Starstruck and AI-struck: Concentrate's takeaways from HubSpot's Inbound convention

HubSpot's annual conference, Inbound is always an amazingly enriching experience.  Aside from being starstruck by keynote speakers like Serena Williams, Ryan Reynolds and David Spade, there's also an impressive lineup of subject matter experts, well placed to share their expertise, experience and HubSpot knowledge. In September every year we head off to Boston along with 1000's of passionate HubSpot partners and customers to make sure we're in the ring with HubSpot's latest market insights and leading technology updates.  

Why do we send delegates 15,000 kms across the world each year?  Well, HubSpot is the heartbeat of ours and our client's businesses and there's no better way to keep it pumping than getting amongst it with some of the world's best minds in sales and marketing. 

You don't go to Inbound without coming back all fired up and inspired.  So hot off the press, here's the download from the Concentrate's Directors Owen Scott and Greg Williamson who went along this year.

AI holds promise when marketing, selling and customer service is getting harder 

B2B businesses worldwide are finding it harder to drive growth in the current environment. HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan said in her opening keynote that benchmark win rates are down from to 19% from 23% last year and customer retention is also down.  Sales and marketing go-to-market teams are struggling to get customers to their website, meet targets, find growth and match customer expectations - and many times they are doing that all with tech stacks that are falling short.

• Are inefficient, switching between an average of 15 different point solutions to just manage customer interactions.
• Aren’t getting value from their tech stacks, according to nearly 80% of leaders.
• Are working with disconnected data, with 7 in 10 businesses feeling this pain. When it’s hard to get customer insights and complete handoffs between teams, the customer experience suffers.

Yamini says "Technology is profound when it solves old problems in new ways.  Now we need new ways to access insights to be able to solve the age-old problem of growth.  And AI has the potential to do that".

"HubSpot has released some practical AI tools, great tools that you can actually use today to improve your sales and marketing activity."

Owen Scott

Concentrate Director

Owen says "HubSpot has released some practical AI tools, great tools that you can actually use today to improve your sales and marketing activity. In order to prepare for AI though you need to improve your CRM data, both structured (e.g. name, address) and unstructured data (e.g. emails, meeting notes, call logs). This will empower AI tools in the future. If you are not capturing and managing data across your organisation, then you will not be able to exploit the productivity enhancements of AI tools."

HubSpot's 2024 - Easy, Fast, Unified

Recognising that just as the digital landscape is continually evolving, so should our tech stack, HubSpot have focussed on unveiling the easiest, fastest and most unified version of HubSpot yet and AI is undeniably a huge part of that. HubSpot is built so that Sales, Marketing and Customer Service, your GTM teams have what they need to unlock growth in their businesses.  

1. Easy to use - tools that are intuitive and simple for users
2. Fast time to value - get return quickly
3. Unified data to power AI - connected data

Greg's take home around this is pragmatic "HubSpot released a swathe of exciting new product features during Inbound, particularly around AI. What is exciting for our clients is that these features will address three key business problems - how can I make it easier for my team to use our CRM to drive growth? How can we move faster and with clear ROI? How can we bring all of our data together from whatever source (CRM, calling, emails, social media etc)."

"How can I make it easier for my team to use our CRM to drive growth? How can we move faster and with clear ROI? How can we bring all our data together from whatever source?"

Greg Williamson

Concentrate Director

2024 Spotlight New Releases

See HubSpot's summary of the over 200 features released at Inbound. But here's our summary the most exciting innovations:

1. Breeze Copilot

• Breeze Copilot is HubSpot’s new AI companion to boost productivity and make work easier.  It taps into your smart CRM to learn exactly what your business needs and delivers insights and suggestions that make sense for you.
• Breeze Agents are a suite of four AI-powered experts that work for you.  From start to finish, they get work done efficiently while still giving you control.  These agents include: Content Agent, Social Media Agent, Prospecting Agent and Customer Agent.  To find out more head here.

Concentrate's Business Development Manager, Nathan Jessup has had a look around the Breeze Prospecting Agent.  He says "This feature is still in beta, but already looks and sounds like a game changer for sales. It's a great application of AI into the sales process, and will support us with scaling our outreach while still keeping it personalised and relevant."

“It's a great application of AI into the sales process, and will support us with scaling our outreach while still keeping it personalised and relevant."

Nathan Jessup

Business Development Manager

2. Breeze Intelligence

• Data enrichment which pulls from a database of over 200 million buyer and company profiles into your CRM so that you get the most up-to-date and complete information
• Buyer intent intelligence to help customers identify which prospects are best fit.
• Form shortening to increase conversion by automatically adding information Breeze Intelligence already knows.

Concentrate's RevOps Specialist Gavin Gilbert has had an initial exploration of Breeze Intelligence and says “I've just started getting into the product release with Breeze AI, and was looking at the new "buyer intent" tool within our portal. Breeze Intelligence provides a simplified way to identify buyer intent cues on our website and the likelihood that they would engage with us and our services.  It's an exciting tool and I can't wait to explore it further."

“Breeze Intelligence provides a simplified way to identify intent cues on our website and the likelihood that they would engage with us and our services."

Gavin Gilbert

Marketing Account Manager

3.  Marketing Hub and Content Hub

• Tools to capture attention like Content Remix for video, which uses AI to turn a single video into a full campaign of clips, audio and written content.
• Tools to generate leads and convert prospects like Lead Scoring to find high engagement, high-fit prospects and Google Enhanced Conversions to leverage first-party conversion data from HubSpot to improve campaign performance.
• Tools to measure impact like the new Marketing Analytics Suite, which brings all marketing metrics and reporting in one place to improve campaigns and get results faster.

Concentrate's Head of Marketing, Lisa Pfahlert says "These tools will help marketers think about things in a totally different way.  Productivity tools to help you manage key tasks and reports, in-depth insights into campaign ROI, and AI powered messaging insights into what's working along with amazing AI content creation tools, will free us up to get on with the things human intelligence enriches - and the best part?  It's all data driven".  

For more on the Marketing and Content Hub releases read here.

4.  200+ other releases 

Overwhelmed?  Let's work together to make the most of this exciting new frontier in marketing and sales.

Just like you, we're wrapping our heads around these amazing new tools and features and can't wait to get them working for our business. We'd love to chat about them with you so reach out to us for more.