Each year HubSpot hosts INBOUND, the annual conference where connections are made, knowledge is shared and, most excitingly, new HubSpot CRM products and features are announced and launched.
In this blog post, we’ll run through some of the best CRM-related announcements from INBOUND 2021.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
- HubSpot CRM: New Product Features
- HubSpot CRM: Customizable
- HubSpot CRM: Connected
- HubSpot CRM: Customer-Centric
Let’s go.
HubSpot Product Features: CRM Crafted for Growth
HubSpot’s CRM is built on the following principles:
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- Provide a single source of truth to make it easy to align marketing
- Use one intuitive UX to make it easy to adopt
- Use a unified codebase to make it easy to adapt
The announcements at this year’s INBOUND centred on the following things:
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- More customer-centric
- More Connected
- More customizable
Let’s take a look at some of the specific announcements, and what each of these means in practice.
Latest Features: HubSpot Customizable CRM
HubSpot has announced four powerful new features to help you customize your CRM:
- Association Labels
Deal with the right people at the right time, and automate processes more efficiently.
Whereas previous contacts could only really be associated with company records, you can now detail more specific connections.
Association labels provide context about where each contact sits within an organisational hierarchy. You can describe the association too: for example, multiple contacts under one company with different roles (billing, contractor, etc).
- Sandboxes
There’s no feeling worse than accidentally pushing live a change that breaks a client site.
With sandboxes, Enterprise level users will have access to an all-new controlled environment where changes can be tested before going live.
You’ll be able to build and test workflows, integrations, pages and so on before pushing them live. And because what you see is how it will look if you choose to publish, you have full confidence in your changes.
- Permission Sets
Managing access permissions in large organisations can be difficult.
Now with permission sets, admins can customise permissions in granular detail, granting the right level of access to each and every person.
Permission sets can be customized based on roles, teams, or individual users.
- Business Units
Making it easier to stay effortlessly on brand, business units gives you the power to separate multiple brands in one HubSpot account.
You can organise domains, branding and other account settings into business units in a shared HubSpot account, allowing you to target and tailor marketing by brand, and to analyse the performance of each unit individually.
Latest Features: HubSpot Connected CRM
HubSpot has announced four powerful updates to existing tools to help you better align and connect the data at the core of your business.
- Behavioural Analytics
Targeting contacts based on their behaviour makes for more personalised and effective communication.
Where behavioural analytics has always been used by marketers to trigger emails, display ads, and otherwise target contacts based on their behaviour, HubSpot's new custom behavioural events power up this functionality, letting you track and report on any activity from within the CRM.
- Forecasting
Tracking deals in one place prevents duplication of efforts, and the updates here are designed to streamline this tracking process.
Deal split also allows multiple reps to customise splits, evenly or by percentage, bringing further clarity.
- Custom Report Building
HubSpot is renowned for its powerful custom reports, and they just got even better.
You can now include data from new data sources including media, sales emails, sequences, subscriptions, and other custom behavioural events as detailed previously.
- Launch of Operations Hub Enterprise
This is perhaps the biggest announcement from INBOUND 2021!
Existing HubSpot Enterprise clients asked to be stewards of their data, and HubSpot responded. It's now possible to create datasets with custom properties without having to dig for the data and to use formulas to build datasets within the CRM.
Together these tools let you tell a full story of your data and provide clients with more consistent, compelling, and actionable insights.
Latest Features: HubSpot Customer-Centric CRM
HubSpot has announced four powerful new features to transform your customer experience.
- Custom Surveys
Surveys are a great way to garner information and insights from customers, and HubSpot's custom surveys just got a lot better.
You can now customize the look and feel of your surveys, choose from more question types, and use drag-and-drop functionality to seamlessly put them together.
Keeping surveys on-brand ensures a more coherent brand experience for your customers, and an ability to save analytics for each survey means full access to the data and insights you collect.
- Customer Portal
This is a Service Hub Pro Plus feature.
Client's customers can now review their own support tickets, allowing them to see progress, attach supporting files, and write responses. This increased involvement and visibility reduce the risk of frustration.
- Payments Functionality
This is only available for Starter+ customers in the US.
For the first time ever you can now enable checkout using HubSpot payments. Described as 'revolutionary', HubSpot's addition of payment functionality directly in the CRM removes the need for third-party payment processors.
HubSpot payments have all the features of well-known payment systems and are built on Stripe: a reliable and powerful platform.
You'll be able to accept cards or ACH, and the system can process everything from one-time payments to recurring monthly memberships.
- Dynamic Content Using Custom Objects
This feature allows content to be dynamically populated based on custom object population data, meaning listings can be pulled in and generated automatically after initial setup.
Think of real estate listings where lots of listings need to be created, updated, and maintained on an ongoing basis: doing this manually is incredibly time-consuming; using dynamically generated content makes things far more efficient.
Functionality That Elevates
There you have it: a rundown of the new HubSpot CRM features and functionality announced at this year’s INBOUND conference.
As you can see, HubSpot’s ongoing mission is to make its CRM as powerful and versatile as possible. As a HubSpot user, you have access to the tools designed with the sole purpose of improving online marketing for businesses and customers alike.
The focus this year - customer-centric, customizable, connected - speaks to HubSpot’s goal of putting the power in your hands to attract, delight, and convert customers.
If you’d like to learn more about the HubSpot CRM and how it could help your business, head over to our contact page and book a meeting with one of our team. We’ll talk you through your options.
