HubSpot INBOUND: Uniting Data and Teams for Growth | Sophie Schaffran

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Welcome and Episode Context

Alise Kostick: Welcome to the show. I am not your host, Brendon Dennewill. I'm filling in, as he's at INBOUND. My name's Alise Kostick. I'm a RevOps Strategist at Denamico, joined by Marketing Director Sophie Schaffran. We're here today to talk about all the new releases coming out this week at INBOUND.

Sophie Schaffran:: Thank you, Alise. We just took a quick dive through everything that came out on the main stage. As usual, it's 200-plus updates, so today we're combing through the highlights: the first things we feel people need to know as you start walking through these releases and seeing what might be a good fit for your organization.

I think we should start with a quick recap of how we got here. Last year at INBOUND 2024, and just before, HubSpot released the new "easy, fast, and unified" slogan. Last year was a lot about Breeze AI. We saw an acquisition of Cashflow for an updated CPQ in HubSpot, a lot of focus on Breeze Intelligence, updating records, integrating AI throughout the platform, and a huge focus on agent AI through Dart Mesh and things like that.

These are things to keep in mind as we go through the updates, because this year the releases are really around that third piece of the slogan: the unified messaging. Through the last year, they've really been building on this release after release. This year it's about unifying all the data in your CRM in one place, across teams.

A lot of organizations have only about 20% of their customer data in structured form, while about 80% lives in unstructured data: call transcripts, emails, service tickets, and things like that. A lot of what we'll talk about today is really about that unification, with HubSpot becoming the platform that does that by default. Regardless of what hub your teams are in, they're all seeing the same customer data, just in a different view that makes sense for their role.

Alise Kostick: And when you look at the releases, they'll generally be broken down by hub and where they fit into HubSpot overall as a product. But we thought it would make more sense today to walk through how each role within your organization can leverage HubSpot, because although people may be operating in the same hub, they might be using it differently. Some releases cover multiple pieces of the platform, so we'll break it down role by role rather than hub by hub.

Sophie Schaffran: Definitely. We'll put as much as we can in the show notes. We'll link to the overall fall spotlight and all the information there, and we'll link to any available documentation so you can go back and reference it. There'll be a lot more to dive into, and I'm sure as we get into each piece of this with clients here at Denamico, we'll have more episodes deep-diving into specific use cases.

RevOps: Operations Hub Becomes Data Hub

Alise Kostick: Since I'm a RevOps Strategist, I think it's only smart that we start with the RevOps roles. That's where I'm the most interested, and I hope everyone else is too.

Sophie Schaffran: The unification theme fits this role perfectly. When you're talking about RevOps, it's about aligning your people, process, data, and technology. We say that on the show all the time, and all of the releases at INBOUND this year really just reinforce that. Let me highlight a few that I think will be interesting for leaders in this role.

One of the big updates is that Operations Hub is transforming into Data Hub. It's a name change, but it's also gaining more capabilities. Operations Hub was really the RevOps hero for aligning all the systems. It was a much more technical hub compared to others. With this release, there will be more ease of use and a more user-friendly interface for less technical people on teams.

They're also rolling out Data Studio within this. It will give you the ability to directly connect to spreadsheet apps, data warehouses, and things like that. It's going to cut down on time spent migrating with integrations or manual data entry. It will really help you connect all your systems, clean your data more accurately, and continue to automate more complex processes.

Within this, there's also a new data quality feature. There have been some elements of this in HubSpot already to help with formatting and duplicates, but this takes it to another level with a cleaner dashboard view. You can quickly see formatting and duplicate issues. There's also a new ability to set up custom deduplication rules on certain records, so you can decide exactly how you want that to work. You don't have to worry about things being deduplicated that you don't want deduplicated, you can opt to review those, or you can let those processes run in the background so you're not spending manual time on it.

RevOps: New CPQ in Commerce Hub

Sophie Schaffran: Regarding the Cashflow acquisition: at INBOUND, we're seeing the first real integration of what that means for HubSpot. They're releasing a new CPQ in Commerce Hub. This is in public beta, so anyone interested will still need to opt in. It's really going to improve quote creation, deal closing, approval workflows, and invoicing. You can run that through workflows in HubSpot, which makes payment much easier from the customer's end.

We know a lot of organizations run into blockers when actually trying to collect payment. This should improve things for both teams and customers. One thing worth noting: this first iteration sounds like it's going to be better suited to smaller teams and organizations with a simpler product catalog. We're talking 200 or fewer employees and 100 SKUs or fewer. It won't be the right fit for manufacturers or companies with more complex product and SKU builds. That said, I think they're probably building a lot of that infrastructure on the back end that we may be able to leverage in the future.

RevOps: Smart CRM, Data Insights, and Breeze AI Updates

Sophie Schaffran: The Smart CRM is another significant update. We'll talk about it in more detail within specific roles, but essentially it allows you to see all the same customer data in multiple views across the team. Sales can see what they need; service can see what they need. It's much more customized in terms of format views. You can automatically enrich data, and the insights offer more analysis and alerts so you can see any changes on accounts, risks, or opportunities.

And of course, we can't have releases in 2025 without AI updates. Breeze Copilot is getting a rebrand to Breeze Assistance, so within HubSpot there will now be Assistance and Agents. What stood out to me most is the ability to actually train these within HubSpot now. You can manage and customize them in something called Breeze Studio, where you can teach them how you want them to function and train them on your own language and documentation.

It's going to become a lot more customized, similar to what you would have in a ChatGPT or another external tool. HubSpot recognized that people were still leaving the CRM to use external LLMs. This gives you everything unified in one place, where you can combine all of your first-party data and client information in a safer, more controlled manner.

Alise Kostick: I'm never going to have to leave HubSpot.

Sophie Schaffran: I think that's the goal. We're getting there.

Marketing: Marketing Studio and Campaign Visualization

Alise Kostick: Let's take it back to where HubSpot all started and look at what came out for Marketing Hub. It's HubSpot's bread and butter, and it feels like they've got some cool advances coming for marketing teams.

Sophie Schaffran: Marketing Studio is new, and this is another one in public beta. There are elements within this related to AI tools and features in HubSpot, so if you're looking for it and can't find it, it may have something to do with your AI settings. Users will need to be given access to that in your platform. We'll put a note in the show notes.

The studio feels like a continuation of the marketing journeys released this spring, with more visualization in the tool. As a marketer, I love this. It's more of a whiteboard experience where instead of just creating campaigns or emails, you can actually plan and draft them. You can view an entire campaign or customer journey, add sticky notes, comment and communicate with your team, and see whether an email is in draft, scheduled, or already sent. Anything that has gone out will show you high-level performance metrics, and you can click right through to any of your assets to revise and make quick changes.

I think this is going to be an interesting way to pull together your campaigns, journeys, and any planning you're doing in an outside project management or whiteboarding tool. It should also be an easier way to communicate with other teams about what's going out to customers and when. A lot of times you get questions from sales or service asking what's going out to customers, when they get it, what it looks like. This will let you create a quick visualization you can share with other teams.

Marketing: Smarter Segmentation and Personalization

Sophie Schaffran: Within Marketing Studio, any campaign or journey you're putting together will need segments and personalization. HubSpot has updates here as well. The segments are going to be easier to build. This is essentially a new iteration of lists in the marketing space, with a cleaner interface and improved and/or logic, which I know I'm personally excited about. You'll also be able to compare segment performance. If you're running paid ads, anything you build in these segments can be connected with ad platforms and sent that way.

There will also be something called clusters within these segments, combining key properties you'd use to build a list or segment with engagement level. The idea is to identify people with a higher probability of converting based on how they're engaging with you.

On personalization: it's essentially a feature that looks to me a lot like the landing page section in HubSpot, but for content personalization based on site visits and segments. You can make the content on a page dynamic based on whatever you're seeing in the segment. This could be great for industry pages, for example, where you pull through specifics based on a contact's CRM data or site visits. You can compare those pages, and there's an AI element that will recommend changes and show you performance. It's a combination of landing pages, A/B testing, and personalization all in one place.

Marketing: AI Email Features and Engagement Optimization

Sophie Schaffran: The last thing coming out, also in public beta, is an AI email feature. If you're migrating to HubSpot from another email platform, this one is worth watching. You can upload HTML emails and the tool will generate your emails for you. Templates that you need to migrate are going to become a lot easier to move over.

There are also new optimization options. At both the campaign and the contact level, you can optimize send time. Right now, a lot of that is limited to time zone. This will be much more personalized to help with engagement, open rates, and click rates.

The engagement optimization is also becoming more nuanced. Today it's fairly binary: either contacts aren't engaged and you exclude them, or they're highly engaged. Going forward, you'll have least engaged, moderate to high, and high engagement tiers. You could use this to improve your open rates, or run re-engagement campaigns with people in the middle tier to move them back to high engagement. It will also detect performance anomalies, flagging them with red or green indicators in the hub so you know when to dig deeper into your data.

Alise Kostick: I'm excited about those, especially for new clients coming on with old marketing systems. It would be nice to get their emails over and make them feel somewhat similar, but in a better tool.

Sophie Schaffran: Yes, and that takes such a long time. I've definitely done that in other roles, and it is not a quick migration. Now it is. Thanks, HubSpot.

Sales: Prospecting Agent Refinements and Meeting Notes

Alise Kostick: Maybe we should show some love to our sales team members out there with their new releases as well.

Sophie Schaffran: Within Sales Hub, there are two specific releases, though the things that are going to benefit sales the most probably fall more within the Smart CRM and some of the AI features there.

Within Sales Hub, there are updates to the Prospecting Agent. If you've been exploring that or wanting to explore it, now would be a good time. You can put more guardrails around that agent. You could already create outreach and review it, but there are now more specific time and day settings, as well as language settings. If you're doing any kind of international outreach, there are multiple languages available now. It's not a major shift; it's more of a refinement of that agent.

Meeting notes are also now available in HubSpot. Everyone probably already has their favorite AI note-taker. If you don't, definitely explore this one. If you do, why not give it a try and see? Especially if you haven't already integrated your note-taker into HubSpot or your CRM, this is a good one to test. When we talk about all that unstructured data, meeting notes are going to be a huge source of it. Having all your meeting notes in HubSpot, you'll start to see a big shift in how that data fills in across the CRM.

Sales: Self-Generating CRM Data and Smart Views

Sophie Schaffran: On the topic of self-generating data in the CRM: essentially, the CRM is going to start pulling information from all the unstructured places in your system. A couple of examples: information in someone's email signature. Let's say you're speaking with a client and you haven't filled in their title, location, or phone number. Today so much is done over email, Zoom, and Slack that when something escalates and you actually need to pick up the phone, you realize you don't have that information. Now you don't have to worry about that. All of this data will start being pulled into contact records.

This will also pull in auto-responses. If you're trying to reach someone who's out on vacation, you can set up a field to capture when they're returning to office so you can resume follow-up. It can also pull in backup contacts from out-of-office replies, so if someone says "reach out to this person instead," that gives you another contact at the company to build a relationship with.

In the Smart CRM, there are also new views coming. Right now we all have the standard table view. New options will include Kanban boards, charts, a timeline view, and a map. For sales, the map could be really interesting for territory planning, identifying new opportunities in specific regions, or planning events.

Alise Kostick: We just had to wait. Now I can give all my clients the answer they've been looking for. Especially when it comes to territory planning and bringing on new reps, I think it makes a real impact. When they're looking at quotas overall, they might not know they're gaining traction in certain regions. It'll help show why they're making money where they're making money, and also show where they may not need to spend as much time on the sales side.

Sophie Schaffran: Absolutely. When you have all the information, it's equally about where you should spend your time and where you shouldn't. Maybe you've been spinning your wheels on things you should drop.

Alise Kostick: And it probably saves them from staring at spreadsheets longer than they want to.

Sophie Schaffran: A map is just so much more enjoyable than a spreadsheet.

Service: Data Agent and Smart Insights

Alise Kostick: Last but not least, we can't leave out Service Hub.

Sophie Schaffran: These last highlights for service are also worth keeping in mind for sales, as there's a lot of overlap. There is a new Data Agent, one of the big releases this fall. This agent will work across the Smart CRM, through workflows, and through Data Studio. It's going to analyze all of your data, both in your actual CRM fields and in unstructured data: calls, emails, documents. It can also search the web.

Instead of manually researching prospects, or equally doing that for someone you're working through a support case with, you can see all of this summarized at the company or contact level. It's really going to help build stronger relationships and give you a deeper understanding of what's happening at the account level.

The Smart Insights part of the CRM is also getting new catch-up cards on each contact record. These will surface things like customer sentiment, performance shifts, and key insights. That can help customer service reps stay ahead of issues and reduce the time spent manually reviewing every email in a case. HubSpot has already put out data showing this type of thing has been saving service teams a lot of time. This is just another iteration on that kind of output: less time reviewing, more time actually talking with the customer after reviewing those smart insights.

Where to Learn More

Alise Kostick: So if I want to learn all about this, Sophie, are you sending this in a newsletter? Tomorrow?

Sophie Schaffran: You know it. Obviously, this was a really quick highlight: hundreds of releases, and we just covered the most important things for each role. I'll have a deeper breakdown with links to all the resources. If you're not already subscribed, it's a great time to do it. We'll post it on the website as well, and I'll link to it in the show notes. So if you're listening to this a few days later and you're not quite as deep into INBOUND as all of us HubSpot-focused folks are, you can catch it later and find it easily.

Alise Kostick: Well, thanks for the rundown, and maybe we'll be back filling in for Brendon Dennewill again. Otherwise, he'll be back next week. Thank you. Bye.

Sophie Schaffran: Awesome. Thanks, Alise. Bye. 

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