Catching the highlights - Inbound 2023 with HubSpot

New HubSpot Releases and Key Takeaways from the Concentrate Team

Unless you've been living under a rock, you're undoubtedly aware that HubSpot's biggest event of the year, Inbound, took place in Boston, Massachusetts the other week. Concentrate was fortunate enough to send two of our team members to gather insights on the latest HubSpot product releases, tips, tricks, and wisdom from global HubSpot leaders and renowned business professionals.

For partners like Concentrate, the conference spans four days, and the schedule is jam-packed. As the comedian John Mulaney quipped, "It's the most overscheduled conference I’ve ever seen." And he's absolutely right.

However, that tightly-packed schedule means we have a wealth of insights that we're eager to share. But we’re realistic. While we'll strive to get to the heart of the conference in this blog, we won't attempt to cover everything we've learned all at once. With that said, if you're interested in more details, make sure to register for our upcoming webinar series, where we'll delve deeper.

"Ai yai yai" - where do we begin?

Let's start at the very beginning with the overarching theme. HubSpot knows how to tell a compelling story, and as they do each year, they embarked on a captivating journey, this time with generative AI (artificial intelligence).

HubSpot has been incorporating AI capabilities into its product suite for some time now. However, like  the rest of the world, they had yet to fully realise its potential. That changed with the release of generative AI. As Yamani Rangan, HubSpot's CEO, emphasised, "AI has the potential to transform knowledge and creative work, and that is a profound change. Generative AI is moving us from the age of information to the age of intelligence."

What's particularly exciting about HubSpot's approach to generative AI is its inclusivity. While HubSpot acknowledges that generative AI is already bringing about change, they recognise early on that to truly harness its benefits, you must leverage authentic input – something only humans can provide.

So, what does that look like in HubSpot?

New AI capabilities in the HubSpot CRM Platform 

HubSpot aims to empower businesses of all sizes to utilise AI to drive growth, gain deeper insights, and create more value for their customers. To achieve this, they have integrated AI into various tools across the entire HubSpot CRM platform, in the form of ‘assistants.’ Here's what they've been up to:

1. AI Assistants: these are generative AI tools designed to supercharge marketing, sales, and service teams. AI Assistants work seamlessly across the entire HubSpot platform, helping teams draft content, create images, generate blog ideas, build websites, and develop reports instantly.
2. AI Agents: these are a suite of AI-enhanced tools to assist small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in automating, responding to, and elevating their customer service across live chat and email. The first AI Agents are set to launch in early 2024.
3. AI Insights: Predictive AI features that unlock better analysis and recommendations, including AI-powered forecasting.
4. ChatSpot: Currently in public beta, ChatSpot combines the power of ChatGPT with data from various sources, such as a HubSpot customer's Smart CRM, providing growing businesses access to powerful generative AI capabilities. Since its launch in March 2023, ChatSpot has garnered 80,000 total users and 20,000 prompts created.
   

But wait, there's more...

We weren't kidding when we said Inbound was packed this year.

In addition to the new and exciting AI features mentioned above, HubSpot also unveiled a new Sales Hub, along with over 200 other product updates.

Here are a few noteworthy ones:

• Sales Hub Prospecting Workspace: We are creating a dedicated workspace for sales reps that consolidates the entire prospecting experience within HubSpot. This workspace will help reps organise their day efficiently, stay focused on their daily activities, surface new or urgent tasks requiring their attention, and align everything they do with their overarching goals, all without having to switch between apps.
• Lead Management: We are introducing a new ‘leads’ object in HubSpot, integrated into the prospecting workspace. Users can now create leads from contacts, similar to how they can create deals. No more hassle assigning leads to reps or dealing with unnecessary busywork.
• A/B Testing in Sequences: For any email step, you can now split sends 50/50 to experiment with different templates. You can also report on the performance of both templates to make quick decisions and optimise your outreach strategy.
• Prospecting Activities Reporting: This out-of-the-box report provides sales managers with insights into their teams' and reps' activities. Prospecting activities help assess the effectiveness of your sales processes, resource allocation, and team performance.
• Lead Form Routing: You can now create conditional redirect rules within HubSpot Forms to automatically qualify and route your leads to the right representative. With conditional logic, you can change the thank you message, URL, or meeting scheduling page based on the form response, allowing marketing and sales teams to automate their own qualification rules.
• Sync Data Between HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator: HubSpot's LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration has received a significant upgrade, enabling two-way data syncing between the two platforms. This enhancement offers more automated insights and deeper reporting capabilities—a major improvement over the existing Sales Navigator integration. It's worth noting that HubSpot will be one of the first sales software platforms to have access to this integration.

Source: The product updates mentioned above are directly sourced from HubSpot's Inbound 2023 release notes.

Inbound in Summary

Inbound 2023 has shown us that HubSpot continues to prove itself as a thought leader in business and customer technology – embracing generative AI to the max as well as updating and innovating its product suite to stay ahead of its customers’ demand.

While we've shared a wealth of product updates, our team is most excited about the possibilities now available through the generative AI tools integrated into HubSpot. We believe these tools will empower our clients to accelerate their business’s impact.

If you're excited about exploring these fantastic updates and maximising the potential of HubSpot's latest features, we have an exciting opportunity for you. We're planning a series of webinars, and we want to gauge your interest! In these webinars, our knowledgeable team, who are experts in these innovations, will provide in-depth guidance on how to leverage these new features effectively. If you would be interested in attending, please fill out this form.