Those familiar with HubSpot understand quite well at this point that they don't tend to shy away from releasing product updates regularly, and sometimes quite aggressively.
This year, HubSpot may have outdone themselves, though, as they aim to release not just a significant amount of updates, but perhaps some of the most influential, impactful, and consequential updates in recent years.
To understand the scope of these recent updates, it’s important to understand what HubSpot’s aiming for with them.
In spring of 2024, HubSpot released a number of updates relating to AI usage in their platform, with the goal of helping businesses “reinvent their process for the AI era at every stage of their go-to-market strategy.” What we see in this recent round of updates both continues and builds on this, aiming now to help businesses “reinvent growth with solutions that are easy to use, fast to adopt, and unified with data.”
Put simply, their aim is to build on and (quite significantly) enhance their existing AI solutions and recently released tools, introduce new tools and solutions, and make their platform more intuitive to use than ever before to solve for a number of identified customer pain points.
This year, HubSpot users will get access to a new collection of AI tools in their portals called “Breeze” - an umbrella term covering Breeze Copilot, Breeze Agents, and Breeze Intelligence.
| Breeze Copilot | Breeze Agents | Breeze Intelligence |
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A virtual assistant that works with you everywhere you go in your portal. |
Specialized agents designed to automate manual tasks for you so you can focus on more strategic work. |
Improves your work by making it more productive and helping to streamline buying processes |
Breeze Copilot is HubSpot’s refreshed virtual assistant that works with you wherever you go in HubSpot; this is the new evolution of HubSpot’s ChatSpot tool, and lives directly in your portal.
In addition to being available for you regardless of where you are in your portal, Copilot is also now context aware, meaning that wherever you are, you’ll get customized insights and support depending on the specific page that you’re on and the content that you’ve viewing. To drive these insights and support, HubSpot has introduced prompt-driven enhancements to the tool that will better summarize, relay data, generate content, make recommendations, and do much, much more.
As an evolution of ChatSpot, Breeze Copilot is significantly easier to use than previous iterations and will be accessible by simply selecting the designated icon in the top-right corner of your screen upon login. Additionally, Copilot should be fully mobile app friendly from the start.
Breeze Agents are a net-new tool to HubSpot.
Agents aim to automate previously tedious, manual tasks for you so you can focus more on your strategic initiatives and less on potentially repetitive, daily implementation tasks, and can best be described as “AI-powered experts designed to automate tasks and scale your team’s growth.”
These new Agents are broken into 4 categories:
Social Media Agents are available with Marketing Hub Pro+ subscriptions and are used to generate better social posts tailored specifically to your business and brand, and speed up your content production cadence.
This Agent will leverage data-driven insights like past performance, business details, and industry best practices to not only help craft the perfect post for each of your most valuable platforms, but also advise on the best days and times to post to maximize post reach and engagement.
Content Agents are available with a Content Hub Pro+ subscription and help to generate high-quality content fast. This includes landing pages, blogs, website pages, and case studies.
This Agent will use both internal and external data points to ensure content meets your specific goals, attracts visitors, and drives leads.
It should be noted, though, that this Agent does NOT create content continuously, but instead guides the user through a prompt-based workflow to gather the necessary information. Additionally, in the case of landing pages, this Agent can also not create CTAs or conversion points (at least not yet).
Prospecting Agents are available with Sales Hub Pro and Enterprise subscriptions.
Essentially, these agents aim to help you engage with your ideal prospects by creating personalized outreach strategies. Data from your CRM like intent and activity will be leveraged to craft personalized emails, and help you reach out at the right time.
Customer Agents will be available with Service Hub Pro+ subscriptions.
These Agents act as AI-powered experts for your business, helping your customers in real-time by training on your website, blog, and knowledge base articles in mere minutes. Conversations with these agents feels natural, and when the time comes to hand off to a real person, transference is positively seamless, allowing the Agent to route even the most complex issues to your team without any issue.
Breeze Intelligence is a feature that will be available for purchase to all portals with an active, paid subscription.
This brand new feature aims to improve B2B data enrichment and enhancement as well as add buyer intent data to your CRM to help your business drive new demand and increase conversions through each point of your sales funnel – all directly within HubSpot.
There are 3 key features to Breeze Intelligence
Data enrichment, like the name suggests, helps HubSpotters see the full picture of a company that they’re looking at in their CRM. HubSpot is now tracking 40+ attributes (updated every 20 days) for more than 200+ Million buyer and company profiles.
Companies and contacts may have their data automatically enriched once they’ve been added to HubSpot, with bulk enrichment options available for legacy contacts and companies.
The limitations to this tool so far are credit-based; HubSpot is introducing credits that will be purchased and used to enrich company and contact records with each enrichment using 1 credit. Automatic and continuous re-enrichment of records will be (at least initially) limited to the 1,000 and 10,000 credit SKUs.
Buyer Intent intelligence helps teams to easily identify and prioritize good-fit, high-intent customers based on target markets as well as website activity.
Powered by reverse-IP and enrichment data sources within your own Smart CRM, this functionality will tell you whether a visitor is ready to buy from you whether they’re already a contact in your CRM or not.
To get started, you’ll need to specify and set your target markets using key company attributes like location, employee count, and revenue. Then, you’ll need to set your intent criteria by choosing which pages are the most important from a signaling perspective. Finally, you’ll set up your intent orchestration, and see a list of companies showing intent on your site so you can take immediate action; you’ll even be able to filter by companies in your target markets and see which is already in your CRM.
The limitations to the new Buyer Intent tool are that your HubSpot tracking code needs to be installed on all pages to correctly capture and make use of first-party data, and will be limited to the top 100 visitors for each selected timeframe.
Form Shortening may be the most straightforward update from this long list, as it effortlessly achieves what the name suggests.
When a user begins filling out a form on your site, form shortening will check your enrichment data for existing data, and only the missing data points (form fields) will be shown. This helps to minimize the number of fields and questions contacts are required to fill in, making the barrier to convert that much lower.
Breeze isn’t the only big thing hitting your portal this fall; in addition to the heap of shiny, new AI tools that you can have access to, many of HubSpot other tools and Hubs are getting some much needed love as well, including:
| Content Hub | Marketing Hub |
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Let’s take a quick look at some of these new and updated features a bit more closely.
Hub: Content Hub Pro+
Issue: Creating derivative content takes a long time and can be quite costly
Features: New solutions being added to the content remix tool include the ability to create videos for different platforms, create case studies leveraging your CRM data, and create and manage podcasts more effectively.
Hub: Content Hub Pro+
Issue: Keeping a consistent brand voice can be difficult at times, especially when managing multiple channels for a single brand.
Features: You can now create multiple brand voices and align them with specific channels like social, emails, blogs, etc. Additionally, brand rules can be set to adjust for, and use colloquial language, specific verbiage, unique punctuation, etc.
Hub: Content Hub Pro+
Issue: Many users were unable to integrate CRM data into their website to create personalized experiences.
Features: You can now embed content blocks for any 3rd party website inside HubSpot, and then add them to your website directly from the WordPress editor.
Hub: Content Hub Pro+
Issue: Users have been unable to fully customize membership experiences to match their business needs.
Features: Membership management apps can now be used for all membership content (like blogs, knowledge bases, customer portals, website pages, etc.). Additionally, private blogs can now be crawled and indexed and when a user lands on the page from search, be prompted to create an account to continue.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Despite short-form video being the highest converting channel for the past two years, HubSpot hasn’t supported YouTube or Instagram.
Features: Now, users can publish directly to YouTube and monitor comments all in one platform. Additional management to LinkedIn and Instagram is also available.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Previous lead scoring models were difficult, if not impossible to customize and lacked transparency into how scales were determined.
Features: users can now identify leads most likely to make a purchase based on past behavior, campaign interactions, and demographic data all backed by AI-insights. Leads can be routed to and collaborated on by sales reps when promising opportunities arise. Additional insight into score calculations is now also available.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Static or limited progressive forms increased friction points to conversions, and may have led to conversions being left on the table.
Features: New forms experiences and features allow marketers to create higher converting forms that seamlessly fit their brand identity and minimize user friction. This includes things like multi-step forms, conditional logic, conditional redirects, and CRM validation and spam submissions.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Regulation, data privacy concerns, and browser changes diminish the reliability of data derived from 3rd party cookies or mobile identifiers.
Features: Now, send your own first-party cookie data back to ad networks. Optimize bidding strategies by sending this data directly to Google from HubSpot.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Marketers used to have to hop between screens and tabs to get a good feel of what their responsibilities were.
Features: Now, HubSpot marketers have a single workspace to gain a bird's eye view of team work, and can easily surface tasks that need attention.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Managing subscriptions in HubSpot used to be a chore and large source of frustration for many users, leading to increased unsubscribe rates and churn.
Features: Now, you can create personalized preference pages for different segments to leads only see the most relevant options when unsubscribing, reducing the “unsubscribe all” action.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Two primary reasons for losing SMS deals are the challenges of sending SMS from dedicated short code and managing replies.
Features: Now, meet customers directly where they are – in channels that are easily accessible, and deliver quick response times through a shared inbox with two-way SMS conversations.
Hub: Marketing Hub Pro+
Issue: Marketing Hub provides multiple channels to engage leads and customers through. This leads to a fragmented dataset and difficulty understanding reports and campaign performance.
Features: The new analytics suite allows you to get actionable insights faster than ever with a collection of out of the box reports geared for marketers. You can also now generate reports based on user questions.
As if HubSpot wasn’t already releasing enough new product updates and solutions, our Sales Hubs, Operations Hubs, and Smart CRMs are also going to see their fair share of updates this year as well.
| Sales Hub | Smart CRM | Operations Hub |
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If you’re feeling a tad overwhelmed at either the sheer number of updates that HubSpot is releasing this fall, or at the prospect of your HubSpot experience changing significantly as new tools, solutions, and process are are introduced into your portal, you’re certainly not alone.
As these tools roll out in the coming weeks and months into your portal, understand that HubSpot, along with their extensive partner network, is doing a ton of active monitoring and education to ensure that users are well-prepared for, and feel confident in the new tools that they’ll be using.
And, should you ever need the help, the team at p80 is ready to help you get the most out of your shiny new HubSpot experience.