INBOUND represents another step forward in HubSpot’s evolution into a corporate and enterprise-grade CRM platform. HubSpot’s signature event has brought with it a slate of new features across all its hubs.
Each Hub is a powerful standalone product, but collectively they offer growth-focused companies a scalable, comprehensive toolkit to power sustainable revenue growth, efficient operations, data-enabled sales, and best-practice marketing.
Here we’ll review the most exciting updates to the CMS Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Marketing Hub and Ops Hub, the last of which enables development teams to cleanly integrate data sources and other tech solutions into HubSpot. These new features showcase HubSpot’s renewed commitment to connection: Connected tech, connected data, connected customers. Amid a “crisis of disconnection” in which customers inundated with marketing are experiencing “digital fatigue,” HubSpot seeks to reforge connections in new and powerful ways.
HubSpot’s prolific pace of development can overwhelm business leaders searching for a technology solution that empowers them to meet ambitious KPIs without pulling them too far into the weeds.
Given the over-saturation of high-powered growth solutions on the market today, many leaders ask companies like HubSpot and its partner agencies to contextualize new updates with clear, relevant use cases for business growth.
This article will provide context specifically intended to help executives and other leaders understand the high-level implications and value of each new feature, including how these upgrades play a role in HubSpot’s rise as a core business technology solution for hundreds of thousands of companies. From startups to enterprise firms, everyone can benefit enormously from the new types of connection that HubSpot offers.
Powering the revenue operations revolution with upgrades in data quality and management, CRM object modeling, and additional customization.
The New Breed team is particularly excited about the latest updates to the Ops Hub. Historically, this newer Hub has been less accessible and intuitive than the other Hubs, requiring many businesses to undertake extensive custom development before getting clear value from the Hub. These new features will open new horizons in real-time data modeling, data integrity, automation, and reporting, giving non-tech users enormous power to build sophisticated solutions and keep data clean.
What is it? The Data Quality Command Center gives users a central location from which they can monitor data health, enforce data discipline, automate data cleanup, and more.
Why should you care? According to Harvard Business Review, only 3% of companies' data meet even basic data-quality standards. If your company deals with data at any significant scale, think back to how much time your team has spent identifying bad data and data gaps, cleaning data, and working on solutions to prevent future data issues.
The Data Quality Command Center (and a complementary new feature called property validation) is HubSpot’s latest answer to this ubiquitous and persistent problem. It empowers non-tech users to monitor, clean, and standardize data at scale.
What is it? The Custom Object Builder brings one of HubSpot’s most powerful and developer-reliant features into a new native tool. Users can now build and edit custom objects from within HubSpot itself – no custom API calls needed!
Why should you care? Custom objects enable companies to mold HubSpot around their more unique processes, metrics, and goals. They can measure process health, track special relationships, represent industry-specific entities (ex: a property for sale by a real estate brokerage), and so much more. Building, editing, and maintaining custom objects – invariably costly in time and money, requiring developers and unique expertise – is now accessible to non-tech users from within HubSpot.
What is it? Product Sync offers users a native solution to sync data back-and-forth between HubSpot product objects and other product management systems.
Why should you care? Unless HubSpot communicates in real time with external product platforms, your user data will remain outdated until you build a reliable integration using middleware or a custom solution. Custom integrations, even via middleware, typically cost significant money and time both to develop and maintain. HubSpot has absorbed that expense and headache by adding a native product sync solution.
An expanded and refined campaign control center, with a strong focus on KPIs and revenue attribution, adds a powerful omnichannel organizational tool to your marketing arsenal.
Amid this new crisis of disconnection, omnichannel marketing and sophisticated attribution models have never been more essential to getting the most from every marketing dollar spent. Marketers need a reliable, intuitive, comprehensive solution to both monitor the strength of a company’s connection with its customers and clearly demonstrate the value of marketing activities in converting those customers. HubSpot’s answer: Campaigns 2.0 in Marketing Hub.
What is it? An unrivaled organizational and analytical tool for marketing campaigns, offering robust collaborative features, real-time revenue attribution, and asset management from a centralized dashboard.
Why should you care? In a crisis of disconnection, effective marketing campaigns need every edge to perform and deliver value. HubSpot used countless data points and success stories to guide this latest build of its most capable attribution and organizational tool for marketing campaigns. This newly-upgraded tool will enable your marketing team to collaborate with sales, monitor campaign performance, and attribute revenue more effectively than ever.
Advanced customization and refinement of battle-tested tools help sales teams hit revenue goals like never before.
Making good on its promise to evolve new and stronger connections between customer and company, HubSpot has brought a series of valuable incremental upgrades to its latest edition of Sales Hub. Especially when combined with New Breed sales apps like Distributely and UPonent, this iteration of Sales Hub provides the most effective toolkit yet for your sales representatives.
What is it? New HubSpot-generated phone numbers that forward directly to designated users, enabling inbound calling via HubSpot and masking personal numbers.
Why should you care? Harkening back to its B2B roots, HubSpot has long connected its outbound-only calling feature directly to a sales rep’s personal cell phone (in B2B sales, inbound calls tend to take a back seat to outbound prospecting). With this latest update, HubSpot joins other CRMs in offering a native phone number generation feature so sales reps can receive and automatically log inbound calls on a masked number as well.
What is it? Custom sales goals enable your sales leaders to set custom goals and KPIs for your sales team to hit. This expands performance tracking outside of traditional metrics like revenue, deal count, and meetings, allowing more unique and sophisticated assessments of sales team performance.
Why should you care? The real-time goal progress and forecasting component of HubSpot has been a boon to sales teams from the first day it came online. Leaders need at-a-glance assessments of team progress toward quotas, and forecasts that automatically adjust to new developments can help teams pivot quickly. When paired with one of the leading gamification apps like New Breed's UPonent, these new custom goals take the strain out of tracking sales progress in less visible sections of your funnel and help motivate your sales reps to maintain momentum throughout the sales cycle.
These exciting new features come at a time when more companies of all sizes are starting to embrace the paradigm that HubSpot has encouraged for years: “Market to others as you would have them market to you.” In a crisis of disconnection, “market” goes beyond the traditional scope of marketing to include the full breadth of the customer experience.
If your systems, data, messaging, and people are disconnected, your customers will inevitably sense these disconnections. It will erode trust and further disconnect them from your business. HubSpot strives to evolve and strengthen connections, so you can conquer this crisis and exceed your business growth goals.
The power of HubSpot can require substantial expertise and experience to harness effectively. Partner agencies like New Breed collaborate closely with HubSpot to help companies build and optimize a HubSpot environment that best serves their business needs.
If your team is ready to transition into HubSpot – or take your HubSpot to the next level – book a meeting with one of our growth consultants and let’s start the conversation!