New HubSpot features announced at INBOUND 2021!

As the week of HubSpot's biggest event of the year draws to a close, we are reflecting on what we have learned and sharing a breakdown of the latest features announced for those using HubSpot CRM.

It's been a busy week of learning for the HubGem team as we all attended INBOUND 2021 (online this year), we have spent 3 days learning the very latest updates from the world of marketing, sales, service and ops.

HubSpot used their event to launch some exciting new features and we have digested them into a handy guide below! But before you get stuck in, we recommend you take a look at the wonderful keynote talk from HubSpot Co-Founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, who sums up the importance of customer-centricity perfectly in his usual entertaining way!

So, what's new in HubSpot?

HubSpot has been determined to keep the customer front and centre of the way organisations around the world communicate and their latest updates are all designed to be customer-centric.

Payments

HubSpot Payments

HubSpot’s payments feature is currently in beta and available in the U.S. only, we will monitor closely when this will be rolled out globally.

With the launch of HubSpot’s payments feature, you can deliver a delightful and connected buying experience from your CRM. This feature is built natively within HubSpot — so it's easy to embed payment links into emails, quotes, websites, or live chats for faster delivery and more streamlined collection.

So what does this mean for the education sector?

Schools, colleges and universities will be able to take payments directly from HubSpot forms, ideal for deposits, events, registration fees and memberships. No more clunky payment processes means happier customers.

Customer Portals

Ticket Index

For those using Service Hub Professional and Enterprise, Customer Portals are now in beta.

With customer portals, customers can easily view and manage support tickets, explore the knowledge base, and gain more ownership over their service experience. We’ve also introduced custom feedback surveys, so you can ensure customers feel valued and heard every step of the way.

Set up your portal without developer resources
Connect your help desk and shared inbox
Give access to your knowledge base from within the portal
Automatically apply your brand colors, fonts, and logo

So what does this mean for the education sector?

Guiding students/parents through the admissions process can be a challenge, it is hard to give personalised and timely support without stretching your internal teams. Give your prospects more control and insight into the support requests they raise with you, all whilst reducing the number of interruptive phone calls... what's not to love?!

More customisation - a range of features!

Make HubSpot your own!

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Ready to wow your customers? Start with a CRM platform that’s built differently — one that’s flexible enough to fit your needs and align to the unique way that you do business. HubSpot’s latest improvements give account administrators control to customize and craft their instance of HubSpot without creating a mess of complexity. Use business units to easily manage multiple brands across a single HubSpot portal, association improvements to align your CRM with the way your business actually runs, and a new set of admin features to make managing users seamless.

So what does this mean for the education sector?

Setting your HubSpot account up to really meet your needs and reflect what you do is essential - especially in the education space where our needs are just that little bit more complex or bespoke. We are super excited about custom associations which will help educations organisations link the different objects in their CRM more efficiently. One example, is using Deals to handle your Applications, and associating multiple contacts to this deal with custom labels (student, parent, agent, feeder school, reference...).

Sandboxes

This is big news for our bigger customers! HubSpot is launching sandboxes for those on Enterprise products. A must-have for scaling companies, sandboxes are production-like portals where you can try new things without impacting your current setup. Want to test a new integration without affecting your team? Done. Interested to see how a change to your deal pipelines impacts your sales team’s workflow before you take it live? Now you can do that, too. Because your sandbox is a mirror of your HubSpot portal, you can explore new features and test new ideas that will impress your customers and set your team up for success.

So what does this mean for the education sector?

For universities or colleges who have multiple complex brands, object relationships and many moving parts - sandboxes give you a space to build great things and do thorough testing without any impact on your main account. A big example here is integrating your HubSpot account with your MIS system, test the integration, build out the best workflows to delight your customers and get everything running smoothly before you make any changes to your live account.