The New HubSpot Product Launches Announced At Inbound 2018

Over 20,000 marketers from around the globe descended on Boston this week for HubSpot’s annual conference, Inbound.  Each year, the event grows in size, as does the HubSpot product!

One of the big highlights of the event are Darmesh Shah’s and Brian Halligan’s - The founders of HubSpot - Keynote presentation, during which they discussed the fact that the marketing funnel traditionally used by HubSpot to model the inbound funnel had cracks in it and needs to evolve to stay with the ever changing way that buyers like to buy.

They introduced the Flywheel, a model based on the fact that marketing, sales and customer services all need to work together and feed each other in order to grow a business.  A summary can be seen in this video.

During his Keynote, Brian hinted at changes to new enhancements and products that were either released that day or were in Beta and coming soon, all designed to support and get the flywheel spinning.  

As a HubSpot partner, we’ve been lucky enough to have a sneak preview and try these out and I have to say, they are world class! It puts HubSpot on another level - but that’s not surprising considering the $80m that they’ve spent this year alone on R&D and product development.

So here’s a summary of the changes to expect:

Hubspot Platform Expansion

HubSpot are the first to admit that until now, their target market was firmly in the SME bracket, but not all SME’s - Really they were appealing to companies of the size between 20-200 employees.  They wanted to fix this so over this last year they have built packages on all three of their Hubs (Marketing, Sales and Service) and can support all businesses irrespective of their size and stage of growth.  So they’ve standardised their offering across each of the Hubs with Free, Starter, Pro and Enterprise products. You can see what’s included in each of the different tiers on HubSpot’s pricing page.

HubSpot Enterprise

HubSpot realised that their Enterprise tier, simply did not offer enough differentiation between the Pro product and that it did not have enough features in order to support the much larger organisations - Enterprise has been the main focus of their development this year and over 20 product enhancements or additions have been announced making Hubspot enterprise a serious competitor over some of the more traditionally Enterprise offerings such as Marketo and Pardot

Hubspot Video

With more and more video being consumed every day over the internet, video is a medium that every marketer simply has to adopt. A major product announcement is HubSpot video which is available to both Pro and Enterprise customers.

It gives the ability to host and manage video files within the platform with features such as being able to put CTA’s (Call to actions) and forms within the video. They’ve made It super easy,(1 click) to add a video to a social media, blogs, web or landing page and gives all the reporting metrics that you’d expect.  You can even trigger workflows based upon the interaction of the user.

Sales Hub and Service Hub users can now easily record and send 1:1 video’s and send in emails or put on support pages in order to enhance their relationship with their prospect or clients.

Marketing Hub Enhancements  (Enterprise, unless stated otherwise)

Teams - Pro and Enterprise Level - You can now enhance the organisational structure of your HubSpot users, putting them into multiple teams which helps with security and reporting.  Pro level can have up to 10 teams and Enterprise up to 50

Custom Analytics Views -  This gives greater reporting functionality over the traffic coming to your website and segments can be created such as geographical or URL structure

Membership Driven Content (In Beta) - Different content can be shown only to a select group of users for example, members of a specific list or paying customers, which opens up the opportunity to build membership sites within the product portal

Email Frequency Safefuards (Coming Soon)  As your portal grows and multiple automated workflows are built, it’s easy to send out too many emails to the same person - I’ve seen one example where I had 6 emails from one company within a 30 minute period.  You will soon be able to have safeguards put in to prevent this happening and prioritise the most important emails

Continuous Testing -  Forget A/B testing,  Enterprise level users will be able to run continuous tests across assets such as leadflows and landing pages with HubSpot optimising for the best results at all times. This has been launched on the Leadflow product to start with but will be expanding soon

YouTube Integration - Giving you reporting over your companies YouTube channel

Predictive Lead Scoring - This has been enhanced with more factors coming in to play to increase the accuracy and effectiveness

Single Sign On - Making it easier to get access for your team and to enhances security

Custom Bots - Increased chatbot functionality, such as lead routing and booking appointments.

Slack integration - Allowing notifications to be sent to your teams Slack channels through workflows

Company based workflows - (Pro & Enterprise) - Allowing you to trigger actions based upon company names

Smart content reporting (Pro & Enterprise)- Showing you the effectiveness of your personalised content

Customer report builder (Pro & Enterprise) - including cross object reporting allowing you to create more sophisticated reports

Sales Hub Announcements (Enterprise only)

Playbooks - Building a full suite of instructions, best practices and knowledge resources for your sales team to use.  Allowing you to standardise and improve the sales experience

eSignature - Forget printing off PDF’s, signing and sending back - Electronic signatures makes the acceptance process smoother

Approval Management for Quotes - Set rules for quotes that meet certain criteria such as discounted proposals

Call transcription and recording - Any recorded calls will be automatically transcribed and put into the contacts timeline

Quota management - Set individual goals for each of your sales team

Revenue Tracking - Making it easier to manage recurring revenue and renewal processes

Service Hub Announcements - (Enterprise only)

Goals (In Beta) - Give your service teams goals, such as response time, ticket volume and report on the targets

Health Scoring (Coming Soon) - Helping you identify customers who are at risk of leaving you and prompt you to intervene

You’ll appreciate that there were a lot of announcements during Inbound '18, and we’ve not (yet) had a time to get our hands on some of these feature to report fully on them. But watch this space! As we learn more, we’ll post details of each feature, how it works and why we’re excited by them!