AMA: HubSpot Named a Leader in 2021 Gartner ® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms

News Ask Me Anything and Panel Discussions
1

HubSpot has been positioned by Gartner as a leader in the Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation for our Marketing Hub. The evaluation was based on specific criteria that analyzed the company’s overall completeness of vision and ability to execute.

From October 18 - October 22, 2021 we’ll have members of our product team answering questions about HubSpot’s position in the Magic Quadrant, HubSpot tools and more.

Not sure what to ask? Here are a few questions to get the conversation started:

  1. What tools has HubSpot invested in that made it stand out in 2021?
  2. What future tools are on the roadmap to continue investing in Marketing Hub?

Get your download of the full report here.

2

Are there plans/What are the plans to remove siloing between Marketing Hub and the other HubSpot hubs, so they interact more seamlessly?

3

This is a great question, and one that is on our mind all the time. We even have an internal name for this, we call it chevrons. If you look at the flywheel, the little triangles that connect each hub inspired the name.

Everything is built on a unified platform, so right off the bat we work hard to make sure all the data is in the same place. We try to make sure that content editing across the platform is the same, your assets are all available via file manager, reporting is the same, and automation is the same. We call these primary colors, and they are unified across the entire platform.

Beyond that, last year we worked to bring sales and marketing closer together by building ABM functionality that you can enable when you own both hubs. It was the first time we experimented with net new functionality appearing when you have two hubs, which a user can enable at their discretion via settings.

There are other items we work on, such as exposing net promoters from service hub in list segmentation so that you can do marketing against them.

If a customer buys something, you can customize emails from marketing hub to recommend other products, let them know about that product in particular, etc.

Going forward, we want to do things like expose conversational intelligence data from sales hub into marketing and service hub. We also see a bright future for the unified inbox, so that all forms of communication might be able to go to a single inbox that is customized per person.

Those are just some examples that we have today, let me know other areas that you feel are clunky and I can speak to those or pass this information along to a product manager

4

How does HubSpot plan to serve those smaller businesses and non-profits alongside the enterprise companies? It seems like the technology continues to grow into the enterprise segment. What are you doing so your smaller businesses don’t feel abandoned like you’ve become too complicated for everyday users?

5

We have been focused on enterprise as of late because it was where we were weakest, specifically with customers outgrowing us and we wanted to ensure people could scale with us.

But this is led to a ton of benefits for the pro tier, as well as free and starter. The system is much more stable, it is more performant, it makes it easier to scale with large data sets even if you are only at pro, etc.

As for smaller companies, we have made a ton of investments in free/starter and will continue doing so. You can now email up to 10,000 people, make landing pages, run ads, have a full CRM, a full help desk, and now a custom website.

The blurry part is when customers are small but have sophisticated needs… Those areas can be challenging if a business is sophisticated in one area, but less sophisticated in another. There will be natural tension on needing to upgrade.

Another area we debate internally is what is the appropriate amount to pay for software if you are going to run your entire business on it. In the past, people were really focused on spending as little as possible on free, point, and open source solutions. Those days are beginning to fade into the past as many companies realize technology and its benefits are vital to their success.

Our job is to find that right balance… At what point should a company start paying a premium for software that they will build their whole business on. That is what we are constantly trying to get right.

We hear about various features that we may have in the wrong tier, and we take that serious. I can’t speak for the other hubs, but memberships in the CMS is a specific one that comes up related to this. I think a lot of people would like to see that feature brought all the way down to starter perhaps because it helps make real the CRM plus CMS dream. Things like this will be a constant evolution.

Do you have a specific example where you are feeling pain?

6

Thank you @nicholasholland - Nothing specific comes to mind. Just an overall pontification of whether some of the smaller, long term customers are feeling any shift. I’ve been a HubSpot fan & costomer for a long time and can feel the shift, but haven’t seen any “abandonment” as of yet. I was just wondering if y’all were talking about that at all internally. Thanks!

7

Do you have any plans to build A/B testing into chatflows?

8

I talked to the product team and they said they’ve done some light research on it, but it’s not a frequent request and it isn’t on the current priority list. I will tell them that you asked about it

9

Hello!

What has the inclusion as a Leader in 2021 Gartner ® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms meant for the entire product team?

Regards,

10

Being recognized doesn’t really change anything for the product team, but we have worked on this for a few years in preparation.

One area where Gartner influenced us was machine learning… We’ve always taken the approach that machine learning should be in the background, working diligently on behalf of customers. However, the Gartner process really made us think deeply on how well we surface our AI/ML efforts to the customer. This whole process helped us put a finer point on it, build some marketing materials around it that help customers who search easily understand what we do, and gave us a crisper perspective on what we tell the market going forward.

But beyond that, we really still derive our product roadmap directly from customers. Every single PM spends enormous amounts of time with customers, pouring over customer feedback such as this community, and doing lots of UX research. That is then distilled into a set of priorities that we can handle based on our resources and the pace at which our customers also can handle it.

We want to put customers at the center of everything we do, so winning this award is more validation rather than having any direct influence on what we do

11

Are there any key features that are missing from HubSpot but present from another magic quadrant software, and what are the plan to address these gaps?

12

There are no big gaps that I’m aware of. Gartner has its own weighting system which it does not share with the vendors.

13

Do you have any idea when they incorporate a chat queue?

14

This is something we are very interested in doing, so research is underway on chat queues and real-time routing. Unclear as to when we will deliver as development hasn’t started yet, but it is something that is definitely on our radar and we have started work down this path

15

What are your plans for fixing the massive Gmail plugin issues that started yesterday, and so that this type of disruption doesn’t happen in the future for companies using Google Rapid Release?

Our product is built for Google, and being on Rapid Release is critical for our business to serve our customers and remain competitive in the market. Now, we’re being told be HS support that we need to choose between our sales team being able to do their jobs and our product & CS teams being able to service our customers :disappointed_face:

16

Truly sorry to hear that the Rapid Release updates interfered with the Gmail plugin for you and your team. Our engineering team has been actively working on building a fix for the segment of users who have enabled Rapid Release for Google Workspace.

Given our multiple points of integration across Google’s product catalog and HubSpot’s growing reputation (e.g., via the Gartner assessment), we’ve been able to continue building tighter relationship with teams at Google. Together, we are focused on building processes for working together on releases and providing opportunities for advanced testing. We both want to ensure our mutual users have smooth experiences as our respective products continue to change and grow.

Every time we see a disruption to customer experience, we run a formal retrospective process to identify the root cause of what happened and put plans in place to mitigate the chance of a simiar problem ever occurring again. We promise to learn from this one and work with Google to get ahead of similar issues in the future.

17

Quickbooks online sync. Here is a screenshot where you say it can sync ALL contacts to the hubspot CRM. But, I cannot get an answer. This is with the native one and not the connex. I have tried to find this answer for many days now. I have asked your live chat for tech support. An account manager called me and promised to email me and NOTHING. - https://prnt.sc/1wzujxq

I am evaluating your tools and support.

18

Hi Matthew, thanks for checking us out. Today we do sync all contacts through the Quickbooks integration, but we do not have import through the native integration. So right now when you turn on the sync, all contact records will sync over as they are created or updated. You can learn more about the integration within our knowledge base here. We’re actively developing this integration, so continue to refer the to knowledge base article for the most up to date details. Additionally, if you were to become a paying customer, you’d have additional support from our customer success team as well.