On October 12th, HubSpot’s leaders took to the stage for INBOUND 21 – well, the virtual stage, since things still aren’t quite back to normal in these post-Covid times. But they didn’t let that stop them – the INBOUND event is one of the world’s biggest and best marketing events, with influential speakers from across all areas of digital and culture. It’s also the forum used to announce innovative exciting new HubSpot updates, and this year was no different. Let’s take a look at the latest HubSpot product updates, as premiered at INBOUND 21.
What did HubSpot announce?
HubSpot is on a mission to become the number one CRM in the world and they believe that means focusing on the three Cs: customisable, well-connected and customer-centric.
All of the key updates announced at at this year’s INBOUND 21 can be bucketed into these three categories – and all of HubSpot’s new features can be summed up in this simple statement from Libby Maurer, VP User Experience: “You shouldn’t have to work for your CRM. Your CRM should just work for you.”
Customisable
When it comes to customising a CRM, HubSpot reckon it’s important not just to customise the database part, but also ensure that it can be customised to make it easy to use for customers. It can be daunting to roll out new features without testing them, so one of the key new features HubSpot has launched is sandboxes, available for Enterprise users.
What are sandboxes?
HubSpot describes these as “production-like portals where you can try new things without impacting your current setup”. Essentially, sandboxes are a safe space that emulates your actual CRM so you can test out new features to see what the impact is before you actually push anything live.
Whether it’s rolling out a new sales pipeline, introducing integrations or developing a new theme, sandboxes enable you to run experiments so you can see what works and what doesn’t without impacting your current setup.
Attacat’s View: This feature is perfect for HubSpot developers & solution architects who need to ensure that custom integrations & additional automations are put through UAT before being released to production. It is an enterprise feature, suited to HubSpot customers whose business processes are heavily reliant on HubSpot.
Are there any other new customisable features?
The introduction of sandboxes could be a game-changer, but it’s not the only new feature that allows you to make your CRM your own.
At INBOUND 21, HubSpot also announced new business units, allowing you to easily manage multiple brands across a single HubSpot portal. If you have multiple brands under one roof, this will be big news for your business, making it much easier to keep on top of your different assets.
There’s also a new set of admin features to make it easier to add users to your CRM and ensure everyone has the right level of access.
Well-connected
HubSpot is striving to improve access to data and reporting, and that’s what they mean by being “connected” – connected to the information you need to take your business to the next level. The big news here is the introduction of the Operations Hub Enterprise.
What’s the Operations Hub?
HubSpot knows that for businesses to grow, they need to run more efficiently. That’s why they launched Operations Hub back in April 2021, giving businesses a unified toolset that allowed teams to connect and clean data. It was originally available in Free, Starter and Professional versions – but at INBOUND 21, it was announced that Operations Hub Enterprise would soon be released.
What does Operations Hub Enterprise offer?
The key feature in the enterprise-level version of the Operations Hub is datasets, a new business intelligence feature that allows ops leaders to curate data collection. They can set up reusable tables for their business, including pre-selected fields and calculated values. This saves ops teams time and gives them more control over their data – and what’s more, it gives downstream business users easier access to data. Datasets ensure that the most meaningful data is collected, it’s consistent across the board, and it’s easy for everyone in the business to use and interpret.
Operations Hub Enterprise also offers fast and easy integration of HubSpot data into Snowflake, an industry-leading data warehouse, with Snowflake Data Share. It’s a turnkey solution, giving companies a fast and easy solution for integrating and analysing data from two different sources.
Attacat’s View: Ideal for Operations & Marketing teams that need to ensure a high level of data quality within HubSpot, saving time & money by automating the data cleanse process. Allowing them to get on with sparking growth rather than spending time tidying up their data.
Customer-centric
There were some big updates to make HubSpot even more customer-focused than ever before, including customer portals, custom surveys and, most exciting of all, native payment processing.
Customer portals
This update is designed to put the power back in the hands of customers, freeing up more time and resources for your customer support teams. Companies can create a branded customer portal where customers can log in to easily view and manage their support tickets, find answers to their questions in the knowledge base and, generally, have a more empowered service experience. Your support agents can stop answering repetitive questions from customers, and customers will be happy with the speed and ease their queries are resolved – it’s a win-win situation!
Attacat’s view: This benefits Service teams with SLA’s in place, where customer service issues are often handled offline and across departments, where your customers are required to be updated on their issue throughout the process.
Custom surveys
Who doesn’t want to increase customer satisfaction? Well, HubSpot has just made it easier for you to ensure your customers feel valued with the introduction of custom feedback surveys. These can be easily customised to your company’s needs so you can gather insights on what matters most to your business – but for ease, HubSpot also offers pre-built net promoter score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer effort score (CES) surveys. Either way, the easy-to-use built-in dashboards ensure you can see at a glance how your customers feel about your business, instantly picking up on any pain points.
Native payment processing
One of the biggest announcements at INBOUND 21 was the introduction of CRM-powered payment processing, called Payments. Currently only available in the USA, we hope that it’ll expand to the rest of the world soon, as Payments is built natively within the CRM, making the purchase journey much easier for both businesses and customers. You can accept payments within your CRM, meaning there’s no need for multiple tools – you’ll have your website, CRM, reporting, automation and now, payments, all in one place.
Excited by these updates? Want to find out how HubSpot’s new features can help to streamline your business processes? We can help with HubSpot onboarding and management – just get in touch with us today for a free demo or HubSpot audit with one of our experts.
