Inbound 2021: all product updates at a glance

From Dharmesh Shah to Oprah Winfrey and from Yamini Rangan to Spike Lee. Inbound 2021 is already upon us. Several days VOL immersed in the world of HubSpot where tens of thousands of attendees found inspiration with each other on business transformation. Educational keynotes and conversations with each other provided great learnings and take-aways to take your business to the next level.

Of course, inbound wouldn't be inbound if HubSpot product updates were also dwelled upon. We have already seen some brilliant updates this year, but the product updates announced during the annual inbound event are just a tad more spectacular than the "regular" updates throughout the year. Read on quickly because I've listed them for you.

HubSpot customer portal

The HubSpot Service Hub is a brilliant part of the growth suite. With it, you give your customers the ability to collect feedback. In the form of tickets, in which they ask for help, support or insights. And on the other hand by actively asking for feedback by sending out NPS surveys, for example.

The missing part here is the self-reliance of your customers. Especially in the case of tickets, it's often a one-way street. Someone sends in a ticket and your organization deals with it. Interim updates regarding these tickets are often manual. Sending a response back by email. And if you have an impatient customer, you often receive messages asking for a status update.

These things are now a thing of the past. Recently there is a customer portal functionality added to the Service Hub (currently still in the BETA stage). This gives your customers insight into the status of all tickets at all times. They have a central environment with an overview of all tickets including the communication around it.

No more constant requests for updates. A complete overview at all times with the customer portal.

Business Units

Does your organization operate in different business units? Perhaps different (sub)brands that fall under the organization? But do you also want to continue to identify cross- and up-sell opportunities between those business units or different brands?

Then this update is very interesting. With the new business unit add-on HubSpot gives you the ability to neatly segment all assets within HubSpot. You can easily segment all landing pages, forms, emails, etc... by business unit so that the portal remains clear. This also applies to contact or company data so that this remains separate per business unit, but you always have the option to add it to more business units. For example, in the case of cross-and-up-sell as described above. In addition, reports can easily be segmented based on business units while also being laid across all business units for the overall picture.

HubSpot Payments

Money! We sometimes like to talk about it, sometimes we don't. But there is no question that money is an important part of business. Your products or services cost money. Simple.

So at some point during the customer relationship, the conversation will have to be about money. And specifically, payment. We can facilitate virtually the entire customer journey through HubSpot. From unknown visitor to lead, into the sales pipeline with a new customer as the "end result." And what comes with becoming a customer is, of course, the payment component. Payment will have to be made for the agreed upon products or services. Through clever integrations, HubSpot was also able to facilitate this to some extent, but these solutions were never really part of the HubSpot growth suite itself.

Until now. With the launch of HubSpot payments, it is possible to set up this final step in the sales process in HubSpot as well. Give your customers directly the option to pay via credit card or bank transfer. And, of course, not only at the end of a long sales process.

HubSpot payments also allows you to add these options to your website. For example, do you have paid content that people are only allowed to view after payment? Perfect for virtual events and merchandise, for example. With HubSpot payments, it's now possible.

Note the HubSpot payment options are currently not very specifically focused on the Dutch market. So don't expect to be able to send your (potential) customers an iDeal or Tikkie link through HubSpot. But who knows what the future holds ;)

Sandbox

ABT. Always be testing! Before you launch a slick marketing campaign, of course you test everything thoroughly. Are all the texts right? Images? Links? Then click publish and go with it! You can also test your website thoroughly before publishing changes, using the preview option or the staging functionalities.. However, as HubSpot users, we do not have an environment in which we can also test on a CRM level. A workflow to automate certain things within your contact database or sales pipeline, for example. You obviously don't want to run those tests on your current database. A small error can easily creep in. And such things are not always easy to fix without creating a huge workload!

Fortunately, all Enterprise accounts now have the option of setting up 1 or more test environments. In other words, the secure sandbox. With the click of a button, HubSpot creates a copy of your current production environment. Including all properties, themes and templates.

Note: HubSpot will not transfer data such as customer or company information from your live portal to the sandbox portal. In addition, there is also no synch option available for now in which you can, for example, publish that well-tested workflow back into your live portal. HubSpot is expected to make some strides in this in the coming period. Until then, at least you can play it safe in the sandbox.

Operations Hub Enterprise

A few months ago, HubSpot launched its new Hub. The Operations Hub was born. With the Enterprise version (available Nov. 1), data analysts have business intelligence capabilities at their disposal to create even more accurate reports and make data-driven decisions. This combined with the already existing data-synch capabilities with now more than 50+ tools brings that single source of truth very close!

2022 and beyond!

With these updates, HubSpot is taking big steps to help organizations collaborate even better. Both internally cross-teams as well as collaboration between your customers, suppliers and partners. Also, definitely don't think HubSpot is sitting still right now and is fine with it. There is much more on the horizon in 2022!