| From mysterious “surprise delight moments” to inspiring speakers and product releases, there’s so much to soak up at INBOUND 2023. INBOUND is HubSpot’s annual conference for sales, marketing, and service professionals wanting to scale their businesses. Every year, the can’t-miss keynote HubSpot Spotlight reveals brand new product and feature updates added to the customer platform. So far, there has been more than 200 in 2023! |
The keynote is a pretty big deal, which is why we’re bringing you the news directly from the conference in Boston. In this post, we walk through our favorite HubSpot product announcements and what they mean for your business.
New Sales Hub revealed
We heard loud and clear that non-selling activities continue to distract sales reps from what they do best: connecting with customers. So HubSpot Sales Hub has been completely reimagined to increase productivity and facilitate deeper connections with the prospects. The biggest hub changes target three activities: prospecting, deal management, and reporting.
An enthusiastic Andy Pitre, Executive Vice President of Product & UX, told INBOUND that 88% of salespeople say personal connections are the most important part of their job. Yet only one-third of Sales’ time is spent building relationships. He said fixing this starts with a better prospecting experience.
Enter: Prospecting Workspace (available for Pro and Enterprise tiers).
First look: Sales Hub Prospecting Workspace
We’re pretty thrilled about this one because it brings your schedule, goals, and to-dos together in one place. It’s now so much easier to organize the day’s activities and act on urgent tasks knowing how everything connects to the big picture. And with tools embedded into the workspace, it means less busy work and more time to build those important relationships.
We’ll be talking about deal management, reporting tools, and plenty more in our upcoming blog exploring the new Sales Hub. But if you can’t wait, watch this video:
Smart CRM built your way
HubSpot’s founding ethos has always been about empowering businesses to match the platform to their needs. Previously, many CRM updates involved small changes like custom sidebars, but this time they’re really ramping up its customizability.
First up: new CRM customization grants developers the power to adjust HubSpot’s Smart CRM’s user interface for their own needs. Essentially, net-new UI elements can be created to customize CRM record pages based on your business requirements. Now relevant information can be displayed and viewed at the right place and time. We love this update for its time-saving ability.
Smart CMS allows customization of its UI to meet your needs.
Similarly, the CRM Record Page Editor allows admins to adjust the middle column content and layout of a contact record. Those tweaks mean only information critical to your role is displayed, which aids efficiency and helps deliver a better customer experience.
But there’s more! Eight CRM data components will be added to Smart CRM, such as Report, Association Table and Stage Tracker. The goal is to help teams visualize data better and keep everyone working within HubSpot. Take the Stage Tracker component, which illustrates exactly where a deal/ticket is in the pipeline and its related properties. Teams can arm themselves with knowledge of whether they’re winning at a glance.
HubSpot AI in the intelligence age
This topic was one of our top four INBOUND predictions. During the keynote, HubSpot CEO Yamani Rangan addressed generative AI and its implications for marketing, sales, and service.
“While we have seen major shifts in technology, from cloud to mobile to social, what makes [AI] feel different is the speed of change,” said Yamani. “More has happened in our industry in the past nine months than other industries have seen in the past nine years.” Just take a second to absorb the enormity of that statement.
Generative AI promises to drive connection at scale — which drives growth. That’s why HubSpot is rolling out AI-powered features in every one of its hubs.
Take AI-powered content ideas, as an example. HubSpot is fusing the best bits of ChatGPT and SEMrush keyword data to give users the ability to generate blog ideas. All you need to do is enter a broad topic description and HubSpot provides ideas scored by ease of ranking and popularity. That’s huge! It will take creators less time to brainstorm ideas and free up more time to focus on producing ultra-high quality, higher-performing content - which will be even more important as the content landscape flattens out under the weight of AI-created low-quality content.
Marketers can adjust their tone of voice with the help of AI Content Assistant.
There’s also AI Content Assistant and Campaign Assistant. They help Marketing and Service quickly build content in landing pages, knowledge base, conversations inbox, marketing emails, and more. They even provide suggestions to adapt your tone of voice in line with preset goals.
We think HubSpot’s AI assistants will speed up work while other tools automate it. Predictive insights will allow teams to uncover new knowledge. It’s all welcome a push toward the “age of intelligence.” But it’s only the beginning.
Grow better with a connected customer platform
INBOUND was a blast and didn’t fail to deliver the brilliant HubSpot product and feature updates we’ve come to expect. Remember, we’ve only covered a handful of the new features coming your way. The hope is that HubSpot’s customer platform will better empower all areas of your business, from marketing and content creation to sales and service.
