HubSpot's biggest features now in action: HUG event recap INBOUND 2023

Sales, Marketing and Operations professionals now have the newest updates for HubSpot. Here’s a quick recap of our live HUG event with our founder Luke Trewin, our lead solutions Architect Kye Bessent, Trav White and Dom Carlin from Neighbourhood. Quickly learn the insights and updates revealed at INBOUND 2023. HubSpot is taking the lead to fast-track your marketing and sales performance, implement AI, enhance lead management and improve many more groundbreaking features. Get the scoop before anyone else! 

What's coming next?
HubSpot INBOUND new updates!

Be the first to hear the latest innovative features coming to your HubSpot platform. INBOUND comes once a year and without fail, it delivers the greatest tips and tools to set you and your business up for success. 

This recap will walk you through the latest announcements for HubSpot’s software and how you could leverage them for future success. Ensuring you get all the essential highlights from this year's INBOUND. If you’re looking for more details, you can watch the full recording of our HUG event here. 

5 Major changes to what’s rolling out at INBOUND

1. Sales Hub Refresh 
2. CRM Customisation 
3. Artificial Intelligence 
4. Commerce HUB 
5. SMS (available in USA)

Please note: Some of these updates are not available in Australia yet, but we can help you develop a solution to suit your unique business needs and make the most of these new opportunities. 

Our RECAP: There are so many new features and updates, we've listed them here so you won't miss a beat. 

1. Sales Hub Refresh
Features:
(Click on the dot point list to go straight to feature)

• Prospecting workspace
• Lead management space
• A/B split for sequences 
• Sequence analytics and reporting 
• Meeting improvements 
• Lead form qualification 
• Lead reporting
• Predictive forecasting 
• Deal inspection view 
• Content assistant 

Sales Hub gets a fresh look:

One of our highlights is the revamping of Sales Hub. HubSpot has left no stone unturned in enhancing the platform, with new features such as:

🚀 NEW Prospecting workspace:
This gives you ability to streamline your lead generation efforts and organise your leads effortlessly. Everything you want to see is available in one place - your leads, tasks, sequences and schedule.

You’ll have an overview of your prospects information and can quickly dive deeper into the specific areas you’re focusing on. 

• Prospecting Workspace Knowledge Hub Article

Image Source: Hubspot

🚀 NEW Lead management:
You can simplify lead tracking and management with this intuitive tool. HubSpot is adding a new lead “object” that’s embedded into the prospecting workspace. This gives you the ability to track leads separately from the actual contact itself. You can now create leads from contacts, the same way you can with deals.

This reduces the hassle of assigning leads and simplifies the lead management process. You can create, assign and engage leads as they move seamlessly through your sales cycle. When you open a lead’s information, you’ll have a split view for easy navigation and a simple overview of their status, with automated progress tracking. 

🚀 NEW Email A/B split testing for sequences (available for all Hubs):
Fine-tune your outreach strategies and improve engagement rates with email split testing.  Send different templates to your customers with a 50/50 split and experiment for the best results. You’ll have detailed reporting features, so you can identify the open rate, click rate, reply rate and meeting rate. You’ll have reports on performance for both tests to help you make decisions quickly, optimise outreach and implement improvements. 

• A/B Testing in Sequences Knowledge Hub Article

Image Source: Hubspot

🚀 NEW Sequence step analytics:
With step-level analytics, you can now report on every single step in your sequence. Giving better overall understanding of rep performance and conversions. This also helps you gain in-depth insights into your email sequences for data-driven decision making.

 🚀 NEW Sequence outcome reporting:
Two new metrics are going to be added to sequences for Sales Hub Enterprise customers. This is helpful for building a deeper understanding of the success of your processes and making better decisions based on metrics.

Sequences can be a great solution before workflows come into play - we feel these new features will add value to your sequence strategies. 

1. Deal rate: The percentage of contacts enrolled in a sequence that resulted in a deal being created.
2. Total revenue: The amount of revenue from closed won deals influenced by the sequence. 

 🚀 NEW AI assistant on Sales Hub:
This is available in HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook or Office 365. You can create highly personalised sales emails in far less time. Minimising your repetitive tasks,  helping with researching, reviewing or crafting fast and relevant messages that connect. We’re most excited about this feature as it speeds up your response times and keeps the experience personal. 

🚀 NEW Sales-to-sales handoff (Pro Hub and Enterprise):
This enables you to book meetings on behalf of others! This is a huge time saver and is a great new feature addition.

You can now seamlessly schedule meetings from your workspace for smoother handoffs between BDM reps and account executives. Making for a smoother process when handling qualifying calls that require bookings. This helps you reduce the friction from back and forth communications and keeps the momentum going for successful lead management. 

Image Source: Hubspot

🚀 NEW Lead form qualification (Sales and Service Enterprise): This allows you to create conditional redirect rules within HubSpot forms to automatically qualify and route your leads to the right rep, based on user interactions with website forms. You can set different messages, URLs or meeting schedules based on form response - helping to minimise lead loss.

🚀 NEW Lead reporting (Pro and Enterprise):

This enables your sales and marketing teams to have an aligned prospecting strategy and report on each step from lead generation to revenue, and track how you're converting your inbound, outbound and qualified leads. You can access comprehensive reports to evaluate your sales and marketing team's performance, and encourage your teams to have clear goals and insights. 

1. Lead contract rate report: Uncover how reps are engaging with your quality leads and why they convert. 
2. Lead source report: See how your inbound, sales or your product-qualified lead sources perform and contribute to high-value leads. 

🚀 Prospect activities reporting (Sales Hub Pro and Enterprise) :
This report gives sales managers insight into their teams and reps activities. Prospecting activities helps you assess the effectiveness of your sales processes, resource allocation and team performance. 

This helps you analyse performance of activities during the prospecting process, such as: 

• Booking meetings 
• Enrolling contacts in sequences 
• Making calls 
• Completing tasks

🚀 HubSpot embed for Salesforce (Sales Hub Pro and Enterprise):
This enables you to create better connections with your prospects and customers with Sales Hub, no matter which CRM your team uses. You can enrol contacts into your HubSpot sequences and create meetings directly from Salesforce records. 

🚀 Salesforce activities sync (all Pro Hubs, live in public beta):
This allows you to sync Salesforce activities into HubSpot. You can analyse your calls, meetings, tasks and more in Sales Hub, no matter where they originated from. This is a robust native integration that will allow the return of data into HubSpot from Salesforce. 

🚀 NEW Deal management tools:
You can uncover new insights and prioritise your deals with deal tags, deal insights and a deal inspection field. Get a better understanding of how your deals are progressing and easily create tasks to keep moving forward. 

🚀 Forecast insights:
Ultimately, this is better insights for sales teams. These forecast insights allow you to see how your revenue is trending against your sales targets for the months, quarter and/or year. The new embedded forecast insights data makes it easier to monitor how the forecast and pipeline is trending through the quarter. 

🚀 Forecast accuracy tracking (public beta):
This allows you to measure the reliability and effectiveness of your forecasts and processes.

• Forecasting Accuracy Knowledge Hub article

🚀 NEW AI forecasting (Public beta, for Pro and Enterprise):
AI looks at your historical data and gives you a better understanding of where you should be, helping you fast track forecasting and gain deeper insights.

Image Source: Hubspot

To strengthen your revenue forecasting further, we recommend Ebsta.
Ebsta is a powerful revenue intelligence tool which when paired with HubSpot and our recommended tech-stack will help you streamline your processes and empower your forecasting strategies. Analysing trends, forecasting with AI and using a combination of these tools will save you time and make your decision making process a little easier, which is currently mission critical for businesses.  

🚀 Forecast across all pipelines (Pro and Enterprise):
You can now manage goals and forecasts across your pipelines. 

🚀 Deal inspection view (Pro and Enterprise):
You can now see insights on pipeline health and sales velocity when managing deals. With these new insights, you can prioritise more easily and managers can coach more effectively. 

Image Source: Hubspot

🚀 Deal funnel reporting (Sales Hub Pro and Enterprise):
You now have two visualisation choices. 'Sankey & Funnel' and you can edit this report in journeys.

'All stages in order’ funnels got updated with skips, conversions and time in stage. Although, customisations are available only for Enterprise. This limitation lift will help with designing your sales process and make reporting more accurate.

Image Source: Hubspot

🚀 NEW Deal journey analytics:
This report gives you a true reflection of the path from prospect to revenue.

Customer journey analytics now includes the ability to build journey’s based on deals. This is exclusive to Sales Hub Enterprise. This helps you improve along the way and view where friction points occur throughout your deal stages.

Image Source: Hubspot

🚀 Deal Tags (Sales and Service Hub):
You can now create coloured deal tags making it easier for you to visually scan the board view and know which deals to prioritise. Super admins can create up to 10 deal tags, each based on a set of conditions. Deal tags will appear on board cards when those conditions are met. 

🚀 Advanced Playbook recommendations (Pro and Enterprise):
AI can now help recommend playbooks using any property in any object (including custom properties and properties in custom objects). This enables you to deliver tailored content to your teams, at the right time. 

🚀 Playbooks, snippets and rich text formatting
(Pro and Enterprise, Sales and Service Hub):
You can now save commonly used phrases as snippets and reuse them in playbook notes. You now have snippets supported in playbook note fields. And, you can format your notes using rich text editing tools. This helps you reduce your repetitive tasks and effortlessly save frequently used phrases. 

🚀 Playbooks on custom object records
(Pro and Enterprise Sales and Service Hub):
You can now access playbooks directly from custom object record pages. This enables you to create interactive content cards that can be displayed in contact, company, deal and ticket records. You can reference these cards when speaking with your customers and create standardised notes. 

🚀 Coaching playlists:
This enables you to save call recordings to playlists, making it easy to onboard and up-skill reps at scale. These playlists can be shared with your teams, enabling them to improve their skills and learn successful selling tactics. 

🚀 Sequences on Mobile (Sales and Service Hub, Pro and Enterprise):
IOS and Android Apps will support enrolling, un-enrolling, pausing and resuming contacts from a sequence. 

🚀 Content assistant on mobile (all Hubs):
Artificial Intelligence is now available on the HubSpot mobile app. This is great for sales teams on the go. iPhone users can now boost their communications efficiency when prospecting or selling by leveraging AI to help them compose emails and close deals faster. 

🚀 NEW QR code scanner (all Hubs):
You can now scan a QR code or business card through the HubSpot app and add the contact information into your HubSpot account, plus immediately enrol them into a sequence. 

• QR Code Scanner Knowledge Hub Article

2. CRM Customisation 

🚀 CRM development tools to build UI extensions with react as front-end:
You can create custom cards for use of CRM records with reacts to build richer and interactive extensions. This helps to improve your overall functionality and bring information across the platforms into one central place and show users the right information at the right time. 

🚀 8 CRM data components including Report, Association Table and Stage tracker (Enterprise, public beta):
You can now boost rep activity by customising the record page view by teams. You can monitor account revenue, filter associated contacts, visualise deal ticket pipelines and stages and action extensibility in CRM data components.

Image Source: HubSpot

🚀 CRM record page editor:
The CRM record page editor allows admins to easily customise the middle column of a record to match their business needs. This is a highlight for making adjustments to your CRM overview screens and gives you more customisation options. 

Image Source: HubSpot

3. HubSpot's Artificial Intelligence:
Your new trusted assistant

Introducing your new assistant for streamlining tasks, making data-driven decisions and supercharging your productivity. HubSpot's AI is here to help you transform the way you work and achieve your business goals more efficiently.

Say hello to the future of seamless assistance. With all the excitement around AI it's important to treat these new features as a powerful tool, not a new employee. 

🚀AI subject line generator (all Hubs):
You can now automatically generate email subject lines for your campaign. The subject line generator will read the content from your marketing email and using industry best practices, generate three subject lines. You won’t need to prompt this tool, you can generate subject lines with just a click of a button. 

🚀 AI website builder (private beta, all Hubs):
HubSpot are building a single-page AI-enhanced onboarding experience that dramatically reduces the number of decisions CMS free users need to make when getting started with a website. It won’t create an entire website, but it will help minimise the decision making process for those getting started with CMS Hub.  HubSpot will ask you questions about your business after signing up and leverage generative AI to create 1 single-page site. 

🚀AI Generated Social copy within blog editor
(Marketing Pro and Enterprise) : 
Helping you effortlessly create social posts by assisting you with creating captions, summaries of content and it'll give you multiple variations to choose from. 

Image Source: HubSpot

🚀 AI powered content ideas (all CMS and Marketing Hubs):
This uses Semrush data to help generate ideas for your blog. Powered by ChatGPT and keyword data from Semrush, this AI tool helps you generate blog post topics, post titles, descriptions and outlines. You can prompt HubSpot with a topic of interest and it will evaluate results based on their ranking and popularity on google search. 

Image Source: HubSpot

🚀AI content assistant (all CMS and Marketing Hubs):
With one click, SEO friendly title and meta descriptions can be generated for pages and blogs. 

🚀 AI content assistant, image generation (Marketing and CMS, Pro and Enterprise Hubs):
You can generate images based on a prompt or context from the task being performed. 

🚀AI content assistant, slash and highlight commands
(CMS, Marketing Hub and Service Hub):
There are now slash and highlight commands for text editors across the HubSpot platform. You can generate blog outlines, paragraphs, ideas or conclusions within the blog editor, along with editing existing text to rewrite, shorten, expand or change the tone of the text you select. 

🚀 AI assisted report descriptions and AI generated reports
(all Operation Hubs):
You can now use generative AI in HubSpot to create reports with just a simple question. AI generated reports make it simple to get started with building the perfect report to answer business questions. Saving you time and helping you effortlessly gain deeper insights. 

Image Source: HubSpot

🚀AI generated workflow descriptions: 
Save time and have automated descriptions created for your workflows. 

🚀 AI generated conversation summary (all Hubs):
Conversations across all channels in active threads can now be summarised in the comment section. This feature creates a concise conversation summary for any inbox user who can quickly get the context of a conversation, without having to read every message. 

🚀 Content assistant in inbox:
With this content assistant, you can do everything from generating responses, to customer inquiries, to editing existing or generated text by opting to rewrite, shorten, expand or change the tone of the text you select. 

🚀 LinkedIn and Facebook text ads copy generation:
Helping you generate copy for your ads at a faster rate. This gives you a good base to start from, enabling you to customise your ads how it best suits you, enhancing your word choice, structure and readability. 

4. Commerce Hub (available to U.S)

This is a relaunch of the Commerce Tool. You can now streamline your opportunity-to-revenue process to get paid faster, increase revenue and save time.

Features: 

🚀 HubSpot payments and links 

🚀 Automated billing and products library 

🚀Stripe payment processing integration (U.S only): You can now seamlessly collect money from your customers on invoices, payment links or quotes within the HubSpot CRM by using your existing Stripe log in. 

🚀 Invoices (U.S only): HubSpot payments merchants can now create native invoices. Invoices can be created from contacts, companies, deals or quotes to speed up sales processes and reduce risk of human error. 

Image Source: HubSpot

5. SMS - Only available to U.S 

🚀 Many mobile messaging (SMS) (add on to Marketing Hub Pro U.S) :
You can effortlessly send broadcast messages to existing and prospective customers. You can leverage unified HubSpot data with SMS to deliver personalised reminders, offers and updates to drive engagement and action. You can also seamlessly connect landing pages and meetings to be linked into your SMS messages. 

🚀 Consent management (Marketing Hub Pro, U.S):
Manual and automated consent management enables you to add modify or remove verifiable consent from your contact list, ensuring compliance and data integrity. Automation can help reduce your admin work and easily handle opt-out requests, ensuring that your communication is respectful of your audiences preferences.

Summary 

It's time to make the most of these new opportunities. 

INBOUND has shown us that Artificial Intelligence is taking a huge leap for strengthening our processes, streamlining operations and minimising our manual tasks. We can now fast track the way we work to better perform, analyse and provide for our customers. 

AI is an extremely helpful tool in assisting you to reach your goals faster and make data-driven decisions more accurately. Helping you deliver exciting and engaging content at scale. 

This years INBOUND event showcased HubSpot's commitment to staying at the forefront of technology with an abundance of new features and updates whilst highlighting the power of the HubSpot's community for coming together to learn and grow.

HubSpot's new features are now in action, we're excited to build upon these innovative experiences and help you grow your business. 

Are you ready to see what AI can do for you? Let's get started!