INBOUND 2024 once again proved to be an unmissable event for HubSpot users and partners, delivering crucial insights and innovations that drive growth.
As always, product updates took centre stage, aligning with the event’s theme of "reinventing for growth" with solutions that are easy to use, fast to adopt, and seamlessly unified with data.
This year, we at Huble were one of the main sponsors at INBOUND for the second year in a row, showing our commitment and confidence in the HubSpot ecosystem.
This article will explore the major product updates unveiled at INBOUND 2024, why they are critical in the current business landscape, and most importantly, how they can help you grow your business even further.
The Top Updates You Need to Know About
Table of Contents
- Breeze - HubSpot Rebrands AI Tools
- Breeze Intelligence - Here’s What Happened To Clearbit
- Your Highly Sensitive Data is Now Secure in HubSpot
- Personalise Your Preference Pages
- The Forms Experience has been Reinvented
- Even more customisation in Workflows
Breeze - HubSpot Rebrands AI Tools
AI tools are still in their early stages, with only early adopters stepping into this space to gain market share through faster, more efficient processes.
But with any new innovation, there are risks.
These early adopters are navigating a steep learning curve, with few true experts to guide them.
Mistakes and tech debt are part of the journey, and companies will need to accept that in exchange for the potential rewards.
On the other hand, many companies will choose to wait until AI matures before fully embracing these technologies.
While some companies are taking cautious steps in AI adoption, others are moving forward by incorporating AI into their core systems to stay competitive.
HubSpot has rebranded its collection of AI tools as Breeze, making it easier for businesses to leverage these innovations in their day-to-day operations, simplifying complex tasks, and enabling them to operate more efficiently.
There are two core elements to Breeze.
The first is Breeze Copilot. A copilot is defined as "a qualified pilot who assists or relieves the main pilot but is not in command."
In our context, this means you remain in control of HubSpot, while Breeze Copilot is designed to assist and take over certain tasks, easing your workload.
Copilot is a generative AI tool, like chatGPT, accessible from every page in HubSpot.
Depending on which page you're on, you can engage Breeze Copilot, and it will assist you based on the context of that page and what you're trying to achieve.
It can also read the data on the page, so if you're on a specific company record or deal, for example, it can provide summaries and other helpful insights.
And then there are Breeze Agents. An agent is “an individual or entity authorised to act on behalf of another”.
In the world of AI and HubSpot, agents are tools that are designed to take care of repetitive tasks so your team can focus on the bigger picture. There are currently four agents.
Social Media Agent
HubSpot users can use the social media agent to generate posts that are perfectly tailored to their business, audience, and brand, streamlining the content creation process.
Social media managers no longer have to worry about crafting posts from scratch, simply review and approve the suggestions.
With the social media agent, you can drive consistent engagement by creating regular posts that resonate with your audience and reinforce your brand message.
It even recommends the best times to post for maximum impact.
Beyond saving time, the agent taps into data-driven insights, analysing past performance, business details, and industry best practices to improve the effectiveness of your social media content, providing benefits that go beyond manual efforts.
Content Agent
HubSpot users can rely on the content agent to quickly generate high-quality content that attracts and converts leads while maintaining your brand voice and leveraging existing CRM data through a guided process.
For content creators, the agent simplifies the creation of landing pages that drive conversions, helps diversify content with podcasts, showcases customer success stories through case studies, and even produces SEO-optimised blog posts, without the usual hassle.
Marketing managers will appreciate how the content agent uses both internal and external data to ensure that every piece of content aligns with business goals, attracts the right audience, and generates leads.
It takes the guesswork out of content strategy, allowing your team to focus on scaling results.
Prospecting Agent
Salespeople using HubSpot's Sales Hub can rely on the prospecting agent to engage leads by automating the research and personalisation of communications, simplifying the outreach process.
You can choose to review and approve each outreach before it begins or let the agent run autonomously.
By identifying companies and contacts in your CRM that align with your ideal customer profile and target personas, the prospecting agent helps you focus on high-potential prospects, saving you time and effort.
It develops personalised outreach strategies by researching each target company and contact to gain a deep understanding of their business needs.
It also monitors signals of intent and activity, crafting tailored emails based on its research and CRM context, ensuring it reaches out at the best moment to drive engagement.
Customer Agent
Imagine having a customer service rep who knows everything about your business and is always ready to assist. This is what the customer agent delivers to HubSpot users.
Once trained on your approved content, the customer agent can handle routine queries, allowing customer service reps to focus on more complex issues.
Training the agent takes just minutes, using content from your knowledge base, website, and blog.
It then provides natural, personalised customer service that aligns with your brand, using only approved content, eliminating the risk of inaccurate information, and even citing sources to build customer trust.
For customer service teams, the agent ensures seamless handoffs by managing repetitive queries while routing more complex issues directly to your team. This keeps you in control while maximising efficiency.
Plus, it uses data-driven insights to track resolution rates, handoffs, and customer sentiment, giving your team the intelligence needed to improve service quality continuously
By unifying data across the platform, Breeze ensures that your teams are working with accurate, up-to-date information, making it easier to make informed decisions.
It is easy to use, has a fast time to value, and is powered by unified data, allowing teams to quickly take advantage of its benefits.
This helps businesses streamline operations, improve customer experiences, and ultimately accelerate growth by focusing on innovating and scaling strategically.
Breeze Intelligence - Here’s What Happened To Clearbit
In November 2023, HubSpot acquired Clearbit, a customer intelligence platform that offered data enrichment and intent data tools and services for sales and marketing teams.
The platform used artificial intelligence and machine learning to provide detailed information on companies and their customers, including contact information, demographics, and online behaviour.
Now, just over a half year later, Clearbit has been built into the HubSpot platform, as it does with all of its acquisitions, unlike its competitors who cobble together their acquisitions instead.
This comes at a time when many businesses are struggling to deliver personalised outreach at the right moment, often because they lack clear insights into their target accounts.
On top of that, relying on multiple third-party intelligence tools often leads to confusion, with tangled databases that are hard to manage and even harder to trust for accuracy.
With Breeze Intelligence, businesses can simplify their demand generation and increase conversions throughout the funnel, all from a single, integrated platform.
This removes the guesswork, helping teams focus on engaging the right prospects at the right time.
With Breeze Intelligence you get access to data enrichment, buyer intent data, and
form shortening.
Data Enrichment
HubSpot's new data enrichment tools allow HubSpot users to improve, and enrich their existing data by automatically completing missing data fields.
This helps marketing, sales, and service teams to have a more contextual view of the individual they are engaging with, improving conversion rates and customer experiences.
HubSpot automatically enriches company and contact profiles across over 40 properties, drawing from millions of records.
This eliminates the need for your team to spend hours or even days of manual data entry, saving valuable time.
This enrichment can also be tailored by users through enrichment settings.
The terms and conditions specify a few guidelines around data enrichment, such as the number of credits allocated to each customer, with 1 credit used per record.
Additionally, automatic and continuous re-enrichment is available for customers with 1,000 and 10,000 credit SKUs, ensuring scalable enrichment options based on your plan.
Buyer Intent Data
These days, most prospects remain anonymous until they’re ready to make a purchase, filling out forms only when they’ve reached the final stages of their decision-making process.
With traditional lead capture becoming less effective, businesses need a new way to identify potential buyers early on.
By analysing intent signals, behaviours that indicate a prospect’s interest in purchasing, salespeople can prioritise leads more effectively, focusing resources on accounts that are most likely in-market right now.
This approach helps accelerate the sales cycle and boosts ROI by targeting the right prospects at the right time, even before they officially raise their hand.
With Breeze Intelligence, these high-intent customers are identified based on your target market and their website activity.
To do so, you first set your target markets using key company attributes such as location, employee count, and revenue.
Next, you set intent criteria by choosing which pages on your site (for example pricing pages or case studies) are the most important for signalling intent, specifying the minimum required number of visits and visitors from accounts, as well as the recency of that visit activity.
Once complete, you’ll get access to an interactive list of high-fit companies showing intent that allows you to filter by companies in your target market(s) and, depending on whether you’re focused on net-new or existing accounts, either in or not in your HubSpot CRM.
It’s important to note that to capture first-party data, a tracking code is required, something that’s already standard for companies using HubSpot.
Additionally, while the feature provides insights on the top 100 visitors for a selected timeframe, it’s available in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Japanese, ensuring accessibility for a broad range of users.
Form Shortening
Form shortening plays an important role in reducing friction during the lead capture process.
Marketers aim to keep forms brief to improve conversion rates, but there’s always a balance to strike, ensuring they capture the essential data needed for follow-up.
It's all about optimising the form to collect the right information while keeping the experience as seamless as possible for potential leads.
With HubSpot’s Form Shortening, marketers can minimise the amount of information required from prospects upfront, improving conversion rates, and creating a smoother, more user-friendly experience while still capturing essential data through other methods like data enrichment.
It increases form completion rates by reducing the number of fields and ensuring high-quality data collection without too many redundant fields.
Form shortening is currently available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Japanese.
Your Highly Sensitive Data is Now Secure in HubSpot
The ability to store sensitive data, including personal health information (PHI) and highly sensitive data like social security numbers, is critical for organisations that handle confidential information.
As data protection laws like GDPR and HIPAA continue to evolve, businesses must ensure they have secure, compliant solutions for managing such sensitive information.
While earlier this year, HubSpot became HIPAA compliant, allowing healthcare providers, insurance companies, telehealth services, and other entities handling sensitive patient data to leverage HubSpot's comprehensive CRM, sales, and marketing features without the risk of non-compliance, this new update further extends the type of data that can be stored in HubSpot.
Enterprise customers can now store highly sensitive data, including PHI and social security numbers, in HubSpot to power their go-to-market, manage compliance, and prevent disruptions.
This update allows businesses in sectors like healthcare, finance, and government to operate with confidence, knowing their data is protected under industry-leading security measures.
This capability allows companies to expand their offerings to clients who require strict compliance, opening up new growth opportunities in highly regulated industries.
Personalise Your Preference Pages
We've seen that historically, managing subscriptions in HubSpot has been a source of frustration for many users, leading to subscriber churn as a result of a poor subscription experience.
The issues with HubSpot's Preference Centre stemmed from its limited ability to support more complex subscription setups.
While it allowed for basic subscription types, it struggled with more granular, hierarchical preferences.
For example, if customers wanted to subscribe to marketing materials specific to regions or categories, such as a particular country or subcategories within commercial property, HubSpot's default system couldn't accommodate these nuanced preferences.
As a result, we've had to implement solutions like creating custom properties on contact records and building custom subscription centres to achieve more advanced segmentation.
While these customisations allowed users to update their preferences and enabled HubSpot to segment and target them with the right content, they were by no means a perfect solution or a long-term fix.
Although it may seem like a small feature, HubSpot’s new custom preference centre is a game-changer for larger, more complex companies considering HubSpot.
It allows businesses to create personalised preference pages for different segments, giving subscribers control over the types of content and communication they want to receive.
By giving users more control over their preferences, businesses can reduce the likelihood of total unsubscribes, as subscribers can opt to receive the content that’s most relevant to them rather than cutting off communication entirely.
This improves the overall subscriber experience and helps businesses better understand their audience’s preferences and behaviours.
As a result, companies can deliver more targeted and meaningful content, leading to higher engagement, improved brand loyalty, and sustained growth.
For larger organisations, this level of customisation can make all the difference when deciding on a platform like HubSpot.
The Forms Experience has been Reinvented
HubSpot’s reinvented Forms experience introduces features designed to help marketers create forms that convert better and align with their brand identity, all while reducing visitor friction and maximising lead generation.
This includes multi-step forms, advanced styling options, conditional logic, redirects, CRM validation, spam protection, and form shortening - all aimed at making the user experience more intuitive and tailored.
Multi-step forms, for example, break down what might otherwise be a long, overwhelming process into manageable steps.
By guiding users through smaller sections, marketers can significantly improve form completion rates and create a more user-friendly experience.
Advanced styling and layout customisation let marketers create forms that perfectly match their brand’s look and feel, ensuring a visually appealing and engaging experience for users.
Conditional logic allows businesses to go a step further, tailoring each user’s journey by showing or hiding fields based on their responses. This personalisation makes the form process more relevant and efficient for prospects.
Conditional redirects take personalisation even further by directing users to specific pages or actions based on their form submissions. Whether it’s offering a demo or routing high-value leads to a sales rep, this feature ensures users are directed to the most appropriate next step.
CRM validation ensures that the data collected is accurate and ready to be synced with the CRM, enhancing data quality and reducing errors. Spam submission prevention, meanwhile, helps ensure that the leads you capture are genuine and valuable, protecting data quality and the time of your sales and marketing teams.
Finally, form shortening helps simplify the process even further, creating a smoother experience for the user while still collecting essential information through complementary tools like CRM validation and data enrichment.
For businesses, these updates represent a smarter, more efficient approach to lead generation that can make a real impact on engagement and growth.
Even more customisation in Workflows
HubSpot workflows provide a wide range of automation capabilities, from basic task creation and email management to complex data transformations and third-party system integrations.
Recent advancements have expanded these capabilities, enabling users to better organise data, generate valuable insights, and perform sophisticated data transformations.
The improvements within workflow actions can now support even bi-directional syncing with external systems, allowing for seamless automation across various business processes.
Whether for simple in-house tasks or complex cross-platform operations, HubSpot's workflow features offer comprehensive solutions to simplify and improve business efficiency.
How Huble can help you leverage these updates
These latest innovations mark an exciting new chapter in HubSpot’s evolution, reinforcing its mission to empower businesses to grow better by simplifying tools, improving accessibility, and unifying data.
With these updates, companies have even greater opportunities to simplify their operations and improve their growth, but the real power lies in using them effectively.
That’s where we come in.
We’re here to guide you in making the most of these tools, ensuring they’re implemented in a way that truly drives results and helps your business grow.
For a deeper dive into these updates, be sure to watch our on-demand webinar, where we share insights and strategies to make the most of these powerful new tools.
If you’re ready to take the next step, speak to our team today to explore how we can help you unlock even greater growth.
