How does one judge the enduring nature of a CRM? How do you, as a business owner, trust a platform’s long-term capabilities and know it will be able to forge and nurture your business's growing customer relationship management needs? The answer is simple. Check whether it evolves with the changing needs of its users.
If it keeps upping the ante on its features, you have a platform you can trust for the long haul.
HubSpot is one such platform. The slew of features it has launched recently in the Sales Hub further illustrates the platform’s ability to meet the demanding expectations of sales professionals.
In a word, the new features in the HubSpot Sales Hub can be called ‘empowering.’ This hub offers features that help you approach the sales process more strategically and scale it up quickly as needed.
HubSpot Sales Hub – An Overview
HubSpot is a leader amongst marketing automation platforms and has found a place in the leaders' quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for three consecutive years, including 2023. But HubSpot is more than just a platform that simplifies, scales and transforms your marketing endeavours. It also offers a comprehensive Sales Hub with a vast collection of features and tools that focus on streamlining sales workflows, facilitating data-driven decision-making, fostering better alignment between marketing and sales, and empowering the sales team in many different ways to meet sales targets.
Sales Hub emphasizes boosting sales by forging better customer relationships. The Hub has always been known for offering a variety of advanced features in line with not only prevalent technological advancements but also the changing expectations of sales personnel across organizations. The new HubSpot Sales Hub features and tools now include the power of AI. Currently, 37% of organizations are harnessing the power of AI in sales, and while this isn’t a small number, it is all set to go up. HubSpot has now integrated AI into its Sales Hub through HubSpot AI, making it easier for sales professionals to leverage AI.
HubSpot Sales Hub New Features
Let’s take a closer look at why salespeople are excited about the new HubSpot Sales Hub features:
The prospecting workspace
The new HubSpot prospecting feature offers sales reps an exclusive prospecting workspace that helps optimally organize the various prospecting tasks. Its salient features include:
- Task organization by type, e.g., calls, emails, etc.
- Visibility into task progress
- Task scheduler
- Integration with Sequences for clarity into tasks due in active Sequences
- Task suggestion for a new contact (types of activity for a contact)
- Review all scheduled tasks
Use Case:
Consider a company X experiences fast-paced growth. Sales can leverage this feature to ensure they don’t miss out on contacting a lead by getting overwhelmed with the number of leads coming their way.
Next level lead management
HubSpot drives optimal lead management after sales reps have set their leads up in the prospecting workspace. The salient features of unified lead management include:
- Pull leads from ‘contact lifecycle stages’
- Once leads are imported, get a unified lead view from the leads tab
- Lead selection and necessary action, such as sending an email directly from the dashboard
- More information about the lead, such as last contact and scheduled next contact, and schedule an activity for the contact
- Editing lead and all associated information
Use Case:
The sales team in company X wants more control over their leads because they want to accelerate contact velocity. Rather than waiting for marketing to pass the hottest leads to their team, they can proactively import leads from different lifecycle stages to convert them into opportunities.
Create more impact with sequences
HubSpot’s ‘Sequences’ feature helps sales reps automate and personalize email outreach, to automate prospecting strategy. New sequence features include:
- Align sequence to business impact
- Clarity into how sequences result in setting up more meetings and closing deals
- ‘Step analytics’ to find out why a particular sequence is underperforming, by going through each step of the sequence
- On finding a step that needs to be refined, the new A/B testing feature helps you test different options, and identify the step that works best
Use Case:
A sales rep X wants to optimize Sequences that don’t seem to deliver results. He can go through all Sequences that are delivering ROI and replicate the same steps in those not offering value.
Deal accelerators
HubSpot’s deal management tools have always been top notch! The new HubSpot Sales Hub features just take it a notch higher:
- Organize deals easily and quickly with the new ‘Deal Inspection View’
- Click on a deal and get granular information on every activity associated with the deal, earlier, you ended up on the deal records page to get this visibility; now do not leave the deal board, do not lose sight of your deal pipeline
- The new ‘Deal Insights’ feature shows insights on the top of the deal board; save time spent in accessing multiple reports that deliver needed insights.
- Categorize deals using color-coded tags, making pertinent information easily accessible, and apply these tags to specific pipelines
Use Case:
Your company needs to take actionable steps to move deals through the pipeline, and this can be achieved through deal optimization. Leverage HubSpot Sales Hub new features in deal management to accelerate the pipeline.
Improved mobile prospecting
New HubSpot Sales Hub features and tools aim to maximize prospecting potential beyond the confines of the office and the desktop/laptops. Salient features include:
- ‘QR Code Scanner’ to import vCards and contacts directly to the HubSpot portal
- Register the above leads directly and start nurturing process through mobile app, leveraging sequences on Mobile – a new feature
Use Case:
Imagine your booth at an event that attracts hundreds of customers who have shared their contact cards with you. You wish to push many of these contacts to sales because they are hot leads, and you don’t want to waste time doing so. All you need to do is scan the QR codes then and there at the booth to integrate them into your CRM.
Smoother handoffs between sales
Harness the benefit of a low friction lead hand-off between marketing and sales with the new HubSpot Sales Hub features:
- ‘Book on Behalf of Others’ feature where sales reps can book a meeting on behalf of a sales engineer or other experts to move the lead through the funnel quickly
- ‘Meeting Rotations’ to transfer the lead from a junior sales executive to a senior and more knowledgeable sales rep
- “Lead Form Routing’ enables marketing reps to book a sales meeting on behalf of the sales rep
Use Case:
A company Y thinks it is wasting a lot of time in the lead handoff between marketing and sales, and the lead many a time is lost because of the time lag. This is just one of the challenges that can be solved with this new HubSpot sales hub feature.
Scaling with better insights
Intelligent Forecasts
The forecasting feature in the Sales Hub is improved further in the all new HubSpot Sales Hub. Salient features include:
- ‘Accuracy Tracking’ feature helps sales rep get into historical forecasts to improve their forecasting and identify achievable targets
- ‘Forecasting Insights’ tells sales reps and leaders whether their revenue predictions are on point and track important metrics across the pipeline to monitor the pipeline trend across teams
Use Case:
In Y company, a sales team and leadership struggle with bad forecasting, which results in resource misallocation and bad strategic calls. The new forecasting features drove optimal forecasting to ensure better outcomes.
Dig deeper into leads
Get a better understanding of how leads move through the pipeline with the deal-centric reporting features that are a part of the new HubSpot Sales Hub features & AI tools:
- ‘Deal Funnel Report’ takes into consideration the non-linearity of the lead’s path, accounting for metrics like skips, conversions and more
- ‘Deal Journey Analytics’ creates reports that visualize the deal journey in an easy-to-consume manner.
- ‘Sales Velocity Report’ offers deeper insights into sales performance based on key metrics like conversion time, productivity etc.
Use Case:
A manager must present a deal optimization strategy to the C-suite for the New Year. He wants to make an impression by identifying realistic goals and pitching ideal resource allocation. Improved lead reportage will help him delivered informed strategy suggestions.
Prospecting Analytics
Managing prospecting optimally is well and good, but what about analysis? New HubSpot Sales Hub features and tools don’t disappoint on this score:
- ‘Prospect Activities Report’ offers complete visibility of all the prospecting activities leveraged by sales reps, to the sales manager
- Sales managers can track key performance metrics like number of activities per day, per contact, conversion rate and more
- ‘Lead Funnel Report’ offers comprehensive data on contact-to-lead-to-deal conversion rate and the time spent by a lead on each stage
Use Case:
A new sales manager is tasked with not only identifying slow movers in the sales team but also zeroing in on identifying lead sources that are delivering more value and the lead conversion time. All this manager needs to do is harness the power of the new prospect report feature in the new HubSpot Sales Hub.
New HubSpot Sales Hub Features & AI Tools
We are witnessing a seismic shift in how businesses conduct their operation by harnessing the power of AI, and sales is no different. In the Sales Hub, AI seeks to simplify specific tasks, enable results-driven decision-making, and accelerate task velocity. HubSpot AI tools include:
AI Assistants
Generative AI tools are integrated with the HubSpot platform to offer various services, including drafting content and developing reports. With ‘Content Assistant’ in the Sales Hub, you can tap into the expertise of an AI content writer who can quickly draft content, helping you create content for all types of written communication to engage your leads and customers better. The AI email writer makes drafting emails a breeze and even more impactful.
AI Forecasting
Predictive AI enters the picture here, wherein this technology is used to dissect and analyze historical sales to deliver clarity on the future sales roadmap.
ChatSpot
This tool brings the power of ChatGPT to integrate it with a range of data sources from the HubSpot CRM. Generative AI is leveraged to deliver complex information regarding products and services your business sells.
Conversation Summary
Imagine the amount of customer interaction that goes into making of a successful deal. There are questions to answer, unique requests to fulfil, and comprehensive information to provide. This happens day in and out, and there are times when you want to deliver lead status to your team. This is where an automated conversation summary comes in to help make sense of all the conversations that took place with the lead across diverse channels.
Integration availability with sales platform
With HubSpot Sales Hub integrations, you can empower your team to do more by connecting essential systems for your business with the HubSpot platform. The new integrations include:
HubSpot Salesforce Integration with Activity Sync
With HubSpot Salesforce activity sync, you can effortlessly manage and track all your sales activities, including meetings, tasks, and more, regardless of their origin. This synchronization feature enables you to seamlessly register contacts directly into HubSpot Sequences and automatically schedule meetings by leveraging Salesforce records.
Deeper Integration with LinkedIn
The new HubSpot Sales Hub feature and AI tools enable you to use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator and sync your data between HubSpot and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. This feature offers a unified view of sales goal progression irrespective of the platform you are using. The objective is to help you manage all your leads and clients from one place, regardless of their origins.
Conclusion
Not all new Sales Hub features are available with all versions of the HubSpot Sales Hub. Identifying and mapping your needs to the available features for a particular version is essential. Speak to the experts at TransFunnel, who can provide Sales Hub guidance to help you make the most of this platform.
