by:
evmwang
Welcome, dear friends, to a special edition of the product updates blog! This year at INBOUND, we fight against the modern crisis of disconnection and unveil a new era; the Age of the Connected Customer.
Our times have created a great deal of isolation and distance, in our personal lives and business alike, with blank stares behind a computer screen becoming the norm. It's no wonder customers are more shut off than ever.
Gone are the days of casting a wide, generic net to attract as many customers as possible. Instead, customers now require personalized messaging, genuine connection, flexibility, and value. Here’s how we’ve built solutions to drive better customer connection at this year’s INBOUND.
What’s new on our connected platform?
Quote-to-Cash Improvements
For most B2B small and midsize businesses (SMBs), the quote-to-cash process is a frankensystem of tools, including CRM, quoting, invoicing, and accounting systems. In fact, the average B2B SMB uses five or more tools to go from prospect to buyer.
Spend less time and resources connecting data with systems, and more time connecting with customers. By providing native quoting capabilities in the CRM, and building seamless integrations with popular accounting software, such as Quickbooks Online, you’ll streamline the quote-to-cash process and get paid faster. Plus, the new payments schedules tool brings extra flexibility, so those selling services can break down a large bill into a series of installments.
New tools to enhance the SMB quote-to-cash process include the Quickbooks Online integration, customized quote templates, and payment schedules. Quote-to-cash improvements are available to all HubSpot customers.
Learn More:
B2B eCommerce
Customer expectations for online buying are higher than they have ever been. Fear not, INBOUND provides a way to offer modern, customized e-commerce encounters. Transform the buying experience for your sellers and buyers using the only all-on-one CRM with integrated commerce capabilities.
HubSpot’s commerce-powered CRM platform now offers even more ways to accept payments, including the ability to collect payments with forms, meetings, marketing emails, and more. In addition, payment links now support an open amount field where buyers can enter the amount they want to pay. Delight customers with the ability to transact when and where they want -- while cutting your costs and complexity.
B2B e-commerce features include payments in meetings, forms, marketing emails, and open amounts. All of these features are now generally available to US customers in premium editions of HubSpot.
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Import Error Handling
There is no worse feeling than learning your data import contains errors that you now have to find and fix in a spreadsheet before importing again. Stop bad data before it starts. With our improved import experience, discover and fix errors before it enters your CRM. That means less manual work now and fewer data headaches down the road, giving you more time and confidence to level up your impact.
Import error handling is now live and available for all HubSpot customers.
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Property Validations
Consistency keeps your data clean over time, but how can you manage the data other users input into your CRM without creating annoying and time-consuming processes?
With property validations, you can now create and enforce rules for certain properties that govern what users can (and can’t!) save as a property value. The result? A more reliable database, higher quality data your teams can count on to make tough business decisions, and a better customer experience.
Property validations are now in public beta and available to all free and paid Operations Hub customers.
Data Model Overview
Learn how your data is organized for better insights with a data model overview at INBOUND.
Data quality starts with knowing how your data is structured in your CRM. The data model overview is a learning and planning tool that visually represents the complex system of data that’s stored in HubSpot. Use it to visualize how you can use the HubSpot CRM to reflect your unique business, so you can set up your data model quickly and correctly.
The data model overview is now in public beta for free and paid Operations Hub customers.
Data Quality Command Center
With the data quality command center — an exciting new addition to Operations Hub — gauge the health of your HubSpot data in one central place. With the all-in-one dashboard, you’ll identify unused properties, data sync bottlenecks, formatting issues, duplicates, and more before they snowball. And the best part? You can fix the errors right from the command center.
The data quality command center is now in public beta and available to all Operations Hub Professional and Enterprise customers.
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Data Quality Automation Recommendations
Even small formatting issues can mean big trouble for marketing, sales, and services. Forget the manual burden of fixing data errors. With data quality automation recommendations, artificial intelligence suggests rules for fixing formatting issues within CRM properties (e.g. capitalization and spacing). Once you accept the suggestions and enable the automations, your database practically cleans itself. Kinda like a CRM Roomba.
Data quality automation recommendations are in public beta and available to all Operations Hub Professional and Enterprise customers.
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Data Sync Improvements - Product Sync
Maintain customer connections when you keep your internal data and systems connected too. Data sync integrations help you get there, now supporting product library data. Sync your HubSpot product library with more than a dozen third-party apps, two ways and in real-time. No more jumping back and forth from your favorite apps to your CRM.
Product Sync is now live and is available to free and paid Operations Hub customers.
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Data Sync Improvements for Health
Keep your teams aligned and alert to integration issues. With sync health, you can better understand your integration health and diagnose data syncing issues effortlessly. That means less time-consuming, manual data monitoring and more time bonding with customers.
Sync health is now live and is available to free and paid Operations Hub customers.
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Records Right Sidebar Configuration
Admins can optimize the right sidebar for reps by showing or hiding card sections in the right sidebar. Pro+ customers can configure conditional logic to show the most relevant information to the right user through custom layouts and permissions for teams.
Right Sidebar Customization is now live and available for all Professional and Enterprise accounts.
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New Activity Types & Configurable Activity Buttons
Track your customer’s journey from end-to-end. Build out thorough logs of all customer touchpoints and open new ways for your team to track their connections with prospects and customers. Log new types of customer connection activities including SMS, LinkedIn Message, WhatsApp, and Physical Mail. Configure which activity buttons appear in the record highlight card and reorder them for quicker access.
Configurable activity buttons are live and new activity types are in beta. Both features are available for all users of the HubSpot CRM.
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Board Card Configuration
Get a leg up on the competition and build lasting, meaningful relationships with customers by better knowing their actions at every stage of the deal. Admins can increase access to customer insights by selecting up to four properties to display on board cards of all pipeline objects - deals, tickets, and custom objects. When multiple pipelines are present, configure conditional logic to show different properties for each pipeline.
Board card configuration per pipeline is in GA and available for all customers in a tiered manner, as listed below:
- Ability to add up to 4 properties - generally available to free and paid customers across all Hubs
- Configure by pipeline: generally available to Professional and Enterprise customers across all Hubs
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What’s New in Connected Apps?
Customer Journey Analytics
We’re gonna let you in on a secret - if you want a real connection with customers, ditch your recycled campaign formulas. Today’s patrons and clientele crave personalized experiences and deep connections. You’ve got to understand them at their core.
New customer journey analytics gives marketers the ability to visualize a customer’s entire end-to-end journey, with deep insights into how to optimize the moments that matter most for increased conversion.
Customer journey analytics is coming soon to all Marketing Hub Enterprise customers.
Free CMS Tools
Every business needs a website that leaves a lasting impression with prospective buyers. With new, completely free CMS tools, you will be able to build a professional website in no time. No need to break the bank hiring a developer or spend hours learning to code. Expand your online presence with beautiful, secure websites that scale with you as you grow - for free.
Free CMS tools are now generally available to all free and paid HubSpot customers.
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Marketing Campaigns
Run campaigns in HubSpot to take tactics and turn them into a fully orchestrated strategy. Align your team for seamless campaign execution, drive engagement at every touchpoint for a great customer experience, and tap into insights that drive campaign optimization and growth.
Some recent campaigns improvements include: upgrades to the collaboration tool allowing support for comment threads, and attaching/highlighting comments directly to individual parts of the asset; including forms as an asset on a campaign, as well as when you clone the campaign; the ability to add a number in the budget field to allow for more robust reporting; the ability to view revenue attribution and deal attribution right from within campaigns; the ability to compare the performance of two or more campaigns against each other; and a better understanding of how each contact was influenced.*
Improvements across campaigns are now live and available for all Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise customers.
*Please note that influenced contacts upgrades are only available to those accounts created after April 1st, 2022. Influenced contacts upgrades to all other accounts coming soon!
Learn more:
Custom Report Builder
The custom report builder brings data from marketing, sales, and service into one place for connected insights from across your flywheel. Recent improvements to the custom report builder include scatterplots, pivot tables, and KPI comparisons, making customer insights more accessible to your teams than ever. And the custom report builder is powered by datasets, where you can add logic, run calculations, and save your queries for easier repeat use by all your front office teams, all without leaving the HubSpot CRM.
Custom report builder is now available to all Professional and Enterprise accounts across Sales, Service, Operations and Marketing Hub.
*Note: Datasets is available with Operations Hub Enterprise
Learn more:
Ad Conversion Events
More and more, customers are privy to the amount of revealing data being taken from them via the internet. Understandably, walls have come up, making it more difficult to build that crucial, initial relationship. It’s important to embrace the privacy meta and respect that your customers want to see real effort from you to reach them.
With HubSpot’s ad conversion events, power your hyper-targeted ads across the major ad networks. By the end of 2022, HubSpot customers will be able to fully realize all of their first-party data so they are able to target, report, and optimize in a cookieless, privacy-first world.
Google Offline Events (lifecycle stages), Facebook CAPI for Pageviews, Facebook offline events for Instant forms (lifecycle stages), and LinkedIn offline events (lifecycle stages) are live for all Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise customers.
Additional privacy-first features we've launched recently include improvements to cookie tracking, adjusted open rates in marketing email, and our EU Data Center option.
Learn more:
Deal Management
Are you a sales team leader? Then you’re probably familiar with the chaos that comes with an influx of new clients and complicated orders in the pipeline. While it’s a good problem to have, why not make it easier to manage those connections across your teams. A manageable deal means a likely-to-close deal, so say hello to better deal management functionality.
Improvements to forecasting and deal management include: a new goals app, team goals, and better-integrated forecasting and deal management experiences for reps.
Available to:
- Forecast submission enhancements [LIVE, Sales/Service Pro+]
- New goals app [Private beta, Sales Starter+, Service Pro+]
- Deal stage forecasting [LIVE, Sales/Service Pro+]
- Fiscal forecasting [Private Beta, Sales/Service Pro+]
Learn more:
Custom Goals
There’s no cookie-cutter way to grow a business. That’s why we developed custom goals to help you easily set, track, and manage performance. Keep goals updated automatically by reflecting any changes made to targets in the progress bar. Align stakeholders with notifications based on setting, achieving, exceeding, and missing goals to drive higher transparency and shared accountability.
Custom goals is now in public beta and available for all Sales Hub and Service Hub Enterprise customers
Learn more:
Records Overview Tab
Optimize customer interactions by seeing critical information front and center on the record. See important properties, recent communications, and associated contacts, companies, deals, or tickets
Professional and Enterprise customers can configure the layout and which properties are shown such as metrics, a recent activities card, and an associations table. Configure conditional logic to show the most relevant information to the right user through custom layouts and permissions for teams.
With Service & Sales Hub Enterprise, developers can create custom cards with development tools to feature on the custom tab.
CRM record overview is currently in private beta. When live, this feature will be available for all Hub customers. Further customization is available for Pro+ customers, and custom cards are available for Sales & Service Hub Enterprise.
Learn more:
Records Custom Tab
Bring more information across your systems into one central place on the record. Sales and Service Hub Enterprise developers can create custom cards with development tools to feature in an additional custom tab if they need more space. Create custom cards to interact with internal or external data: a button to trigger a HubSpot workflow, property list of external ERP data, or statistics with market trends.
Records custom tab is now in public beta and will be available for all Sales/Service Hub Enterprise customers.
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Inbound Calling
Building a more connected world means communication should go both ways, not just from you to the customer. Provide reps with unique phone numbers that can be used to place outbound and receive inbound calls right from and to their personal phone - without exposing their personal number. Protect your reps' privacy, while opening the doors for active two-way communication and relationship building.
Even better, record, transcribe, and coach based on the content of these calls with transcriptions live in the CRM (now available in the US, UK, and Canada).
Inbound calling is now live and available for all Service Hub and Sales Hub Starter, Professional, & Enterprise customers.
Learn more:
WhatsApp Integration
If deeper customer relationships are a priority, your teams must be able to intuitively connect with clients. WhatsApp, which brings together two billion people worldwide, is ideal for building familiarity with prospects.
Teams can connect a WhatsApp business account as a messaging channel in the shared inbox and communicate with prospects and customers. This launch will support both business-initiated and contact-initiated WhatsApp messages (video and images supported), and conversations will be visible on the contact record.
The WhatsApp integration is now in beta and once live will be available for all Service Hub and Marketing Hub customers at the Professional and Enterprise tiers.
Learn more:
Product Recommendations in Marketing Emails
Ever opened, then deleted, an email in less than 5 seconds because the product recommendations weren’t relevant to you? It happens to all of us, even with companies we love.
As a solution, HubSpot offers even more ways to sort products to hit the sweet spot of interest with customers. The new product recommendations feature provides marketers with a simple method to incorporate customer-relevant products into marketing emails.
There are 4 different filters to pull products into an email: Top sellers, Latest products, Price (high to low), and Price (low to high).
Product Recommendations in Marketing Emails are now live and available for all Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise customers.
Learn more:
Custom Object Builder
Business requires solutions as unique as you are in order to grow better. With the new custom object builder, you’re now even more empowered to customize your data model around your company—not the other way around. This simple, intuitive tool makes it easier than ever to build your custom objects. No code required.
The custom object builder is now in public beta and available to all Enterprise customers.
Learn more:
Development Sandboxes
Craving more space to innovate and test new concepts? Try development sandboxes. Confidently build and test early proof of concept development work before implementing them in a standard sandbox or production account.
Available for HubSpot Enterprise subscribers, we’ve expanded your freedom. When new development sandboxes are created, they will have the same features and CRM object definitions as the customer’s production account.
Development sandboxes are in beta. This feature is available for all Sales/Service Hub Enterprise customers.
Learn more:
Projects GitHub Integration
GitHub is an industry-standard for developers. Want to enjoy even smoother team collaboration? Enable GitHub integration to easily store and track your HubSpot Project’s codebase. Connect and create with your team using familiar Github tools and workflows, plus trigger project builds by pushing code to their repositories.
Projects GitHub Integration is in beta. This feature is available for all Sales/Service Hub Enterprise customers.
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CRM Card Builder
Developers, you can now craft new CRM cards to help CRM users do their jobs more efficiently. The new CRM card builder tool provides an interactive interface to easily create the necessary JSON payloads to deploy custom CRM cards in the middle panel of the HubSpot platform. Moreover, you can also use these CRM cards on custom objects or display custom object data over other records.
CRM card builder is in beta. This feature is available for all Sales/Service Hub enterprise customers.
Learn more:
Debugging
Enjoy recent improvements to the debugging experience for a world-class developer workflow on HubSpot. In addition to improved existing features, discover a new CRM mid-panel card logging system to help you monitor how your private app functions. Each log contains details about every execution, including whether it passed or failed, for an easier time debugging potential issues.
Debugging is now in public beta and available for all Sales and Service Hub Enterprise customers.
GraphQL in CMS Hub
With this update, developers have what they need to craft personalized, omnichannel, and data-driven experiences. The newly released GraphQL layer will help to query for, and display, your HubSpot data on CMS pages, emails, external content, integrations, and more.
GraphQL is available for CMS Hub Professional and Enterprise customers via beta sign up.
Learn more:
Thank you for joining us for this year’s INBOUND edition of the Product Spotlight. How will you be using these updates to connect with your customers? Let us know!
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