INBOUND 2023 — HubSpot’s annual user conference in Boston, MA — just ended, and when I say just, I mean people are still filing out of the conference center, so these takeaways are fresh. In the coming weeks, we’ll be strategizing with Trekk clients about how to leverage the new features and tools that HubSpot announced this week. Here’s a preview of the topics we’ll be discussing and the news that has the Trekk team most excited.
Artificial intelligence is coming for your CRM… in a good way
AI has been dominating the news since the launch of ChatGPT, so the fact that it was the big topic of conversation at INBOUND is no surprise. The HubSpot CRM has offered informational AI for data enrichment for some time, but they’ve been quietly debuting generative AI tools all year. This year’s conference was a chance for the product team to package these tools — plus a few new ones — as “HubSpot AI.”
HubSpot AI includes:
- Content Assistant to help with your blog and social content
- Campaign Assistant, which can create landing pages and ads and is FREE
- Website Assistant, which HubSpot claims can build a website in just a few minutes, though we have yet to test this claim
- AI chatbots that use the content on your website — your site pages, your blog, and your knowledge base — to answer customer questions
- AI sales forecasting that uses your own sales data to make predictions
- Reporting Assistant, which can answer your questions about your data in the form of charts and graphs
- Support Assistant, designed to help customers service reps work more efficiently
These tools aren’t meant to replace your team but to help your team work smarter, surfacing insights from large amounts of data and helping individual sales and service reps focus on what matters most — real live connection with actual customers.
Sales Hub has been completely reimagined, and we love it
We’re already big fans of Sales Hub, and now it’s even better. Leading up to and during INBOUND, we saw live demos of the new Prospecting Workspace, which brings all a rep’s daily work into one streamlined view — no more toggling between tabs! New features have also been added to the Deals pipeline, including deal labels that can be automatically updated based on conditions you set; for example, a deal can be automatically marked “Stalled” if it’s older than 120 days or “Missing Info” if there is no associated contact.
There are also updates to the logic with which HubSpot handles leads, with the new ability for contacts and companies to be considered “leads” multiple times in their customer lifecycles. As an agency, we’ve built custom workarounds to solve for this much-needed functionality many times, so we welcome this change with open arms.
Other Sales Hub improvements include A/B testing in Sequences, conditional lead form routing to ensure leads who convert are sent to the correct sales rep, and the option to redirect lead forms to meeting links, again with conditional logic.
These changes have been engineered to eliminate repetitive manual tasks and save sales teams a ton of time, but heads up: if your sales team uses HubSpot, these new features may require some proactive communication to minimize confusion and maximize adoption.
HubSpot has unlocked the CRM for major customization
This last piece of news mostly applies to the under-the-hood elements of your CRM, but it has the potential to vastly improve the way your teams use HubSpot.
First, for all HubSpot subscriptions and tiers, you can now customize the middle column of the object record so that it shows content or data tailored to your business. You can even add multiple tabs, and, with most subscription tiers, create personalized views for different users based on their permissions or team.
For Sales or Service Hub Enterprise users, the customization goes even further. HubSpot is now allowing React-based UI extensions that leverage serverless functions and can interact with both HubSpot and external data. This means that with a little custom code, the CRM, which is already pretty great out of the box, can be completely customized to meet your company’s needs.
We’re here to answer your questions
If you’re a HubSpot user, you’ll already see some of the features I mentioned in your portal. Others are still in beta — to opt into those, click your profile picture in the upper right corner of your account, select Product Updates, and have at it. (You'll see even more new products and features there — for a full list of everything HubSpot announced at INBOUND, head to hubspot.com/new.)
Questions about how to use HubSpot’s new AI tools, train your sales team on the new Prospecting Workspace, customize your CRM, or generally make the most of your investment in HubSpot? Let’s chat.
