INBOUND22 Updates - Introducing the Connected Customer

HubSpot has once again inspired businesses to grow at their annual INBOUND event which brings together thought leaders from over 161 countries across marketing, sales, customer success, and revenue operations.?

It’s a community gathering for visionaries who are passionate to bring more thoughtfulness into the buyer/consumer relationship. This year we have been privileged to have Darren Leishman representing Spitfire Inbound in Boston, as well as having the team based in South Africa participating online.

The Connected Customer

If there is one overarching theme that the HubSpot leadership team emphasised at their keynote, it is that we need to be taking into consideration the crisis of disconnection that many organisations around the world are in, and it is time to move towards the age of the connected customer. This means that we need to move towards a different kind of solution and playbook to grow and to lead the drive from customer management to customer connection.

Inbound is evolving and we need to find new ways to engage with customers and prospects. The HubSpot platform is central to this as it is designed to unite your data on a commerce-powered, connected CRM Platform that helps you easily deliver flexible, customised experiences with the connected Hubs. Essentially, not only are we talking about a connected platform, but also connected applications.

By a connected platform we are referring to the ability to connect all your data and systems through the only commerce-powered CRM platform. This will help you to cut costs and complexity, and delight customers with the ability to transact when and where they want. Some of the features are payments, data and data quality as well as advances in reporting.

When we are referring to connected applications we are referring to HubSpot’s Hubs .

HubSpot's Hubs have the ability to delight customers with a connected, customised experience so they feel known and valued from awareness to advocacy.

This allows you to drive deeper connections with customers and establish more growth through unparalleled experiences designed around customers needs, not your metrics -- all while reducing your costs.

Essentially you are able to spend less time, money, and resources connecting your data and systems with a crafted, all-on-one CRM Platform. Some of the features are customer journey analytics, Campaigns 2.0, Sales Customisations and more.

Moving on to product releases we are excited about - some of you may already have been able to access through Beta or Early Release, but there are some exciting new betas and live releases coming too!

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COMMERCE

Payment schedules is now live! A payment schedule allows merchants selling services to break down a large bill into a series of instalments, each with their own due date, amount, and name. Please note that these are only available in the new CMS based quote templates - not the legacy quote templates and is separate to the ability to conduct transactions using HubSpot payments which is still only available in the US.

OPERATIONS HUB

Product and Invoice sync through data sync are no longer limited to Quickbooks and Shopify.?

Product sync is live and will connect third-party apps to your HubSpot product library to run a data sync bidirectionally. Setting product sync up is just as easy as setting up any other data sync through the app marketplace.

Invoice sync is still in beta. Before, Data Sync worked with contacts, companies, and deals. With Invoice Sync, you can sync your invoices one-way from third-party apps (Quickbooks, Dynamics 365, NetSuite, etc.) to HubSpot. This expands beyond just Quickbooks Online, and further embeds it in the data sync framework.

Get the complete picture of your business and let actual revenue power marketing, sales and services insights in HubSpot.

The last Operations Hub update is data sync health. This allows you to understand integration health and diagnose syncing issues quickly and easily, to ensure your systems and teams stay aligned around consistent data as you scale.

Inside the app's sync settings, we've added a new tab called 'Sync health'. This will show you which integrations are insync, excluded from sync, or failing to sync.

DEVELOPER IMPROVEMENTS

Developer sandboxes are in beta! This is a huge win for all sales and services enterprise customers.?

A development sandbox is an isolated environment in which a developer can confidently build and test early proof of concept development work before implementing them in their standard sandbox or production account. When new development sandboxes are created, they have all the same features and CRM object definitions as the customer’s production account.

Another beta that will be exciting for all developers with sales and services enterprise accounts is the Projects GitHub integration! An exciting update as developers can use GitHub as the source of record for their HubSpot Project’s codebase. They can collaborate with their teams using familiar GitHub tools and workflows and trigger project builds by pushing code to their repositories.

Debugging is the third of four updates for sales and service enterprise users and will be in beta.

The final of the developer updates for sales and enterprise users is the CRM card builder.?

HubSpot now offers developers the ability to craft new CRM cards that will make it easier for CRM users to do their jobs. The new CRM Card Builder tool provides an interactive interface for developers to easily develop the necessary JSON payloads to deploy custom CRM cards in the middle panel of the HubSpot platform.?

Moreover, developers can also use these CRM cards on custom objects or display custom object data over other records.

DATA MANAGEMENT AND QUALITY

One of the updates that you may already have experienced that is live is the Cleaner Import in all hubs at all levels. This flags and resolves data errors before they are published to the CRM - less manual work and less reactive problem-solving down the road.

There are four updates that are in beta around data management and quality.

1. Property validations (all Hubs) enforces consistency and is key to keeping your data clean over time.? Property validations give you more control over the data that reps enter manually without adding annoying process or procedures that can slow them down. This results in fewer inconsistencies in the database, less friction in the flywheel, and a smoother customer experience! Have a look at Kyle Jepson’s LinkedIn video where he introduces this update.

2. Data model overview is also in beta for all hubs. Data quality starts with a good data structure and the data model feature makes it easy to visualise how your data is organised in HubSpot. Watch Kyle Jepson on LinkedIn as he introduces this feature.

3. Custom Object Builder is available to Enterprise users in beta. With custom objects, your CRM setup can be as unique as your business and you can customise your data model around your company and not the other way around. The new custom object builder empowers you with a simple, intuitive way to build your custom objects. No code required. It allows an admin to define the name, plural name, and first property of a custom object. It requires them to use separate tools to manage associations, create custom properties, and set up customisations.

4. Data Quality Command Centre is in beta to Ops Hub Pro and Enterprise users and many of you may already have access to this feature. In the data quality command centre you are able to get an at-a-glance overview of insights on the health of all of your HubSpot data in one place. It identifies stale properties, integration bottlenecks and formatting issues or duplicates all in one dashboard. This is incredibly helpful when managing your data hygiene on an ongoing basis.

The last of this category of updates is the Automation Recommendations beta available to Ops Hub Pro and Enterprise users. HubSpot has reduced the manual burden of fixing data errors by using their artificial intelligence to continuously scan your database for issues and then recommends automations to fix them. As HubSpot puts it: “HubSpot CRM cleans itself.” Previously we had to manually accept any suggestions one by one which was a lot of manual work - this feature allows Ops Hub Pro and Enterprise users the ability to save time and focus this time elsewhere!?

Read on more of the updates and? the full article here.