Greetings from INBOUND 2022!
Much of the Simple Machines team is here in Boston for HubSpot’s annual event. As always, along with the keynotes and breakouts designed to educate and inspire, the HubSpot product team has announced several new product features and improvements.
The theme this year is all about addressing what HubSpot calls the Crisis of Disconnection. The idea goes something like this.
Businesses are struggling to connect with prospects and customers, connect systems and connect community. To break out of this phenomenon, we need to move toward a new era: the Age of the Connected Customer. The foundation of this effort starts with a more connected CRM platform that creates better, more customized experiences across the customer lifecycle.
Whether you can relate to this challenge, or you’re just interested in learning what HubSpot is rolling out this year to make your life easier, we’re taking a break in between sessions to provide a roundup (in no particular order) of what we think will be the most impactful product announcements from INBOUND this year.
Customer Journey Analytics
Available with Marketing Hub Enterprise (In Beta)
Even with robust dashboards and reporting, it’s tough to visualize your customer’s end-to-end journey. What touchpoints are moving them forward, and where are they falling off? What moments actually lead to conversions?
With HubSpot’s new customer journey analytics, marketers have a visualization of their customer’s entire end-to-end journey. This tool will help provide deep insights into how to optimize for conversions that haven’t been as readily available in previous reports.
Custom Object Builder
Available with Enterprise (In Beta)
We’ve written about custom objects before. If you’ve had experience using them, you know that creating them is a pretty resource-intensive task that requires enough coding a developer is typically needed.
With the new custom object builder, you can easily customize data models around your business — rather than trying to configure your business model to work with HubSpot. Because the update requires no code, customization will be much less cumbersome. Admins can define the name, plural name and first property of the custom object without involving a developer.
Payment Schedules
Available in Quotes (In Beta)
HubSpot recently rolled out its payments feature, which allows users to easily collect payments directly from their CRM without third-party integrations.
With payment schedules, merchants selling services can now break large bills down into a series of installments and attach amounts, names and due dates to each. This should be especially useful for B2B service providers and companies with retainers and other types of recurring payment arrangements.
Data Sync Health
Available with Operations Hub Free and Starter
One of the biggest challenges when it comes to executing a revenue operations strategy is ensuring that, as you scale, your teams and systems maintain (and stay aligned on) consistent data.
With this new feature, you have a more useful view of integration health and can better diagnose syncing issues. Within the app’s sync settings, HubSpot has included a new tab called ‘Sync health’. Here, you can see which integrations are in sync, excluded from sync, or failing to sync.
Product Sync
Available with Operations Hub Free and Starter
As your business grows, the number of apps in your tech stack invariably multiplies. With Product Sync, you can now connect third-party apps to your HubSpot product library to run a bidirectional data sync, ensuring data is up-to-date and consistent between your apps and your CRM.
Where in the past the feature was only available for Quickbooks and Shopify, this feature now allows more than 20 data sync apps to run product library syncing.
And fortunately, product sync setup is easy. If you’ve set up any other data syncs through the app marketplace, you’ll be familiar with the process.
Data Quality Command Center
Available with Pro & Enterprise (In Beta)
Maintaining a clean and accurate database is easier said than done. One reason for this is, that even in a centralized CRM, different data types live in different places.
With the new data quality command center, you can get snapshot insights on the health of all your HubSpot data in one place. From spotting unused properties to uncovering integration chokepoints, this helpful new feature lets you get ahead of data problems before they become serious issues.
Automation Recommendations
Available with Pro & Enterprise (In Beta)
Wouldn’t it be cool if your HubSpot CRM could just clean itself?
HubSpot’s Artificial intelligence constantly scans your database for problems and recommends automations to fix them. So rather than having to manually accept suggestions one by one, you can address issues quickly and easily, saving you time and letting you focus on more impactful work.
What’s Next?
While these are just some of the product announcements made public at INBOUND this year, there will be more to come and we’ll be sharing resources on social and through our newsletter (if you haven’t already, you can subscribe at the top of this page).
Also, stay tuned for our team’s key takeaways learnings from the sessions we attended this week, which we’ll post in the coming weeks.
If you’re interested in discussing how HubSpot’s newest products and features might benefit your business, we’d love to talk.
