Inbound23 was a blast, as always, but this year felt a little different. Sure, every year starts with “we’re in a period of rapid change” (and it’s always true) but this year wasn’t about the hype of jumping on new distribution channels, automating everything, or learning how to work in a remote-first culture. This year was all about AI.
It is clear that HubSpot invested heavily in integrating AI into the platform over the last 9 months and this Inbound was HubSpot catching us up on all the changes to the platform and the sessions leaned heavily on presenters telling us how we can use AI to change the way we do business. The integration of AI into the HubSpot platform is a change we can't ignore.
As HubSpot power users who manage a high volume of HubSpot portals for our clients, these are the new product releases that were notable for us. Some of these features have been out for a few months so you may have already played around with them and others are still in beta (contact us if you want to get on a beta list).
This is potentially a huge advancement in the CMS design and development process that could take our MVP process timeline down to hours vs weeks. With the AI Website Builder you put in some information about your business and your audience and HubSpot CMS will generate your website page templates. You will obviously still need to do some work to customize your design and update your copy, but this does provide the opportunity to launch a site within a day.
The HubSpot CMS AI Website Builder is currently in Private Beta. Please contact us if you want access.
Need an image for a blog post or social campaign? The AI Content Assistant is now capable of image generation and can create an image for you based on your blog content. This feature is in Private Beta for Marketing & CMS Pro+ Customers.
Side Note: If you’re interested in playing around with image generation we recommend using ChatSpot which is available to everyone.
Sales sequence users rejoice! We can now do A/B testing of split 50/50 for different email templates for any email step in a sequence.
This is live in Marketing Pro+ portals already but is only available in the US. SMS used to be a one-to-one action, meaning you’d have to do it at the contact record level, but now you can SMS a whole bunch of people via your workflows.
You can now report on opt-out rates, total clicks, click rate, replies and reply rate for SMS campaigns. This is only available for Marketing Hub Pro+.
Get an instant list of suggested blog post topics, titles, outlines, and descriptions and build our your content calendar plan in record time. The HubSpot AI Post Generator will score topics based on how easy/hard it’s going to be to rank for them and how much search volume they have in Google. This is a public beta that is currently available for all Free+ customers.
Content generation + page creation. The landing page generator will not only write your landing page content based on your brief but it will also create and publish your landing pages for you, in minutes.
This one is pretty cool if you have access to the “Leads” tab (that’s private beta, reach out if you want access). With the leads tab enabled you can see your ENTIRE prospecting experience in one spot. All your tasks, meetings, follow-ups, and lead progression statuses are front and center so you can focus on the hottest leads first.
HubSpot has a great overview of the prospecting dashboard here.
As someone who has worked with HubSpot and Salesforce for a while, this one makes me stop and give HubSpot a bit of a side-eye.
HubSpot’s shift to Leads as an object vs. a contact status is great for better reporting, visibility, and automation of leads… but… it also kind of feels like HubSpot is abandoning its simple “a contact is a contact regardless of where they are in their journey” and moving towards Salesforce’s “a contact is a contact unless they’re a lead or a customer then we need different records/objects to manage these different stages”.
Track how often sales reps are contact leads with the Lead Contact Rate Report and see which sources are converting to leads with the Lead Source Report. These reports were available previously with the contact records but now you’ll be able to limit that to just the lead records.
See the number of leads generated, conversion rates, and the time it takes to close deals, which will give you a more comprehensive insight into the performance and effectiveness of your sales team.
Pull in data from any source and show them directly on the object record. Think here of pulling your 3rd party data and having it natively show up on the Contact, Deal, or Company record. Use these with Custom Objects and your HubSpot UI just jumped lightspeeds ahead.
Long awaited! Trigger required properties based on conditions throughout the CRM. This is currently in Private Beta and will be available to all Pro+ customers.
Calls, meetings, tasks and other activities in Salesforce can now be synced with HubSpot.
You can also enroll contacts into HubSpot Sequences from Salesforce and create HubSpot meetings directly from Salesforce records.
Some existing sales integrations got a huge overhaul with the new Sales Hub suite. If you’re using any of these tools you’ll want to add these new integrations:
An ongoing pain has been solved! Sales reps can now book meetings on behalf of other reps and provide round-robin routing functionality right in the contact record for the rep that’s next up in the rotation. This is now live for all Sales & Service Pro+ customers.
Conversations for customer service usually take a few messages back and forth and it can be a pain to go back and read them all to understand what’s going on with a conversation. With the Conversation Summary, all active channels and active threads in Service Hub can be summarized in the comment section.
Auto-generate responses to customer inquiries or edit existing or generated text to rewrite, shorten, expand or change the tone of the selected text. This can be very helpful for reps who know what to say but could use an assist on how to say it.
“How many contacts based in Australia have I generated each month this year?”
You can now use Generative AI in HubSpot to generate reports, just like you’d ask your assistant sitting beside you to generate them. This is a private beta tool.
HubSpot has taken a lot of the existing tools and rebranded them together as the “Commerce Hub”. In summary, they’ve rolled Invoices and Payments into the automation tools so you can automate and report on invoicing and receiving payments. Along with syncing in Invoices from other platforms (Quickbooks, Stripe, etc.) you can create and send invoices from HubSpot.
Payments are only available for US customers.
These are just a handful of the HUNDREDS of new features and products that have been rolled out in HubSpot this year so far. It can be hard to keep up.
Please reach out to us if you’d like access to any of the beta tools mentioned here or if you and your team need a refresher on how to best utilize the HubSpot suite.