Bill: Thank you for joining the Missing Half podcast. I'm Bill Woods, your host, where we're discovering what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. Today, I'm joined by longtime friend and colleague, Rachel Muradyan. Rachel, thank you for joining us.
Rachel: Thanks for having me, Bill. Excited to be here.
Bill: Great, so Rachel, we like to start by getting to know our guests a little bit and a little bit of your background. And your background kind of fascinates me as we've done some projects together in the past and just catching up and getting to know each other. Maybe start a little bit with your education and some of your career and maybe some things I think that are a little bizarre but just fascinating like the language studies and that type of thing. Just maybe start there and walk us through where you are today.
Rachel: How much time do we have here? I mean. All right. I'll even throw you a curve ball, because I bet you didn't see this on my LinkedIn. I went to high school in Central Asia, and that's where my Russian studies came in. So I started my international career pretty early when I was 13. And after that, I decided to have a career in international relations, studied politics, economics. Thought I wanted to do something in Washington or overseas and save the world. Instead, it was the height of the recession, the 2019 recession, and I got a job wherever it could take me, and that was in education consulting. And then I decided I liked books more than bombs because all of my studies was pretty much about war. And that's kind of started my path in education. My dad was a high school principal or elementary school principal, but I really wasn't, didn't really see the whole allure of education until, until my first job. And then, a couple of years after that, I decided to go and teach at a university in China with my husband. And we had two years over there working at a, it's called a dual degree program. So, students could get their bachelor's degree in the Chinese University and the American Kansas University that I worked for. So it was a really great experience, taught me a lot about Chinese culture, Chinese educational system, American higher ed, and then decided to get my master's degree in international education management. And then that's when I became a marketing manager for international language programs. So took my Chinese studies that I did in China and graduate school, kind of had my Russian studies from high school and college, and got to work with students from all around the world.
Bill: That seems, Rachel, to me to be very typical, right? You learn Russian, you learn Chinese, because what else do you have to do, right? I mean, those are two very aggressive subjects and very technical, right? The hardest language in the world beyond the English language is the Chinese language, or some would argue that it's more difficult. That just fascinates me about you and that your experience that you would do that to yourself. Right. But sometimes we have to put ourselves through pain to make progress. But that's just amazing to me that you had those two experiences and studied that hard on those two subjects.
Rachel: Thank you. I think it taught me a lot because I'm not naturally gifted at languages. I would be the first to admit it, so I had to try very hard. And I think that taught me a lot in my career as I pivoted to marketing, learned that basically from scratch, technical consulting, HubSpot software and beyond. So highly recommend doing something early on that you're not naturally gifted at. Because it teaches you humility and it teaches you how to work pretty hard. So that's my two cents for learning the language.
Bill: No, I think that's great. I really believe like for my children, we're putting them through some aggressive language courses and really trying to get them to be proficient to the point of fluency. And I'm going to share what you just said with them. So it's not just Dad saying that he wants to be mean and put them through like bad things. And like there's actually value and you can like get something from this and it's good for you. So, well, I think one of the things I think that's helped you maybe and you might disagree with me on this. Whenever you look at when you've pivoted and we're going to get into this a lot later, but I just want to kind of draw the bridge here between your early experience and then what you've been doing recently. Whenever you look at data and you look at sales integration of like CRM data, marketing automation data. I mean, that's a very technical thing. And in its essence is its own language. It is very difficult. It is very hard and I think when you look at learning Chinese, learning Russian, those types of studies, it almost prepared you for really being able to engage those projects at a different level.
Rachel: I've never thought of it that way, but you're right. It does take a different way of thinking and approaching and maybe, yes, like learning language and parsing out all different data points and creating like a data picture does use a lot of the same thinking and tools. So that's a great correlation.
Bill: Sure. Yeah, I think we have to look at it from a standpoint of it's just so different and you have to think about it behaving differently because it's not linear. And especially when you look at the interaction, like if you get into something complex like Salesforce integration with HubSpot or other type of applications, you're translating two different languages together. And we've experienced that, right? We had that experience together on a project and I'm sure you had it many, many times over with other projects you did in a prior role.
Rachel: Because it's not a one to one. English you cannot do a one to one English and Chinese translation because it will make no sense. No sense. You really have to massage, kind of think a little bit differently, like say, well, this kind of correlates with this. So it kind of has the same meaning. Yes, you're right. Making those connections is very, very important.
Bill: I just want the 50 Marketing crew and to recognize that I brought something insightful to a podcast here. So this will be something we mark and maybe we play back at a team meeting because Bill had an insight. So, well, Rachel, one of the other things I know about your background is when you went to higher ed, you were involved in part of the marketing function and you actually got to experience CRM and marketing automation integration more from a user standpoint from trying to integrate it and accomplish initiatives that was part of your professional journey. Could you maybe talk about that a little bit and how that prepared you for your role today?
Rachel: Absolutely. I started off very new to marketing and the CRM world. So there was a pretty uphill battle in terms of trying to get up to speed because I was the marketing person for eight of our different language programs. While at the same time we were launching our Salesforce platform. And so, at first, I took a very hands -off approach to the CRM. I thought my job was just going to be in marketing, wanted to focus on that, but quickly realized in order to be an effective marketer, I needed a very strong CRM. So that's when I got involved in more of the architecture. And that is what I highly, highly recommend to people who are working with this CRM is to take more ownership of it because then you can have the ability to make it work how you want it to work. Otherwise, you're gonna just have a developer or somebody, some architect in a probably far away place who's gonna be setting it up for you and then handing it to you and it's going to be useless. So that's when I started taking a very active role in understanding how it works and understanding how I can use it better in order to automate things, in order to message out, in order to do reports. All of those things I had to learn how to do because higher ed, we don't have a team of 30 people doing all this. It was a one person show and that was me, so I had to do it. So it was a great process. It was a great learning experience, but not my favorite system. I'll just put that on record. Which we'll talk about later.
Bill: Yeah, we're going to talk about it later. Yeah. And so like, Hey, we're going to give you the unbornish truth. I know Rachel has some very strong opinions about marketing automation platforms and CRMs. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted her to be a guest and share for our listeners, because we're going to get down into the details and really jam on some topics that are, some of them will be a little more controversial than others, but these are from her professional experience and our experience. Rachel, I had a similar experience to you in coming up through dealing with marketing automation platforms and CRMs in the early 2000s. So we're not going to talk about what that means.
Rachel: Ancient history.
Bill: Yes, thank you. Thank you. In the early 2000s, I was a marketing manager and we had the need for our road Salesforce to have a CRM. And this was before marketing automation because this was pre-internet, right? Pre cloud pre everything. And we were trying to cobble together a syncing system with Act! where I created a custom database with custom objects. And then we had syncing through cellphone call in. I mean, it was a disaster compared to where we live today. But I completely agree with what you're saying about one of the pitfalls I see with a lot of organizations today when they try and take on marketing automation and CRM integrations, they don't own it. And they feel like, we're going to work on this for three months. It's going to be perfect. We're going to move it forward. And then I can set it and forget it. And that is a complete recipe for disaster. When I took ownership of that Act! database and that integration and that build, we started to see progress. Nowhere near the progress you can achieve with the tools we have today. And I'm sure, I mean, that sounds like that was your experience when you took ownership of it in the higher ed job.
Rachel: Absolutely.
Bill: So I think that that's a takeaway, an early preview takeaway of what we're going to talk about today. Whenever you were dealing in the higher ed job role as a marketing manager, you're dealing with market automation, you're dealing with CRM integration and building that out. What were some of your frustrations in that? Other than and I get it because this would apply to a lot of our clients who are in that middle market. We aren't going to have Fortune 500 company. We aren't going to have Fortune 500 company scale of operations, people, budgets, timetables. I have a client right now who their parent company is in Switzerland and they have a three year window with five dedicated people to spec, build out, install and train their new CRM. We're living in a space where our clients are going to have to do this much more rapidly, much lower budget and be much more aggressive in the timeline. So what were some of those frustrations you saw back when you were trying to implement that for the eight programs for your employer?
Rachel: Absolutely, it was a lot of learning what not to do, unfortunately, but that's still a good education. There was no rollout, there was no roadmap, there was very little planning or structure, very little enablement on this very complex tool. And so a lot of us were thrown in, either willingly or not willingly, into this software with no training and no real support. So it was very difficult initially and even beyond it because our my my programs operated very differently than the degree programs. So it was all built out for one team, one system. And I think that's often common too for for different people in marketing, right? It's like maybe for one product or one core business area. But then if you are on any sort of different track or periphery team, then good luck, Chuck. Like you're not really given anything. So that's when I had to realize that the systems that were kind of in place for them were not working for me. So I started developing a, I started putting myself in meetings where there were discussions and I started becoming friends with the main architect because I knew that in order to get anything changed and customized on my side, he was going to have to architect it for me. And that was very challenging too because I did not have the vocabulary. I don't know if you've ever worked with very, very technical people. If you do not say the exact word that they are looking for, they are like, if you say hall instead of meeting, they're just like ships in the night, like have no clue what you're saying. So it was very important for me to learn how he approached things, how he liked to be communicated with, and also the vernacular that he was familiar with in order for me to get the request and the structure built how I wanted it to. So that was a very important lesson to me, is like how to work with a technical audience and how to speak their language. Going back to language full circle because they speak a very different language than maybe you and I do, right? And what we, you and I could kind of correlate and like understand what we're like, maybe we use like slightly different terminology and like, you know, automation versus workflows. Like we kind of know what each other mean. Technical audiences, much, much different, much different minds. So yes.
Bill: When you look at the stakeholders, when you look at you’re dealing with, let's say a sales management team or that department that's on the CRM side, and then you're looking at the marketing team, there's two languages. So we need to translate there. Then we have to go to the dev side. And if there's a unpaired or an integration that's specified between two, like, so if you have HubSpot CRM and MA, that's a lot easier than say, in my opinion, than HubSpot MA, marketing automation, plus Salesforce, because there's a whole other language. And it feels to me kind of like that game we played as kids where they'd sit 10 of us in a row and whisper something in the first person's ears. And it was like oranges taste like citrus fruits. And at the other end, you know, the last kid would say, I like chocolate ice cream. And that almost a lot of the projects we've worked on, you have to work really hard at making sure whoever says whatever, it translates from step one to step 10.
Rachel: Absolutely. That your messaging is super super crisp. The other component too is talking to stakeholders and talking to executives because they also have a much different vocabulary than we do and much different different priorities so you have to understand what each priorities are make sure that it's meaningful to them make sure everybody hears that message and that you have them repeat it back to you too make sure that that is literally, it's tedious, but it's so essential. That is 100%.
Bill: Not only do you need them to repeat it back, you need to document it and have them sign it. Right. It almost gets, yeah, get it in writing and have it translated and reverse translated to make sure everybody's on the same page. Well, before we get really deep in the weeds, let's just talk about your current position. So Rachel, you recently have moved, you were in HubSpot as a integration specialist focused on Salesforce, HubSpot integrations and you went through a lot of wars there and we worked on some projects together, but now you've moved into the training, the HubSpot Academy division. So maybe talk a little bit about that transition and your new roles as a learning expert and helping people understand HubSpot and all of these tools and ideas today.
Rachel: Absolutely. I feel like I just came full circle with my, with this position now. So I, my first three and a half years at HubSpot was all on the technical side. I was doing technical support. I was doing technical consulting, integrations, implementation. And now this job at the Academy is bringing in my education background, my love for learning, global mindset, because we have, we have international content for in many different languages. We definitely have a very global audience. So this is just like a like amalgamation of all of my loves together in one position. My job specifically is working on our partner accreditations. And so those are very rigorous credentials that partners can receive if they are proven to have validated experience in certain technical, mostly technical or strategic competencies. So part of my job is the programming of this, running it, working on the evaluation process and all that stuff. So it's very, very interesting.
Bill: When you look at that full circle, when you first stated early in the conversation about how it was hard to learn languages, you didn't have a gift there, but you pursued that, honed your skills. I don't want to say dreams come true, but dream jobs or ideal jobs do come to you. Not the first job out of college, but you start piecing together skills and opportunities and experiences. Then you've worked hard and you've earned where you are and you're in the convergence of those in, I don't know if it's your ideal job, but it's closer to your ideal of what you would want to do. So that's, I think, also a lesson for any of the young people who might be listening to this. And if I make my kids listen to it, like, you know, keep working hard. Dreams do come true, just but they don't happen overnight. It's not like an Instagram reel where you graduate from college and now you have the Ferrari and whatever other things are important to young people today. So. Well, congratulations, Rachel, on your career and where you've made it to here so far. And I'm excited to follow along as you continue to develop your opportunities.
Rachel: Very kind of you, thank you.
Bill: Well, let's talk about the weeds here of some data migrations and some of those details. Because one of our goals in the Missing Half podcast is discover what's missing in manufacturing and B2B marketing. And I think we could probably sit here and talk for about two weeks straight about what's missing in strategy, tactics, implementation, and then ongoing optimization when it comes to data, when it comes to picking a marketing automation platform, when it comes to picking a CRM platform and making those all work together over the long term, there's just so much there we can talk about. So I want to get into the weeds, but at the same time kind of fly at a high level because the folks who are going to be listening to this are looking for value in how they plan, budget, create expectations with the C -suite and their management, how they execute and prepare their organization to hopefully have a successful situation and can really scale and leverage marketing automation and CRM. So let's jump right into it. And in your role as a technical consultant, you worked on a large number of migrations. And these were technical migrations. These weren't just like, go to the standard HubSpot Salesforce connector and connect it and then walk away. Because I thought that was funny. I had a client one time who said, well, all you have to do is click on that. And then it'll be there. I'm like, hey, you go ahead and you click on that and then let me know how that works. So we worked it out with that client after they looked in it and saw that it was a disaster. But can you maybe give us an overview of what you've learned during those processes and fly pretty high, but maybe, and we're gonna get into pitfalls, we're gonna get into the biggest mistakes you've seen and those types of things, but let's just start with an overview of those experiences.
Rachel: You're so right. It's a little bit mind-boggling how few how few people approach a data migration with the necessary seriousness that it really requires. When you think about it, it's data. And I think a lot of times we are just very used to things being very easy. Click of a button, right, where we can order food and it can be on our doorstep in three seconds. So we're this very instant gratification culture. And I think we've figured because technology is optimized for our use and service that it should just be super easy and straightforward. So that's, I think, the biggest misconception that I want to try to crush because it is, it takes a very serious approach of a lot of planning, a lot of discovery, and a lot of times, implementers are not in the room when these decisions are being made. But if you have any say, any ability, I highly recommend really thinking through of all the needs that you have as a marketing person, whoever in your job, what's working well with the current system, if you have a current system, a long list of wishes, right? And making sure that gets surfaced to the right people. If you are the one doing all the evaluation, take your time, make sure you speak to every person on the team and make sure you're speaking to people that might not be on your list too, because those people sometimes aren't the most important. They get overlooked, but they're the ones, you know, maybe on the ground, like doing a lot of the work versus just talking at the director level, you're only going to get a certain perspective. So that is doing your due diligence with discovery is going to set you up and yield so much return on that time. And then you can take all your findings, right? It's like if you remember writing a research paper, right? Like it's a similar approach. You gotta get all your sources. You gotta come up with like, what is the data telling you? What are people telling you? What is the software telling you? And then you make hopefully the right decision to select the CRM or the automation software that you've decided is going to be the best fit. And then the real work begins. Then you have to create an entire plan. And there's a strategic plan, there's a technical plan, and then there's the change management plan, which often gets overlooked, right? I've seen so many teams do an amazing job at one and two, and then just completely forget about three. And guess what happens? Six months later, sales aren't using it. They have their spreadsheets. Marketing is like free versions of MailChimp. Like it's, I would, yeah, I think you, I think.
Bill: We all have the scar tissue, Rachel. We all have the scar tissue. We all have like, I've been through therapy about just this subject, right? So I have a therapist just for data migrations and integration because the unneeded stress, I think you're right on. The biggest mistake that companies and like organizations are making is underestimating what it takes to do data right, to do CRM and marketing automation and those integrations right so that it not only works from like having quality data, but then quality processes that can be scaled for both marketing and sales. And whenever we underestimate what it's required, and then we build a bad foundation, then we shouldn't be shocked when it all falls apart and we've invested in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars, all kinds of time and resources, and then at the end of it, we don't have anything that works. So I completely agree. I think from an overview standpoint, if we could use the word underestimating or undervaluing, whatever the word is, I'm not sure, but that is just a huge problem in this industry. And I agree with you as well. People want that one click that quick. And certainly data has matured beyond where it was like in the early 2000s, when we started with data, data was terrible. There was nothing and there were no tools or AI or, you know, optimization tools that could fill in the gaps and the data wasn't really available. But even with that, we need to take it a sec further because our organizations are asking us to do so much more with it. So we need those data touch points. So I think that's great feedback and a great overview of some of the challenges. One of the things I know that will be true for a lot of our clients in the mid-market is they'll be starting from scratch. They won't have anything like there's no old CRM. They just have sales teams that are out there using Google Docs and Sheets and filling in their call reports. And we'll have outdated databases from the company that are not databases of our prospects. They're the AP clerk at the company, not the identified buyer teams. If we were going to do that kind of start from scratch, really entrepreneurial approach to getting our CRM launched and then doing some integration with marketing automation, are there any thoughts or guidance you could give to really get something started quickly? And once again, these people aren't going to have a million dollar budget and five people. This is going to be one person, limited budget and limited time. Any thoughts on that? And I know this is a tough ask because this one might be, this might be what goes viral for us, Rachel. If you, if the answer you get like, like you'll be booked on every podcast in the country, you'll have the answer and this is how we make it work. So I know this is a tough one.
Rachel: You're exactly right. This is where the most of people are in right now. And they don't even know where to start because they have nothing, really. But they do. But they don't know how to make this work for them. My first step after you've done all your due diligence is data hygiene. The biggest pitfall that I see is just people uploading their address books. Their Quicken. They just think, well, I need to fill it with data because it's been sitting here and I have an empty CRM and that's terrifying. But you get bad data in, you're going to corrupt your CRM from the very beginning. And what I firmly, firmly believe, whether you're migrating or you're starting from scratch, is to clean your data. Create criteria. Does it have an email address? That should be number one. 99 .99 % of all businesses should use email addresses as their unique identifier, as their contact record. If you don't have an email address for them, get rid of them. They don't exist to you.
Bill: At least not in the in this data set. Go get it. Go get it if you want. Yes.
Rache: Yes, in your data set. Or get it, yes. If they're important enough, you should surely find them. Pick up the phone then, if you have a number for them. If you don't have any contact information, why do you even have them? Right, so that should be the first step. The second one is, when was the last time you've contacted them? If it has been more than six months, most likely they are stale. Most likely they are not going to be a useful person. I can't tell you how many times we think that a stale, outdated, old email address is better than no email address, but it's not. It's just better to let them go to the wayside and if they resurface again, great, welcome to our CRM. But if not, they will only cause more issues with your emailing, with your audiences, with your lists, with your, the trust with your salespeople. Because that is so essential because salespeople will not trust marketing people if you continually give them bad data. And if they've just spent their entire day trying to chase down leads that don't even work for the company anymore, but you thought they did, you're going to have a really hard time when you actually do give them a good lead the next go around because you just wasted a day of their precious time. So you really wanna make sure that the data that you have is as good as it possibly can get because that is going to be, that's gonna go a really long way in helping you as a marketer and then helping your sales team work with you.
Bill: I couldn't agree more. In 2020, we launched our own data services team here at 50 Marketing as part of our agency for this, not only for CRM data, but for website data for e-comm. Any type of data sets we have that we have to deal with with our clients or that we're developing for our clients has to go through a hygiene process. Quality over quantity. And I think this is a psychological issue and you hit it. I want to put everybody in there. I want to get everybody in the world. And the reality is for most businesses, they don't need 10,000 new clients a month, right? They're not some SaaS that can just replicate and skyrocket. And we have this abundance mentality that the abundance of opportunity has to be always available, as opposed to I have a friend who owns I think he's up to like 22 car dealerships. And I believe the reason he's successful or one of them is he said this to me one day, Bill, I still sell cars one at a time. He focuses on selling cars one at a time, and I don't know how many thousands he sells a year, but it's a lot right. They're huge. But he focuses on one at a time. And I think when we look at our data hygiene and we look at that CRM and providing, you know, marketing, providing a lead to sales, it is better that it is really good and high quality and low quantity because they will burn out really quickly on bad leads, on bad data. And then they will just abandon the effort and there's no buy-in. So I agree with that. I think I would rather see a client come in with 200 leads that are high quality, build the system, run it through, make sure it was working well before, and then add incrementally good data over time as opposed to, hey, we have 10,000 people in the database from 1975. Let's get them all in there. Cause hey, who knows? Who knows? And that's where marketing automation and CRM platforms are not a fix all. They are not going to solve all of our issues. They're only binary, they're fast, they help us scale, but you wanna scale good. And this could maybe be a Star Wars reference, like you wanna scale good and not evil, right? You want the good side of the force working for you. So, no, I think that's a great overview. And like, I think the next level of client we have that we deal with and that would be part of this audience today would be a client who's, they're not starting from scratch. They're going to transition from a legacy system. And whether that's like kind of like an entry-level system, like a Zoho or it's like really old school, like Act! or Pardo, Gold Mine. I mean, we can go back through the litany, the graveyard of CRM's past. What do you think beyond the data hygiene, because I think that whether you're doing starting from scratch or your enterprise, that's a fundamental principle. What do you think is your most like your highest recommendations for someone who's migrating from a legacy system into a new system?
Rachel: Yes, so migrating, again, do not underestimate it. Do not approach this casually, even if your executives have approached it casually. As much as you can, you need to set expectations that this is going to be an arduous process under the best of circumstances. I always like to set expectations. I'm not a pessimist, but I'm a realist, right? Like there's, it's just whenever you're migrating to systems, it is going to be very complicated. And so you really need to be as prepared as you possibly can. So working with an agency is something I highly recommend. Unless you have somebody who has done this before, the benefits that you are going to reap from not making 5,000 mistakes and maybe only making 50 mistakes is going to be, it is going to be the best decision you have made. So this is just something like, I always say, it's like, help, let the experts help you because they can think about things that never would have crossed your mind. They will ask questions that you would have never even thought to ask. And that could have derailed the entire migration, like the number of failed migrations that I had been brought on to or heard about will blow your mind. It is, I'm sure you, too. Like it is, it's just because I think the approach was just let, well, you rip and replace, like just go, yeah, pick up and drop and we're done.
Bil: Yeah, you right click on your mouse and you copy and paste, right? It's that one click that quick. Yeah. And it works. And I think, that's, that's right on. Rachel, the next thing I'd like to talk about, and I think this is something that often happens in these processes, is companies and individuals get focused on the tech stack first
and they don't start where they need to. So let's go before data hygiene. Let's go before we're talking about the integration. And I think this is something that HubSpot really champions. And in the HubSpot courses, which you're now a part of developing and really talking about, and this seems so simple, but I think often simple, like will reduce a lot of problems. But let's talk about, you know, the people side of this and like, not only the people side of change, but then like actually just setting the goals. Because if we just copy the old CRM, the legacy CRM, or we're starting from scratch and we just launch off into this great unknown, we don't have goals. We haven't considered the people and the change that they're going to experience. How important is that in the entire process?
Rachel: Essential like I said that third piece the change management should be where just as many resources and time goes into as your other pieces the tech stack the strategy very very crucial that you have a strong why. Right, that golden why of you can articulate that people who are on your team can articulate that Why are we doing this? Why are we going through this whole process? Why are you taking all my time away from this? Why are we spending all this money? And if you don't have a strong convincing message for that, then you need to press pause. And you need to get your team together and figure out that why before you even start moving on. Because if you don't have buy-in now, you're sure as not gonna get buy-in when the waters get choppy in two months and all your data is gone and your structure is not working on either platform. And yes, so that is my number one recommendation.
Bill: Yeah, because the storm clouds are rolling in, right? They are coming. The high seas are coming and we need to be prepared. How many organizations do you see in your experience may start this process of the why, but fail to break the whys down into, here's a why for sales. Here's a why for marketing. Here's a why for C -suite executive management, why we're doing it. Like, it seems to me that we can't just say, we want to scale marketing and sales data and scale efforts. We need to get down into, hey, this level of SDR, BDR, marketing manager, email manager, this is your why for transitioning to HubSpot Pro, MA, and sales platform. Do you see that as a miss by a lot of organizations?
Rachel: Almost all the time. Yeah, and maybe that's because the bias is because I brought in because things do not go according to plan, but you're right. So many people overlook the specific needs of those departments and not just, yeah, why? To make more money. Why? To scale. That's not a why, right? That does not resonate at my job as a sales rep or as a marketing manager. So you're right. Like what is also very needed is to have those discovery questions. I always love to start with what are your biggest pain points? That is just like surefire way to get an answer and to get a really good picture of like of the issues that they face on a daily basis. And so if we can flip that and we can get the why of like why we are solving for this, that is going to resonate with people because we want to make their lives easier and not harder. Salespeople, marketing people, support people, everybody has extremely difficult jobs. And if we can show them that this system is going to solve for those pain points, that is how you are going to get that adoption, that buy-in, that co-creation that you need to get this going.
Bill: I think a key aspect of that as well is not only identifying those pain points, but getting each stakeholder or stakeholder like persona to recognize what's working well. Everything in their current system isn’t garbage. And there's some things that even the early systems did well and help people achieve their goals. And I think everybody's always willing to complain about what doesn't work well. But getting them to also recognize when you're mapping this out, you know, define it negatively and positively so that you see both ends. So, you know, hey, these are things we definitely want to carry over. These are aspects of the CRM that are really important to us. And then here are the gaps. And then here's what absolutely works terribly and is inefficient and causing us pain. Do you think that could be an essential part of the process as well?
Rachel: Absolutely. You're so right. People fear change because of a myriad of different reasons. But yes, like if something is working how they're accustomed to it for a number of years or however long, it's very hard for them to let go of that because they have a system down and that's what they're used to and that's what's working for them. And you're right. We need to give them the reassurances that the most important pieces that they do like, that is very important to them, we will do our best to preserve it as much as we can. Yeah, you're right. That's very important.
Bill: So Rachel, our audience is made up of mostly manufacturing and B2B companies that are anywhere in revenue from 10 or 20 million up to 150 million. So that kind of gives you a perspective on what resources and team members they have available and what they have to work with to execute these. So I would like to go into some rapid fire Q&A of just some back and forth to give them some guidance, to provide some education and guidance for marketing managers as far as budget scope, timing and that type of thing. And these can be very rough ranges. Like the first question, how long should a CRM data migration take? This isn't one that we're going to say 27.5 days, but you know, like three to six months, six, like, so we can be broad, but I think those are the type of answers that our marketing managers need to be prepared because these are the questions they're going to face from the C-suite or from management whenever they're approaching these type of projects. So are you ready for the rapid-fire round? Let's do it. So how long on average do you think a CRM data migration integration should take in terms of months would be the right unit of measure?
Rachel: Average three months, 90 days with a plan after completion to ensure operations, everything is working well. That's important. It's not 90 days, wipe your hands, walk away.
Bill: Okay, so would you say to add a little more color to that, 90 days to a soft launch, then maybe another 30 to 60 for like quality control and a little bit more heavy handed change, like adapting to what comes up quote unquote. And then after that, can we kind of go into a manage and maintain mode?
Rachel: Yes. Correct. Yes, 30 to 60 days. 30 days if everything goes perfectly well, 60 to 90 days if there was some issues with the rollout.
Bill: Excellent. And I think that that can provide like a roadmap for our audience where they can kind of, if I was them, I would paint the worst case scenario where it's 90 to 120 for the first step. It's 60 to 90 for the heavy oversight and adaptation. And then thereafter, we still have to budget and resource ongoing maintenance and optimization. That's always going to be the case, but that would really give a marketing manager some wiggle room.
Rachel: Yes, externally always say 120, internally have 90, and then hopefully you get somewhere in the middle. Absolutely. Always. That's my strategy for almost everything.
Bill: Yeah, over, over deliver and under promise, right? When a project is done, right? Okay. We're past that soft launch and adaptation. If you're going to consider a percentage of effort for ongoing maintenance compared to the launch, what type of percentage, I mean, I know these are kind of rough questions, but if we're going to say base hundred to get it launched, and then maybe it goes down to 50, 60% effort in that soft launch adaptation phase, what is our ongoing percentage effort to maintain it?
Rachel: So you're talking about like a CRM integration, correct? Like so maybe sales is using Salesforce, marketing is using HubSpot. That type of integration where I see the most success is an average, I guess breaking it down, I would say an average of one to 10 hours a week, potentially. Yeah, yeah, I would say no fewer than one hour. Anything more than five to 10, I would, that would be some serious concerns, but it could take up to that amount.
Bill: When you're talking about those hours though, you're talking about someone who knows what they're doing.
Rachel: That's correct. And that's hopefully, hopefully when you did the migration process, you had enablement built in. So you were taught to how to do that. And you weren't just kind of, again, thrown into the ether and told to figure it out because you're right. If somebody's coming in with very little to no knowledge about either platform or both plus integration. So that's three different separate pieces. It could potentially take quite a bit more time.
Bill: So one to 10 hours of a outsourced expert or of an internally trained enabler who really knows all three areas and knows what they're doing. Okay, great. Cause that gives, I think some of our audience a way to scope this and present a proper expectation so that they're kind of playing defense whenever they're getting challenged by the executive, the sales manager. Oh, you’ll just figure it out and
whatever, and then they're the ones who come back screaming three months later when all is not well, which we want to try and avoid. Where do you see the biggest budgeting problem or miss whenever people are budgeting for these change initiatives? Is it in the data hygiene? Is it in the integration? Where do you see? Or is it people? They just don't have enough people hours budgeted. What do you see as the biggest miss in a CRM integration with budgeting?
Rachel: CRM and also I would say marketing automation, the biggest miss is the decrease in productivity in leads that you will generate. So for marketing, when your entire marketing automation software has changed, you are not going to get the number of leads and MQLs that you have in your previous system. You are starting from almost scratch and a lot of leadership do not recognize that your numbers are going to go down before they go up. And the same with sales too. You cannot expect the same level of productivity and quota hitting when you've changed sales’ entire system. So there really needs to be a lot more understanding and grace for those teams who are doing a lot of different roles plus learning, plus building all of your assets or whatever from scratch, that that is just going to mean naturally that you will take a hit on those numbers for a good quarter or two.
Bill: And I'm having flashbacks right now. So pardon me as I think back through some of those biggest mistakes as we've seen with clients, right? But no, I agree with that. I think one of the biggest mistakes you can make is expecting that your efficiency performance is just going to like immediately stay the same or improve dramatically as you build scalable operations, there is that learning period, there is the trial and error period, no matter how good the process is. So that's great. How many percentage wise, like probably one of the biggest mistakes we see is people undervaluing or under budgeting that ongoing maintenance piece. What percentage of technical implementations did you work on, do you feel that that was undervalued and that maybe had been one of the biggest mistakes that these companies were making when they're dealing with the marketing automation or CRM integration?
Rachel: Absolutely, almost almost everybody I don't I don't know if I've ever worked with a client that was like, yep That was exactly what we were expecting in terms of budget and bandwidth. Like we are super happy sometimes you get those and those are those are the best ones, but You know for better for worse sales people will say a lot to sell people on the software, okay, and maybe de-emphasize some of the problems and pain that can go along with merging systems, integrating two systems. And so I think a lot of times expectations are not set correctly, and I understand why, but it really does make everybody else who's dealing with that fallout, their job is a lot more difficult. So I just take everything with a grain of salt that you hear from somebody who's trying to sell you something.
Bill: Well, Rachel, that's one of the reasons why I really wanted to have you on the podcast is you're giving unvarnished truth because you had to clean up the messes in the actual implementation side of this. And yeah, I get it. You know, we're a platform agnostic, but at the same time, we think HubSpot does a nice job with the marketing automation and CRM integration. And that's what we use and recommend to our clients. But whenever a salesperson from HubSpot is trying to sell it, they're trying to get the sale. And obviously if every salesman told every buyer everything, there would be no progress in the world. So we understand no deals, nothing would happen. Nothing happens till something is sold or something. There's that old adage, but there needs to be that moment of truth where we all accept with honesty, the realities of what's going to happen and what needs to be expected. So I think, you know, all of them, that's probably true. And I think if you get someone who's like, this is exactly what we thought, and we budgeted correctly, then you have that lingering thought of what did we miss? Because there's something there, like there's something in that black box, it's going to pop out here, a gotcha moment, and it's coming, right? Okay. This is a really, I think a geeky question and a very technical question. What do you think about data flow diagrams and have you used those extensively on projects? Do you feel those are like, I feel like this could be a golden nugget for a lot of people, as they're planning and working through these projects.
Rachel: I exclusively use them. I don't extensively use them. I use them for almost every single major data migration. I think also integrations too could also, it's very, very important, especially custom integration, essential for a custom integration. Very, very good to have for a native integration like the Salesforce HubSpot Connector. I like doing two. I like doing an ERD, so yeah, entity relationship diagram, the very, the technical one for my side and any developers that I'm working with. And then I like to have a prettier one for stakeholders that kind of, they don't have like the little, yeah, one to many, like all the like really messy associations. It kind of looks a little freaky for some people that like, but then Lucid, shoutout to Lucid. I'm sure you use it all the time. That's that's my go-to for ERDs. It's just very helpful for me to just to map things out and visualize it. You can't do that in a Doc. You can't do that with words put it on a piece of paper put it on a whiteboard. Put it somewhere so you can see how everything is connected. Get a lot of people's eyes on it get feedback because sometimes how you think the data is gonna flow is really not how people need it to flow. And until you see, until you hear, you know, hear what they say, map it out, and then they're like, wait, no, that's not gonna work for us at all. You're like, well, okay, glad we did this because this is exactly what you told me. And then you rework it. So essential, crucial, do it. You will not regret it.
Bill: I think one of the biggest time savers, the biggest, what do you want to call it hacks, cheat codes for any of these projects is getting something like Lucidchart. It's cheap, get multiple users. I would pay 10 times more than what we're paying for that. Don't tell Lucid and no one tell Lucid this, but yeah, don't tell them.
Rachel: I have a friend who works for Lucid, so I'm calling her right now.
Bill: Yeah, don't tell her just like, but that tool and there's other tools out there to be platform agnostic, there's tons of tools like Lucid that you can get, but it is so critical to visualize it because people verb, you know, there's the, the ancient way, the caveman way, which is the verbal lore way of doing these, where they get on a Zoom and everybody talks about it and everybody wants to get off the Zoom. So they shake their heads and say, yes, I understand. And then we all go away and nobody knows what anybody was talking about. There's the Google Doc. Which is, I think, kind of like the next level in the spectrum, which is they write it. So we move from verbal to written. Then I love the folks who think that a Google Sheet and trying to diagram out trees through like the different cell structures, like that feels to me like the next level of insanity, but getting to a Lucid chart, a Lucid diagram and looking at those flows and then making sure. You know, if I'm a marketing manager, I want my team to sign off on these things. I want them to sign off on that level of detail, but I agree with you as well. I love this idea and I didn't think about this before, and this is probably a gap for our team. We need to have a executive level summary diagram as well as the detailed blueprint spec for the developers and for the data services team. I love that. That's a great takeaway for our team to do a better job of because I can, going back in my mind of historical occurrences where we've gotten bogged down in the weeds with the C-suite in the real technical and just having that, you know, here's an area that is one to many as opposed to all of the variations because then they're going to start going down that rabbit hole and we may never get back.
Rachel: Yes. And using, I love using it to test drive, like the using a real one of their companies, one of their top companies, putting, plugging all of those real life examples in and then saying like, okay, so this situation comes in, guy from Pepsi or yes, well, whatever comes in. This is the process of where this contact is going to be going through this diagram that is like that is so essential to be able to do that, make that connection to their actual work and seeing if it works or not.
Bill: So another topic, and this is something that HubSpot talks a lot about in the CRM, is the custom objects. Do you have any guidance? We have the out of the box tool that we can implement, but then we have the custom objects. Do you have any guidance around the pitfalls of too many or too few? What would you give an organization that's maybe starting from scratch or their legacy system was just basically a glorified content contact record, there weren't a lot of custom objects, what would be your guidance on a way to approach custom objects?
Rachel: That is another very hidden but big pitfall I see in a lot of people when they set up their CRM. They either create too many, you're limited to 10 anyway, and that's by design because they really can be the best thing for your CRM or the worst thing if they're not set up correctly. So for example, you're in manufacturing, right? I've seen people do custom objects for every one of their products. And because I want to see if Bill has purchased this tractor, I want to see that associated. There should be very specific reasons. Like core parts of your business need to be, if they're not already identified in HubSpot, right? So we have an ability to have products, right? We have that functionality already. So making sure you understand your system and understanding, okay, does this already have it built in? If not, then the another question is what's the argument for a property or a field versus a custom object? And usually, if there's just a lot more data associated with that specific part that you need to represent that can't be captured with one or two properties, then it might be worth exploring introducing a custom object, but making sure you have a really clear understanding of the relationship between the company between the contacts. And if you don't have a clear strategy and also a clear reason for why you want to represent it like this, step back a little bit and then ask. Because sometimes it's like, well, of course, this is what we do all the time. But how are you going to use this? How is this going to be really important to how you manage your data. If you can't really answer that, then it might, you might need to look at something else.
Bill: I think this also kind of parlay's into one of the biggest mistakes companies make whenever the sales team is steering the ship and saying, we have to have Salesforce. Everybody who's serious, everybody who's got a good sales team uses Salesforce. And then I've made the mistake or opened my big mouth in meetings being kind of more of an advocate on the marketing automation side and saying, well, why specifically do you want to use Salesforce, why can't we just use HubSpot's CRM and market automation platform that's already integrated? The reporting's already there. We don't have to spend the extra money on the integration. We don't have to spend the extra money on the maintenance and ongoing. And I think one of the biggest mistakes companies make is they let the sales team dictate that Salesforce needs to be used out of just that's what everybody else is doing, as opposed to there's a use case or an actual reason for that system. Have you seen that happen when you've been experienced the Salesforce plus HubSpot integrations?
Rachel: Yes, very, very common, very frustrating too, but I understand it. Sales drives the revenue. And so money speaks, right? And people like to do what they're used to. So for the longest time, Salesforce was really the only option. And I'm sure when these, the chief sales officers were, you know, breaking ground, getting their shoes wet in the sales world, that was what was used for any reputable serious company. And so now they're in the C-suite and making those decisions. And unfortunately, a lot of them don't do the due diligence that's needed. So sometimes what I, if you're ever in those rooms, sometimes it's like, hey, can we, can we get a demo even just of HubSpot? Like, HubSpot's biggest customer, we sold them HubSpot over Salesforce because of usability. And they let their sales teams work in both for a certain amount of time and almost across the board every single salesperson said we need to use HubSpot. It's 4,000 times easier to use, more user friendly, and thankfully that CSO said listen to their team and was like yeah we need, you go through salespeople so fast like you need to get them up and running as soon as possible so sometimes if you can get that like proof is in the pudding right like get get them and some people who are actually making those sales deals on the software and their minds might be changed. They might not be and then whatever you get, you get more and more work because it's more work to integrate the two and there'll be more problems and headaches. So they'll need you more. So it keeps us in business, but it's also not, not ideal. I agree. And not necessarily for most people.
Bill: I agree. I think one of the biggest challenges we face is that the underestimation of the overhead burden on salesperson's time with a cumbersome CRM. I have a number of friends who are professional salespeople. They operate in some advanced healthcare, surgical equipment. I mean, just technical stuff with a lot, a lot, heavy, heavy use cases. And their biggest complaint is not how much money they make, is not how well they're doing. It's I have to spend so much time maintaining my Salesforce instance and updating the information all the time. And I come from an entrepreneurial background. You know, my dad always told me, make sure your salespeople are selling, not doing administrative work, not. Their job is not running Salesforce, their job is going and winning deals and generating revenue and maintaining good client relationships. And I know that's kind of a general statement. And I'm sure there's a number of people who would disagree with me about the onerous overhead created by Salesforce instances. However, I would love to see them do, and I'm not even saying it has to be HubSpot. I would love to see them compare that instance to any other CRM, marketing automation integration, and then actually run the numbers and see what's easier, what takes less time to execute for the salesperson. And I'm not even talking about the benefits of marketing automation. I'm not talking about the integration benefits, the reporting benefits. I'm not talking about any of that scalability, just the usability for the salesperson. And I would be shocked if the outcome didn't play out kind of the way we've talked about it here. I've seen it too many times. And maybe part of that in fairness is the space we operate in. In the middle market, in smaller companies, that may be more true. Maybe as the level of complexity goes up, Salesforce has a better use case. I don't know, because we don't deal with Fortune 500 companies. We're not in that space. So maybe the use case is there. But I know my experience. I know our clients' experience. And that's what we've seen.
Rachel: You're right, it's really mind boggling when I see a mid-market company with very limited resources say, we're going all in on Salesforce. And I'm like, do you have a technical team? Do you have a solutions architect? Do you have a Salesforce administrator? Do you have like three to five people dedicated to like setting this up in a way that's going to be conducive to your business? Because if not, then like, not as like, stop the conversations now, because you need a different CRM that's going to be much better suited, and also a CRM that can scale with you. And like HubSpot has done a really good job too of starting with those small medium businesses, but then also being able to scale up with the complexity of more enterprise level customer too. That wasn't always the case. I'll be very honest with you for, yeah, Salesforce definitely owned that for a long time, but it's 2024. Tech moves very fast. Like it's within everyone's best interest to evaluate what you're the tools that you're using today. And don't go into that sunk cost fallacy. That's the biggest piece that I see a lot of people, well, we've already invested millions and millions of dollars into it. That was our higher ed company, the higher ed organization I was in had invested too many millions of dollars into it and it was broken on almost every level. But we couldn't do anything about it because it would be too costly to replace it even though it was costing us enormous amounts of money.
Bill: Sunk cost, it hits us all. There's no two ways about it. And we need new thinking to displace that prejudice and that old way of thinking. And certainly tech has helped everybody think differently because there are upstarts and disruptors that enter the market all the time. AI is going to play a whole other role in that. And so we'll see that, I think, adoption, change, adoption, acceleration need. So yeah, I couldn't agree more. Let's, let's pivot. We have a couple of minutes left here, Rachel, and I want to pivot to, you allow allowing you to have, we do shameless plugs. So, your new role at HubSpot is in the training arena and you focus on helping your team build better training for the HubSpot user community and for the agencies. Maybe talk about that and the value of the academy. Certainly a lot of our team has been through a lot of those courses. I myself have sat through a lot of those courses, learned a ton. So let's go ahead and give you the opportunity to plug the HubSpot Academy and the learning in that area.
Rachel: I love your question too that you had presented to me was like what what have I learned about continuous education right or customer education and how to balance slowing down with keeping pace with the market I think the Academy does a really good job of providing the content that people need when they need it There's a lot of different formats. So what I have found personally, I consume also a lot of Academy content as well. I find it very valuable. But it does get overwhelming, right? Like even just like HubSpot in particular, but that's not even including all the myriad of other resources and training, newsletters that we get bombarded with every day. And I think some people get paralyzed too with just like how much they feel like they need to know. So what I found has been very helpful for me is every month I set a new goal. So sometimes for some people could be a week, some people could be a quarter. But what is my goal for the, what do I want to learn? What do I want to upskill on for this month? And I try to, I try to switch it every month. It's either a technical or it's a soft skill. So I think a really overlooked soft skill is storytelling and the importance of being able to tell a compelling story, whether it's you’re a marketer and you're trying to create a marketing strategy for people, or you're trying to sell your executives on a new initiative, you need to have compelling stories. So I find LinkedIn learnings for this. I've taken courses on this. Find out what format works well for you. And then I try to do something more technical. So some people are really good at self-paced learning and they're just like, they can just kind of go in and find a course on their own to listen to. For other people, maybe they need like a cohort to understand. So we have both, right? You can go into the Academy app, academy.hubspot.com and start learning anything about our platform and then also just marketing, sales, best practices, get upskilled on whatever's of interest to you. Or if you're a partner, you can also join one of our boot camps and they're completely free and they're like, you're with a cohort every week learning something about like account based marketing. We have rev ops, we have pipeline generation boot camps and they go super in depth and like some people need that accountability of logging in every day and that's how you learn. I think that's a really great format for some people. So finding out the format that works for you and then a specific skill set that you want to learn for that month or for that week whenever you have the time really helps me feel like I'm not falling behind. But I'm also not overwhelmed or not like just scatter picking things, but not really getting anything meaningful and useful for it that I can use in my life. So that's my plug.
Bill: No, I think that's great. And I appreciate one of the things I appreciate about the HubSpot training platform is the various methods they deliver. Not only from like, I know some of our younger people love the videos. They love to watch his videos. I'm on Zoom a lot. So I love to read the transcripts because I need actually I'll admit I print some of them out. I know that's we're not supposed to print as much, but I print the transcripts up and I mark them up. Yep. And it's like old school, like paper and pen, But you can deal with those however you need to deal with them. And I agree that we need to set goals. We need to make sure we're slowing down to make sure we learn what we need to learn. I think HubSpot does a great job of creating like those theory and introductory survey courses as well as, okay, now let's get down to the weeds and actually technically implement these types of things. And then they have the, like the playbooks or the, like the guides that you can walk through like the practical guide. So I've always appreciated that. I think HubSpot has created a whole new movement in our space around education and they've set the gold standard. So I've always appreciated that. So congratulations to you and your team on the work you're doing. We appreciate it. We put a lot of our people through the classes and ask them to learn not only things about HubSpot, but then just general social media planning. Or those other theoretical skills that are so important. My son is a rising sophomore in college taking marketing, and he's often asked me, what can I do to supplement what I'm learning? I was like, I can give you a list of courses. And a lot of them are from HubSpot because I feel like the academy, the higher ed is still teaching very basic marketing concepts, consumer behavior, persuasive theory, all important things. But in the practical world of 2024, where are we talking about buyer persona segmentation? Where are we talking about how to write a creative brief? Where are we talking about these like skills that these marketers are going to need to function and actually get their job done and not show up at their first job, having no clue how to get anything done? And that's hyperbolic. I mean, that's extreme, but there's a lot of truth in that we come out of the higher ed with these ideas. And unless there's a track around specific digital marketing execution, we're not coming out with young people who are degreed, who can actually we can plug into the agency and they can go. So I think HubSpot is a great like add on right to kind of bridge that gap. So I don't know if you've seen that or experienced that in your in your time there.
Rachel: You're about to see me get on a soapbox. I have been in higher ed for seven years and I will tell anybody until I'm blue in the face that you should not go to college for technical skills. You go to college for a myriad of other reasons. I think there's a lot of amazing things about college that is not the place for you to acquire real life technical skills. There are so many other trainings. If you want to learn how to code, if you want to learn how to develop. Yeah, computer science is like, OK, but by the time the things that you learned as a freshman is going to be completely irrelevant by the time you're a sophomore, go to boot camp like go. Yeah, learn on HubSpot certification software. Find areas that you're interested in, like exactly what you said, and figure out what are the practical skills, how to build reports. You do not learn that in college. Unfortunately, many of our professors have never, none of my professors had ever held a real job outside of academia. So they're telling me everything in theory, and they taught me a lot of great things about critical thinking, but your, I, entered the workplace completely ignorant of how to have any sort of practical skills of marketing, of sales, of business in general. So you're right. There are so many better trainings that do a really great job of learning, of teaching technical skills. So I think you need, if you can, you can have both, but do not go to college for technical skills only.
Bill: Until the marketing, the business schools treat marketing like the engineering schools treat engineering or the accounting schools treat accounting. We are going to have people with very soft skills and theoretical foundations, but an inability to deliver on anything technical. And I agree. I mean, college is a great place to grow, to learn communication skills and all of those things. But when you're looking at marketing, cause we looked across the country for schools and opportunities that would give us, give him what I thought, which it's my limited experience. So this isn't, you know, truth for all, but, would give technical skills. And the idea became like a go and learn theory, go and learn communication, go and learn, these softer skills, grow up. And then hit your boot camps, hit your HubSpot, hit LinkedIn, hit whatever the newest, latest, greatest. Cause there's every day there's something to develop those technical skills. The other thing, my son, and my son's going to kill me for saying this, but he wanted to kind of polish his Spanish, his foreign language. He's like, well, should I take that at college? I was like, no, let's go to Barcelona for six months. Immerse yourself and go get it. That's the only way he's going to take it from where he is in his proficiency to fully fluent and being able to technically interact in that language. So, well, Rachel, as always, when you and I get together, we, we, we end up going long because there's so much we cover and we had this with some of our implementations and our work back and forth, but it is always a pleasure. I just find it very enjoyable, to interact with your intellect and your experience. And we always have a great time. I definitely want to reserve the right to run this back again and talk again in the future. Whatever the topic is, maybe we'll dive into higher ed and get a lot of haters about the current state of college, business, schools or whatever. But we'll pick a topic to make sure we're excited about it. But thank you so much for joining us. You've provided a lot of value for our target market, for our audience. I took some notes during the process of some Easter eggs or golden eggs that I found in the process. So thank you very much and we just really enjoyed it.
Rachel: Such a pleasure, Bill, as always. Please have me back. Love to chat. As you know, I have opinions, so always happy to share and just hear from you as well.
Bill: Excellent.