INBOUND 2023: Diving into 3 ways HubSpot is improving their CRM this year!

It’s INBOUND time of the year. And that means HubSpot is introducing a series of great functionalities that will continue to help all HubSpot users and admins all over the world. In this blog, Glynnis and Dennis will take you through some (but not all) of the newest features added to HubSpot’s ecosystem. Ready? Let’s go!

The Sales Hub Relaunch

Sales Hub is relaunching in HubSpot! A lot of new great additions to the system, and sales teams using HubSpot are going to be happy with these. Below are our key takeaways: 

• Prospecting workspace & leads

For quite some time, the Prospecting Workspace in HubSpot has been a great functionality used by sales teams all over the world. Tools like Tasks and connected calendars are part of the Prospecting Workspace.

So what about Leads?

No, it’s not like the full Salesforce object, but a smaller object that is either connected to a contact or a company. HubSpot is introducing the opportunity for sales reps to track where leads are in a process using a lead status.

It’s safe to say that you can use this functionality to replace HubSpot’s existing ‘lead status’ property. The big advantage? You can register the status of each time you are actively working on a contact. Even if the conversations run dead, you are still able to start a new ‘lead’ cycle months later.

• A/B testing in sequences

This is a big one! You will now be able to start splitting email sends in sequences on a 50/50 level by using different sales templates. It is amazing to now, beside marketing email A/B testing, also being able to test out the performance of the sales mails that you send out. You are able to easily report on the performance of your templates, and draw meaningful conclusions about your outreach efforts. 

• Forecasting is improved in different ways

Historical information in your forecast tool will be used by HubSpot’s AI technology to provide more insights. These insights will help you understand how forecasts change over time, thus enabling you to further improve your sales processes.

Another update we cannot forget: forecasting across all pipelines is now going to be possible. No more need to set up your forecasting per pipeline, but an overall forecasting for all your sales efforts in general.

• Improved deal funnel reports

Have you got deals skipping certain stages, thus making your funnel reports more difficult and not complete? Deal funnel reports will now also allow you to include those in your report.

Updated reports will now also show skips, conversions and time in stage. Deals that went from A to B to C, or deals that went from stage A to C immediately can therefore both be easily reported on.

At Conversion Crew, we’ve had many questions related to this (missing) feature, so a lot of our clients are happy this is now possible!

CRM customization

In the area of customizing your CRM, HubSpot is launching and improving a series of tools at INBOUND this year. If you’re looking for ways to customize your platform even better, HubSpot now has more options to help your organization scale up quicker. Let’s dive in!

CRM development tools 

First things first: CRM cards will become more flexible, more powerful and easier to build. This will help you bring more information across your systems into one central place on the record. 

This improvement will help you show your users the right information at the right place and time. But UI extensions will do so even better! By using this feature you are able to create custom cards on a CRM record page. However, you’ll need React to build richer and more interactive extensions that will enrich different teams by working from an improved user experience.

CRM data components 

With these new CRM cards we can now start adding a lot of information that there is internally in the system already. 

You can for example see how a deal is doing compared to other deals or how is it being forecast. Normally you would have to leave a specific deal, go to forecasting or reports, and there you would see how it is pulled together and perhaps use some filters with it. By allowing you to look into this from the object itself, you immediately at one glance get a good overview of how it relates to other objects into our properties, so how it was pulled together in certain kinds of reporting. 

There are 8 CRM data components that you can use in your custom cards to visualize data. These are HubSpot components that provide deep flexibility to how data can be presented on a record. These 8 components include: 

• Data highlights 
• Property list 
• Association property list 
• Association tables, where you can customly define every contact that is associated to the deal in a table kind of structure
• Association pivots 
• Stage trackers, where you can immediately visualize where the deal sits in a pipeline without just looking at a property
• Quick actions 
• Reports 

This tool is designed to save you a lot of time and to let the CRM work better for you. You can now unlock a lot of different types of information and also it gives so much flexibility. 

CRM Record page editor

And the last one of this section: the CRM record page editor is a single interface you can utilize to configure record pages. This will make it much easier for all HubSpot users to define the information your team will see.

For HubSpot Admins, it will be much easier to customize the middle column of a record and show exactly the information needed in your organization. The greatest part? Your team only sees the information they need.

Next steps in Artificial Intelligence

After the enormous developments of Artificial Intelligence in 2023, HubSpot was quick to jump on the bandwagon and create different (great) functionalities that involve AI. With INBOUND this year, HubSpot continues this development by introducing new AI features that will help HubSpot users of Marketing, Sales and Service products!

• AI website builder

Are you starting out small? Or do you need a website up and running fast? HubSpot’s AI Website Builder allows you to build a single-page website after following a series of questions and you need a website up and running fast!

• AI-generated social copy within blog editor

As a marketer, using content in multiple places is a well-known practice. HubSpot will now allow you to start drafting content for social media posts when you are still working in your blog post editor. It gives you a summary of your blog content, and it allows you to use that for a social media post. How cool is that! This feature also saves a lot of time. 

• Titles and meta descriptions

SEO specialists, pay attention! New content assistant functionalities now help you automate your SEO titles and descriptions in just one click. No need to rely on this in a fully automated way. The goal here is to make your life easier. Especially when working on pages that do not require highly optimized meta descriptions, this feature will help you save a lot of time.

• Conversation summaries

After a long conversation which you are forwarding to your specialist colleague, you are normally required to write a decent summary which explains the client’s question in detail.

• Reports and report descriptions

Last, but not least: there’s two birds with one stone here. First, you can now add descriptions to your report. It’s a huge improvement (as small as it seems, it will add lots of value). HubSpot’s AI technology will help you write a description for the report you have just built.

But hey, we can take things a step further. Using Operations Hub you will also be able to use Generative AI for creating reports by just asking a simple question. It will save time and effort and make your life much easier in HubSpot.

Getting excited?

Are you as excited about this year’s INBOUND updates as we are? Feel free to get in touch with us to discuss your thoughts and what you’re most excited about!