Episode 304: What was useful from HubSpot’s annual event and product announcements?

Welcome to HubShots Episode 304: What was useful from HubSpot’s annual event and product announcements?

This edition we dive into:

• HubSpot’s recent product announcements and what we can learn from them
• Is HubSpot a CRM or a Customer Platform?
• Campaign Assistant, now with added AI
• Prospecting tool benefits
• The Workflow cleanup feature is pretty handy
• Using WordPress and HubSpot CMS together
• HubSpot Guide Creator
• What languages does HubSpot Chatbot support
• Workflow action: Future Date Calculator
• Adding Emojis to record sections
• How to reduce hard bounce rate on email sends
• Midjourney prompt of the week
• HubSpot’s CRM puzzle
• Moving notes from HubSpot records to another portal

Recorded: Wednesday 04 October 2023 | Published: Friday 13 October 2023

Table of Contents

• Shot 1: Growth Thoughts of the Week
• Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week
• Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week
• Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week
• Shot 5: HubSpot Workflow Feature of the Week
• Shot 6: CMS Hub Feature of the Week
• Shot 7: HubSpot Cool Tool Item of the Week
• Shot 8: Listener Question of the Week
• Shot 9: App Marketplace App of the Week
• Shot 10: HubSpot Kaizen Tip of the Week
• Shot 11: Bogus Tip of the Week
• Shot 12: Listener Feedback of the Week
• Shot 13: AI Prompt of the Week
• Shot 14: Thought of the Week
• Shot 15: Quote of the Week
• Shot 16: Training of the Week
• Shot 17: Download the HubShots Framework

 🌱 Shot 1: Growth Thoughts of the Week

What do HubSpot customers really care about?

Hint: It’s probably not product updates from INBOUND

For listeners to this show, and HubSpot partners like us, HubSpot’s annual INBOUND conference is a highlight of the year.

But for the majority of HubSpot customers that we work with, most didn’t even know it was on.

To them HubSpot is just one app amongst many - a single pond in a raging river of applications - that their business uses.

So, when we met with them in the week following INBOUND and asked them their thoughts, there wasn’t much excitement about it, instead it was more of a ‘is there anything useful for us that we should know about?’ conversation.

There’s an important lesson for us here in our businesses, for how we communicate with our customers, and what they really value.

Chances are they don’t care that Reese Witherspoon was a speaker, or that the keynotes focussed so much on AI, or that HubSpot is trying to describe themselves as ‘a customer platform’ now.

Instead they just want to know what’s going to help them do their job better.

Takeaway: Aim to provide real value to your customers on their terms, not yours.

Feel free to add your thoughts and comments about this on my LinkedIn article.

That said, there’s some useful feedback about what HubSpot thinks customers are interested in…

Using INBOUND as a sign post for what HubSpot is hearing from the market

It’s easy to think that what you do in your own business is typical for other businesses.

For example, we’ve incorporated AI tools into all our company processes - planning, ideation, content creation, imagery, video, emails, summarising, etc. We consider it normal - similar to how we use spell check or grammar checker tools.

But that’s not the case for most businesses. To pick a simple example: Everyone knows about ChatGPT, but hardly anyone uses it for more than a few tests here and there. There’s no depth to its use within a company, and there’s likely no other tools being used (eg Midjourney for imagery).

That’s where the INBOUND keynotes, and HubSpot’s product focus on AI is illuminating.

HubSpot was careful to explain the context for AI, explain what AI is, what the opportunity is (and the trends), and how to use it in their product range.

To me this is an interesting signpost. It indicates that the feedback HubSpot is getting from the market is that although everyone’s heard of AI, few actually understand it or use it. HubSpot is trying to unlock AI usage in a simple, useful way.

Takeaway: If you use AI in your business process currently, you’re probably still in the minority. Most probably aren’t, and there’s an opportunity to start with the basics. It might feel like you are dumbing it down, but that’s actually what’s valuable now.

Finally…

Is HubSpot a CRM or a Customer Platform?

An interesting nugget to consider from INBOUND is the messaging HubSpot is testing in market.

HubSpot is a CRM Platform… (from their home page):

HubSpot is a Customer Platform… (from their internal page):

There’s some confusion here to be sure, but it’s also fascinating to see how quickly they roll out and test new messaging. Your thoughts?

Other Nuggets

• 25% of attendees were in a sales-related function. Which means 75% weren’t!
• And yet there was a big focus on Sales tools and activities
• 1500 Apps and integrations now available in the Marketplace
• 200+ new features that HubSpot has rolled out over the past year
• Products stations where you could go and talk to the people building the product and play with it, Ian did this for the payments/Commerce Hub features as we have been waiting for a long time for it in Australia!

They Ask, You Answer Summit APAC

Reminder: Moby, Tasha and the Red Pandas team are hosting the They Ask, You Answer Summit in Australia later this month (31 October).

Marcus Sheridan will be flying down to be one of the speakers. Don’t miss this.

We’ve already booked our tickets. HubShots listeners can get a 50% discount on ticket prices by using code: hubshots

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✨ Shot 2: Quick Shots of the Week

Here’s a few quick items of interest we noticed:

• Leads in Prospecting Workspace - we are testing this and enjoying using it
• HubSpot AI
• AI Assistant for Workflow Descriptions
• When in websites/landing pages you can edit the Navigation Menu from the Tools menu
• Conditional logic on form submits

We are posting on LinkedIn lots

We’re now sharing quick tips on our LinkedIn page for HubShots here, and for XEN here.

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🚀 Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Campaign Assistant: Free AI Marketing Asset Creator

Access it here

We have started testing this out.  Once you login this is what you see:

It is a good way to get started with campaign creation.  You still need to review this and place your creative genius but this is a great place to start if you are feeling stuck.

Note you will have to create assets separately.

Here is an example of a LinkedIn Ad we were creating. You will notice if you are using HubSpot you can publish the ad straight to your HubSpot Ads!

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💰 Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Prospecting Tool

This is focussed on the Leads tool that has just been released. From initial testing internally and with clients it looks like it is welcome and easy to use.

This is where you can browse all the activity on the contact.        

By clicking on the email button you can email the contact directly from here.

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👨‍🔧 Shot 5: HubSpot Workflow Feature of the Week

Workflow Cleanup Feature

This is super handy - HubSpot will find ‘clutter’ in your workflows and clean them up.

A typical example - you have old workflows that have nested branches (ie branches that have branches etc). HubSpot will combine these up into a single branch if appropriate.

By the time I was putting together this Shot in the show notes we had cleaned up all the workflows in our portal, so I can’t

BTW here’s an example we shared on LinkedIn a while back.

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🔥 Shot 6: CMS Hub Feature of the Week

Using WordPress and HubSpot CMS Together

Use HubSpot for landing pages

This is a great place to start if you have Marketing Professional and want to get landing pages up and running quickly.

We’ve had clients use WordPress for their main site, and HubSpot for their landing pages.

Then they move their blog over to HubSpot.

And then later they sometimes move their entire website over to HubSpot.

What should you expect?

• The user should not notice the difference between your website and the landing pages/blog if they are done well.  If they are observant they may notice the domain change from www.hubshots.com to go.hubshots.com but not notice any difference on the website
• Ability to quickly launch landing pages with personalisation/smart content
• Ability to split test landing pages

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🔧 Shot 7: HubSpot Cool Tool Item of the Week

HubSpot Guide Creator

This is supposed to be a simple little tool for capturing processes in web-based tools.

It’s simple to get started, but can be a confusing mess after that eg how do I share a previous Guide I recorded last week?

Also it’s limited to 10 guides per portal at the moment.

But it is a beta, so that’s fine by me.

Get started here.

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🔧 Shot 8: Listener Question of the Week

What languages can I use with my Chatbots?

This question came up in a prospect call recently. This company is setting up a site with multiple languages and wanted to know whether HubSpot's chat tools supported multiple languages. The answer is yes (here’s the full list):

• Afrikaans
• Arabic (Egypt, Modern Standard)
• Bengali
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (Hong Kong)
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (UK)
• English (US)
• Finnish
• French
• French (Canada)
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia)
• Japanese
• Korean
• Lithuanian
• Malay
• Norwegian
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Portuguese (Portugal)
• Romanian
• Russian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish (Mexico)
• Spanish (Spain)
• Swedish
• Tagalog
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Note: no mention of Klingon being supported any time soon.

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🔧 Shot 9: Marketplace App of the Week

Future Date Calculator

We discovered this when we were trying to solve a problem for a customer of ours.

You first need to add the Future Date Calculator app from the Marketplace app. Once installed you’ll have this action available:

Plus check out some of their other apps. All free!

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📈 Shot 10: HubSpot Kaizen Tip of the Week

Kaizen is a compound of two Japanese words that together translate as "good change" or "improvement."

Add Emojis in record sections

You can add emojis to the section titles in object layouts (eg Contact sections):

This is set in the record customisation settings when setting the section title:

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🔧 Shot 11: Bogus Tip of the Week

Reduce Hard Bounce Rates by Sending More Emails

This is one of those dumb ‘tips’ that is actually something you should consider - to get around HubSpot’s hard bounce rate rules.

My thanks to Adam at FGM for highlighting this one to me.

HubSpot’s marketing emails have limits around bounce rates and spam rates - and if you exceed those limits you’ll potentially see your account suspended. I know, crazy.

But here’s the thing - their limits aren’t based on the total number bounce occurrences (or spam), instead they are based on % rates.

So, consider a typical churn rate of your contact base over the course of a year.

Let’s assume you have 100 contacts and average churn is 24% over the year.

This means 24 contacts will move on and their email address return a hard bounce.

Over the course of the year that’s 2 per month.

So if you send a newsletter email every month, your bounce rate will be 2% (ie 2 out of the 100) - which is acceptable. Just.

But send a newsletter quarterly, and your bounce rate jumps to 6% (ie 6 out of the 100) - which could have your account flagged.

Which is silly really. You’ve likely only sent quarterly because you are focussing on value. But by moving to monthly, and likely reducing the quality, you’ve reduced the chance of your account having issues.

Your thoughts?

Summary: send more emails

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💡 Shot 12: Listener Feedback of the Week

“I love the structure of your Podcasts. the video functionality and being able to see you guys, plus click through to the relevant sections. so good! thanks for all your knowledge and sharing with us.”

• Sassika

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🏈 Shot 13: AI Prompt of the Week

Midjourney prompt for candid style photos

Prompt: Filipino woman working from home, in front of laptop, casual wear, candid, relaxed, natural, photography

Notice the hand though - looks a tiny bit odd…

Tons more Midjourney prompts and inspiration here and on our LinkedIn page here.

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📚 Shot 14: Thought of the Week

HubSpot’s CRM Puzzle 

I wrote a brief post a few weeks back contemplating where HubSpot is heading in terms of their CRM and data confidence plans.

Essentially I was trying to imagine how HubSpot might combine:

• it’s CRM foundation toolset,
• with a database as extensive as Apollo.io (or ZoomInfo etc)
• And the engagement data of contacts that it knows about across all their customer portals

Imagine how much they could enrich the data in their portals - it would be incredible.

(Let’s leave aside privacy and data sharing concerns)

How they navigate this over the coming years, as well as face the likely future legislation changes, wll be interesting.

Read the full article on LinkedIn here.

BTW I loved Dharmesh’s post about getting your words out.

This is what I’m practising on my personal blog currently, and selectively sharing as LI articles on my personal profile.

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✍️ Shot 15: Quote of the Week

“You must out-fail the competition.”

From The Diary of a CEO by Steve Bartlett

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🏋️ Shot 16: Training of the Week

Importing notes from one portal to another in HubSpot

This one’s a bit technical, but covers our learnings from using a few tools to duplicate a HubSpot portal over to a new portal.

Part of the process was around moving notes over to the new port. Here’s the details.

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🏋️ Shot 17: Have You Downloaded The HubShots Framework?

HubShots Framework Poster

Download a copy of the HubShots Framework A3 PDF poster (recently updated with colour coding and more).

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🧲 Shot 18: Follow Us on the Socials

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HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN Systems, XEN Create and XEN Solar.

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