Part 1: Understanding the Latest Enhancements to HubSpot's CRM [2020 Updates]

If you’re using HubSpot to send emails and social posts, manage your sales pipeline, and host your website pages, there are new and improved features rolling out regularly that are worth keeping an eye on.

It’s important to stay up to date, but it’s even more important to understand how you can put the new features and improved functionality to use throughout all parts of your flywheel. We recently released the sixth episode of our SmartTake series, “What’s New with HubSpot,” in which we discussed Hubspot’s recent CRM enhancements. Going forward, HubSpot has subdivided the Sales Hub into four main themes: Core Database, Sales Acceleration, CPQ, and Reporting. Today I’ll talk about the Core Database and Sales Acceleration themes and their core enhancements in detail. Stay tuned for Part 2, in which I will talk about the recent enhancements for CPQ and Reporting.

What Is HubSpot’s Sales Hub?

HubSpot’s Sales Hub allows you to do the following:

• Manage your contacts, companies, and deals in a Core CRM Database
• Perform all your prospecting and outreach and collect all your sales productivity tools in one place (Sales Accelerator)
• Close deals, configure price quotes, send quotes, and accept payments (CPQ)
• Do all your basic Reporting in one place

Core Database

1. Custom objects 

HubSpot is looking for its users to match their business with HubSpot, whatever the industry. If you’re not able to find the right pre-existing objects to match your business, you’ll now be able to create your own and automate them. This feature will allow you to extend your database and rightsize it to your specific needs as a company, instead of walking your way through the property logic that you had to do in the past.

Use Case: Let’s say you’re a real estate company and you want to have one object for realtors and another object for buyers, but neither fit into the current pre-existing objects. You can now custom create objects to fit your needs.

Disclaimer: You’ll have to have HubSpot Enterprise to access up to 10 objects on about half a million records. 

2. Merged deal records

Combining deal records is particularly helpful for cross-selling among different product lines by combining these deal records. 

Use Case: If two different sales reps have each created their own separate deal, but down the road they realize it should just be one record, you can now merge those two deals to keep your records clean. Another use case scenario might be when you have two different product lines or two different divisions within the same company, and you realize it makes more sense to combine them under one deal. 

3. New permission settings for sales content

You’ll now be able to make any of your sales content (e.g., templates, sequences, documents, and/or playbooks) private or shared. This feature gives your team security and control over your content, as well as keeping everyone in alignment. 

Use Case: Some organizations have several sales teams and divisions selling different products, which might all have different processes. This new permission setting will allow these types of organizations to have better control over the content available to each of those teams.

4. Automatically capture contact details from emails with HubSpot AI

One of my favorite new enhancements is the ability to automatically capture contact details from emails. It allows your sales team to be more efficient, and it saves reps time. This feature now supports Spanish and French, in addition to English. 

Use Case: A new contact sends you an email. HubSpot will read as many details as possible from that contact’s signature, and then it automatically populates those fields into the contact record.

Sales Acceleration

1. New task queue experience

This new task view is designed to help sales reps be more efficient and save time. This enhancement allows you to customize your tasks. You will have more flexibility in customizing the appearance of your tasks. It includes some calendar functionality to allow reps to create a task instantly and alert them when tasks are due, in addition to allowing your team to group tasks together. 

2. Advanced sequences

Another sales acceleration new feature is “Bulk Enrolling,” which will allow you to bulk enroll about 50 contacts in a single sequence. Like my fellow SmartBug Sandy Moore said in the webinar, “Sequences are looking a lot more like a lead nurture workflow in the marketing hub.”

If you’re a sales manager, you’ll get a full view of the entire team’s performance with the “sender score” feature, allowing you to direct them in a better approach moving forward. 

It will show you how your reps are personalizing and selling emails, and how well your team’s sequences and emails are performing. This allows you to be more effective in your coaching.

Use Case: Let’s say your organization sells to specific industries, like healthcare and senior care, and you find an article that you want to send to individuals in those industries. You can select as many contacts as you want and bulk enroll them in a sequence, allowing you to be more effective in your sales productivity. 

3. Leveraging video in HubSpot sequences

Video is one of the best ways to connect more personally with a prospect. You can now natively use video inside your HubSpot sequences and templates with their Vidyard integration enhancements. You can create a one-to-one video to hyper-personalize your outreach efforts, or you can grab a video from your existing library.  

Use Case: Rob Sale, Senior Manager, Alliances and Partner Development at Vidyard, shared one of his rep’s experiences with using video in his outreach. Out of 3,000 video-based first touch sent emails, this rep saw a 66 percent open rate, a 20 percent click-through rate, and a 10 percent meetings booked.

4. Improved LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration

For those of you who do most of your outreach in LinkedIn—good news! You can now make connection requests and send InMails within HubSpot. 

Use Case: If you’re already using LinkedIn in your overall marketing strategy, and are utilizing paid social and LinkedIn ads, you may discover that some of your contacts clicked on specific ads. Your sales reps can now follow up with LinkedIn sales, and they will most likely get a higher response rate than if you were to send an email with no context. 

5. Company un-enrollment in sequences

A new sequence setting you can now use is company unenrollment. If anyone in the company that you’re prospecting to replies, you can eliminate the possibility of multiple touchpoints by unenrolling everyone else from that company.

Use Case: Let’s say you’re trying to connect with certain people, from a prospecting standpoint, but you know there might be multiple touchpoints in this organization. When you finally make contact with one person, you don’t want to continue sending everyone else in the company the same messages. This feature will allow you to unenroll everyone else and provide a better experience for both parties. 

6. Custom redirects for meetings links

Pre-Meeting:

Custom redirects allow you to redirect prospects to a specific page, or even a video, that has all the information you want them to know before a meeting takes place. This will provide a better user experience by requiring fewer clicks than before, when you would send an email with attached documents. 

Post-Meeting:

You can now customize what a meeting outcome was. This feature gives you a big-picture view of the meeting, it allows you to segment and label various parts of the meeting, and it gives you a view into the follow-up that needs to happen.

7. New features for enhanced Slack integration for account-based collaboration

The Slack integration also has some new enhancements. This ties down to ABM and makes sure that if you are working on a big deal, you can create a channel or room in Slack to collaborate with your team and coordinates sending the right information back to HubSpot. Slack is another connection point that ensures your conversations stay relevant and that your team is collaborating on the right things. 

Here are a few of my favorite Slack commands:

Contact: /hs-search-contact {contact name} 

Company: /hs-search-company {company name}

• /hs-report-company {company name}
• /hs-buying-committee {company name}

Deal: /hs-search-deal {deal name} 

• /hs-search-my-deal {deal name} 

You can update the deal stage from Slack by clicking “Update deal stage” and selecting a deal stage in the drop-down menu. 

Whether you’re a sales leader, executive, or revenue operations professional, HubSpot CRM’s features just keep getting better and better. I’m looking forward to discussing the newest enhancements for CPQ and Reporting in Part 2 of this blog post.