Summary of the New HubSpot Features Announced at INBOUND 23

INBOUND is HubSpot's biggest event of the year, attracting thousands of marketers and sales teams from around the world to Boston, MA. Here are some of the top new features announced in HubSpot's keynote on day 1 of INBOUND 23.

Sales Hub Refresh - with some great new features for admissions teams 👀

Engaging with prospects in their sales or admissions journey has become harder than ever, it is a challenging and competitive environment for education providers of all shapes and sizes. Across platforms and industries, trends are showing that engagement is down as prospects - sick of relentless unhelpful salespeople, and cluttered inboxes - ignore outreach.

To succeed, the best admissions and sales teams are creating better customer connection through relevance. They focus on quality over quantity, outcomes over activities, and helping humans over pushing products. They see the individual person behind the prospect and lead with empathy to understand their challenges, identify any blockers, and uncover new insights for them.

HubSpot's Sales Hub brings all of your admissions data, tools, and teams together on one single platform. So... What's new?

Prospecting workspace - a new central location for admissions teams to manage their engagement
New 'Leads' object and Lead Management tools - this gives teams the ability to track Leads separate from contacts
A/B testing in Sequences - split test two different emails in an admissions sequence and compare the performance
Sequence-step analytics - report on every single step in your admissions sequence to
understand which engagements are converting into meetings
Book meetings on behalf of others - and provide round robin routing functionality right on the contact record to efficiently book a meeting for the admissions or sales team member that is next up in the rotation
Conditional redirects on HubSpot forms - this is a big one we have been waiting for! For each form submission, HubSpot now allows you to have conditional logic set to change what thank you message, URL, or meeting scheduling page appears, based on the form response. Out customers have been waiting for this one!
Lead Reporting - demystify the road from lead generation to enrolments and rally your marketing and admissions teams around clear goals and insights.
HubSpot embed for Salesforce - enroll contacts into HubSpot Sequences and
create meetings directly from Salesforce records, and sync Salesforce activities (eg calls, tasks, meetings) into HubSpot records
Forecasting insights, AI forecasting and accuracy tracking - see how your revenue is trending against your targets for the month, quarter, and/or year, get AI-generated predictions, and measure the reliability of your forecasts, we expect these features will be popular with Senior Leaders and Finance teams!
Big improvements to deal funnel reporting - key to effectively reporting on admissions conversions such as enquiry to application, or application to enrolment
Playbook improvements - including Snippets and Rich Text Formatting and the ability to use Playbooks on Custom Object records - perfect for our Enterprise customers!
Improvements to the mobile app, including the ability to manage enrolment in sequences, a QR scanner to save contact details on the go, and AI content assistant features available on-the-go.

Introducing... Commerce Hub 💳

HubSpot has had a range of commerce features for a while now, but at INBOUND 23 it announced it is repacking these into Commerce Hub whilst also introducing some new enhancements:

Features you’re familiar with:

HubSpot payments (US only, for now...)
Quotes
Payment Links
Automated Billing
Products Library

And some new ones:

Stripe payment processing - Commerce Hub now offers flexible payment processing, allowing you to seamlessly and quickly collect money within HubSpot CRM by using your existing Stripe log in. (US for now, international roll-out expected within the next 6 months)
Invoices - create invoices natively within HubSpot, this will allow you to to bill your buyers, manage payment collection, and automate billing processes alongside your CRM.

A whole host of new AI features 🤖

Generative AI is moving us from an age of information to an age of intelligence. Intelligence from Generative AI can help education providers boost connection, by deeply understanding their customers' needs and creating personal, easy experiences.

AI Forecasting Tools
AI subject line generator
AI website builder
AI-Generated social & ad copy
AI-powered content ideas
AI Content Assistant enhancements
AI-Generated reporting
Landing page creation

We will be launching a blog article detailing what all of the new AI feature mean for education marketers and admissions teams shortly - so keep your eyes peeled!

In Summary...

HubSpot is continuing to provide new features and popular enhancements to its already impressive CRM. These latest announcements bring dozens more ways that HubSpot offers value to education providers who have historically been let down by clunky, old-fashioned and disconnected systems.

Innovation in new tech like the advancements in artificial intelligence brings new opportunities to marketers and admissions teams. We will be sharing more information on these new features in coming weeks with our existing customers, if you would like to learn more about these features and all the other ways that HubSpot can transform the way you work in the education space then we welcome you to book a HubSpot for Education demo here.