by:
jbogaert
Your End-All Guide to the New Sales Hub
In case you missed it: Sales Hub made waves at this year's INBOUND event as Andy Pitre, EVP of Product unveiled some of the biggest updates that HubSpot has seen in the 10-year history of its sales software. In this post, you'll learn everything there is to know about why and how Sales Hub has been redesigned to power your sales team’s productivity through relevance – so they can break through the noise and really connect with buyers.
A New Era in Sales
A productive and efficient sales team has always had the upper hand. However, with the economy and buyer behavior changing, sales leaders are starting to recognize that their productivity playbook of old is losing its effectiveness.
Sales Team Have a Productivity Problem
For the last two decades, sales teams have relied on a playbook of "more" to drive growth: more reps, more software, more activities. However, times have changed and so have buyers. Budgets are tightening, deals take longer to close, and prospects are becoming more difficult to reach. As a result, growth is stagnating and teams are feeling discouraged.
But don't take our word for it. Earlier this year, we surveyed over 1,000 sales leaders worldwide and found that their top challenges this year come in the form of standing out from the crowd and meeting quotas. Sales productivity has become a critical problem for sales organizations to respond to and “more, more, more” is no longer cutting it. In fact, replying by upping the volume only pushes buyers away even further as it so often comes at the expense of value.
Learn more about HubSpot’s sales software
AI: From Challenge to Solution
With AI entering the fray, the gap between buyers and sellers is set to widen even more. Generative AI is arming buyers with readily available information at their fingers and it’s changing their expectations of sales. Buyers no longer want salespeople to provide simple product descriptions, instead, they expect to feel heard and their challenges truly understood.
The good news is that, when harnessed properly, generative AI has the power to relieve the mounting pressure on sales teams. Not just by automating time-consuming busy work, but by unlocking new levels of customer relevance. Generative AI can empower sales reps to transform simple personalization into meaningful connections.
A Better Way to Win
We examined the industry, listened to our customers, and believe that the answer to this productivity problem is to stop clinging to the quantity of your sales activities; it is to start obsessing over the quality of your sales engagements.
There’s a better way to win in this new era of sales. One where sales teams can reclaim their productivity and rekindle what they love most: selling. That’s why we have reimagined what it means to do sales on HubSpot. Because the better way to win is to craft authentic customer connections at scale.
And that all starts with the new Sales Hub, HubSpot’s AI-powered sales software that is built for productivity and powered by relevance. Sales Hub increases productivity and improves customer connections with a slew of new features that help sales teams prospect smarter, accelerate revenue growth, and scale insightfully. Let’s dive in!
The Grand Tour of the New Sales Hub
With the new features unveiled at INBOUND23, Sales Hub solidified its position as the core of your modern sales stack. Built on top of HubSpot’s Smart CRM, Sales Hub takes your sales processes to new heights, revolutionizing sales engagement, deal management, and reporting/coaching. Here’s how:
Prospect Smarter
Let’s start with the sales engagement tools in Sales Hub that equip your business development teams with the means to start relevant, contextual conversations that captivate prospects and convert them into deals. By adding a new prospecting workspace, unifying lead management, upgrading sequences, and simplifying lead handoffs, Sales Hub empowers your sales teams to prospect smarter, not harder, and deliver a world-class buyer experience.
The Prospecting Workspace
Your new prospecting workspace (Professional+) will help your salespeople stay focused and on-task as they engage their prospects. It brings everything reps need to prospect into a single tool – providing them with a single view of all their work. Now your sales reps won’t get distracted having to manage dozens of tabs and disconnect tools. Whether it’s completing outstanding to-do’s or making overdue calls, with one click they can get into work without delay.
The workspace also makes sure your sales reps never lose sight of their leads. It surfaces CRM data of upcoming meeting participants, displays relevant context in task queues, suggests the next best activity, and ensures your sales reps always have the most relevant context at their fingertips to create meaningful customer connections.
Unified Lead Management
Yes, you heard that right. We are redefining lead management (Professional+) in HubSpot by introducing leads. Now, just like tasks or tickets, you can create lead records. Leads are not a standalone object. Rather they’re records associated with a contact or company that you can create to track and report on the journey your prospective customers take in your sales process.
Managing your leads happens inside the prospecting workspace. The great thing here is that it’s almost fully automated. Your leads will move seamlessly through their stages as your sellers engage and connect with them. Reach out to a lead and they will automatically move from New to Attempting. When they respond, they’ll move to Connected. Are they qualified? Here’s a deal creation panel so you don’t waste any time and immediately turn them into a deal.
Smarter Sequences
With HubSpot sequences, you can automate entire prospecting strategies. They let you create and manage a series of steps (like automated emails, tasks, calls, and more touch points) that help salespeople effectively engage prospects at scale. To improve the effectiveness of sequences, here are some new features to help you turn the art of prospecting into a science.
For starters, your reps are now able to directly tie sequences to business impact. The new outcome reports (Enterprise) let your reps see how good their sequences are at generating meetings and closing deals. Found a sequence that’s underperforming? Then use the improved step analytics (Professional+) to find where your sequences are falling short. Step analytics now lets you analyze each step in your sequence, anything from an automated email to a manual task. Found a step that needs some optimization? Use the new A/B testing (Professional+) functionality to experiment with different options and figure out what works best for your audience.
Seamless Handoffs
To empower your sales team in creating delightful buyer experiences, Sales Hub now comes with functionality that removes the friction from your lead handoffs.
For one, the introduction of book on behalf of others (Professional+) will let your prospecting reps capitalize on successful qualifying calls. They can now immediately book the next meeting on behalf of an account executive or simply round-robin the meeting host to be the next best salesperson in line using meeting rotations (Professional+).
But there’s more! With the addition of lead form routing (Enterprise) your marketing team can now leverage HubSpot forms to generate sales meetings on behalf of your sales reps. Simply add conditional rules to your form to qualify website visitors and redirect them to a meeting scheduling page.
Mobile Prospecting Updates
Of course, prospecting doesn't just happen at a desk. With the HubSpot mobile app, your sales reps won’t have to wait until they’re back at their desk to get stuff done. As QR-codes of vCards are steadily replacing traditional business cards, your sales teams can now leverage the QR-code scanner (Free) in the HubSpot mobile app to import vCards and add contacts directly to their HubSpot portal. Then immediately enroll these new leads and start nurturing them right from the mobile app with the new sequences on mobile (Professional+). Lastly, HubSpot’s AI content assistant (Free) is now on mobile so your reps don’t have to painstakingly type out emails on their phones. The AI assistant will help your reps generate relevant sales emails in a flash.
Accelerate Revenue Growth
We know that closing deals quickly is a top priority for every account executive. With HubSpot's deal management and automation tools that’s always been a given. Sales Hub’s deal board helps your sales teams streamline their sales processes, ensuring that opportunities move seamlessly from qualified all the way to quote.
And now, it’s even easier for your sales reps to keep track of all deals in their pipeline. The new deal inspection view (Free) helps them organize their deals at a glance. Simply click on any deal you want to inspect and now, instead of going directly into the deal record page and losing sight of your pipeline, you will stay on the deal board and get a summary of all recent touchpoints and relevant activities associated with that deal on the side. This way sales reps can look through their deals more quickly to get an understanding of what deals require their immediate attention.
To keep an eye on the health of your pipeline and deal velocity, sales reps previously needed to find and access the right report within sales analytics. The newly surfaced deal insights (Professional+) now prevent those extra steps and remove the need for keeping multiple tabs open. The insights are displayed at the top of the deal board and can be hidden at any time. They’ll give your salespeople a direct overview of some key pipeline metrics like deal amount, new deal amount, and average deal age.
Scale Insightfully
The path to scalable success lies in accurate goal setting, prediction, and attainment. With HubSpot's integrated reporting and coaching tools in Sales Hub, your sales managers can accurately set, predict, and hit their revenue targets and effectively uplevel their teams with insights. Here’s what’s new in the world of sales reporting and analytics:
Prefer videos over text? Watch this video to see all new reporting features in Sales Hub.
Forecast Intelligently
Forecasting is getting an upgrade in the form of the new accuracy tracking (Professional+) view. Sales managers can now leverage their sales reps’ historical forecast data to track the accuracy and reliability of their manual submissions over time.
With the newly surfaced forecasting insights (Professional+), managers can quickly look into the state of their revenue predictions. The insights tell you how your forecast and pipelines are trending across teams through key metrics like team goal, closed won, gap, and forecast submissions.
Prospecting Analytics
Optimizing prospecting activities for conversion is essential to improving your sales engagement efforts. With the new out-of-the-box prospect activities report (Professional+), your sales managers get a holistic view of their reps' prospecting activities. Track progress across different activity types like sequences, calls, and meetings, and then dig into key performance metrics like conversion rates, activities per contact, or activities per day to figure out which sellers are crushing it and which ones might need some more coaching.
The new lead funnel report (Professional+) lets sales teams effectively track lead activity – giving them a comprehensive view of the contact-to-lead-to-deal conversion rate and the time leads spend in each stage. By analyzing lead conversion, sales managers can identify areas for improvement, optimize lead nurturing strategies, and even evaluate the effectiveness of different lead sources. This new out-of-the-box report lets managers then assess the performance of sales reps in how they handle their leads so they can make data-backed decisions on how to drive revenue growth.
Deeper Deal Reporting
A deal’s path through your pipeline isn’t always linear, which makes measuring conversion rates and finding improvement areas really difficult. With the improvements made to the out-of-the-box deal funnel report (Professional+) your managers can now rest easy knowing they’re reporting on accurate and reliable metrics. The deal funnel report accounts for skips, conversions, and time-in-stage metrics, and with the help of deal journey analytics (Enterprise) your managers can go even further and customize the deal funnel report by visualizing it as a Sankey chart and by leaving out certain stages.
Lastly, one of the most crucial metrics to track in sales is sales velocity. It helps showcase sales team productivity and uncovers weaknesses in the sales process. With the help of the new sales velocity report (Professional+), salespeople can gain valuable insights into their performance so they can make informed decisions to optimize their sales strategies. This out-of-the-box report lets sales teams understand the time it takes to convert leads into customers and allows them to set realistic goals and allocate resources effectively.
Essential Apps for Sales Hub
Finally, you can now leverage a collection of recommended sales integrations (Free) in the HubSpot app marketplace. With Sales Hub at the core of your modern sales stack, you can seamlessly integrate your other sales tools with HubSpot. These integrations include ZoomInfo Inbound Enrich, Gong.io, PandaDoc | eSignatures & More, Aircall, and many more!
Announced and Coming Soon!
That might be it for everything that’s new in Sales Hub today, but we also announced some big upgrades that our product teams are still building and testing. Most excitingly: AI forecasting and a completely rebuilt LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration.
AI Forecasting
Your sales managers will soon be able to compare the accuracy of their manual revenue predictions to an AI-powered projection. AI forecasting (Enterprise) will look at your historical manual forecasts and your closed-won amounts and give you a best and worst-case scenario of where you’re likely to end up for that month. Early testing has shown that AI forecasting helped some teams improve accuracy by up to 95%!
A Better LinkedIn Sales Navigator Integration
Soon, your sales reps will be able to enjoy an entirely new LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration (Professional+). HubSpot is working closely with LinkedIn to rebuild this integration and has been chosen to be one of the few providers in the market to get this kind of exclusive integration. The new LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration will be able to sync data two-way between the two platforms – giving reps more insights and managers deeper reporting capabilities so they can prospect more efficiently, build deeper relationships, and close deals faster.
Let Sales Hub kick your Q4 off with a bang!
Try out Sales Hub today or book a meeting with our amazing sales team that can show you how they are using the newest Sales Hub tools to power productivity through relevance.
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