Although HubSpot releases new features and functionality throughout the year, they typically announce the most exciting changes at their annual INBOUND conference. In the past, INBOUND has in Boston, and I’ve attended every year possible since I started using HubSpot in 2013. This year, INBOUND2020 was virtual, but the new product announcements were just as exciting (if not more) than in the past.

In case you’re not familiar with HubSpot, I’m starting with a little bit about what it does and then on to my personal favorites from the list of product updates highlighted and announced at INBOUND2020.

HubSpot Product Update Announcements

New Sales Hub Enterprise Features

The fact that HubSpot has an enterprise version of the Sales Hub isn’t new, but they’ve added a list of new features to make Sales Hub Enterprise even more powerful yet still easy-to-use. Many legacy CRMs currently on the market share some common problems that have led to some interesting (and sad) statistics.

• More than 50% of sales leaders say their CRM is difficult to use.

• More than 1/3 of CRM implementation projects eventually fail.

• 47% of sales leaders say their current CRM isn’t powerful enough to help them grow over the next three years.

  *Sources: 2017 analysis by CIO magazine, and market research survey of sales leaders, conducted by HubSpot in June 2020.

If technology makes a sales rep’s job harder, they’ll give up using it. Sales tools that increase administrative time for reps take time away from making sales. Unlike legacy CRMs, Sales Hub Enterprise has the sophisticated functionality sales leaders need while making the job of sales reps easier. Here are the newest features added to support that goal.

Custom objects allow you to store nearly any type of data in HubSpot, and they don’t require a learning curve because they work just like HubSpot’s standard objects. That means you’ll be able to easily create and manage them, set up workflows for them, and run reports on custom object data. Custom objects will be significant for sales teams, but they have applications across an organization (I’ll cover more about that in a bit)!

AI-powered Sales Acceleration

HubSpot has leveraged the power of AI for years to find ways to help users work faster and more efficiently. One of the newest enhancements is a feature that scans your prospect’s email signature to pull relevant information into the CRM automatically. This new feature pulls in things like name, company, job title, and other data and automatically populates it on the contact record. This automation is estimated to save almost two hours per rep per week. Even better, it’s available to all Sales Hub users.

Enhanced Configure Price Quote (CPQ) Tools

To design more visually rich proposals, users can leverage the design manager to create more visually rich options or select from a list of pre-built proposal templates. Proposal templates are available in beta starting in Sales Hub Professional, Marketing Hub Professional, and CMS Hub Professional. Sales Hub Enterprise, Marketing Hub Enterprise, and CMS Hub Enterprise have access to custom proposals and templates.

Speaking of quotes, at INBOUND2020, HubSpot also introduced an all accounting extension and all-new accounting integrations to help reduce friction and turn quotes into cash. With new accounting software integrations, you can now use QuickBooks Online, Xero, NetSuite, and Nubox directly within HubSpot to generate invoices, sync currencies, and associate tax codes. In other great news, this feature is available to all HubSpot users. 

Streamlined Sales Reporting

The all-new Sales Analytics tool is available to Sales Hub Professional and Sales Hub Enterprise users. This tool gives you deeper insights into the overall health of your sales pipeline with access to over 20 powerful reports like: 

• Deal funnel: This report helps you better understand the efficiency of your sales funnel.

• Deal pipeline waterfall: This report helps you understand “the why” underlying changes to your pipeline. You can see the total for specific types of modifications to deals in a given period, and drill more in-depth for more specifics.

• Deal change history: This report shows you a real-time feed of every deal change, exactly why deals changed, and essential change highlights, such as close dates that were pushed or deals that have regressed to earlier stages.

• Call outcomes: This report is one of several “Coach Reps & Teams” reports available in Sales Analytics. These reports provide managers with insights to help coach individual rep performance. 

The screenshots in the carousel below are courtesy of HubSpot and show examples of the reports I’ve mentioned above.

New Marketing Hub Features

New Scalable Pricing for Marketing Hub Contacts

In addition to all the exciting new features now available in the Sales Hub, HubSpot also highlighted what’s new for the Marketing Hub including an upcoming change for Marketing Hub contacts pricing. One of the many things I love about HubSpot is the way the care about and listen to customer feedback. A top pain point voiced by Marketing Hub customers has been the way contacts are priced.

Here’s the issue, although HubSpot’s core CRM comes with “unlimited free contacts”, when you use Marketing Hub along with the CRM, you’re charged for all contacts. Many businesses want to store contacts in their CRM that they don’t include in marketing campaigns, so this caused a point of friction. Examples include:

• Bounced email addresses

• Unsubscribes

• Sales contacts you need to store but don’t want to include for marketing

• Services contacts that you need to keep on file, but wouldn’t include for marketing

So, what’s changing? There will be a new “Marketing contacts” pricing model for Marketing Hub that enables you to store up to one million contacts that you don’t market to for free, and only pay for the contacts you will market to via email or ads. The new pricing will be available on October 21st for new Marketing Hub customers. Existing Marketing Hub customers that are up for renewal in October can switch to the new pricing starting October 1st.

CRM-Powered Marketing

Personalization in your marketing is more critical now than ever before. To that end, HubSpot has added features that let you leverage more data from your CRM to power all facets of your marketing.

Custom Objects - The new custom objects I described previously for Sales Hub Enterprise are also available in the enterprise levels the Marketing and Service Hubs. For marketers, custom objects mean you have the ability to create even deeper segmentation and execute highly targeted campaigns in ways that weren’t possible before. You can learn more about standard and custom objects here.

Programmable Email Content - Today, you can personalize marketing emails in HubSpot using content tokens and smart content. With this new feature (currently in private beta), you’ll be able to leverage a single email template that uses custom, conditional logic to deliver a unique version of your message to each contact on your list.

CRM-Powered Ads - HubSpot has added ads optimization events (currently in beta), enabling offline conversion tracking directly from HubSpot. With this new feature, Google will know when your contact becomes a lead or customer and the value of that customer to you. Ads optimization events will better inform Google’s ad algorithms to show ads to the most valuable types of leads for you.

Behavioral Events - Formerly called custom events, behavioral events are available in Marketing Hub Enterprise. These events allow you to trigger personalized marketing based on actions users take on your website, inapp, and more.

New Reporting Options

New Tools for Account Based Marketing (ABM)

In May, HubSpot rolled out a long list of ABM features that help marketers and sales teams work closely together to run an ABM strategy in HubSpot. As Knoxville’s HubSpot User Group (HUG) Leader, I covered these features in-depth in a virtual HUG event. Here’s the presentation deck from that event for your viewing pleasure!

New Service Hub Features

With HubSpot’s Service Hub, you can have a software solution that both maximizes efficiency and helps you delight your customers. With that goal in mind, here are some of the recent updates and enhancements to the Service Hub.

Inbox Ticket Sidebar

Now available for all products and plans, there’s now a dedicated ticket view you’ll see when responding to conversations in your inbox. When you respond to your contact, this view surfaces any tickets associated with that conversation to provide better contextual information about the associated ticket,

JIRA Integration

Also available for all products and plans, HubSpot has an all-new native JIRA integration. Service representatives can create Jira issues from a ticket record, attach an existing Jira issue to a ticket, and automate and report on tickets using the workflows tool.

Advanced Team Management

There’s a new Team Management View in Conversations now available for all products and plans. Previously, only individual users could control their own live chat availability statuses. Now, managers can use this feature to quickly view and manage agent permissions, status, and availability for live chat across their team.

With new custom bot templates, you can also leverage an automated bot to manage common Service interactions, like informing a visitor of your business hours, or answering FAQs!

Knowledge Base: Multi-Language Support and Single Sign On

Now available for Service Hub Professional and Service Hub Enterprise, you can create and manage a multi-language knowledge base from inside of HubSpot. You’ll have 25 languages available to create multiple language variations by translating existing knowledge base articles.

With Knowledge Base Single Sign-on, now all enterprise product users can manage authentication, registration, and access to your restricted content on the HubSpot platform through a third party SSO solution.

Custom Surveys

Now in beta starting in Service Hub Professional, a new custom survey tool allows you to create feedback surveys using custom questions. You can include single-line text, smiley ratings, and number ratings. You’ll have the option to send your survey via email or embed them on your web page.

There’s a lot to love about the recent changes to HubSpot’s CMS. Before recently selling my digital marketing agency, I wrote this post on our agency’s blog to provide a detailed description of HubSpot’s CMS and the five reasons I highly recommend it!

To wrap it up, I hope you found this helpful in understanding some of the exciting new features and tools HubSpot announced at INBOUND2020. If you’d like to learn more from HubSpot on any of these, they have a What’s New section of their website that has helpful videos and product feature descriptions. I’m the HubSpot User Group Leader for Knoxville, and I’d love to have you join our community to enjoy ongoing education at our free events (currently virtual).