[September 11-22, 2023] AMA - Ask Us Anything About Sales Hub

[ARainford]

 

Hi HubSpot Community, 

I’m Alex! I’m a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Sales Hub here at HubSpot. At INBOUND, we announced some new and exciting features for Sales Hub, including personalized sales engagement tools, smarter sequences, new deal management capabilities, advanced analytics/reporting, and more.

We all know that in todays’ macroeconomic environment, selling is becoming more challenging and complex than ever before. Sellers are putting even more effort to meet quotas and close deals, but are now facing a productivity problem due to fragmented systems. More time is being spent on administrative tasks than actually selling. With these new Sales Hub features, we’re enabling your teams to consolidate all their sales data, tools, and teams together on one single platform, from prospecting to close. 

We want your teams to work smarter, not harder. That’s why we’re thrilled to invite you to our upcoming AMA where we answer all your questions regarding our features in Sales Hub.

Our AMA will take place right here in the Community forum from September 11-22, 2023. 

Not sure what to ask? Here are a few sample questions: 

• How does this feature assist in managing and tracking communications with leads? 
• Do your prospecting features offer types of customization and automation for sales outreach? 
• Can I set notifications and reminders for follow-ups on important lead interactions? 
• Will there be any AI-driven insights or recommendations for my prospecting strategies?
• What are some of the new reporting features that you’d recommend? 
• What are some use cases of customers who’ve used these features? 

Hope you’re all excited about this as much as we are! Feel free to drop your questions in this thread and a HubSpot Expert will be back with a response 🙂. Looking forward to hearing from you!

[WCloos]

Will leads possess the ability in the future to house custom properties? This would be helpful to many HubSpot customers who would like to gain insights on their leads, where they ended up, and break it down by reasons they were not quoted aka quantity price, capability... the example use case for our org is we would like to freeze frame the contact us submission such that it is stored in the lead record. The contact could then make multiple requests and in turn, generate multiple lead records that would be distributed to different teams across our org.

This use case would be applicable to a business that has multiple product lines with dedicated teams to price out those products in each division. The leads object is an exciting new record type for HubSpot. I think it'll require a few tweaks to get it to be useful for most. 

[CBoxmeyer]

Fairly new Sequence user here, and probably fairly simple question. I have a sequence made, and some templates that I am using. Say I have 5 contacts enrolled. I noticed a bad link in a template. I updated the template to correct it (and saved it using same name). Now I want to enroll some more contacts. Do I need to do anything to the Sequence to ensure that Template update has made it to the new enrolled Contacts? Or am I good to go? Thanks for your answer or advice.

[ARainford]

@CBoxmeyer great question. You can find more info here. But if you are enrolling new contacts, those should see the latest updates to the sequence. 

[JairedJ]

We have Shopify connected to our account and our salespeople would like to use the Shopify Ecom product library in their deals and quotes. Would you know of any reason why they should not use the Shopify products? 

Reasons I thought of but am unsure of:

If Shopify breaks will the products break as well?

Will it affect reporting consistency - more than one line item on a report representing the same product? 

[ARainford]

@JairedJ Hey there! Great question. You can find info on our Shopify integration here. Shopify products do flow to HubSpot products so you should be good there. If the product breaks in Shopify I assume it wouldn't be able to work with HubSpot then. Are you talking about reporting in HubSpot or Shopify?

[Adam_W]

While it's great to see new, innovative products and offerings, I do think that HubSpot would garner a lot more support/praise/loyalty by looking backwards and fixing some of the really painful QoL issues that are littering the Community section.

I'm not trying to rag on HubSpot, I get that nobody got promoted for fixing technical debt and enhancing that "MVP" feature. But, it's very hard to claim to be Simplifying [my] Process when I spend literal hours trying to work around the roadblocks in the product. 

For example, in no particular order:

• Organise/arrange contacts on company record
  HubSpot just randomly sorts by the most recently added contact.
• Bulk Edit Phone Number Validation
  E.164 is supported but unenforceable. 
• Associate Tasks with Contacts AND Companies by default 
  Creating a task doesn't associate properly so things can (and do) get missed.
• Parent-child company properties available for workflows
  Want to ensure that Parent and Child share critical attributes? You'll have to use (and pay for) a third-part app. 
• Customize default country code for phone numbers
  No way to prompt form-fillers to fix their error, or default based on location.
• Automatic adding of TAX (VAT) when creating quotes
  Manually adding tax rates. On. Every. Single. Quote.
• Unpublish form
  Delete or deal. There's no way to archive and hold onto it.
• Ability to merge companies that have parent/child records
  My personal favourite. Deduping these is a nightmare. Or, again, pay a third-party to work "magic" via HubSpot's API. 

[ajkinbrum]

Hi. I'm starting to use the prospecting/leads tool, but I'm running into difficulty in instances when I'm working two leads in one company. When I'm moving a lead from connected to qualified, it's not letting me assign the deal to both leads. I would record a video, but don't want the contact info in the public domain! Is this a bug, limitation, or am I doing something wrong?

[ncarbone]

Hey! This is working as designed. We're tracking which specific lead converted from that one company.  This helps with attribution and conversion reporting for prospecting efforts, sequences, marketing, etc.. If we were to qualify or attach both leads to the deal, you end up double counting your leads. 

[jaybaum]

A few questions (more so feature requests)! 

1) Will there ever be improvements to tasks? I'm talking subtasks, custom task statuses/pipelines, perhaps advanced text editor to allow for checkboxes and such within task descriptions. Also, will sales and marketing tasks ever be centralized?

2) Will there ever be improvements to the "attatchments" section on a record? It's litterally chaos. We need somewhere to upload a file such as an externally generated quote or document - without it being the attatchments section. That section gets flooded with email signature attatchments, isnt searchable, it isnt great. 

3) With the new SMS feature, are there any plans to make a if/then sending option? For example if send fails to "phone number" then send to "mobile number".

4) Any plans to roll out "personal" email inboxes like other CRMs have? My reps want one central place where they can view all new, sent, draft, and scheduled emails without going into individual records. This would allow them to fully live in HubSpot and ditch their outlook inboxes. 🙂 

5) Any plans to increase limits on association labels? Currently all hubs are limited to 10 per object, would love to see at least 20-30 per object.

6) Will reps ever have the ability to "create a lead" from hubspot on mobile? This would be HUGE for trade shows and community/networking events. Bonus points if they could add a lead "memo" when creating, for example: John wants xyz software for x purpose." 

[vishnu]

Hey @jaybaum - I'm a Product Manager for the Mobile App and creating Leads from Mobile is something we are looking into. I'm going to follow-up in DMs so we can chat mmore on this!

[ncarbone]

Hey! I'm one of the Sales Hub Product Marketers! Some thoughts on these questions...

1) Will there ever be improvements to tasks...

I'm reading between the lines here, but it sounds like you're looking to do some more advanced project management-ish stuff in Sales Hub. Sub-tasks laddering up to a main project or deliverable, client onboarding, etc..

What I'd recommend here is using a custom object as your "Primary" task, since custom objects can have pipelines, properties, their own tasks, etc..

Sales and Marketing tasks are fundamentally different, though, since Sales tasks relate to objects and Marketing tasks don't. We do not have a timeline for possible unification.

2) Will there ever be improvements to the "attatchments" section on a record...

At the moment we don't have anything planned, but this is a good point and I'll file a feedback submission with the product team!

3) With the new SMS feature, are there any plans to make a if/then sending option...

Not that I'm aware of, but I'll log this feedback as well!

4) Any plans to roll out "personal" email inboxes like other CRMs have...

Can check and report back! Counterpoint - do you want an inbox in HubSpot, or could potential improvements to the existing Gmail/Outlook plugins accomplish the same goal? I.e., bringing even more of Sales Hub and the CRM into the tool reps already use for email?

5) Any plans to increase limits on association labels...

You're not the first person to mention this. Just messaged Product, can report back and see what they're thinking!

6) Will reps ever have the ability to "create a lead" from hubspot on mobile...

Will check and provide an update. 

[jaybaum]

1) Will there ever be improvements to tasks...

I'm reading between the lines here, but it sounds like you're looking to do some more advanced project management-ish stuff in Sales Hub. Sub-tasks laddering up to a main project or deliverable, client onboarding, etc..

What I'd recommend here is using a custom object as your "Primary" task, since custom objects can have pipelines, properties, their own tasks, etc..

Sales and Marketing tasks are fundamentally different, though, since Sales tasks relate to objects and Marketing tasks don't. We do not have a timeline for possible unification.

This idea could work great - but one big thing tasks are missing is the ability to add an attatchment to the task or comments. Currently, you can only add a link or an image. Often times we need to comment back and forth with revisions or misc docs, pdfs, excel sheets or other items that arent an image. 

[ncarbone]

If a job-to-be-done is big enough to warrant docs, revisions and comments, then IMHO that job becomes the object record (for ex. "ACME Corp Client Statement of Work Prep") and the revisions, etc., become tasks associated to that object record (ex. "Revise SOW due Friday, Sept. 22"), which could also have attachments, comments, dual ownership, workflows, reports, etc..

I do agree that attachments on tasks would be a great add, though!

[jaybaum]

Thanks for the fantastic response! Here's a little clarification: 

4) Any plans to roll out "personal" email inboxes like other CRMs have...

Can check and report back! Counterpoint - do you want an inbox in HubSpot, or could potential improvements to the existing Gmail/Outlook plugins accomplish the same goal? I.e., bringing even more of Sales Hub and the CRM into the tool reps already use for email?

- Inbox in HubSpot! We use outlook, the HubSpot add-in is tramaticaly unreliable at times. I blame microsoft for that. It constantly gets hidden, unpinned, logs out. My reps work in HubSpot all day and have to manage two tabs, one for their personal inbox, one for all things HubSpot. They email out of HubSpot almost all the time, and really just want their "personal outlook inbox" in HubSpot so they can (pretty much) leave their actual outlook window in the dust. 

TLDR: Reps want to live in HubSpot, not Outlook. 

[JWGotham]

How can I change who a contact is being automatically assigned to when a Form is capturing a lead and assigning it to one of our reps? I'd like to add someone to the "round robin" instead of having to manually change the person the contact is assigned to. 

[MParham]

Hi @JWGotham!

There are a couple of ways you can do this!

One way would be by utilizing the "rotate record to owner" action in workflows. This action lets you assign ownership by rotating between specific users or teams that you configure within the action. It will rotate contacts to the user that was least recently assigned a contact. Rather than going in and manually assigning contact ownership, you could continue to add users or teams to the "rotate record to owner" action in your workflows, which work as a round robin. 

We have a new way of doing this with a new feature in Sales Hub, as well! Our new Lead Form Routing functionality is in public beta for Enterprise Sales Hub and Enterprise Service Hub portals. This will let you create conditional logic to redirect form submitters to round robin scheduling pages immediately on form submission. You can change which round robin scheduling page you redirect a prospect to based on what information the prospect provided in the form submission. Contact ownership will be automatically assigned to the user that the meeting was booked with via a round robin rotation. You can add someone to the round robin by editing your round robin scheduling pages. This is a way to get a meeting booked for qualified prospects right away, get a contact owner assigned, and cut out any friction during the meeting booking process.

[TFour]

is it possible to allow a sales rep to edit a task but not delete it? or disable edit comment for the whole team ?

[ncarbone]

Not at this time, no. Task permissions exist for editing and viewing, but not deleting.

[BCarterCT]

When will HubSpot introduce user specific timezones for companies with staff located in different time zones globally? This was flagged back in 2017, but hasn't been addressed. Like many organisations we have teams in both the UK and USA. However the default is that all users timezone is the same as the parent account. This means our US staff have issues with HubSpot's meeting calendar as it defaults to UK time. Now that remote working is so commonplace, this is a sorely needed feature.

[adamlfoster]

 I have now spoken to a number of my clients and one request is common and this is the ability to create a contacts view based on this new associated lead object.

Within the contacts page we should be able to filter by 'associated lead' properties. This will allow us for example to build a contact view of all leads in 'connected' stage.