Welcome to Week 4โor as Gru would say, โLightbulb!โ ๐ก
This week is all about how your People, Platform, and Process come together to create one despicably effective HubSpot ecosystem. Just like Gruโs operations, the magic isnโt in one gadget or one minionโitโs in how they all work together as one perfectly orchestrated plan.
Your mission (should you choose to accept it ๐๐ build processes that empower your people, optimize your platform, and unleash your minionsโuh, I mean agentsโto do what they do best!
๐ญโItโs so fluffy, Iโm gonna die!โ โ Agnes (and probably you, when your dashboards finally align across every hub)
๐For Week 4, share in the comments below:
๐Wins โ Whatโs something your โminion squadโ (or team) achieved this week that made you proud? ๐Hidden Gems โ Which HubSpot tool, workflow, or AI agent made your process smoother? ๐ณPotholes โ What challenge or chaos popped up this week, and how did you (or your minions) fix it?
๐ก[BONUS] Reflection โ How do you balance People, Platform, and Process in your own Super Admin world? Which one tends to be your strengthโor your Gruโs next big plan?
โจ Remember: even Gru didnโt 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 donโt work in isolation.
๐ As your instructors @ChrisBabelquest , @AliSchwanke , and I @MuseDebbie, weโre 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 ๐ถ, and drop your Week 4 reflections or questions below โฌ๏ธ
(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.)
๐ณPotholesโ We couldn't figure out why required properties were not filled out on some deal records despite being clearly required... and then we figured out they were being worked by a super admin who was allowed to skip rules.
๐Hidden Gemsโ So help resolve and give visibility where this was happening, we created tasks for that admin to see when they had required fields missing.
๐Win: The buyers journey visual finally helped me understand how pipelines and stages connect. ๐Hidden Gem: Workspaces. I didnโt realize how much they cut down on noise and help people focus on the right tasks. ๐ณPothole: Still figuring out the right โexit criteriaโ for pipeline stages when Iโm not fully hands-on with an active portal yet. ๐คAI Prompt: โHelp me define clear exit criteria for pipeline stages, even if I donโt have a live pipeline to reference.โ It gave me a solid draft to start from.
๐Win Deleting over 50,000 contacts out of our system. It was terrifying but necessary to clean up our database.
๐Hidden Gem Using the Original Source Drill-Down 2. I realized that for list imports, this field actually holds the Import ID. This was a lifesaverโit allowed me to see if a contact came from a specific bogus list upload.
๐ณPothole Having trust issues with the Last Engagement Date filter. I tried to use this to find inactive contacts to delete, but I caught a few records that did have recent activity despite the filter saying otherwise. Itโs rare, but it makes me have less confidence in mass deletions.
Super Admin Fall 2025 Bootcamp โ Week 4: People, Platform & Process
WIN We migrated to the new standard sandbox so we can now deploy directly into live. Until now, we had to build everything from scratch in live, and we did this for six different regions (UK and EU). This created a lot of duplication and increased the risk of human error, so this is definitely a big win for me.
HIDDEN GEM The Deal Loss Agent AI is a game changer.
POTHOLE I am struggling to identify duplicates in the system before switching on auto merge in Data Management Studio. I am unable to scope out the impact at this stage.
REFLECTION I think my natural order is process, people, platform. Sometimes you have to be strict to drive quality, standards and best practices, but that does not mean you do not listen to the users. The platform is for them. It is about finding the right balance and making sure you do the best for the users while still following the processes in place.
WIN - I've now got a 'master suppression list' to herd the cats of the basics we will never want to include in an active list for a campaign etc. That way we only need one suppression list membership in list criteria a lot of the time, rather than numerous variations.
HIDDEN GEM - We don't need to use Pipeline rules, because I've already covered those relevant in permission sets and teams, or by collectively reviewing stages and everyone's definitions of them.
POTHOLE - our processes/definitions aren't consistent across the business, this is a long term project
WIN: This week, we statred restructuring our deal pipelines. Watching the team navigate the new stages and see how each handoff flows smoothly across marketing & sales felt rewarding. The changes make it easier for everyone to track progress, focus on the right deals, and spend less time chasing information
GEM: Using cross-hub dashboards alongside smart lists turned out to be a game-changer. We can now pull pipeline data, customer touchpoints, and deal health into one view, giving the team clarity without extra clicks or confusion.
๐ณ POTHOLE: While building the new pipelines, we discovered some automation wasnโt firing consistently across all stages. It highlighted how small gaps can cascade if left unchecked.
Winsโ Whatโs something your โminion squadโ (or team) achieved this week that made you proud? I was able to get my sales team to start using a NLWC SOP automation that allows us to start disassociating contacts from companies and then we add them to a list that we use to track in another tool where they may have gone to work
Hidden Gemsโ Which HubSpot tool, workflow, or AI agent made your process smoother?
Workflows are making it smoother, AI agents seem to not be. They seem like a nice idea but take time to set up and I have too many other things I need to do. Potholesโ What challenge or chaos popped up this week, and how did you (or your minions) fix it?
I had an email campaign set up using personalization tokens for our sales team. I made one email that used email sending address personalization, email name personalization, and email signature/meeting link personalization based on the contact owner, and there seems to be some sort of delivery problem with it because our opens were basically at 0 for the test we did. Reflectionโ How do you balance People, Platform, and Process in your own Super Admin world? Which one tends to be your strengthโor your Gruโs next big plan? I think the order for me goes People, Platform, and Process... I tend to listen to our users as much as possible to try and figure out the pains that they currently have with hubspot so I can fix it for them on the platform, I tend to get a little lost on making sure theres an actual process.
Win: I began the communication process with our sales team to craft a deals pipeline and begin to implement it in Sales Hub.
Hidden Gem: Once the deals pipeline goes live we will be able to capture new dimensions of data that we had previously not been tracking.
Pothole: When building out segments, I discovered that our data is in worse shape than I had originally thought. It will need to be completely overhauled to be able to use segments effectively.
Week 4 Big Wins/Little Victories: I backfilled some Deals without Anticipated disbursements going back about a year. This will be helpful in crafting revenue projections. Potholes: I discovered several duplicated Deals in one pipeline Hidden Gems: You can change the metrics that show up in your object views so the most important stuff for your workflow shows up first. AI Prompt: How to access my account's sandbox?
๐Wins โ I got a clearer understanding of our current sales process and ideas of how to improve it. ๐Hidden Gems โ Love using segments for easier and more specific workflow triggers. ๐ณPotholes โ Still struggling with all these duplicates. Looking into Koalify. ๐กReflection โ I don't have much "control" over the people portion, but overall, I think people are more efficient and less frustrated when processes are clear and simplified. I think my strength is finding and creating clarity in building processes for my team.
๐ Super Admin Fall 2025 Bootcamp โ Week 4: People, Platform & Process ๐
Wins: We deployed a new sales process this week with one of my teams and really excited to watch it unfold.
Hidden gems: Using the unenroll criteria in HubSpot workflows and also delays and branches to unenroll if they don't fit the criteria. So a double approach to unenroll to make sure contacts don't continue in the workflow if they no longer fit the criteria.
Potholes: When copying workflows for a similar process, just reviewing at different times because I always miss updating an important step which definitely causes chaos.
๐ Super Admin Fall 2025 Bootcamp โ Week 4: People, Platform & Process ๐
Win โ This week, Iโm proud that our team cleaned up and reorganized our deal pipelines, making them much clearer and easier to track.
Hidden Gem โ The Deal Loss AI agent was a great find!
Pothole โ I linked my work email to the Help Desk to test out some ticket worflows, but it also connected it to the shared inbox my team is currently using! A few emails ended up there fo the team to see๐. it was a good learning moment.
Wins โ Set up data audit reports to catch problems earlier
Hidden Gems โ Conditional rules can now be applied to large property cards! this used to be only possible in the small property cards, we missed the memo of this update apparently ๐
Potholes โ Third party app wasn't responding in workflow editor, submitted a ticket to integrated app to troubleshoot
Win โ Merged a lot of duplicate contacts in my clientโs platform. It was actually pretty fun to doโand super satisfying to see the data all cleaned up afterward.
Hidden Gem โ Learned how to pin columns in views and create custom views, which makes navigating data so much easier.
Pothole โ I need to find a way to associate contacts with custom objects automatically, without manual work. The keys I use need to be updated whenever the association doesnโt happen. I also want to make sure HubSpot doesnโt create new, incorrect associations.
Wins โ Did a good clear up of our single deal pipeline that had a lot of historical data (result of multiple pipelines merged into one, and also multiple people managing these deals). Implemented new stages, fields and required properties to make sure we're collecting better data e.g. having a field for qualified vs unqualified and not including them as separate closed lost stages. Hidden Gems โ Started using Help desk for our sales enquiries which has been super useful - our customer success manager loves the customer agent replies and we'll look to implement this for the support side of the team from next month. Potholes โ Currently trying to work through some Asana integration workflows where we're now collecting data in product that has in some cases already been collected in hubspot. Want to merge all the data into one field rather than having 3 different fields that collect all of this. Need to work out the best way to fix this with a workflow!
Super Admin Fall 2025 Bootcamp - Week 4 Winsโ Simplifying our pipelines by clearing gray areas - exit intent, win/loss criteria, using priorities, and deal tags.
Hidden Gemsโ Deal loss agent...
Potholesโ Based on Week 4, I need to create a visual for how all of this fits together. Reflection โ I'm still learning how to balance people, platform, and process. I tend to lean towards making sure people are happy, but it shouldn't be at the detriment of everything else. Bumpers, guidelines, and clear information can also make people happy. ๐
