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Tom’s Tips Podcast: S3E10 – Remote Edition

Written by Zach Gilbert

Published: 11/11/2020

Announcer:

Hey, everyone, welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, your place for obscure movie references, cat facts, and everything MagHub related. And now, your host, MagHub Product Manager, Tom Bellen.

Tom:

Hello, everybody. Welcome to Tom’s Tips Podcast, the 9.8 version. This is just the start of November, so nothing exciting is going on in the world at all, just MagHub release information. I am joined by, always, Zach Gilbert, our marketing director. Say hello to the jugheads, Zach.

Zach:

Hello, jugheads.

Tom:

That is the name. I think that is the name. I always forget her name. Oh man, what a crazy time it is right now, but it’s a beautiful fall day. I know this is your favorite season. I mean, despite everything that’s going on, it couldn’t be more beautiful. Am I right, or am I right? Or am I right?

Zach:

You are right.

Tom:

I know. So it’s a great time of year for us, I think. Very excited for the release. I get to go outside. I get to go golfing one more time this weekend. Golf courses are just swapped because it’s like 70 degrees in Michigan. Too bad the sun sets at like 1:00 PM.

Tom:

Do you have any plans for this beautiful summery fall weekend?

Zach:

I have a lot of plans for this weekend. One is I am going… What am I doing this weekend? I am recording my podcast episodes this weekend so I can get caught up, I am doing a podcast interview, I am playing some games with some friends out of state, and then I’m helping a coworker move a fridge this weekend.

Tom:

So first of all, that obviously is not me as a coworker, unless you’re stealing my fridge. That would be something with me.

Tom:

But the sad reality is that when it’s supposed to be like, I don’t know, whatever, 60, 70 degrees and sunny this weekend, it sounds like you’re spending most of your time inside. What is wrong with you? Get out there, get some leaf peeping in. Get that peeping in.

Zach:

I have peeped enough in this leaf season. I will have the windows open and it’ll be comfortable and maybe I’ll sit outside and enjoy a little sun before I go back into my dungeon. I am perfectly happy with that. I am ready for snow, personally.

Tom:

Oh my God, you’re the worst.

Zach:

I’m sorry.

Tom:

We can agree on one thing that both of us will probably be doing this weekend, or today, because I know we’re big fans of both of these shows. Because it’s Friday, which means that the Great British Baking Show has an episode out on Netflix, and so does the new episode of Mandalorian.

Tom:

So I was wondering, how did you feel about the first episode of Mandalorian? We not talked about that yet.

Zach:

Ooh, man, I was extremely happy with the first episode of season two. I thought it was terrific. It was my favorite. I was so happy.

Tom:

You’ve got to love some Timothy Olyphant. Everyone loves Timothy Olyphant. Nobody knows they love Timothy Olyphant, but you just got to love him.

Zach:

Probably because of the name Olyphant.

Tom:

Yeah. I mean obviously Deadwood, he was good in that. I never saw Justified, which I pretty much think is the same show from what I understand of it. But I know, I mean, he’s just sort of… So basically in this thing, too, he’s some sort of kind of just little town sheriff guy? He is typecast.

Zach:

It is.

Tom:

Slightly different timeframes, but it’s all the same. You know?

Zach:

I agree.

Tom:

Yeah. But I know it was very good. Obviously, the British Baking Show, which right now, if you had to choose, you could only watch one, would it be Mandalorian over British Baking Show? I assume so.

Zach:

No. I think actually I would do Great Britain. I look forward more to Great British Baking Show. So although I normally would choose Mandalorian, I’ve got to go with GBBO. I think it’s way more fun. I enjoy this season. I think this is one of my favorite seasons. I’m not as happy about the hosts as much, personally. I love Noel, but I’m still not sold on the Matt Lucas train yet. I would still choose GBBO right now. There you go. Shocker.

Tom:

Yeah, well, I think in some ways I do, too, just because my wife, we watch that together. She works a lot of nights, so like that’s usually our Friday relaxing. Whenever we do find that hour to watch a show together. She’s not as into the Mandalorian. She doesn’t believe that this is the way.

Tom:

Even though I know we haven’t gotten caught up too much on it, but I haven’t watched this week’s episode so no spoilers on that, but I know all of us were pretty disheartened about who left recently. That was hard to take. Yeah.

Tom:

We’re moving on from that. Moving on to different bigger and brighter things, which leads me to talk about the 9.8 release. So coming up, obviously, we have our 9.8 Release. There’s actually a fair amount of a lot of interesting things in this one after kind of last release. More transitioning.

Tom:

So with 9.8, one of the big items that’s been going, talked about for a long time, the day is finally here, has finally been decided, the votes are in, the dashboard is the overall number of dashboard now. The old dashboard is gone, a lot of the old pages are now gone. So you’re not going to be able to get to the old dashboard anymore.

Tom:

We have a couple of tweaks left to do on it. The biggest one making the public dashboard view only. So that is something that will be done as part of this. But all of the dashboard migrations have happened. We have all the widgets. We added a translation doc to help people who still might be migrating over to find those items.

Tom:

We’ve gotten a lot of additional requests with what more people want to do to it, and that’s great. One of the reasons we did this is because it gives us a lot more flexibility to do even more with it. I know one of the open items we have to do is like the sales team activity calendar, we’re going to remove that page. So we need to make sure that the calendar, you can do things like do multi-select of reps and see order data on it.

Tom:

So there’s a bunch of things we’d still like to do with the dashboard. It’s not that we’re done with the dashboard. It’s really the beginning of the dashboard. We’re just moving on in our lives. So that’s one big item there, too.

Tom:

One of the other big things, too, in this release, and the last release, and actually coming up with the next one, is we had a good amount of our customers who have wanted to kind of fund re-prioritization of things in our system. So there’s things that we always think about doing on backlog, and when customers really, really want that, they want it now, we do you offer that as a service. We’ll be like, “Okay, we’ll quote it out exactly how it’ll work and put some of those things in the system.”

Tom:

So you’ll see a fair amount of those over the next few releases, a couple of those regarding subscriptions. So I think some of the changes we’re making on subscriptions this release make it more in the user’s control to pick the next issue. I know it has been an item that people have talked about for a while now. So now it’s really under the control of the user.

Tom:

So I know that’s going to help our support team because they’re not going to have to try to explain it, and then if you have issues that kind of are not in a typical calendar that would have problems, so I think that’ll help. I think being able to create a subscription and bill it right away will help people streamline it for those who are on the phone with a customer, charge the card, that will be helpful. It’s not banging the table.

Tom:

Then we’ve also integrated with a new payment processor, Braintree, which is a PayPal company. So if you use PayPal now and maybe you don’t like authorize or you’re looking at processors, Braintree is now an option to use for credit card processing. So that’s something that we’ve done as well.

Tom:

Along with credit cards, I know that our internal team, finance team, has been waiting for this for a while, is the credit card expiration changes. So that is, again, if your credit card is about to expire and you’re a customer, you’ll be notified on a cadence that says your credit card is going to expire, please update it. Then when you do it, it’ll update invoices and orders.

Tom:

It will also do an internal thing to let your finance person know here’s a list of all the credit cards that are expiring and here are any orders or invoices those are tied to. So again, that’s going to affect your prepayment ability because you can’t auto charge the card because it’ll fail. You will know it and you can either communicate to that customer, update the credit card, and make sure that they’re aware to update their credit card also. So that been a big part of that release as well.

Tom:

We’ve also had some kind of little things in the release that I know people will like, as far as you can be able to keep the same ticket status when you’re updating things in bulk. We’ve also changed it so when you are updating things like in bulk, if you’re updating dynamic attributes on the context or company search, those will now affect the automation. Because we all have thing that we want to do in automation the next few releases, and that was kind of one of the first things of that that we want to do.

Tom:

So basically if you bulk update 100 contacts and add XYZ, that will then trigger the automation workflow to maybe send an email, or send it to do, or whatever things you can think about that you’d really like to see happen. So those are some of those other items that we’ll have in there.

Tom:

We’ve also made it so you can add loss reasons to all the different things that get deleted in the season, whether an opportunity or a 100% order, whatever that is, you can keep track of that reason, search by that reason, to your heart’s content.

Tom:

So those are, again, some of those bigger items that we have that are going into this release. I think, again, the thing that’ll affect people the most is obviously going to be the dashboard and making sure that you have everything on the dashboard. I think the subscriptions, for those who use subscriptions or been interested in it, is also going to be something that will help with that process and maybe make things a lot more clear in the system.

Tom:

Those are a lot of the big things. Then there’s, as usual, all the little additions that are going to be in the release notes that maybe I didn’t mention and will probably be the most exciting to some people. You know, exciting to one, not so much to the others. Who knows?

Tom:

I don’t know, Zach, if you have any thoughts about this release, what took from the webinar, what you think really, I don’t know, gets you ready for release 9.8?

Zach:

I would say this release is actually quite large. It had a lot of stuff in it. There’s a lot of small things as well as big things. I know we’re doing a lot of custom development, which is always cool. There’s a lot of good stuff happening there.

Zach:

That crowd sourcing mentality of getting people to fund changes in the system for their benefit is pretty cool. I like the new dashboard. Obviously, you’ve already talked about that, so I’m not going to go further into that. I also like the dynamic attributes showing up in the mail merge templates. That’s nice.

Tom:

Oh, I forgot about that.

Zach:

Yeah, that’s a pretty good one.

Tom:

Yeah. So that’s, obviously, if you have a tag that you want to put into a mail merge to help the personalization of it, so basically you could create as many tags as you want. I know there’s already been a couple of requests to expand on that. Yeah, that’s the webinar.

Tom:

So is that the one you’re most excited, then, your mail merges? You marketer, you.

Zach:

I know, right? Shame on me. Yeah, I like it.

Tom:

But yeah, I mean, I think with that and the cost of that, people will be like, well, people want to know how people are going to benefit, why should I have to pay for it? A lot of it is we get a lot of requests and, I mean, I’m not going to say 100% of them, some of them are out there, but almost all of them…

Tom:

Peter is excited. He’s drumming up for this release, too.

Tom:

I mean, most of the requests are totally valid, make perfect sense, and if we had unlimited time and resources, we’d try and get to all of them. But that’s why it’s important, like if someone really wants to do it, we talk with them, we work through, we usually kind of eat some of the cost if we think it will benefit other customers along the way. But you know, there’s things that we had to push off that I know other customers were interested in getting.

Tom:

Obviously, I apologize for the noise. My family and I, I think we’ve all passed the tests so far. We’ve been in quarantine for two weeks, so it’s been a fun two weeks for me. Kids are very excited right now. Just ate lunch, so I apologize for that noise.

Tom:

But yeah, I mean, there’s some other things, too, that we were looking to get to that are going to be pushed off the next release. The update to project task page, which I know I’m really excited about, see, I got bumped, that’s going to move to the next release. I think people are going to be really excited to see that and things that it could move to.

Tom:

We have started building out or looking into our HubSpot integration, which I know is Zach’s favorite thing in the world. That’s another big part of it.

Tom:

There’s a deferred revenue report that I’ve been dreaming about for months. Maybe it’ll happen this release, I’m not sure.

Tom:

So we do have a lot of exciting things planned, things that we’ve discussed, that maybe got moved back a little bit. Dark mode, I hear, could be making a return, a Mandalorian type of return, because that’s one of the things we made them change in this release is we made something that could lead to dark mode. So we’ve got a lot of exciting things to close out the year.

Tom:

But yeah, exciting time. Oh, and I’m looking at my cat. So I’ll jump into cat facts right now, as I look at this cat that I want to murder. Did you know that cats can get diabetes, not have diabetes, and then have the diabetes return? Because that happened to my cat.

Tom:

So my cat is now trying to eat the leftovers of my children’s meal. So I’m going to move this over to make sure he does not do that. So that’s a cat fact for the day. Cat diabetes just comes back all the time. I don’t know if that happens in humans or not, but, you know.

Tom:

So if anyone still wants my cat, just send me a box with holes in it and I will ship the cat to you. This is the point where Zach says something about how I’m not serious, but I’m serious.

Zach:

You covered it well.

Tom:

Oh, okay. Perfect.

Tom:

All right. Sorry. Gaining my process, there.

Tom:

Is anything you want to say right now, Zach, while I get my composure back?

Zach:

Sure. So we are having a digital MagHub University in early December. I will make this known, so make sure everybody’s listening to this, if you’ve gone to a MagHub University the past, you probably should not attend this one. This is definitely made for beginners.

Zach:

We’ve gotten feedback sometimes having a MagHub University where people say like, “Wow, this is really basic. I already knew this.” This is kind of along the same path. It’s going to be very basic. This is for new users, new people on MagHub, and new clients. You’ll all find benefit from this.

Zach:

Like I said, we are going to be doing that in a little bit. It’ll be a small fee compared to actually paying to attend MagHub University in person. Obviously, we’re doing digital for safety. We will have more stuff coming out through Pendo and through email in the next coming weeks, so stay tuned if you want to send some new users to that. Yeah, and some of the money will go to charity as well, just like we’ve been doing.

Zach:

So that’s pretty much all I had.

Tom:

Yeah. The only thing I’ll add to that part, too, is the other thing that I get it is new users or if you set up your system like three, four, five years ago and you haven’t looked at any of that stuff in a long, long time, we’ve had customers get a lot of benefit out of that.

Tom:

So yeah, if you’ve been in it recently, you’re set up, you’re rocking and rolling, it’s not as built for you. But it really is like getting an overview, especially if you hire someone new on the admin side who is trying to get comfortable with how things get set up or how the system works, that’s good. But yeah, if you’re looking to get the newest things out of it, not so much.

Peter:

[crosstalk 00:16:13] (we figured we would leave this in here, just to give Peter his stardom).

Tom:

Oh, all right. I’ve got to go home my son, but before I do that, I have to get my movie trivia question in there. Here’s one question, has anyone ever actually been able to sign into HBO Max before?

Zach:

Yes.

Tom:

Okay, so I still can’t get HBO Max. I don’t understand it. I have Roku, I guess that’s the problem. Is HBO Max real? Is it real?

Zach:

It is real. It is real.

Tom:

Okay. Because one of the things I was looking forward to seeing, actually, my son right now, he wants me to help him with the Witch on a Broom book that we’re playing with, is I want to watch the new Witches movie. I feel like you would like that type of movie. Are you a Witches movie fan?

Zach:

It’s actually funny. So I have never actually heard about Roald Dahl’s Witches movie until a couple of weeks ago, my wife, actually, she’s like, “I hated this movie when I was a kid. This one terrified me. They are so creepy.” I was like, “I’ve never heard of this.” Now I’m seeing it everywhere. It’s crazy.

Tom:

Yeah. So I was a big fan of The Witches movie as a kid. It is creepy. So my sister-in-law and my wife are really into like scary movies, and Peter is, too, and so they love that movie growing up as a kid. Now it’s like, is it too soon to have Pete watch it? I’m like, “Yes, it’s too soon to have Pete watch The Witches.” That movie is terrifying.

Tom:

But in the new one, I know that they were a little bit upset when the new one was brought in because like I feel like Anne Hathaway, I like Anne Hathaway, but I think she’s polarizing a bit. That’s the thing when you have a classic film like that, it’s hard to replace that type of person. So I know Anne Hathaway, and there’s a bunch of things going on, so I’m looking forward to watching it.

Tom:

I’m going to make this question real simple, real easy, for the trivia. Who was the original Grand High Witch? The original, the OG, the one that no matter who they picked to be the new person, people were going to reject it because she was just so good? So that’s going to be the trivia question.

Tom:

I hope to see the new Witches somehow, if HBO Max ever comes to the Roku or is a real thing. I still don’t think it is, and I know John Oliver makes fun of the fact that no one could find it on Last Week Tonight.

Tom:

Just tweet at us @MagHub, who was the OG Grand High Witch from the movie The Witches.

Tom:

That’s all I got. I’m going to go try and parent for a little bit.

Zach:

Good luck with that, Tom.

Tom:

Thank you very much. Thank you all for listening. Have a great rest of your November and happy Thanksgiving. We’ll talk to you after turkey time.

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