(This is a slightly edited version of an internal newsletter I sent to the XEN team this week. I’ve removed private team and client specific items, but kept the gist of it intact.)
Hey Team and Insiders*
I wanted to share some of what I’ve been seeing and hearing in the market, with a few thoughts.
I’ll touch on industry trends, HubSpot considerations, client trends and XEN company news.
Industry trends
Golden Ages
Do you remember the golden age of WeWork?
The offices were luxurious, spacious, cheap, with lots of perks, free meals, events and add-ons - all funded by venture capital, giving occupants more value than they were paying for. That changed when they finally realised they needed to make a profit, so prices increased and perks were pulled back, making the end user pay the real price
Do you remember the golden age of Uber?
Venture capital and gig worker modern day slavery meant we could get cheap rides anywhere with maximum convenience, and the destruction of an existing profitable taxi industry. That changed once the venture capital funding ran out and they realised they had to make a profit - and now prices are much higher. Surge pricing is the icing on top of a service that was never gonna be profitable in its original incarnation.
Do you remember the golden age of AI?
Well, it’s today. We have all these amazing tools and pay twenty dollars a month to burn through hundreds of dollars worth of tokens that someone else is paying for - currently venture capital, circular financing, and all kinds of other stock market props. Enjoy it now while you can, because the golden age of AI will soon be gone and we’ll all have to pay what it costs to really use it. The venture capital is running out, and the hyperscalers are calling for receipts (GitHub is the template).
Here’s my point: Enjoy it now while it’s cheap and at someone else’s expense. But importantly, don’t build your long term house on a foundation of short term cheap token pricing.
Force Multiplier
Everyone talks about the leverage AI provides, how you can 10x your productivity. But what if your input productivity is poor? Distracted, low attention span, falling temptation to outsourcing all your thinking? What are you actually 10x-ing?
I’m back from a two week break. A time to recharge, reclaim my attention span, reduce distractions. My productivity is easily 2x what it was before my break. This isn’t a new insight of course. We all know this information. But sometimes we need to experience it. Feel the change, not just know about it.
Now if I add AI to my process I’m 10x-ing a focussed 2x of productivity. That’s 20x now (if we believe the AI claims).
Here’s my point: sharpen the saw first, and then apply the AI force multiplier.
HubSpot considerations
HubSpot Assistant
I know I harp on this every newsletter (and most recent episodes of HubShots), but I’ll say it again. HubSpot Assistant (or is it Breeze Assistant?) is the best AI based tool in HubSpot. And it’s currently free.
I use it every day, to organise, summarise, learn, and implement. And we train clients on it in almost every call.
It’s really, really good.
A few examples recently:
Preparing a reverse brief for a client
Reviewing the project history for a client
Preparing an implementation plan for a client
Here’s how simple the prompt can be: ‘please review all the meetings with [client name] and her team over the past weeks. pull together a comprehensive brief of all the main requirements, the desired outcomes, and next action items for each department. Prepare a full proposal for the implementation phases to be performed and the priorities for each’
HubSpot Assistant gets you 70% of the way there. For the reverse brief I then spent less than an hour reviewing, cleaning, tweaking and (most importantly) reducing, to get a useful doc prepared.
For the implementation plan, we spent a few hours reviewing, culling and tweaking it, but the heavy lifting had been done by AI, likely saving 5+ hours at a minimum. It had analysed 7 in-depth meetings with the client, across various departments.
While everyone on LinkedIn is breathlessly talking about agentic this and MCP that, excitedly connecting Claude and blindly querying without context, they are often missing the basics. Just getting your meetings recorded, transcribed and analysed automatically in HubSpot is such an easy first step. No shade on all the agentic stuff, but don’t get dazzled with shiny object syndrome and miss the easy unlocks.
Use HubSpot Less
Our HubSpot Updates that Matter (HUTM) sessions have been transformative for clients. We started these as simple sessions to help guide clients through the overwhelming onslaught of HubSpot releases, highlighting just the top 5 or so they should focus on next.
In the conversations lately, we’ve been able to unearth some of the foundational problems the companies have been wrestling with, and solve them (in some cases) on the call itself. Things like phone number formatting, or Views setup, or association management between objects.
The key emotion I sense in clients is relief. A feeling that they don’t need to be racing to implement as much as possible, in many cases getting rid of stuff is more productive. And it can be simple (eg removing a whole bunch of properties on the left hand side that nobody uses anymore - it’s so easy when you know how).
Client trends
Basics
Every client engagement we’re working on currently has a focus on getting the basics right. All the usual suspects (that don’t make for exciting reading) pop up: data formatting, deduplication, segment review and update, workflow audits, simplifying processes. Essentially stages 1 and 2 from the Hubshots Framework.
Clients want to simplify their businesses. They want to streamline operations, consolidate tech stacks (see below), reduce legacy bureaucracy. Can AI help with this? Yes. But can AI also derail this (e.g. automating unnecessary busy work)? Also yes.
The best engagements focus on less: reducing the waste, the ‘we’ve always done it that way’ processes that nobody knows who put in place or why. Sometimes it’s about going back to first principles: ‘Let’s review your lifecycle stages first, before we start implementing yet another workflow that sets a stage that nobody uses anymore…’
With this in mind, we’re seeing two key areas of focus with clients:
Governance (security, permissions, processes)
Consolidation (tools, inputs, analysis)
Consolidation
This one has two layers.
Tools
Implement the tools being rolled into HubSpot as native features. Examples:
Meeting scheduler, now in HubSpot (instead of Calendly)
Meeting notetaker, now in HubSpot (instead of Gong, Avoma, etc)
Website builder, now in HubSpot (instead of Webflow, WordPress, etc)
Running AI over all your meeting transcripts, deal data, etc now in HubSpot (instead of Claude, etc)
Some clients want to do a bunch of these at once (a big consolidation project), but for most we advise chipping away one piece at a time. Training schedules are often the main reason to stage these.
Agencies
Clients are combining or consolidating multiple agencies into one. A typical ‘before’ setup:
Agency A: design/creative (brand and collateral)
Agency B: uploading and optimising in HubSpot
After: consolidate that into a single agency with high-end design plus HubSpot expertise. The benefits (beside reduced cost):
Increased speed (less time spent in handoffs, less multiple handling)
Reporting and campaign implementation handled by one agency end-to-end
Governance
There is a push toward more governance of tech stacks, including HubSpot. This includes things like permissions - what teams can see on records. Sometimes when there are multiple businesses within a portal, you need to make sure one team can’t see what another team is working on. Then there are general things like who can edit versus who can view.
This governance has been neglected for many businesses for a long time. Perhaps one of the advantages of AI is the attention it draws to how easily agents can access all kinds of data. A user may always have had access to something and didn’t realise it, but now when they use AI and agents to query data, they’re getting access to things they shouldn’t.
So this comes back to the basics. It’s all about governance - ensuring security, permissions, and overall access are locked down properly.
Brand Consistency
Clients seem to be pausing big website projects, but re-initiating brand consistency processes. They are reducing the channels they post to, but taking time to ensure the content they share is ‘on brand’. In the absence of other signals, consistency equals quality. Less is more (yet again). Email newsletter templates seem to be a focus at the moment.
XEN Items
Experience
It can be intimidating jumping on a call with a seasoned sales or marketing manager, and ask about why things are the way they are. After all, they are the manager with all the experience, and we are the outsider.
Don’t underestimate the experience we bring, the years of seeing messes and mistakes in countless portals. This is the value we bring. We’ve seen the scars, we’ve learned the lessons.
And that’s what our customers are paying us for. Providing the lens into their portals, their brands, that they can’t see themselves, so close to it all.
Keep in mind that for many of our clients, the new marketing/sales/success manager has inherited a system and set of processes not of their design. They are tasked with getting up to speed, ensuring the platform fits their needs, and growing their business. They will happily accept the diagnosis if it helps them course correct.
This is what we need to be confident in. We’re not experts in their business specific domain, but we are in the tech stack and processes they use. Let’s work with them closely to help.
XEN Opportunities
Customer Experience
Customer experience is increasingly becoming a moat, a differentiator.
As companies embrace AI, they replace their customer support with automated irritation machines.
As an example, Michele and I were happy NRMA insurance customers for more than 20 years, and yet dealing with them in the last few years has been so frustrating that it made the decision to cancel our insurance easy. Decades of customer loyalty eroded with terrible customer experience. Is anyone analysing the customer churn cost versus the cost savings from these initiatives?
For XEN it is a continual opportunity. Customers repeatedly tell us how good the experience is working with us. They tell us the horror stories they’ve had with other agencies, and it is rarely due to technical competence, it is almost always how poor the experience of working with them was. Simple things like replying to emails promptly, ensuring projects are updated, stakeholders informed, and turning up to scheduled meetings (if you can believe it). You know, the basics. Sometimes I’m surprised at how low the bar is. It’s not hard, and yet it seems we are often the exception. Let’s make sure we stay focussed on communicating with our customers, easing their lives, transforming their businesses.
Customer experience is a theatre performance (video).
Other items of interest
During my break, I got to read a bunch of books - you can see them here. A bit of an eclectic mix, all non-fiction, but spanning health, technology, business, purpose, and societal implications.
I enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s book on AI, and I wrote a short summary of it here.
I also read Bill Gates’ thoughts on AI. Two competing reactions as I read it. It’s hard to separate him from Epstein now, plus he’s still a significant shareholder/advisor in Microsoft (which makes it feel like taking advice from the fox guarding the hen house)… but, on the other hand it’s hard not to agree with most of what he says. The rate of change (time compression) is the key factor here. Change is normal, the rate of change is catching most of us unawares. The main thought I had coming off it was… what do I do then? Hard questions don’t have easy answers.
Changing gears… Michele and I have been watching a documentary series on Andy Warhol. I never thought I’d be interested in a bloke who painted soup cans, but it is fascinating. I’m becoming less black and white in my older years, more shades of grey.
As always, health is your #1 priority.
Till next time,
Craig
