Tactic Talks: Navigating HubSpot

James Weis (00:00.11)

have one other time. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (00:01.941)

Yeah, biggest thing is just at the end, don't just shut the browser down because it's gonna record locally and it uploads it. Yeah, so, and it tells you, but there's one, it only happened once, but I was like, no. Someone just was like, all right, see ya, and they just hung up and delete, like close their browser, and then we lost like the last five minutes or something. It wasn't a big deal, but yeah, don't shut it down until it says it's uploaded. All right.

James Weis (00:08.426)

Locally, yeah, cool.

James Weis (00:23.777)

Uh.

James Weis (00:26.926)

So, um.

Chris Kiefer (00:30.229)

Welcome back everybody to another episode of The Pursuit of Purpose. My name is Chris Kiefer and today I am joined by James Weiss who is the owner and founder of Tactic. Would you call yourself an agency, James? I am what? Consulting firm, yeah. So yeah, thank you first of all, James, for coming on.

James Weis (00:44.322)

Not anymore, it's consulting, consultancy. Yeah, yeah.

James Weis (00:52.187)

Absolutely happy to be here.

Chris Kiefer (00:53.773)

And our paths cross because we are both HubSpot certified partners. And James is giving a just a incredibly valuable presentation on the prospecting tool that and features, I should say, that HubSpot has recently added to their sales, their sales hub. So that's I mean, that's kind of what we're going to talk about. But before we get into like the weeds on that stuff, I'd love for you to give like

your HubSpot bio or like how have you interacted, used it and how long have you worked with it, all that type of stuff.

James Weis (01:32.522)

Yeah, yeah, sure. So I've been using HubSpot. So the way I said, I've been a HubSpot user since 2012, and I've been a HubSpot partner since 2015. Prior to starting Tactic, I owned a full service marketing agency where HubSpot was a part of what we did at the agency, but it was everything from print design to...

web development to video production. We had two videographers on staff. I had about 15 people. I had in-house SDRs that we did sales prospecting for folks. And so that was all going really well up until the pandemic hit. We were, I was pretty well, pretty well established in B2B hard tech industry. And...

Chris Kiefer (02:27.597)

When you say hard tech, what do you mean by hard tech?

James Weis (02:29.898)

Yeah, hard tech, meaning like not software, right? So like physical servers or data center products and things like that. So those retainers kind of all left at the same time, unfortunately, so hung on as long as I could, but I kind of figured out what I wanted to do based on what I learned in the agency and...

Chris Kiefer (02:33.837)

Okay.

Chris Kiefer (02:39.31)

Okay.

Chris Kiefer (02:45.723)

Mm-hmm.

James Weis (02:56.938)

The reason I started Tactic was when we were doing HubSpot services, HubSpot work in the agency, my whole thing was just buy HubSpot. I have the people, I have SDRs, I have marketing people, don't worry about it. We'll take care of it. And it worked well for a while, but at the end of the day, the person on the other end of my video calls wasn't getting the, I wasn't imparting any knowledge to them, they weren't getting any value at a HubSpot other than us.

Chris Kiefer (03:24.001)

You weren't teaching them how to fish. You were just fishing for them and giving them the food.

James Weis (03:26.702)

Yeah, we were just exactly right. Exactly right. So that's where I kind of, in part of that agency world, especially with containers, like, you know, the worst word in the world is churn, right? Like, you don't want anybody to churn in the agency world. So trying to learn from all that, that's what I started Taktek is one embracing churn, right? So like the way I do my business and the way I price everything is there's an end in sight, right? My goal is to

teach somebody how to use HubSpot in the most efficient way possible for their business and have some sort of way that one that I know when the relationship is going to end so I can plan for the future and they also have an understanding that you know, this is not for everything. So yeah, so that's been my journey with HubSpot and everything.

Chris Kiefer (04:07.497)

When we're done. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (04:18.633)

I love that. And I was gonna, just for your sake, and I mean, there might be listeners that don't know my full backstory as well, but so I got an engineering degree from Carroll College and I went to work in the engineering world. I lasted six months. First job out of college. I had several internships in college, but first real engineering job. Six months in, I told my boss I was quitting and I was gonna start up.

Production company I guess which was basically that Chris brought up bought a drone and he thought it was cool And thought maybe people would pay for photos and so it was like early, you know DJI phantom and stuff It was still cool back in What year would that have been 2014? And so that evolved into a full-service, you know small business marketing company and same thing we did websites and video and social media and paid advertising and just

James Weis (04:55.19)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (05:11.669)

My, it's like very funny just with what you said. We were trying to do everything and it also was incredibly stressful because, and this is, I don't know if you have encountered or come across any marketing agencies that have really got it dialed. I have come across a few, but my view is that, and I tell this because I've worked primarily with painting companies.

And so we've got all these processes and automations and systems that you just kind of insert into a painting company and you automate some things and you get it set up, but then you hand it off and it's able to save them many, many hours, right? That's so niche. So now I can tell people, like I work for painting companies and not as any painting company, but between like four to 8 million is where they start to really need me. But.

The sweet spot is like seven million to 15 million is like anywhere in that range. If you're a painting company in that, I can save you so much time, you're not even gonna believe it. And it incorporates HubSpot and Zapier and Make and several other tools, just connecting it all together. That's like the freedom that has come from that level of focus of what I do versus what you could probably relate to. In the old days,

James Weis (06:32.366)

Absolutely. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (06:33.277)

I was doing a marketing agency and every single person that walked in the door, it was something different and we're like starting from square one, they want a website, they don't want to pay for the website though, but they want the video, but that's kind of expensive. Do we have something cheap? It's just like, and there was no repeatable, we didn't know like what the ROI was going to be because we'd never worked with this business before, you know? It was just an absolute headache.

James Weis (06:46.381)

Yeah. It's never ending. Yeah.

James Weis (06:55.446)

I know we tried. Yeah, we tried. I tried a bunch of different things. You know, I started, so I, I focused more on the technical side of stuff. That's just kind of where I ended. So I'm a self-taught programmer as well. So I've built a lot of custom integrations and a lot of stuff with the hub, HubSpot CMS and hub DB and things like that. But I tried to, instead of focus on industry, focus on our internal process where like we had our webmaster services, which was

$250 a month, you get a website. We did it all in Webflow. I had a nice process for Webflow developers and things like that. And that did okay. But it's, yeah, once something comes in and rocks the boat just a little bit, it just, you tip right over with any of that stuff, you know? So, and very similar to how you went to the, you know, folk niche down on the industry. So I'm niching down on just...

Chris Kiefer (07:43.129)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

James Weis (07:52.398)

HubSpot in general, right? So like everything HubSpot related. And part of what I'm trying to do is build out these processes with my customers on Miro. So we use Miro to help map out complete processes, start to finish for sales, marketing, customer service. Because when you're building things in HubSpot, you don't want to have one workflow that has like...

19 branches and does all these different things. Right? So it's hard to get a picture of what the entire process is just by looking at a list of workflows and a list of things in HubSpot. So that's why we kind of build it out in Miro and then each piece is linked to a different spot in HubSpot. So you get that whole picture and, and that's the, you know, towards the end of my, uh, towards the end of the, you know, working with customers, I, I do a lot of my screen sharing and I, and I'm.

Chris Kiefer (08:31.993)

100%.

James Weis (08:52.19)

I'm building it for them, but I'm teaching them how I'm doing it. My goal is towards the end is we flip-flop. So now they share their screen and I just talk them through or they ask questions as they go through. It's been really good so far. It's been taking off.

Chris Kiefer (09:09.109)

I'm curious if you have any workflows that would be interesting, that you're able to show without like, I'm pulling up one myself because I use it's awesome. I love I already like where this is going because I realized that one of the most valuable things a consultant does is exactly what you just said. I tell like my

view is that there are many people that know HubSpot, many people that know Make or Zapier, but there's nobody that understands the painting business and knows those things as we do. And so if you're in that space, I'll share my screen right now. For those of you listening or watching on Spotify or YouTube, you can see this. But this is like the process of like the journey for a painting company.

And I love what you said, what I have done, and this has been an evolution of how I map this out, but each yellow box is a automation, and it kind of identifies, so it kind of breaks it up, because this is the life cycle of a customer through the painting business. And the most important thing that I get excited about is that the blue boxes are employee actions, which trigger stuff to happen. The pink boxes are customer.

James Weis (10:03.118)

Yeah.

James Weis (10:20.098)

Mm-hmm.

James Weis (10:30.83)

manual process like something that somebody manual is.

Chris Kiefer (10:32.881)

check a box, input data, submit a form, and then the pink boxes are customer actions, like I accepted a proposal, or I submitted a web form, or something like that, but the red boxes are the automations. And that's the part that's like, when you see, like this is everything that needs to happen in a painting business, many businesses don't even know if they do it or not, because they've never sat down to say, what do we do when you get a quote, or you know, like how does that work? But.

The thing that I think is even more powerful is that just getting to visually put some structure to what they feel is chaotic or varies from one job to the next, you just put in some simple decision trees of like, they're like, oh, well, it depends. Like, okay, tell me the different scenarios and what do you do in that scenario? Okay, build that out. What about this scenario? Build that out, you know what I mean? And that process, it always gets customized for each business. So, here's a different business. It looks...

This was before I started doing those boxes, but it's a similar, there's similar things happening, but they, their like process map that gets created is for them.

James Weis (11:41.896)

There's still the same board is showing, just so you know. Yeah, cool, there you go.

Chris Kiefer (11:47.633)

Oh, whoops, yep, there, thank you for, yeah. So here's the other one, slightly different, obviously. But yeah, it's, and then everything gets customized to that company so that they, because no business is exactly the same, but most of the time it's like 70% the same. So anyways.

James Weis (12:04.962)

now.

Absolutely. And the vocabulary, the vocabulary of what a company calls the thing inside the business is very, very important too, because that's how they're, you know, we're there. You know, I meet with clients once a week for an hour, but I'm available outside of those sessions. But they're in it all day, every day. So being able to map, put it into the process, calling it exactly what they call it. So when they're going to

Chris Kiefer (12:13.181)

Mmm.

James Weis (12:35.478)

you know, talk about it amongst themselves. It all makes sense. Like it's that I learned from, I used to have a, oh, you might appreciate this. I used to have like a website, like a website vocabulary sheet I used to send to clients. Like these aren't tabs, they're navigation items, you know, like things like that, you know, so very, very similar idea.

Chris Kiefer (12:52.949)

Yeah, yeah, mm-hmm, yep. Yeah, I love it. That's just the, yeah, we have, what I try and I've shifted towards like the HubSpot language of like leads, marketing qualified, sales qualified and whatnot, and just explain to people how we take these terms that are like industry standards and apply it to their business so that exactly like what you said, not only are we talking about the same thing, but the software is going to likely already like.

James Weis (13:11.299)

Good.

Chris Kiefer (13:20.437)

we can mirror or modify their language to like when they see something in HubSpot, they're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. So I'm curious, going down this, you said you do like HubSpot, that's your niche. My, like when I am honest with myself, I know Sales Hub very well. The prospecting tools are brand new, so that's.

I'd put an asterisk, minus the prospecting stuff, which I'm rapidly trying to learn. The marketing hub, I know decently well, but then the other hubs are, I've never done anything with CMS. And service hub is not super applicable in the painting industry. But, and then there's the ops hub, I guess I should say, that's another one that is valuable, but it's a lot of just backend stuff.

James Weis (14:15.118)

Yeah, it's a lot of behind the scenes with OpsHub. It's not like a thing that's front and center.

Chris Kiefer (14:17.405)

Yeah, my question is, what would you say, which hub is like your number one expertise?

James Weis (14:27.15)

That's a good question.

James Weis (14:32.966)

I mean, I use all of them. I use all of them pretty extensively and pretty much for every customer.

I would say just because I'm not a content person, I don't create a lot of content. The marketing hub is probably one that's not one that I'm as strong in terms of utilizing. But sales hub, I'm definitely strong in. And the CMS hub is great. I've done a lot with...

Chris Kiefer (14:52.946)

as strong.

James Weis (15:12.162)

the CMS hub in terms of customization. Service hub, I actually use, I'm working with a customer right now that, that we're using the service hub as a whole order processing pipeline. So we go from like a sales, like a sales process, right? To closed one so that once the, you know, anything financial that has to deal with the transaction that's on deals, then at a certain stage, it creates a service hub this way, you know, people in the, in,

shipping and the warehouse, they just have access to Service Hub. They don't have access to the Sales Hub, the sales data. And then build out a process that, you know, with conditional properties and conditional sidebars and things like that. So depending on who owns the ticket, they get to see the data that they need. And then kind of move the, move things along. Yeah. So Service Hub is very powerful, especially when you couple it with like the customer portal and the Knowledge Hub.

Chris Kiefer (15:46.069)

Hmm.

James Weis (16:11.542)

the knowledge base and surveys. I haven't gotten into surveys too much. I'm going to actually start. It's on my list to start reaching out to people after we do stuff. But the really nice thing about HubSpot is that it's all, it does everything really, really well. It doesn't do everything perfectly, but it does do a lot. It's probably the only system that I've seen and I've definitely used a lot. And I've built, you know.

Chris Kiefer (16:18.464)

Mm.

James Weis (16:38.614)

especially on the website side, I've built a lot of websites and WordPress web flow, custom built stuff with the next jazz and, and remix and all this other like front end crazy front end technologies. Um, just from a process point of view, like an internal, uh, like your operational process, how marketing does the campaign, like not, not what it is, just how they execute it, right? How are they going to run ads? How are they going to report on it? How they're going to get landing pages that emails out.

Chris Kiefer (16:59.088)

Mm.

James Weis (17:07.298)

You know, that's, you know, how are they going to manage the website on top of it? Like it's all in one system that made, that gives companies a lot of time back that they don't realize they're spending jumping from different, different things or just having just this, this part, uh, system. So, um, it's my long-winded answer to your question.

Chris Kiefer (17:18.763)

Yes.

Chris Kiefer (17:29.073)

So going down, it sounds like this topic of sales hub, which I feel like this is a part that would be relevant for my audience, talk to me about the new features that they've brought in, prospecting being one of them, and you could even go super niche on some things that you think are super powerful that people are either unaware of or you're, I like to think of it as like when you get on a call with someone,

What are the features that you're like, oh, let me show you this. This is gonna, you're gonna be excited about this.

James Weis (17:58.078)

Yeah. Definitely. You know, when prospecting was announced a few months back, so it's still in beta right now. So I've been actually in the beta for a while. And the whole, if anybody has used task queues in the past where like you had to start a task queue and it was, it was

It worked really well. I utilized it a lot back in the agency days when we had the internal SDRs because that's how I used to build tasks for them automatically and they would start a task queue and they would go and pull up the contact record with the activity that was on the task and they can do what they have to do, hit done and go to the next one. So if you're familiar with that, you'll have a real appreciation for prospecting because what it does is it brings everything into one screen, right? So you have your schedule, you have your tasks in like a...

like a little to do type of like what's due tomorrow, what's due today, what's overdue. If you use sequences, I heavily use sequences. So it gives you an idea of what sequence emails that are getting sent for you on that day on your behalf and kind of brings everything front and center. But when you dive into, when you go one step into tasks from prospecting.

the UI is completely different. So now like you could have all your tasks on one side on the left and then it just brings up the record that it's associated with on the right. Instead of the old way was like, it was basically navigate to that associated record screen. So if it was associated to a contact, it would pull up the contact view and it would have to do. So this is, it makes working in it much nicer, much faster.

Chris Kiefer (19:28.93)

Mm.

Chris Kiefer (19:38.969)

Hmm.

James Weis (19:47.658)

And the things that you're able to do inside of that screen is pretty nice as well. So if you have the LinkedIn sales navigator integration with HubSpot, you're able to send connection requests right from inside of HubSpot. You don't have to jump into LinkedIn and find the person and all this stuff. So you could have a task to do a LinkedIn connection. It pulls it up.

Chris Kiefer (20:10.083)

Mmm.

James Weis (20:16.238)

pulls up the record for you, you click LinkedIn connection, it finds it for you, it finds them on LinkedIn for you. Sometimes you have to match it to make sure it's the right person. But then you drop in your note, hit send, and when you hit, if you have like all, like if the next batch of tasks are all LinkedIn tasks, you complete it, it'll automatically pull up the next record and then pull up the LinkedIn connection automatically, you know, so for the next task. So, I mean, I go through about 30,

Chris Kiefer (20:24.949)

Mm-hmm.

Chris Kiefer (20:40.489)

Mmm.

James Weis (20:45.754)

So I try to prospect to about 30 new people a day. That's my goal. And yeah, that's for tactic. That's what I do. So I spend the morning getting a list together. Who am I going to, like, who's going to be on my outreach list for the day? I try only to spend about a half hour on it.

Chris Kiefer (20:50.709)

And this is for your own business.

Chris Kiefer (21:08.757)

And then when you say prospecting, are you, is prospecting just LinkedIn and emails or are you calling people also?

James Weis (21:16.878)

So because it's just me, I'm just doing emails and LinkedIn. So the way I do it is, so I use Apollo as a data source for contacts. And Apollo is great as another great integration with HubSpot where you can save contacts in Apollo and it gets synced over to HubSpot. So that's where I do my, like I create a list in Apollo who I want to pull in.

save it in Apollo, which syncs it over to HubSpot. And then I have automations pick it up from there to enroll that contact in a sequence and start the process. So my sequences are, I kind of jumped back and forth testing different emails and different styles of prospecting. Now I'm doing, I'm in a, I just started a pro 60 campaign is what I call it internally. Like I'm going to do it for 60 days to get a bigger.

bigger span of data. I did 30 day increments with different lengths of emails. But that's a, but part of that, part of that sequence is that LinkedIn step, right? So like the, the sequence automatically will add the task for me to reach out to them after they've received two emails from me. They, they then get a LinkedIn request for me, but the sequence will stop until I reach out to them on LinkedIn.

Once I complete that task, then the sequence will pick back up a day after I complete the task to send them the next step in the sequence.

Chris Kiefer (22:55.765)

And so a couple of questions on that. First of all, how many other people do you have at your, in your consulting company to help do this? Is it just you running solo?

James Weis (23:05.154)

It's just me running solo. That's it.

Chris Kiefer (23:07.193)

Yeah. And so do you have any VA's or anyone that's helped you with that piece of it?

James Weis (23:12.574)

No, I thought about it, but I haven't really hit that need yet, I don't think. Because I was able to build the automation, because I have the data, I don't need to do a whole lot of research because I'm sure there's a better way to do a deeper sales stuff. If somebody was doing sales as their full-time job at a place, this might be...

there's probably more things that you can do in here. But for me, since I'm servicing clients and I'm trying to do other stuff and I try to make it as efficient as possible and being able to bring 30 people in a day into the system has worked pretty well so far. One week into my new candidate, this Pro 60 campaign, and I have three new

connection meetings, like cold connection meetings, but yeah.

Chris Kiefer (24:14.365)

And our next question would be, is this, are you finding that you are, I'm assuming that you are trying to connect with people that are already using HubSpot and feeling like they're under utilizing it? Yeah.

James Weis (24:25.846)

That's exactly right. Yeah. So that, so in, in Apollo, you're able to, to segment based on technology. Right. So whether or not they actually use it is, you know, it's one, it's in my first email, like checking if they do actually use HubSpot, you know, cause that's what. Well, as part, like I go into it a little bit deeper, but I say, you know, like, uh, like they came up in my research for, you know, people that are utilizing HubSpot is, is that the case? And then I kind of go into my intro.

Chris Kiefer (24:41.909)

just asking them and then.

James Weis (24:55.566)

Because if it's not, then either they'll tell me it's not or they'll ignore it. And that's fine. But just to check.

Chris Kiefer (24:55.661)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (25:05.801)

Yeah, totally. And then so you're helping people with more, like maximizing HubSpot in a better way, which I'm sure like the, that's just seems like such a great, I can see why that would be just a cold email and LinkedIn. You're just, you're doing the, those touches, but they're ultimately engaging and they're raising their hand saying, hey, let me, I would like to ask you some more questions about what you do. Maybe that, maybe that does make sense.

James Weis (25:32.114)

Yeah, exactly right. Because there's so much change that happens in HubSpot, often, very often, and being able to utilize... I'm a certified trainer as well, so I got my training certificate from HubSpot as well. So being able to put that in an email, you're going to have a HubSpot certified trainer effectively on your team that you can reach out to, to make sure to check or to work with when utilizing this.

Chris Kiefer (25:57.101)

Hmm What's the difference between the partner and the trainer because you are you also a partner? Okay

James Weis (26:03.442)

So the trainer is just like, yes, yeah, so I'm a so a partner and So a partner and a trainer the trainer is like it's just a separate it a separate certificate that you have to meet a certain criteria like it's a certain level of partnerships they have to be gold or gold or above and It's it's effectively just a course so it allows me to one okay, I could do group trainings but

They kind of position it more as like very, they back everything. One HubSpot will back everything I teach or anything I do because I'm a certified trainer and they, any, any type of like general courses I wanted to give on HubSpot, they like, they have to be at the same par as the HubSpot Academy in terms of quality and stuff. But I kind of put a different twist on it where I call it all tailored training. Like I'm not, I'm not going to show you.

Chris Kiefer (26:44.29)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (26:55.801)

Hmm.

James Weis (27:03.69)

generic, generally how to use HubSpot, right? For the first like two or three, you know, so I usually work with clients for about 12, about 12 weeks, 12 sessions, right? About 12 weeks. The first like three sessions were never even in HubSpot, right? Like I have to understand the business first and understand processes and how we're gonna utilize it in HubSpot. And a lot of the times, you know, people just have a problem.

You know, like I can't, like I have to get this email out and this is giving me an error. I don't know how to fix this. And of course we'll, we'll take care of that. But I, but I found that like teaching and training people about the software in context of what they have to do on a day-to-day basis sticks much, much faster than kind of general concepts in terms of when you want to do this thing, when you want to do a campaign, this is how you do it. Well.

Chris Kiefer (27:52.245)

Mm.

James Weis (27:59.838)

If they have a campaign that they need to get out, they're going to embrace it much more.

Chris Kiefer (28:04.465)

Yeah. So yeah, you're the, uh, you basically are the way I'm curious also with the prospecting in particular that I assume is you're utilizing it in your own business and you're able to have your diving deeper personally and able to identify the resources and tools that are there that some people that maybe have dabbled in it don't even, they didn't realize they could do that or set it up. Cause that's what I feel like is it's

The most valuable thing that a consultant could do is provide structure to a pre-existing process that they may or may not know they have, and then fully integrate that structured process into HubSpot, and now you're automating tasks and saving even more time, but it's their process.

James Weis (28:53.102)

100%. Yeah, yeah. Because it's what they need to do, right? And so we'll go through, this is pretty common, that when we start mapping stuff out in Miro, you know, if it's a sales process, it's very common to then, you know, two sessions in kind of jump back and say, well, you know, where are we getting these prospects? Like, how can we get more of this beginning part, right? And so we'll do a lead gen process.

that feeds into a sales process, right? But it's still, yeah, it's 100% right. It's still theirs, right? And what becomes more apparent as you force somebody or you force a business to actually look at their process in that way, like on a chart, they start to question everything, right? And I question everything. Why do things this way? Is this really important?

Chris Kiefer (29:24.036)

Mmm.

James Weis (29:51.318)

or not, right? Can we do this in this step so we can save four steps later on? That type of stuff, yeah.

Chris Kiefer (29:51.723)

Mmm. Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (29:56.657)

Right. Yeah, I think that just, it's crazy to me now that I've been in it how few businesses have taken the time to use a tool like Miro. Cause I'm exactly like you, like number one I'm like, hey, I don't work here. So this is for me, but it's also, like originally I thought it was for me. Like I just need to clarify that what you're saying is what I showed here. And they're like, no, that's only part of it. And like, okay, great. And then you realize that the other employee,

then they thought there was a totally different process. It's like nobody's on the same page because no one has ever said, this is what we agree is prospecting, right? Because some reps are like, oh, I sent some emails. Someone else is like, oh, I thought we were supposed to knock on doors. Or it's just like, everybody does it slightly differently. And then it also makes it hard to make improvements because you don't have a consistent set of data to consistently, you know.

audit and make tweaks and improvements, like from the sounds of it, like you're saying, if I heard you correctly, you were doing a 30 day little drip sequence with some mixed of tasks and LinkedIn requests, and now you're like, I'm gonna do 60 days, but you're gonna have, after 60 days, what is that? A lot of, how many, what is that, 60 times 30, right? 100, 1800 requests of data to see like, what's our conversion rate and stuff?

James Weis (31:13.014)

But yeah.

James Weis (31:23.798)

Yeah, yeah, because I just needed to. So on average over the last few months, you know, it's been high 50% open rate, you know, about 10 to 15% click through rates. And I had like five or six meetings and three new customers, four new customers out of it. So I tried, each time I was doing it to different types of prospects too. So like one time I was doing just like,

VP level or director level type of prospecting, like trying to go in and trying to connect with people at that level first. For well, I did that twice. I did one for like big companies that had 100 plus employees, like bigger revenue style companies. Now in this one, I'm...

I'm specifically going after the C-level suite, so CMO, CEO, COO of under 50 employees, but still like 5 to 25 million in revenue, but a lower headcount. What I found in the first couple batches of stuff was they were just more responsive. Good, bad, or indifferent. They just interacted.

more. Whereas the customers that got out of it were, one was an agency, one was, two other were other business, like business businesses. But they, in two instances already, and I've only just started this, I would reach out to the CMO and then I got a senior VP book a meeting.

of the same company, right? So like the CMO like referred it down to somebody else and then they booked the meeting. So I'm assuming that like, hey, vet this, right? Like, is this something that we can do? Is this something that might help? And then that person booked the meeting. So I'm, my, I think there's gonna be more of that as I start adding more volume to it.

Chris Kiefer (33:25.07)

Hmm.

Chris Kiefer (33:43.869)

Yeah, totally. I'm curious if we could just as like a little, I don't know if we can call it a role play, but for the sake of the painting industry, people that might be listening, can you give me like, pretend I'm a painting company, what is the, and I'll say the answers that I know my clients would have, walk me through like, I reach out to you and say,

automating and streamlining our sales process. How could you help us?

James Weis (34:15.918)

Yeah, sure. So first I first I would ask is, are you looking to learn how to take over the process internally? Is there somebody internally within your organization that they're responsible for HubSpot in general, like to manage it long term? And if that's the yes or no.

Chris Kiefer (34:34.729)

Yeah, so question, yeah, my answer to that would be, is that my, can my sales manager do that? Or are you saying like, we need to have like a tech person that's a HubSpot internal person?

James Weis (34:47.23)

It could definitely be the salesperson. It's just somebody that's going to, because there's, yeah, someone that's gonna champion and be that HubSpot person internally. So when, you know, six months after we're done working together, something needs to change in the process. They have the knowledge, they know everything, how everything was built, and they can go and implement that change and own it from that point. It could be anybody, it doesn't have to be a tech person.

Chris Kiefer (34:52.185)

champion.

Chris Kiefer (35:15.777)

Got it.

James Weis (35:16.598)

just somebody that's familiar with the business and has an understanding of how the software was crafted together to support it.

Chris Kiefer (35:22.285)

So I would say, again, for most companies that I'm working with, they have it, they most of them have a sales manager, their knowledge of how to do it, or their technical expertise is probably mid to low, but they understand sales processes and people. So would that work, are you saying that we would need to have, or the expectation that you're setting is, you need, someone on your team should be an expert at the end of this, or you would advise them?

James Weis (35:38.839)

Yeah, yeah.

James Weis (35:50.822)

So that's the reason why I asked the question, because there's two approaches that I take to it. So either I'm going to do a... We're going to go right into weekly sessions. We're going to go through Miro together. We're going to build everything out together. So I'm purposefully kind of holding back in order to show you specific things and teach you HubSpot. But it's only valuable if somebody's going to...

own it inside the organization after the engagement. If not, it's okay. What I end up doing is I'll do a 30 day project where we'll have like one or two meeting kickoff, we'll map everything out together. I will then go build it all out in the next 30 days. Then we will start sessions for about, weekly sessions for three months that does implementation and training on that specific process.

not necessarily on all the bells and whistles and tweaks, reasons why, reasons why like you can't re-enroll an object in a workflow because it's an activity versus something else. Like all those fire points, kind of omit all that because that's not the, there's no one in there that there's no one in the organization that's gonna have an appreciation for it or is gonna be building workflows themselves, right?

Chris Kiefer (37:13.849)

Hmm.

James Weis (37:14.91)

So we'll do it in that regard. And then I kind of.

Chris Kiefer (37:16.301)

So you will do it for them if they say, we don't have someone internally and that's just not a priority for us right now. She say, okay, great, I can build all this for you and I'll train you guys how to use it as opposed to the other side where I'll train someone how to build it and then they're training the team.

James Weis (37:35.446)

Yeah, I prefer to train somebody, but I know because I'm able to train and able to do that, I also can build it probably much faster than anybody else could. So I don't want to, one, it makes sense for me as a business to offer that, but then wrap in, include training, weekly training that kind of tell, at the end of it, go to monthly sessions.

Chris Kiefer (37:47.244)

Yep.

James Weis (38:04.35)

and kind of just be there as a resource going forward. When things pop up or when changes need to be made, we still have, we're still in an engagement. So the build happens a lot faster because I build it for you. The training still happens, but the training is more on the using the process rather than building the process, right? And then the ongoing like monthly sessions

Chris Kiefer (38:28.249)

Got it, yep.

James Weis (38:33.13)

really just checkups, right? And just to see if things need to be tweaked or you take a list of stuff that you want to change or maybe the business is changing, I mean, there's new things happening. We're at least engaged at some level and I'm available outside of those sessions too. So I'm in, you know, I get added to Slack and other issues. I'm trying to drive people more to, you know, email in my inbox, right? And HubSpot gets a little easier to manage, but.

We'll get there. That type of stuff.

Chris Kiefer (39:02.601)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How are you managing your implementation of this? Is this like project management wise, you're using like Asana, Airtable, like what tools do you use to... So you're using the project management tool in HubSpot?

James Weis (39:13.902)

Hubsan, all hubsan.

Well, no, no. I wish they would do something with that project management tool, but that seems like a...

Chris Kiefer (39:24.525)

Cause I was gonna say, it's been terrible when I've tried it, but.

James Weis (39:27.834)

Yeah, yeah. And the templates they have in there are not really that great either. No, but I've implemented my own because I didn't want to have too many systems myself. And I've used all of them. Most recently, I've used Basecamp when I first started doing all this stuff. I went back to Basecamp after years, which was really good. But what I ended up doing is...

keeping track of contracts and engagements as part of sales, as part of a separate sales pipeline after it's closed one. And then I'm keeping track of sessions, you know, so how many sessions people have and the dates just as meetings that get attached to the deals. And then for the work, there's a stage in the pipeline that's, you know, active projects. I kind of just work through those on my, I book out.

So when I'm implementing or I'm doing it myself, I book out in my calendar as if it was a session, right? So I plan it out in my calendar, so, and it takes up a slot as if I was going to do an hour session. Instead, yeah, I'm just building it during that time. So between my calendar and just keeping track in HomeSpot, I was doing it in service tickets.

Chris Kiefer (40:29.238)

Mm.

Chris Kiefer (40:38.997)

And you're just building it during that time, yeah.

James Weis (40:51.826)

I actually spent most of my day today trying to work with some integrations and custom code, some, some stuff to try to do better with keeping track of sessions. Um, but I think I'm going to be moving it to, you know, just keeping in sales pipelines just to keep, keep a, like who's active, who's coming, like who's ending in 30 days and like that's going to kick off other, uh, processes to.

see if they want to extend or other sales stuff at that point.

Chris Kiefer (41:20.652)

Right.

So I realized I started to ask about this painting thing and then we got off track, but let's go back to, cause I'm genuinely curious to what level of value do you think you could provide to a painting company? And most of these painting companies are residential, primary, and then they also do commercial work. I tend to think that a lot of times the companies that don't do commercial work, it's cause they don't know how to get commercial work.

James Weis (41:27.775)

Yes, sorry.

Chris Kiefer (41:51.329)

But my assumption is that with something like Apollo, it would actually be much easier to get commercial work than residential work. And I know that a lot of businesses have dabbled with the seasonality of painting is crazy busy in the summer. And then they usually have temporary workers that are working in the summer, then they drop in size, the business does, drop head count to make it through the slower winter. But then they have to ramp back up in the summertime. So...

Basically, the amount that you can grow in the summertime is dependent on how the least, like you want to drop as little as possible in the winter, but you have to be able to keep those people busy because you can't triple in size from winter to summer, if that makes sense. You can maybe add 40% of your staff additionally, but you have to have trained people that are training the new people, right, as painters. So that's the problem is that every painting company

They need more work in the winter. And one way to do that, my hope is, is through prospecting and leveraging something like what you do for prospecting. And I'm guessing that, especially, you might not know these answers, but like for commercial buildings and different property managers and things that need to get stuff painted, they are going to, it's.

generally a long lead time for them to make a decision. So prospecting is probably something that painting companies need to be doing year round, but they're looking for commercial winter work to fill that slow time. You know what I mean? So based on that, do you have any other questions to decide how or what you might be able to do to solve that problem? Or how would you explore that?

James Weis (43:42.05)

Um, yeah, so I would, if there's, um, so with the understanding that there's, uh, you know, probably this would be more of like something that would need to be built out and something like what you, what you showed before is like ultimately the blueprint, right? Like of workflows and kind of what, how to go from, uh, does it, does it, does it talk about, or does it go into like lead gen?

type of processes and marketing processes or is it more so like when somebody raises their hand and they're ready for a quote this is all the steps that have to happen in order to Yeah

Chris Kiefer (44:19.197)

My process? Yeah, my process is like once a customer submits a web form or says I'm interested. So my process doesn't have the marketing or sales prospecting. I'm not offering that right now, which is why this is very intriguing to me because I basically am helping systemize operationally. And I mean, it's the sales process, but it's a sales process after they have a lead that says, give me a quote.

James Weis (44:25.922)

That's where it starts.

James Weis (44:33.537)

Yeah.

James Weis (44:44.446)

Yes, yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. So I think, you know, too, if there's somebody and it could be a sales manager, could be an owner, could be anybody, the biggest thing with processing is consistency and is being able to put this kind of system in place like I'm working with my company, Tactic, is it's automatic.

So there's like seven or eight touch points in this whole sequence. And there's the goal, especially with commercial stuff, you want to try to build rapport. You have to try to build, you know, trust is interactions over time, right? The more people trust you is basically how many times they interact with you over a period of time. So if you can automate a lot of the first touch points, right, by the time you get on the phone with them or by the time you actually,

utilize the HubSpot meeting tools and they can book a face-to-face meeting on Zoom or a site visit to that end. That would be the end goal in my mind for a prospecting effort, a prospecting process, is to get the salesperson a meeting. That's it. That's all that really can do is get them at that at that.

James Weis (46:10.67)

You know, it's a numbers game, right? You can only get in front of so many people. And on the residential side, residential, to me, that's more wide net marketing type of stuff. Like that's stuff that has to come in from various sources, right? I'm sure there's, you know, like painting companies are probably on like Angie's List and referrals and Facebook groups and all these other things that are probably...

Chris Kiefer (46:34.245)

Mm-hmm.

James Weis (46:38.326)

They probably get a ton of stuff from referrals. So as part of a prospecting effort in general would be to try to amplify the referral part of the business with a process. So doing some sort of marketing or have a process in place when a job finishes to have a survey go out, ask them for a review and all these things and create a process around that too.

um, increase the residential work. And maybe that's something you want to. I don't know if, you know, I don't know the painting industry. I don't know if you just can't do, I guess you can't do outdoor painting, right? And the winter time, I don't know. But, um, yeah. So like if, um, you know, maybe that's prime time for some people to do it. Right. Like maybe that's a time that, um, somebody that was on the fence about a project you can go back to and say, Hey, like.

Chris Kiefer (47:17.934)

indoor painting you definitely can do. Yeah.

James Weis (47:34.538)

maybe we're able to do something a little bit better because of the seasonality, right? While still focusing on automating the commercial side. Because again, the commercial side is gonna be, it's gonna be, you know, those connections, right? You have to have that meeting with somebody that, like a facility manager or a director of operations or somebody is gonna have to hire the company to do the job, right?

But the question is, you don't know who is in need. So you have to talk to everybody. You don't know when somebody is going to need a, or want to redo their conference room or redo all the, all 500 conference room and a whole building. There's no way of really knowing when that's going to be. So that's why it's a volume numbers game. Cause you have to try to talk to as many people or get in front of as many people as possible.

over a long period of time, because then your chances are greatly increased, right? Rather than kind of hunting and picking, trying to find one or two people or going to knock on a couple doors, you know, in a day, when you can get to, you know, 50, 60 people in a day, at least just get in front of them and get the process going.

Chris Kiefer (48:51.021)

Mm.

Totally. No, that's super interesting. I definitely want to chat more about that. I'm keeping an eye on time here. Last couple of questions I have for you are, well, I guess I always, I almost forgot. I always say is if everyone comes to a podcast with kind of some preconceived thoughts or things that you may or may not be wanting to share, any other like closing remarks, ideas, tools, resources.

that you want to share with everybody before I go into my wrap up questions.

James Weis (49:25.499)

Um.

James Weis (49:28.786)

No, not particularly. I mean, just consistency. Everything is just being consistent and sticking to a process. Once you have what you're trying to do, at least a goal in mind, getting there is going to be... You're going to have ups and downs, but you're going to have at least help you carve a pathway to get to where you're going. And using tools like HubSpot and...

and utilizing resources like you and I are meant to help get there faster.

Chris Kiefer (50:01.529)

Totally. What are your three book recommendations for us?

James Weis (50:07.266)

So I have, I don't have any, and it's fine. My wife's a literacy specialist as well. So I don't read very often, but I do have a podcast that I, you know, the HubSpot Agency on Filter podcast I listen to pretty often. Every time there's a new one, there's a lot of great resources on there and they talk a lot about the HubSpot, a lot about HubSpot's new features and other agencies and how they are.

doing different processes of doing different things. And that's where I'm staying mostly up to date on things in terms of HubSpot, as well as the product updates section in HubSpot. So if you have a HubSpot portal, you go into product updates, there's a beta section where you can actually sign up for public betas. So that's how I got into prospecting, that prospecting feature so early.

Chris Kiefer (51:00.886)

Mmm.

James Weis (51:07.018)

was because I was, you know, just kind of keep that up to mind. I try to do a new certificate every quarter, one of the HubSpot Academy certificates, just as a place to get some more information. Yeah, exactly. But I also do a lot of...

Chris Kiefer (51:23.533)

Continue learning. Yeah.

James Weis (51:32.886)

development stuff, so a lot of JavaScript development in terms of coding. So I also listen to syntax podcasts and other kind of general programming type of content helps like when you're able to like think in processes, right, and think in sections, like being able to code or at least like having a fundamental knowledge of how.

write like a simple program. Like it's all procedural ultimately, right? So that's how you look at, that's how I look at businesses, that's how I look at processes, that's how I look at HubSpot workflows. So staying up to date on those kinds of practices also help.

Chris Kiefer (52:06.134)

Mm-hmm.

Chris Kiefer (52:17.249)

And you say it's called the syntax podcast or is that?

James Weis (52:22.226)

Yeah, Syntax.fm. They talk a lot about all different type of coding practices and stuff. That's a really good resource.

Chris Kiefer (52:36.845)

That's awesome. And the final question, what is your favorite movie?

James Weis (52:42.478)

So my favorite movie is the original Top Gun, but the second, the Top Gun 2 is definitely a very close second, so.

Chris Kiefer (52:50.413)

Hmm. Yeah, I thought, I mean, honestly, I was blown away by how good the second movie was. I thought that was very, very well done. It's hard to do. It's hard to do a. Good. No, I was just saying it's hard to do a follow up or a whatever the sequel to a movie like that. And I thought it was like, how are they going to, you know, how are they going to bring Maverick back in? Because clearly, you know, he's going to come into it.

James Weis (52:58.41)

Yeah, I didn't have a... Go ahead, sorry.

James Weis (53:10.092)

Yeah.

Chris Kiefer (53:19.161)

And the way that they did it, I was like, I was creative.

James Weis (53:23.51)

Yeah, yeah, it was definitely good. Yeah, that's me.

Chris Kiefer (53:30.257)

Awesome, and if people want to get in touch with you, how do you recommend or what's your preferred method of contact?

James Weis (53:35.69)

Yeah, just shoot me an email jw at use tactic.com or check out the site and use tactic.com. And if you have any questions or any, you know, any anything bugging you inside of HubSpot, you know, let me know. I'm happy to help.

Chris Kiefer (53:53.001)

Awesome, and is your tactic site all built in HubSpot CMS? Nice. Awesome, well thanks so much for your time, James. I appreciate it. We'll be in touch.

James Weis (53:57.142)

That is, yes.

James Weis (54:04.226)

We got it. Thanks guys.