Sales leaders agree that building relationships remains key to success in B2B sales. Yet, as HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan shared in her keynote at INBOUND, the average salesperson spends just two hours a day selling. Where does the rest of the workday go?
If you work in sales, you know the answer. Discovery and follow-up are the biggest drains on sales reps’ time, limiting the capacity to actually sell. Fortunately, new releases and improvements to Sales Hub created efficiencies that make growth a total breeze. Read on to find out how AI is transforming sales, and the new HubSpot sales features to try.
Smarter selling with AI-powered sales software
AI at work has begun helping humans do more faster — and it’s not all hype anymore. As McKinsey and Co writes, B2B sales is on the verge of a complete transformation. Increases in efficiency and top-line growth are cited as the top potential benefits of implementing generative AI in sales. And the folks at HubSpot agree.
With each major product announcement, we’ve observed the customer platform advance, enabling smarter selling and accelerating more revenue. Automation was a large part of that. What’s shifted is that AI now handles menial tasks in conjunction with automation.
Watch HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan explore AI’s role in business growth.
But fear not! HubSpot remains the intuitive platform you may well know and love. It still affords a complete view of your prospects through unified data and the context sales needs to sell. It is still easy-to-adopt, only tasks get done even faster. This AI-powered sales software frees up time to help you get on with selling, while supporting a stronger pipeline and more deals closed. Here’s how:
New Sales Hub features making growth easy
Today, Sales does their best work with AI, instead of getting bogged down by busywork. In fact, AI now powers the entire HubSpot customer platform with something called “Breeze.”
Breeze encompasses all AI tools in HubSpot, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on Breeze Agent for sales and Breeze Copilot. Plus, we’ll introduce an updated Sales Hub feature, Sales Workspace.
Breeze Prospecting Agent
Prospecting Agent is the next iteration of AI-enabled sales and one of four new AI agents available in HubSpot. It’s always on, so it helps drive pipeline while you’re out there connecting with buyers.
HubSpot says Prospecting Agent “increases your [sales] team’s capacity” by identifying prospects in your CRM and automating outreach. It scans company records and associated contacts and checks them against your ideal customer profile and target persona to find the best opportunities.
Then, using the context in your CRM and signals of intent, the agent crafts personalized outreach emails to be sent at the right moment. In other words, the agent automates prospecting and outreach tasks for you.
Breeze Prospecting Agent helps prioritize the top prospects in your CRM.
Imagine the considerable time savings of having an agent find prospects while you sell. Just be aware that Prospecting Agent does not source new contacts, only potential prospects within your CRM.
Breeze Copilot
Now that you’ve found fresh prospects and scheduled introductions, it's time to do further research. According to HubSpot, using AI tools for discovery can shrink the time spent by 30%. Summaries are an obvious application, for example, creating an overview of lengthy email correspondence. But AI in sales has evolved beyond that in such a short space of time.
One of many fantastic new additions to HubSpot’s family of AI tools is Breeze Copilot, a rebranding of ChatSpot. Think of Breeze Copilot as a virtual assistant that goes with you wherever you work inside the platform. Anywhere you see a diamond icon, your copilot is ready to assist.
Native AI capability in HubSpot makes research, well, a breeze.
Integrating Breeze Copilot into your workflow accelerates preparation for sales calls, not only in basic moves like summarizing information, but also in conducting company research and generating sales performance insights. Tasks that once took hours to action now get done in minutes.
And if you want a hand getting email follow ups done, ask Breeze Copilot. Connection to your CRM data means emails generated are more personalized than asking the likes of ChatGPT. AI expertise isn’t required, either; you simply chat with the tool. If you’re a total beginner, learn about writing effective AI prompts here.
Sales Workspace (formerly Prospecting Workspace)
Bringing it all together is Sales Workspace, which is crucial in helping teams prioritize the multitude of tasks to be done. This time last year HubSpot launched its Prospecting Workspace — a single view of a user’s prospects, goals, and activities — to allow salespeople to work leads in one place. No more switching between countless tabs or apps.
Fast forward to INBOUND 2024, and the feature got a makeover. HubSpot says Prospecting Workspace transforms into ‘Sales Workspace’ (by opting into the public beta), a command center for everything a salesperson does in a day. So how does this help better manage your workload?
Here’s a rundown of the sorts of things can you get done faster:
- Check the day’s to-do list and resolve any important or overdue tasks
- Review and complete guided actions, which are suggestions to help you prioritize work
- Manage leads (just as you would have in the previous workspace)
- Manage deals and view deal insights, an AI-generated overview of the deal and its context
- Review all your sales activity in the feed or filter to see what matters most.
Using HubSpot’s Sales Workspace is swift and simple. Try saying that five times over.
Clearly, Sales Workspace is all about simplification, allowing you to prioritize and complete the most impactful tasks. And in true HubSpot fashion, there are plenty of other Sales Hub updates to discover and more improvements on the horizon.
