HubSpot Expands Functionality of its Growth Platform With New Features Announced at INBOUND 2019

By STS News Desk On Sep 6, 2019

HubSpot Expands Functionality of its Growth Platform With New Features Announced at INBOUND 2019

New features include a machine learning tool to remove duplicate contacts, expanded functionality in Sales Hub Professional, and improvements to HubSpot Conversations

Christopher O’Donnell, SVP of product at HubSpot, took the stage at INBOUND 2019 to showcase the top ideas from customers that the company has now implemented in the product. Customers will enjoy improved functionality, greater reliability, and a more sophisticated user experience across the entire HubSpot platform.

“We get hundreds of suggestions from our customers every year for new features and functionality on our ideas forum, in customer conversations, and on review sites. This year at INBOUND, we wanted to honor our customers by highlighting all of the changes we’ve implemented thanks to that feedback,” said O’Donnell. “Everything you see on the product release stage today is the direct result of customer feedback. We owe our success to our customers, and I want to personally thank everyone who has taken the time to help us make HubSpot better.”

Reducing friction in the customer experience

The ability to deduplicate records was the second-most requested feature in the HubSpot ideas forum for the last year. Duplicate data leads to inefficiencies, both internally and for the end customer. 72% of salespeople spend up to an hour a day on data entry and connecting contact records. Even with that time spent on managing data, duplicates slip through the cracks, leading to customers receiving multiple marketing emails or hearing from multiple reps. To help clean up that process, HubSpot created a new duplicate management tool that uses machine learning to find and merge duplicate contact or company data. The tool gets smarter as it processes more data, creating a seamless experience for both the internal team and their customers.

The new duplicate management tool is now available to all Professional and Enterprise customers across all three hubs.

In addition to the new duplication management tool, HubSpot also tapped into customer feedback to improve the editor experience for email and knowledge base, adding dozens of drag-and-drop templates to both. With improved formatting and enhanced ease-of-use, both features are now optimized for easy and quick editing. The knowledge base editor is now live for all Service Hub Professional and Enterprise customers; the email editor is now available across Marketing Hub Starter, Professional, and Enterprise.

Adding value for growing teams

Last year, HubSpot announced significant expansions to its enterprise-level offerings to help meet expanding customer needs. This year, the company plans to add new functionality to its Sales Hub Professional and Marketing Hub Starter tiers, expanding the scope of these products to help more businesses grow better. New features of Sales Hub Professional are planned to include:

eSignature functionality that saves precious time previously spent printing and sending hard copies of contracts and other forms.
Calculated properties that automatically populate with data from other form fields.
A “Buy Now” checkout experience that allows customers to create a call-to-action that directly connects a product in their catalogue to an online purchase in Stripe.

New features planned for Marketing Hub Starter include a new drag-and-drop editor for landing pages and expanded kickback email functionality. These updates expand the capabilities of the product and give growing businesses a more robust set of tools to power their marketing efforts.

Providing more functionality, for less

HubSpot’s free Conversations tool has evolved significantly over the past year. Since launching the free tool in August 2018, HubSpot has improved usability across multiple product features, including unified thread views, ticket kickback emails, support forms in the Conversations inbox, and more.

The company also has a number of new Conversations features now available in beta, including a free Facebook Messenger integration that enables customers to create a Messenger experience on their Facebook Business page and manage those interactions from their Conversations inbox.

HubSpot also announced this year that it now offers email creation, sending, and analytics, as well as expanded advertising capabilities, all as part of the free HubSpot CRM. By offering email and advertising tools for free, HubSpot is giving users the ability to manage those essential features in one connected system, saving them precious time and providing insight into the entire customer experience.

“When deciding which software to buy, we were looking for tools that would not just help us grow, but also grow with us over time,” said Patrick Shea, vice president of demand generation at Cybereason. “We ultimately decided to consolidate all of our tools and go all-in-one with the HubSpot platform, bringing everything we use under one roof. HubSpot has enabled Cybereason to grow, and is helping us improve the customer experience in the process.”