hone in on where that's coming from. um I don't know how much that's been affected with how many people do remote work now.
Emily Nash (30:19)
Mm-hmm.
Sam C Barth (30:41)
And so you're seeing IP addresses that are homes. But I feel like there are ways to be able to connect like domain information for either the work computer that you're using or the email that you're signed into. ⁓ And they're able to connect your personal profile over to your work profile um. And then I think that's what feeds into some of the smart insights that get done um.
like from within the record cards themselves. Because you can create those smart properties to where it will do web searches for that information and you can specify the prompt. But then they also have like templatized ways of like, hey, if you want to create a specific property for this, we suggest creating this dropdown property that is about the pain points for this user. And we suggest their pain points to be X, Y, and Z.
I went through a suggestion for one of our clients during that today. was like, interesting. It's giving you suggestions as to how to build out HubSpot as well. And so using reading your data for that as well.
Emily Nash (31:55)
I like it.
Charley Vlietstra (31:56)
Thank
Sam C Barth (31:57)
It's
a lot of areas that AI is in, making suggestions.
Emily Nash (32:01)
Okay.
Yes. AI. Yes. Coming back to that, ⁓ we talk about agents. know if we talked about this specifically, but the freeze AI and the different agents around prospecting, data agent, custom assistance. Are we talking about this in other topics or is this totally separate or just baked into the entire platform now?
Sam C Barth (32:25)
⁓ or Charley, would you know more about the Breeze brand and how it's meant to be viewed at HubSpot?
Charley Vlietstra (32:35)
Yeah, Breeze gets kind of used across the platform now. And I think the best way to think about it or to separate it is you have pretty much anything AI related, probably we'll have Breeze in there, but you have your Breeze agents and host bus for customer agents prospecting ⁓ customer knowledge base and uh content. then data agent, I think is in beta. ⁓
And then you have Breeze Intelligence, which is the ⁓ enrichment and data enrichment tool ⁓ that companies can use just to clean their data, update properties, et cetera. So that's how I think about it. um Cause yeah, you see that, you see that word get thrown around and the, those are really the two areas in which um Breeze products live.
Sam C Barth (33:29)
And there's like a list of a lot of the different ones that they have in the marketplace, like ABM landing page agent, blog research agent, company research agent, customer health agent, knowledge base agent, video clip search agent. So there's a lot. I think definitely like data agent, prospecting agent.
Those are definitely gonna be big ones that I think people will use early on. ⁓ The customer agent is one that people that are utilizing Service Hub have definitely already incorporated. And that's where it's reading your CMS data and then it's able to give answers and responses to ⁓ people that visit your website. ⁓ Essentially a way of bypassing like the hard coded chatbot routes that... ⁓
Normally, people would go down during the service hub. So if you just wanted to have general questions answered about your website or knowledge base and stuff, that's what the customer agent would be used for.
Charley Vlietstra (34:38)
And it's now available to to every hub. It's not just a service hub, ⁓ which is pretty exciting. And that's been the most widely adopted agent so far. And yeah, there's it's just amazing kind of what you can do there. First of all, it's really easy to set up. You can train it in just a matter of minutes. You know, you can actually go through, for example, when you're on a demo and show a company how how they can do it. And by the end of that,
Sam C Barth (34:43)
How nice.
Charley Vlietstra (35:07)
like talk track, it's ready to go, which is pretty cool. But what we're seeing is that over 50%, I think it's like 52 % of ⁓ customer resolutions are automatically solved with the agent. So people interact, go to the website, start chatting with them, and they're able to get the answers that they need just from talking to a bot. And I think customer expectations will continue to go that way.
people don't want to have to talk to somebody if they don't have to. And I think pretty soon, you know, if you're if your website doesn't have an agent, somebody's gonna be pretty frustrated and you know, maybe go to your competitor who does it's just going it's going to become the norm.
Sam C Barth (35:52)
Yes, yeah, yeah.
Emily Nash (35:54)
I think data hubs exciting, but an agent chat does not set, I used to set them up. Like, is the next thing you're going to say? And like anticipate what is this? And it like a whole workflow for this to add. But the idea of having what I imagine, I always imagined as a marketer before I know it exists. It uses unstructured data, like chats and knowledge hubs and transcripts. And it brings in information from those that IP from the company and it answers the person on the website.
Sam C Barth (36:02)
Go to the next section.
Emily Nash (36:23)
Why don't we have this for everybody? This is like the takeaway. think data hub, but then also this.
Charley Vlietstra (36:27)
Yes, absolutely. Yep. And the more information you give it, the better it can pull from, you know, your existing public content, your website, blog, et cetera. But then you can also, you know, feed it, you know, information on your side. And yeah, it's a man, can make your life a lot. And not only, you know, like resolve tickets and, you know, reduce the number of, you know, calls that your customer service team is getting.
but it can also help your sales team too. As prospects are asking questions, even before they engage with a sales person in the sales process.
Emily Nash (37:08)
lots of good stuff there. I'm looking at our conversation so far. We're getting into our ⁓ last few topics, which ⁓ we could go into Commerce Hub a little bit, and then I want to wrap it up with our key takeaways. Sound good?
Sam C Barth (37:25)
Yes.
Emily Nash (37:25)
I did
gloss over one thing that Yamini said, was 60 % of Google searches end up with zero clicks. That was like pretty earth shattering for marketers who've been running those Google analytics reports for years and reporting on keywords. And now people aren't going to the website, but, ⁓
Sam C Barth (37:45)
Yeah, it's a huge shift. I mean, Google's even taken on the, or well, Gemini, they've taken on the same route. They have Flow and they're doing those AI overviews within search results, um which I know people, there's been like some controversy about. um But with like speaking to that, the AI engine optimization.
that was also another thing that's in inbound and is another tool in HubSpot, that there's a lot of the same practices for SEO that still matter um with that. And so I feel like it's gonna be like a lot of the same work, but it's gonna gonna be its look different in terms of results, like what you were saying. There's gonna be a lot of people that just do the search, get the answer, and never click anywhere. um
And so making sure that if you're able to get that impression information um and loop that back to and be able to attribute it back to a client, ⁓ I think that's where things are going to start to move over when it comes to that.
Emily Nash (38:53)
That's true. I was thinking too, I've already pivoted and started reporting on conversion metrics because they're much better because you don't have the website traffic inflating or deflating your percentage. So that's been a fun metric to say this has grown by 100%.
Sam C Barth (39:06)
oh
like you're seeing less bounces?
Emily Nash (39:10)
No, so the traffic is down 50 % for my one example. uh, but our conversions are up by like a hundred percent. Um, so it's not like website visits are down. We're converting more of those visits once they make it to our website. So metric is great. I, I, I don't think I dove deeper after seeing being happy with the results being realizing, oh, that's because that we're having, we're down in this traffic. That's why it's up.
Sam C Barth (39:18)
⁓ okay, yeah.
Yeah, you're dominating cut in half. ⁓
Charley Vlietstra (39:26)
Yeah.
Sam C Barth (39:35)
okay, yeah.
Charley Vlietstra (39:37)
Yeah, you're getting a higher share of qualified buyers who are on your website, which are full circle all more reason to have things to support them once they get there like a customer agent. ⁓ You know, just so that they can self service and are more likely to convert into a lead. But yeah, I thought that that was really interesting, too. I mean, traffic is down significantly. I forgot what the stat was. But for HubSpot, our organic traffic has tanked.
Emily Nash (39:40)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Charley Vlietstra (40:05)
but we're getting more leads. Our sales team is busier. It's, there's always a story to be told in the data.
Sam C Barth (40:13)
There's so many websites that are going through cleansing traffic. A lot of websites that will have bots. Twitter X went through that before. Twitch is just starting to go through that. And since Google is feeling it, I think YouTube has also felt it as well. So that's how that's just changing across the whole ⁓ landscape.
its kinda wild.
Charley Vlietstra (40:42)
One more thing to add here is that because people are going to chat GPT for questions to everything, maybe questions to too many things, ⁓ using them as their therapist, that's a whole nother topic. but um
Sam C Barth (40:55)
It's like the movie Her.
Charley Vlietstra (40:57)
I know, it really
Emily Nash (40:58)
or him,
Charley Vlietstra (40:58)
is.
Emily Nash (40:59)
is that the not the other alternative movie?
Charley Vlietstra (41:02)
It's good, you should watch it.
Emily Nash (41:04)
I've seen it with Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson.
Charley Vlietstra (41:06)
Oh, that's right
right. Yes, yes. But where I was going with that is the sorry to derail us. We were at we added AI as an original traffic source. So you have paid search organic search. And then now we can see AI referrals. And so, you know, you can actually see how many people are coming from chat GPT, for example, I had a partner who has recently had a huge uptick in
and leads for their business that came from chat GPT and Sam, I like that you called out that those old SEO tactics and best practices still work, but then customers should also be thinking about other ways they can optimize for those AI engines. Like where are they pulling information from? We know it's largely from like Reddit, YouTube, influencers. that's gonna, yeah, marketers are always busy and having to change their approach, but yeah.
I feel for you now more than ever.
Sam C Barth (42:08)
Yeah, the crawlers are there. They're using all those crawler, all the crawlers that AI systems have. They're going to be using the search engines I think. um although I do think anything that's connected to chat, GBT or co-pilot is going to go through Microsoft just because of how much like funding that's been done by Microsoft. um In terms of Google, I imagine that Gemini
Emily Nash (42:08)
I feel like you're...
Sam C Barth (42:36)
Well, at one point HubSpot and Google were really close and they were thinking about merging. One was going to buy, I think Google was going to buy HubSpot, but I don't think that's going to happen anymore. That would have been very interesting to see if there would have been like a huge connection to all the different organic search stuff that you could do.
Emily Nash (42:51)
What? yeah, I do remember that. Sorry.
Charley's like, no, no comment. I have an NDA.
Sam C Barth (43:06)
Yeah, so yeah, yeah ⁓
Charley Vlietstra (43:07)
That's right. I cannot speculate. Yes.
Emily Nash (43:17)
I would be ⁓ close this out a little bit. We're getting to time in our conversation. I feel like we could be going on for three more hours. Just like inbound was extensive. uh But we have some good takeaways here, I think. I think the main one is that there's still foundational strategy that we still do SEO practices. We still do funnel, but there's methodology and strategy on top of it that we're going to have to just educate ourselves on to adapt a little bit.
Sam C Barth (43:25)
Yep, there's a lot.
in a brand new channel. I've even seen ⁓ in some of our clients reporting, there's some leads that have been referred from Perplexity, ⁓ that other AI system. And so ⁓ there's a lot of sourcing from there.
Emily Nash (43:44)
and brand new chain.
Mm-hmm.
All right, we want to leave with Sam or Charley one takeaway for anyone to take from this conversation or from HubSpot inbound 2025.
Charley Vlietstra (44:15)
One takeaway, again, it's so hard to pick just one, but I guess the theme has been around data, right? So I would just say making sure, well, first of you have the tools that you need, ⁓ but also the right approach to managing the data, like your whole team needs sales, service, marketing, ⁓ and then creating a really thoughtful approach around that. Of course, AI could be a part of it. ⁓
but just don't do the old things anymore. Think about like innovative ways we can reach, we'll just say your buyers, how ⁓ can we market to them? How can we use tools like the prospecting agent to get in front of them and to take some of this work off of you, give you some time back and get really smart about what you're doing. So I think that would be my big takeaway is just take a step back, think about your strategy. What can we automate?
You know, what can we do to whatever your goals are, drive more business ⁓ and just be a company that operates like a company should in 2025 and not like, you know, you're in 2023 because it's all changing so quickly.
Emily Nash (45:29)
No spreadsheets.
Charley Vlietstra (45:31)
Yes, no spreadsheets,
Sam C Barth (45:31)
changes super fast.
Emily Nash (45:32)
All right, I'm going to wrap this up. So this has been Married to Marketing Podcast, episode 11, So subscribe, follow LAIRE, reach out for HubSpot Strategy Consult anytime with Sam or myself, Thank you.
Charley Vlietstra (45:45)
Thanks, everyone.
