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Ian Shields shared thisThe universe has a sense of humor. Yesterday, I was completing another HubSpot Efficiency Audit for a client and the checkpoint # 16 of 90 is sandboxes. "Note: After today, March 16, 2026, your two legacy standard sandboxes will be locked down. HubSpot will end support for them, and you will lose all access. This is a firm cutoff with no extensions." I literally typed that on the exact day the legacy sandboxes hit their original sunset cutoff. 😅 That little coincidence reminded me why system audits matter so much. One overlooked setting, one outdated process, one legacy tool you forgot to migrate and suddenly you’re not just inefficient (you’re locked out of safe testing, deployments break, and critical business operations friction quietly compounds. In the HubSpot Efficiency Audit I just finished, we also surfaced: + Inconsistent deal automation (skipped stages and bad velocity metrics) + Missing critical data on contacts, companies, deals, and tickets + Inconsistent form strategy (300+ forms with varying configurations) + Missing data enrichment All the classic maturity gaps from the RevOps Maturity Model we love. If any of this sounds familiar and you want to catch these things before the next “funny coincidence” turns into a real headache my HubSpot Efficiency Audit is exactly the focused, no-fluff review that helps Revenue and Marketing leaders spot hidden blockers fast. We cover account setup, integrations, connections, data quality, segments, forms, workflows, marketing emails, sequences, campaigns, and reporting gaps in one tight pass. Then you get prioritized recommendations you can actually execute. Comment “HubSpot Efficiency Audit” if you’d like to chat and see if it’s a fit for your team right now. (No pressure—just clarity.)
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Ian Shields posted thisThe best GTM Evangelists out there get it. They treat go-to-market strategy as a clean system: + AI and data working together + teams aligned on customer reality + forward-looking, actionable metrics over vanity numbers They turn the mess into scalable motion without losing the fundamentals. That's why I'm heading to GTM Engineer School. In eight weeks I'll learn to build those exact systems hands-on. Real builds. Expert feedback. Tools that cut waste and boost speed. No theory, just execution that unifies cross-functional teams, mends the tech stack, and reduces the drag on revenue. Yeah, I'm excited to share. Each week, I'll share what sticks as I go. #GTM #RevOps #B2BGrowth
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Ian Shields shared thisThis story hits me right in the feels—kindness is the quiet magic that connects us all. I’m an advisor for Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business Marketing Automation class. And I was a guest speaker sharing a real-world business problem and creating a process map with students. Good process maps are visual stories that marketing operations leaders use to inspire cross-functional empathy, advocate for change, and champion initiatives that improve efficiency and increase revenue. We also demystified the HubSpot schema using an Entity Relationship Diagram. And, on the soft side, weaving in empathy and kindness makes life beautiful. If you’re late? No drama—just glad you’re here. Who’s feeling this vibe? #marketing #marketingops #kindnessIan Shields shared thisEver walk into a room late and feel every eye on you? That was me today. A meeting ran long and by the time I got to class, our guest speaker was already presenting. He was visiting from outside of BYU, which made it feel even worse slipping in after everything had started. He noticed me come in, asked my name, and I immediately started apologizing for walking in late. To my surprise, Ian Shields just responded with kindness. No cold look. He simply said, “I’m just glad you’re here.” That line stuck with me. I’ve been doing my best to juggle work, family, and school. (This will never end) And after that class it hit me that everyone else is doing the same THING. We expect perfection from ourselves and others, when really everyone is just trying to keep up. So here’s the reminder I needed today and maybe you need too. Be a little more patient with the person who shows up late. We don't know what people are going through.
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Ian Shields shared thisHey fellow Utah-based Marketing Ops toy makers and Revenue Ops gift dispatchers. Utah Tech Week is back Feb 2-7, 2026: a full week of community vibes, events, and those magical ‘happy collisions’ across Silicon Slopes, perfect for some post-holiday sparkle! ✨ (https://lnkd.in/gJKiC2UV) I’m especially buzzing for the GTM Hackathon hosted by Mobly on Feb 2-3 in Lehi. Think building scrappy GTM + AI automations and workflows in a high-energy sprint. Perfect for ops folks who love architecting and delivering business impact. There’ll be $10K+ prizes, mentors, snacks, and a showcase party. (https://lnkd.in/gwYKbyMr) Who's joining the fun? Tag a teammate who'd crush this. And let's geek out IRL. #MarketingOps #RevenueOps #GTM #GTMengineering2026 GTM Hackathon by Mobly | Lehi, Utah | Utah Tech Week2026 GTM Hackathon by Mobly | Lehi, Utah | Utah Tech Week
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Ian Shields shared thisYou've invested in HubSpot. But are you using its full power? You’ve poured significant resources into HubSpot as your growth engine. Yet many teams tap only ~50% of its capabilities. This quietly erodes team efficiency and revenue momentum. Without regular evaluation, you’re likely dealing with: ⛓️💥 Workflows that no longer match how your business actually works ⚠️ Data gaps silently undermining your reporting 🤖 AI features sitting idle while your team does manual work Our 88-Point HubSpot Efficiency Audit gives you a systematic evaluation that reveals: ➕ Your current performance score (most companies: 57-70%) ➕ Specific gaps in your tech stack ➕ A prioritized, actionable roadmap for high-impact projects The outcome? Your HubSpot transforms from bottleneck to brilliant competitive advantage. Like kintsugi, mending pottery cracks with gold. HBR’s research-backed insights are clear: regular martech audits don’t just find problems, they coordinate goals, remind teams of proper usage, and drive measurable improvement. Ready to unlock your HubSpot’s full potential? Book a 30-minute audit consultation with me (link in comments). #HubSpot #MarketingOperations #MarketingOps #RevenueOperations #RevOps
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Ian Shields shared thisI'm a better presenter because I continually learn from the best. And one of THE BEST communication experts is Nancy Duarte.Ian Shields shared thisMany presenters lose their audience within the first 30 seconds. If that happens, it’s as if you never even presented... Your brilliant idea or insights that could change their lives never reach their potential. That's why half the battle in a high-stakes presentation is keeping your audience engaged. Here’s a 6-step process I’ve used over the last few decades to win the room during my highest stakes presentations: 1. Know your audience’s values and decision-making style. The first mistake communicators make is presenting what they think is important. But persuasion doesn't start with you and your message. It starts with your audience. Before you build a single slide, understand how they think and what’s driving their decisions. What drives them to make decisions (are they analytical or intuitive)? Are they risk-averse or risk-tolerant? What are their biggest pain points? 2. Understand why your audience is coming to THIS presentation. Taking #1 a step further, think through what everyone in your audience is bringing with them into this meeting. What do they feel about the topic you’re presenting on? What pressures are they facing? What are they afraid of? Are they here because they have to be or because they want to be? 3. Identify how your message solves their problem (make them the hero). Take what you learned in Steps 1 and 2 to create your presentation’s story structure. Position your idea as the bridge that connects where your audience is and where they want to be. Your idea is the catalyst that allows them to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals. 4. Determine the ONE thing you want them to do after the presentation. You know what outcome you need, so don’t leave it up to chance. Give them ONE action to take and make the stakes crystal clear. What happens if they say yes? But more importantly, what happens if they don't? People are more likely to act when they understand the cost of inaction. 5. Distill everything into The Big Idea™. If your audience forgets everything else, what’s the one thing you want them to remember? That’s The Big Idea™. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, he said, “Today, Apple reinvents the phone.” That’s a message that moves people. The Big Idea™ is your point of view plus what’s at stake. It should be a single sentence. 6. Make sure everything in your presentation supports The Big Idea™. Once you have that sentence, test every element of your presentation against it. Your stories, your data, your slides…every piece should reinforce The Big Idea™ and make it impossible to ignore. Cut anything that doesn’t support The Big Idea™. It will only weaken your presentation. This 6-step process has worked wonders for me throughout my career, and I’m confident it can help you begin winning the room during your high-stakes presentations. (A HUGE shout out to Peter Durand for the INCREDIBLE notes on these techniques.) #StorytellingInBusiness #ExecutiveCommunication
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Ian Shields shared thisBack from my 3rd #MOPSAPLAOOZA, and I learned a lot about AI + GTM. With friends and new connections, we shared laughs and knowledge. It reminded me that honesty and vulnerability make us stronger. I presented a workshop, watched many of my friends speak, and leveled up my professional skills. But the real magic? Finding amazing friends in the Marketing Ops Community. A heartfelt thanks to Mike Rizzo and Audrey Harze ✨ for hosting an incredible event. Thanks to my friend, AJ Sedlak, a fellow dad navigating ops and life. We geek out on email marketing, tech, and ops. This is the way! Grateful for these bonds that mix work wisdom with real laughs. They lift us up, just like great friendships should. #Mopza2025 #MarketingOps
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Ian Shields shared thisThe next level for marketing automation: AI reasoning.Ian Shields shared thisAfter 19 years building marketing automation, I can finally see what replaces it: AI systems that reason, not just execute rules. That's why the entire martech stack is about to be rebuilt. Legacy marketing automation platforms remain what they've always been: rules engines wearing a user interface. Those rules are brittle. They can't learn from outcomes. They break when market conditions shift. They require expert-level knowledge and constant maintenance. And they can't handle the ambiguity that defines real buyer behavior. Consider data management. Simple capitalization logic turns MCCOY into Mccoy (instead of McCoy). "Director of Operations" could mean IT Ops, RevOps, or Business Ops? In L2A, a consultant using personal email can't match to their Fortune 500 client. Rules can't handle that ambiguity. THE REASONING BREAKTHROUGH GPT-5 shows 80% fewer hallucinations with Ph.D.-level performance. Claude Sonnet 4.5 runs autonomously for 30+ hours on complex tasks, up from 7 hours four months earlier. DeepSeek R1 achieves comparable performance while being open source. These models reason through problems, understand context, test hypotheses. And the pace of improvement shows no signs of slowing. Applying this to marketing automation, reasoning models can recognize patterns across similar situations without explicit rules, infer relationships from available data, and handle ambiguity by considering multiple signals simultaneously. Journey orchestration becomes adaptive. Today we build flowcharts: if industry = SaaS AND role = VP, send email series A. Reasoning AI orchestrates personalized lists of actions based on actual behavior patterns — understanding when someone is researching versus ready to buy without programmed triggers. Personalization becomes dynamic. Current systems require paths for every persona, stage, industry, personality. Reasoning models determine relevance contextually based on each individual’s history, context, and behavioral patterns. WHAT THIS MEANS FOR MOPS Marketing ops teams won't disappear. But their role will shift from configuring rules-based MAPs to providing context: setting business goals, defining success metrics, establishing guardrails. They'll build data pipelines that give AI access to engagement data, intent signals, product usage, CRM data. The technical work changes. The strategic value increases. After helping build Marketo and watching marketing automation define the last era of martech, I'm seeing the next one take shape. What parts of your rules-based MAP could benefit from reasoning AI? Let me know in the comments, and if you found this useful, please comment or reshare! ♻️ #MarketingAutomation
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Ian Shields shared thisI’m having a blast at #MOPZA25 📸 with MOPs besties Britney Young and Ellie Cary. Thanks for the epic Clueless-themed session on “💅 Ugh As If you know your ICP.” Your content, framework, outfits, and nods to the 1995 classic were totally on point! #mopsapalooza #mopza #marketingops Marketing Ops Community
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This role looks great for a marketing/communications pro early in their career. Any recommendations, Sky King?
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Ian Shields liked thisIan Shields liked thisOnce you have your sales transcripts in one spot here's a sample of what you could build out Then you'd do the following: ➡️ Set up a nightly batch to process this ➡️ Set up a call and response mode (likely via Slack) ➡️ Proactive mode particularly for deal prep We'll cover this in the AI for RevOps course 😎 Level 1: it's a Claude Skill wired up to your systems via MCP (i.e Fireflies, Apollo conversations, Granola, etc) Level 2: it's a framework with instruction set for you to deploy across Slack, n8n, Railway, GitHub, Supabase, model router) Level 3: you're STUCK! That's why you bring in an AI Operator to forward deploy. or you just need an EXTRA level of customization because your footprint and processes are snowflakes Good luck out there rolling out your AI processes Go forth and operate
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Ian Shields liked thisIan Shields liked thisI think Luna xhigh (in Codex) is my new favorite LLM for just GSD. Fast and efficient, no posturing or jargon, and so very competent. The writing, while a bit austere, actually sounds like how a human communicates, not stuffed with slop. And you can use it non-stop on a $20 ChatGPT subscription without worrying about limits.
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Ian Shields reacted on thisIan Shields reacted on thisI've been pretty quiet on LinkedIn over the past couple of months. Life had a few unexpected turns, and I needed to step away and focus on what mattered most. Thank you to everyone who reached out and showed support during that time. It meant more than you know. 💜 ❤️ I'm excited to be back, reconnect with this community, and start sharing again. Hopefully, I can convince the LinkedIn algorithm that I still exist. 😄 I also have some exciting news to share in the near future, so stay tuned. It's good to be back.
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Ian Shields liked thisIan Shields liked thisI've spent years documenting HubSpot portals in Notion and spreadsheets. But static docs almost never get updated. 12 months in, your documentation describes the company you used to be. That gap gets dangerous the second workflows start crossing objects. When one workflow touches contacts, deals, and custom objects, a spreadsheet can't keep up with: - Field ownership (what it means, who manages it) - Trigger logic (and the assumptions made when it runs) - Association dependencies (and what breaks if one duplicates) - Workflow ownership - Downstream reporting impact An outdated doc is worse than no doc at all. And past 200 workflows, the portal just moves faster than anyone can document it.
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Ian Shields liked thisIan Shields liked thisHubSpot just gave Claude something no other AI connector gets yet: your quotes, contracts, invoices, and payments. Buried in this week's update to the HubSpot connector for Claude: quotes and revenue objects, in public beta, available in Claude only. Every other app built on HubSpot's MCP server is still waiting on that access. That's not a small detail. It's a decision about which AI earns the right to touch the parts of your CRM that actually move money. Most "AI plus CRM" integrations still look like this: ❌ Read-only summaries of deals you already knew about ❌ Quotes built by hand, then routed through three approval emails ❌ Conversations scattered across chat, email, and SMS with no single view ❌ Reports on revenue, but no way to act on it This update changes what's possible: ✅ Create and manage quotes end to end, from a single conversation ✅ Read access to conversations across every channel (chat, WhatsApp, SMS, email) in one place ✅ Campaign attribution tied directly to revenue, not just clicks ✅ Conditional field logic enforced automatically, so an agent can't break your pipeline stages HubSpot isn't just adding an AI feature here. They're deciding which agent gets to touch revenue data first. That tells you where this is actually headed: your CRM stops being a system of record and starts being a system that acts. If your CRM could act on your revenue data today, not just report on it, what's the first thing you'd have it do?
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Ian Shields liked thisIan Shields liked thisHubSpot's Claude connector stopped being a search tool this week. Until now, asking Claude about your HubSpot data mostly meant read-only lookups — pull a contact, check a deal, maybe summarize a report. As of July 29, that's changed. The new update lets Claude create and publish landing pages, draft and schedule marketing emails, manage campaigns with attribution data, and even build quotes with your CPQ rules enforced — all from a conversation. It also picks up leads data and conversations across every channel: chat, email, WhatsApp, SMS. The catch: if you already have the connector installed, none of this shows up automatically. You have to reconnect it to pick up the new permission scopes. And quotes/revenue objects are still in public beta, Claude-only, and gated to Revenue Hub Professional and Enterprise. Here's the bigger signal: this is the first in a recurring monthly series HubSpot says it's planning. The connector isn't a set-and-forget install anymore — it's a moving target worth checking every month. If you're running HubSpot + Claude, have you reconnected yet? Curious what teams end up doing with the quote-building capability once it's out of beta. #HubSpot #AITools #RevOps #MarTech #CRM
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Ian Shields liked thisIan Shields liked thisHOW 'BOUT THEM COWBOYS! I am beyond excited to announce that I am starting a new position with the Dallas Cowboys as a Social Media Specialist! A huge thank you to Brittany Johnson, Zachariah Bush, Julliet Hill, and the entire social media team for this incredible opportunity and for welcoming me to the team. I can't wait to work alongside such an amazing and talented group! Ready to head to camp in Oxnard and get to work ⭐️💙
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Ian Shields liked thisIan Shields liked thisThe Great Salt Lake is drying up. You've got an unlimited budget. You get to hire 1 person to lead the charge. They have 2 years to save the lake. Who's your pick?
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Ian Shields liked thisHaving spent the better part of the last 2 years thinking and building a LOT of AI in the GTM team Tebra, and I can say without a doubt AI is making a real impact in how our team does work all day every day. I can't wait to learn from & partner with this person.Ian Shields liked thisI'm hiring a Head of AI Engineering & Enablement at Tebra, and I'd love your help. 🙏 Tebra serves more than 140,000 independent healthcare providers, and we're going all-in on AI as a real organizational capability. This isn't a product role; our product team has that covered. This one is about how we run the company itself, day to day, in every function. The way I describe it internally: a small, elite, highly skilled team that takes on the most important missions in the company. You and two or three engineers will set the patterns and guardrails, build the hardest agentic AI workflows yourselves, and coach AI practitioners in every function to build their own. It's not a role for someone with a strategy and a deck. It's for a hands-on builder-coach who will drive breakthrough transformation that creates big value in the business. You'll report directly to me, and since we're in healthcare, HIPAA and governance are part of the job from day one. If you're a builder at heart and the combination of hands-on engineering, coaching, and company-wide change is what you love most, this role is for you. What a great fit looks like: → 8+ years building, not managing builders. A real chunk of that is applied AI in production → You've shipped agents and LLM workflows into the systems a company runs on: CRM, ERP, data warehouse, support platforms → You can size the ROI of a workflow, and you've told a leader their process needed to change before it got automated. You were right → You've gotten a non-technical team to actually adopt something you built and keep using it → Just as comfortable pairing with an engineer as briefing me If this isn't you but someone came to mind while reading, please tag them or pass along the link. Some of the best hires I've ever made have come through referrals. Full job description and how to apply (US-remote): https://lnkd.in/gNMr3Fxf Can't wait to find the right person for this one. 🚀
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