Key takeaways from HubSpot’s INBOUND24 conference

Nikki Carter • 25 September 2024

HubSpot

11:01

There were two words on everyone’s lips at INBOUND24… and it wasn’t Ryan Reynolds! It was Artificial Intelligence.

INBOUND24 is HubSpot’s mammoth conference. They take over Boston, with a sea of orange. HubSpot is a CRM that brings together your marketing, sales and customer service into one platform.

But Inbound isn’t all about HubSpot. It’s evolved into a major marketing conference with attendees from all over the world.

There was also a running theme of reinvention, and if anyone does know about reinvention, it is Ryan Reynolds. You remember the gangly actor with frosted tips in Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place?

Who is now a world-famous movie star and successful entrepreneur.

He has owned, grown and subsequently sold (for A LOT of dollars!) big brands to even bigger brands. Now, everyone is lining up to know his marketing secrets.

While we couldn’t be at INBOUND24 this year, we scrolled through the feeds, watched the videos, and read the decks. We've put together our key takeaways from the event and are detailing HubSpot’s new additions and improvements.

The key takeaway? HubSpot have upped their game in the AI department and are truly evolving into a smart CRM. AI takes over the tedious, repetitive tasks you hate, and you focus on the jobs you love.

HubSpot has listened to some of their customer’s biggest pain points and implemented solutions that you're going to love. Not only are there completely new tools but there are also new improvements that have left us excited. Plus the inclusion of AI “Agents” means you can put your efforts in where they are needed most.

AI Breeze Agents

On the INBOUND24 stage, HubSpot co-founder and CTO, Dharmesh Shah shared his predictions on the future of AI Agents. He reminded everyone that “AI does not reduce your value. It raises it”.

Launched as Breeze Agents, AI will help you build content, automate prospecting, support customers and analyse social media performance.

Breeze Agents learn from you, your data and your CRM to automate manual tasks. There are multiple agents to choose from, each Agent working as your own virtual assistant so you can focus on the big stuff.

Social Media Agent

The Social Media Agent will review your social media and build better posts that drive engagement.

Key tip when using the “Agents” - use with adult supervision. AI left to their own devices often does not create the best social media posts. Make sure you review the posts! Let the Agents help but not take over.

Content Agent

The Content Agent will automatically generate content using your existing content. This powerful tool now includes being able to generate content for landing pages, podcasts, case studies and blog posts.

Prospecting Agent

The Prospecting Agent will find your ideal contacts in your CRM and deliver personalised content to them.

Customer Agent

The Customer Agent can be trained using approved content so they can resolve customer questions for you. The more you add to your CRM, the more the Agent will learn. The Agent can handle routine queries, leaving more time for your team to handle any complex issues that come through.

Breeze Copilot

ChatSpot is moving into HubSpot and being rebranded as Breeze Copilot. Whilst ChatSpot was great, it wasn’t accessible inside HubSpot. With the new and improved Breeze Copilot, you can now take this feature with you and use it anywhere you are. There is even a Chrome browser extension, making the feature even more accessible.

Breeze Intelligence

Breeze Intelligence is the artist formerly known as Clearbit by HubSpot.

Breeze Intelligence offers features that can help your business drive demand and boost conversion rates.

These features are a great way to capitalise on the data in your CRM and include:

Data enrichment: use and access your data directly within HubSpot
Buyer intent: identify and prioritise high intent customers based on the target market and website activity.
Form shortening: streamline forms while capturing essential data to accurately understand and find leads.

Smart CRM

The biggest advancement in HubSpot’s Smart CRM is for Enterprise customers. It is something that people have been asking for a really long time and it’s finally here!

You can now store Sensitive Data in HubSpot. This is great for industries such as healthcare and financial services. This big move comes off the back of HubSpot offering HIPAA compliance earlier this year.

This feature has been in Beta since April. The addition now opens up huge opportunities to store sensitive data including personal health information.

Our CEO Ryan believes this feature takes HubSpot from a sales and marketing tool to a proper enterprise CRM.

Other new features and updates include:

Quick record create
View meeting and call permission
Edit and delete notes and CRM emails
Unified record page editor
Data setup checklist
AI-assisted insights for reports
Manual CRM backup
Export approvals
Control gradual future releases
View release impact
“New to you” tab
AI Assistant in lists

Something we’re looking forward to is industry templates. This coincides with the theme of HubSpot becoming more customisable. These templates are a recommended set of custom data configurations that reflect specific industries.

Personalised search results are another cool addition to HubSpot. When searching inside the CRM, the results that are related to you are shown first and not just a cookie-cutter search result list.

New improvements to the Hubs

Marketing Hub and Content Hub

Marketing Hub and Content Hub have been quietly rebranded as Marketing+.

The best new addition to the Marketing Hub is the ability to post to Youtube. Yes, video publishing is finally here!

The Marketing Hub was also the next workspace to get a refresh. Now with a single workspace, you can see everything in one place.

Other new additions include:

Analytics Suite so you see all your data in one place and customise for each customer.
The Messaging Insights feature means you can better understand your email campaign’s performance through AI reporting and recommendations.

Improvements include:

Lead scoring: a long-loved feature in HubSpot, lead scoring now has the customisation you’re after. This feature will help you understand who is most likely to convert and identify those that are most likely to purchase.
Dynamic forms: Create higher converting forms with new features including Multi-Step forms and advanced layout customisation.
Google Enhanced Conversions: The latest Google Ads conversions, that allow you to more accurately track conversions. You can now send first-party data to your ad networks.
Personalised Subscriptions: create tailored content experiences for your subscribers based on their interests to improve engagement and retention.

The Content Hub has some solid and worthwhile improvements added to the mix including:

Content Remix now includes case studies, podcasts, and videos. The new case study content type means you can now edit and publish case studies.
Podcast now includes new features that expand functionality and help you to create, manage and share podcasts more effectively.
Brand Voice: AI can sometimes miss the mark when it comes to capturing your unique tone. The latest updates give you the ability to set rules for brand-specific words and phrases.
Memberships and Gated Content: There’s a new reporting dashboard. You can also customise membership assets for registration follow-up, and membership self-registration confirmation.
Content Embed can now integrate CRM data into your website. This is a great tool for those that don’t use HubSpot for their website and merges the smarts from HubSpot into a Wordpress site.

Sales Hub and Operations Hub

There are also a number of improvements to the Sales Hub and Operations Hub that have been released.

The new improvements to the Sales Hub include an improved workspace, selling queues, predictive deal score and deal summaries.

Two of our favourite improvements include:

Guided actions: A new addition to the workspace, guided actions will let you know what you should do next on a deal. In short, they are high-impact, to-do lists that are curated automatically using AI, insights, and lead and deal data.
AI meeting assistant: Prepare for meetings using AI to do the research for you using data from your CRM and the internet. It can also give you your own personal podcast which you can listen to on the way to a meeting so you are up to speed.

Operations Hub now has two new updates to aid in automation, including webhook workflow triggers and the ability to pass data within workflows.

Other updates and enhancements include:

Data sync updates
Data quality enhancements
Dataset improvements and repackaging

The Future of HubSpot

Until now, HubSpot has never been seen as the most customisable CRM out there. Now, not so much. Unfairly so, since it’s featured developer friendly APIs and Custom Objects for many years.

The new features and improvements across the board are all about being able to customise your CRM. AI can help you use your HubSpot data to create better content, find higher converting leads and keep on track with your customers.

Plus of course you get a range of new AI powered improvements. AI that helps you improve your customer experience and optimise your marketing campaigns.

You can now combine people power with AI systems to personalise every customer interaction at scale. Without being a developer. Incredible.

The abilities of HubSpot get bigger and better every year. We can’t wait to see how these new additions and features play out in the market.

Speaking of the future, we will be hosting our final HubSpot User Group event of the year coming up in November.

This event will be all about the Commerce Hub and streamlining your sales. HubSpot payments are a game changer in the eCommerce space for B2B businesses so let’s talk about it.

HubSpot Partners

If you need help to weed through all the latest and greatest from INBOUND24, as HubSpot Partners, we’re here to help. We can help you work out your setup and what tools and features are a right fit for your business.

New to HubSpot? We can help with that too. We can set your business up in HubSpot quickly and as easily as possible.

Get in touch today!

Key takeaways from HubSpot’s INBOUND24 conference