Welcome to Week 4—or as Gru would say, “Lightbulb!” 💡
This week is all about how your People, Platform, and Process come together to create one despicably effective HubSpot ecosystem. Just like Gru’s operations, the magic isn’t in one gadget or one minion—it’s in how they all work together as one perfectly orchestrated plan.
Your mission (should you choose to accept it 😎😞 build processes that empower your people, optimize your platform, and unleash your minions—uh, I mean agents—to do what they do best!
💭“It’s so fluffy, I’m gonna die!” – Agnes (and probably you, when your dashboards finally align across every hub)
👉For Week 4, share in the comments below:
🏆Wins – What’s something your “minion squad” (or team) achieved this week that made you proud? 💎Hidden Gems – Which HubSpot tool, workflow, or AI agent made your process smoother? 🕳Potholes – What challenge or chaos popped up this week, and how did you (or your minions) fix it?
💡[BONUS] Reflection – How do you balance People, Platform, and Process in your own Super Admin world? Which one tends to be your strength—or your Gru’s next big plan?
✨ Remember: even Gru didn’t pull off his master plan alone. It took brilliant minions, cool gadgets, and smart systems to make his missions work. The same goes for you. Great admins don’t work in isolation.
🙌 As your instructors @ChrisBabelquest , @AliSchwanke , and I @MuseDebbie, we’re here cheering you on as you design processes that make your HubSpot universe hum like a well-trained Minion chorus.
So grab your goggles, cue the Minion music 🎶, and drop your Week 4 reflections or questions below ⬇️
(This is the Week 4 thread. Look out for a new post each week so we can keep our insights organized and easy to find.)
WIN: Task delegation is growing beyond just users in the system and extending to our admin group with the recent implementation of a user ticketing system to request, track and manage user issues/wants/needs. Our small team is addressing and queuing all manner of system needs at a record pace using our service request system, and we now have data to discover things like common user pain points so we can improve training, access, and more. Prior to this there was no way to track requests, progress on those requests, ETA or completion.
GEM: Utilizing actively filtered segments within workflow automations has become a quick and easy way to workflow marketing communications based on behavior, intent, and demogrophics. We have gone through almost all active marketing workflows to ensure that they are keyed in on the right customer data and this is also improving our ability to contextualize and personalize messages.
POTHOLE: Balancing user preferences vs. platform standardization can be a challenge. Aligning different teams (sales, service, marketing) on a common tool is less a tech problem and more a people/process challenge. Without consensus on platform usage, resistance to adoption is always at issue. We have become successful in delivering on changes, features, and enhancements by putting the business case first and ensuring governance and structure come with guardrails to eliminate as much error in a process as possible.
Pothole - i have n o idea of what makes a workflow a good one especially for this client so right now i'm just adding things as i go and hoping to figure it out
Reflection - i am definitely learning more of the lingo when it comes to hubspot and learning my way around the app. i do feel a bit behind still though.
My minion squad finally nailed our contact cleanup mission no more duplicate records sneaking around the CRM! The database actually looks... peaceful.
Hidden Gem:
The AI content assistant in HubSpot surprised me this week helped draft quick, friendly replies for support emails and saved us tons of time.
Pothole:
Accidentally broke a workflow (oops) and caused a mini email storm . But we learned to test in a sandbox first crisis averted and minions rewarded with coffee.
Wins – Knowing how views work! Our sales team don’t have access to segments, but they need to be able to view their contacts for emails. I can now on board them so they all have their lists ready at hand.
Hidden Gems – Finding out that HubSpot will flag bounced emails across all of HubSpot.
Potholes – The sandbox had been mistakenly updated with new contacts, meaning that the live account needs to be updated. I’ve solved the issue as to why this occurred, but now need to migrate the accounts over.
Wins– What’s something your “minion squad” (or team) achieved this week that made you proud?
we had an outstanding piece of work to achieve for a client that none of the team had started and from the week 3 work to make a chatflow - I was able to complete the work and teach the team how to do it!
Hidden Gems– Which HubSpot tool, workflow, or AI agent made your process smoother?
None this week that I can think of
Potholes– What challenge or chaos popped up this week, and how did you (or your minions) fix it?
definitely exposign the lack of processes even within out own team, specifically the lack of being able to access the process in hubspot to hold the team to it, make it easier for thme to follow and use- currently all buried in a shared network drive.
This week was all about making sure our team, tools and workflows aren’t just there — they’re actually aligned. I got our first “people-platform-process” meeting on the calendar, where we walked through who does what, which platform pieces they use, and how the process flows end-to-end. It felt like a big step from “we use HubSpot” to “we use HubSpot well”.
Hidden Gem:
I found that simply updating our workflow ownership & review cadence made a difference. Instead of the old “set it and forget it” approach, assigning a process-owner to every major workflow helped highlight where things were stagnating. The little reminder email to review “your” workflows every quarter is now officially in our calendar.
Pothole:
We ran into a snag when the service and sales teams had different ideas of “what platform tools we should use for collaboration”. Sales likes sequences and snippets; service prefers tickets and the knowledge base. Getting both aligned on one unified set of tools + agreed process was harder than I expected. The tech wasn’t the blocker — the people and preferences were.
Reflection:
The big learning for me this week: you can have the best platform and slickest automations but if your team isn’t bought-in, or your processes don’t reflect real-world behaviours, it all falls apart. I think my strength is “platform” (I love fiddling with settings, workflows, dashboards), but I still need to level up my “people & process” ideas.
Wins: We’ve streamlined our customer markets, making it easier to segment our customer base.
Hidden Gems: Just discovered that you can filter and sort cards! I also discovered the priority field which will help with sorting and fitering their cards.
Potholes: Duplicates continue to be a major pain point.
Wins – Raising Data Quality by reducing dublicates with help of the Data Quality Overview and tools.
Hidden Gems – Admins can enter absence-times for absent employees.
Potholes – Changing licences causes loss of exchange-connection of the user, so a new connection has to get started after the user recognized loss of connection in the outlook plugin.
Wins - Analyzed severals forecasting models based on Won/Loss ratios to see how accurate our probability actually was. (It was very off) Hidden Gems - Reports were a HUGE help this week. Tracking progress of a ton of new hires. Potholes - Phonenumbers internal number vs the formatted number are different than we thought. I have to change my import process so one of our new integrations works.
Win - Significant progress made in cleaning up duplicate companies and contacts, thanks to the data hub functionality. Ongoing work to align country names and codes across different properties.
Hidden Gem - Help Desk now allows tickets to be split, making it easier to manage multiple or new requests within the same ticket, or when action is needed from another team working in a separate pipeline.
Pothole - Need to develop more Leads automations, as the volume is increasing and the team is finding it challenging to follow up on all of them.
Wins: Consistent posting on social media via the platform and sending ideas for an AI assistant
Hidden Gems: Teams integration started some excitement
Potholes: Working through properties, inch by inch. Without description or different terminology even AI has difficulties finding redundancies
Reflection: Different teams bring different challenges, one team might be very clear on processes but responsibilites might be unclear whereas. Constantly reevaluating what is needed the most while sticking to the roadmap is challenging.
🏆 Win: Completed a workflow audit for a client and streamlined the SMS actions. Found a few areas to simplify and improve automation logic, making communication smoother and reducing failed sends.
💎 Hidden Gem: The option to enrol contacts in a workflow directly from a filtered view. I can’t believe I’ve never used this before!
🕳️ Pothole: Turned on the “automatically associate contacts with companies” option for a client with 12k+ contacts and applied it retrospectively. We went from 2.5k to 8k+ companies, which created some duplicates... so I’m deep in data hygiene mode at the moment.
🤖 AI Prompt:“Help me create a clear, friendly client update explaining recent HubSpot changes, including the issue, what was fixed, and next steps.”
Win - we reviewed all the properties mandatory for filling in when moving from one pipeline stage to another. Cleaned up and refined a lot of them. Also simply changing the order of some surprisingly helps a lot for the team to proceed.
Hidden Gem - Board view for companies.
Pothole - need to dive deeper into Breeze functionality and agnts specifically, we're still under-using it.
🏆Wins – What’s something your “minion squad” (or team) achieved this week that made you proud?
With the integrated use of AI in its marketing framework, the loop model has helped in discovering many inconsistencies within reports. It helped establish a better understanding of the reports before launching a campaign.
💎Hidden Gems –Which HubSpot tool, workflow, or AI agent made your process smoother?
The Loop model which is an upgrade of the flywheel model.
🕳Potholes –What challenge or chaos popped up this week, and how did you (or your minions) fix it?
Maybe further categorize the loop marketing prompt library by grouping the 100 prompts into categories differentiated by filters for clearer understanding.
Wins: Reviewed all of our workflows and created a clean folder structure and naming convention. I isolated 45 workflows that should be archived - leadership does not want me to delete anything. And found an additional 30 workflows that are old or have no actions associated with them. So now time to bring in the minions for support in reviewing the 75 workflows in question.
Hidden Gems: I want to create a pipeline map, starting with our new business and then looking at our renewal pipeline. We have scattered documentation on what needs to happen from a data standpoint at each phase. I think we have it all, but just not in one clean place. The map will help guide additional automations and data governance.
I am also pretty excited about Buying Groups - they won't work for us as they stand today, but I am meeting with the product team to discuss our needs. So wonderful to feel we have a voice in the direction of the product. Thank you!
Potholes: I get inspired, but then overwhelmed with all the work that needs to be done. I created a naming convention for all the workflows - see the win. However, I am now not happy with it. Sometimes hard to see the convention that is needed until you really dive in. So, despite what AI or other documentation may suggest it still have to fit your business model. Always learning!
💛 Super Admin Fall 2025 Bootcamp – Week 4: People, Platform & Process 💛
👉For Week 4, share in the comments below:
🏆Wins– What’s something your “minion squad” (or team) achieved this week that made you proud? We cleaned up a lot of our unused segments! 💎Hidden Gems– Which HubSpot tool, workflow, or AI agent made your process smoother? I created a task within a workflow for our sales team at the end of a lead campaign. That is not something we had used previously. 🕳Potholes– We need to find a core seat for a team member and do not want to add a new one. We are trying to use our audit logs of other users to see if any of our contractors are not truly using theirs. Not really a pot-hole, but somewhat tedious.
Win – Used conditional logic on HubSpot deal records to dynamically display different fields based on the deal type. It’s been a huge improvement for keeping record views clean and relevant for each team.
Hidden Gem – Field-level permissions on properties. It’s an easy-to-overlook feature, but it’s great for controlling who can edit key fields while still letting everyone view them. It’s been especially helpful for maintaining data consistency across teams.
Pothole – Planning out a migration from Microsoft Access to HubSpot. The structure and formatting differences make it tricky to map fields cleanly, and we’re still figuring out the best approach to preserve key data without bringing over clutter.
Win – Used conditional logic on HubSpot deal records to dynamically display different fields based on the deal type. It’s been a huge improvement for keeping record views clean and relevant for each team.
Hidden Gem – Field-level permissions on properties. It’s an easy-to-overlook feature, but it’s great for controlling who can edit key fields while still letting everyone view them. It’s been especially helpful for maintaining data consistency across teams.
Pothole – Planning out a migration from Microsoft Access to HubSpot. The structure and formatting differences make it tricky to map fields cleanly, and we’re still figuring out the best approach to preserve key data without bringing over clutter.
🏆Wins– A "Wake the Dead" email campaign to confirm if there was anyone at a portion of our email addresses in the database. 💎Hidden Gems– Koalify as a connected app for identifying 2M+ duplicate records. 🕳Potholes– Someone unsubscribed from all email - is not moved to a non-marketing Contact automatically! My Client has not realized this for YEARS and has been paying for an inflated Marketing Contact count in HubSpot. We had to create a workflow to do that 😑
💡Reflection– Right now my clients need process more than anything, so I am setting up guardrails in the system to keep all the people aligned to the new processes.
