HubSpot is publishing more comprehensive monthly updates outside individual portals, such as the “What’s New in HubSpot’s Software” page, previously limited to quarterly roadmaps.

Here’s a list of the latest HubSpot updates relevant to managers: 

• Marketing Campaign custom properties (beta)
• List releases: Create a random sample, clone and restore static lists and ‘has/has not completed’ filters
• Easier social media publishing and email replies on mobile (beta)
• SEO recommendations
• Filter using ‘or’ in views on index pages for all objects 
• Saved task views, clearer workflow errors, resolvable comments and improved comment notifications
• Track more accurate campaign engagement by checking bot filtering status
• Colored deal tags (beta)
• Improved playbook features, survey options and ticket integrations

Marketing Campaigns now have custom properties (beta)

Keep your campaign information and assets organized and report on new types of campaign information, by creating custom properties for Marketing Campaigns. The once-limited Marketing Campaigns feature now behaves like other standard CRM objects (i.e., contacts and deals), so you can organize, filter and report on the custom campaign data most relevant to your business. 

Previously, many companies used complex naming conventions as workarounds to store campaign information in the name. There was no way to report on that naming information as individual pieces of data. Watch a video about this release here.

List releases: Create a random sample, clone and restore static lists and ‘has/has not completed’ filters

If you are running A/B tests, creating personalized actions for a specific active or static list, or choosing contest winners randomly, the new beta release to create a random sample from any list will eliminate the previous workarounds and potential errors from exporting and importing spreadsheets. This new feature allows you to choose a percentage or a count of list members who will be added to a new static list.

You can restore accidentally deleted lists for up to 90 days using the new ‘Recently Deleted’ tab. If you need to filter a static list differently or turn it into an active one, you can now clone it and make those changes. Previously, only active lists allowed cloning. Watch a video about these two releases.

There’s also a new list filter for reporting who has or has not completed a Marketing Event, Media Interaction, or Custom Behavioral Event. The previous ‘is known’ filter for these events was not clearly understood, and it was difficult to segment contacts who had not completed the event.

Easier social media publishing and email replies on mobile (beta)

Using the new HubSpot mobile app features, your team will be better equipped to create and correct social media posts on the go. They include mentioning pages for greater visibility, previewing the link image or choosing the site preview in the post for greater relevance and dynamic hashtags to check correctness while editing the post. In-app editing features also now include changing text, attachments, mentions and link previews.

Encourage greater adoption and data collection by using the new beta release to send and reply to emails within the mobile app. This ensures the emails are timely, tracked and all team members on all devices can see the latest conversation and context for the record.

Dig deeper: HubSpot debuts ChatSpot generative AI tool

New SEO recommendations

Your website can get more traffic by using several new SEO recommendation tools. These tools scan websites for broken external links your team needs to fix, verify pages are working properly and confirm which pages are correctly blocked from search engines. Learn more here.

Filter using ‘or’ in views on index pages for all objects 

Find relevant information across multiple properties faster and create views in real-time, using the new ‘or’ filtering on the main index page for CRM objects such as contacts, companies and deals.

Previously the workaround was to create lists using the “or” filter, which required more steps, took additional time to load and cluttered the Lists area with unnecessary items.

Monitor teams’ work more easily with saved task views, clearer workflow errors, resolvable comments and improved comment notifications

You can more easily monitor specific team members’ tasks or important types of tasks by using the new release to create and pin saved views of tasks, limiting the information to what is most relevant to your needs.

The “workflows with errors” tab has been renamed “at-risk workflows.” That should alleviate some anxiety since items appearing on that tab may not have been true errors or were errors that had been resolved. Admins can now prioritize and ignore risks that are not relevant.

Quickly check if you’ve responded to your team’s comments and see if they are getting the answers they need using the new resolvable comments beta feature in the collaboration sidebar. Encourage your team to resolve the comments incorporated into their work to make finding any unresolved comments that still need to be addressed easier.

See more comment detail and context without logging into HubSpot, thanks to the improved email notifications for comments, including a new subject line format for threading comments in the inbox.

Previously, your inbox may have been overloaded with notifications requiring multiple steps to see important context before responding.

Track more accurate campaign engagement by checking bot filtering status

Determine whether your email engagement metrics are accurate or if they are being inflated by bots by checking the email post-send page for the new status indicator Bot Filtering setting.

If you recently switched to HubSpot and your email engagement metrics are different than in past systems, try toggling this switch on or off to see if bots were the reason your previous system’s engagement numbers were higher.

Use colored deal tags to help your team prioritize deals (beta)

Help your teams prioritize the full or constantly changing deal pipeline boards using the new beta for colored deal tags. Your super admin can create up to 10 deal tags based on a set of conditions, such as deals with a value greater than a certain amount. When the conditions are met, the colored tag automatically appears on the deal in the board view. The board can also be sorted and filtered by the deal tags.

Gather and report on customer feedback more easily with improved playbook features, survey options and ticket integrations

Collect more customer information, guide team members through calls more efficiently and keep your team focused on the customer during calls by using Sales Playbooks inside the HubSpot App for Zoom meetings.

This feature allows your team to use any HubSpot playbook, track and log data on records, search and view existing contacts and associate a playbook with a specific HubSpot contact record, all within the Zoom call without switching tabs or windows. See the feature in action in this video.

Customer service reps can lead consistent calls and collect more reportable information using the Customer Onboarding playbook during their first call with a new customer, a critical point in the relationship to make a good first impression.

The new Business Review playbook can assist with regular customer check-ins, gathering data from the same customer over time and also to compare customers and discover any signals for positive or negative trends.

It’s now easier to report on customer ratings in custom surveys to gauge customer sentiment now that the survey rating is a “number” type, which supports calculating average ratings over time or across customers. The update applies to new ratings, not historical info not saved in this “number” format. Standard surveys such as CSAT already had this ability.

If your company uses Salesforce cases to collect customer questions or feedback, you can now send and one-way sync those cases into HubSpot tickets for greater visibility of customer feedback across teams using different tools (in beta).

Teams using Hubspot can now see if existing contacts have opened a case in Salesforce, giving all team members more visibility into customer communication and support. Previously, cases had to be synced into custom objects in HubSpot, which are only available for Enterprise users and have fewer reporting and segmentation features than native Tickets.

The post HubSpot’s February 2023 releases: The manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

Create custom goals based on any property 

To better hold your customer-facing teams accountable and track progress on department goals, HubSpot Sales and Service Enterprise now allows you to make custom goals based on any property, not just default properties. 

Set notifications for when goals kick off and when they are achieved, exceeded or missed so you can better track, reward, or improve your team’s performance.

Build custom reports using marketing email analytics (beta)

Report on your marketing email performance in new and more relevant ways now that the marketing email analytics are a data source option inside the custom report builder.

Metrics such as open rate and click-through rate were previously only available in the marketing email tool’s analyze space or exported and pieced together in an Excel sheet.

Using marketing email analytics in the custom report builder can tie email performance to other CRM data without using multiple tools. Example reports could include:

• What day of the week has the best open rate.
• What content has the lowest click-through rate and should be reconsidered.

These reports can be added to a HubSpot dashboard where you may view your other manager reporting.

Use HubSpot Subscriptions with free trial offers

Does your company offer a free trial period for a recurring revenue product or service? You can now use HubSpot Subscriptions by scheduling the subscription on a delay during checkout.

For example, the customer would input their payment information today but receive their first recurring expense 30 days from now. (See this video at 1:45.)

Using a subscription this way may solve a common issue where free trials were previously activated within a product app (outside of HubSpot) that may not be integrated adequately enough with HubSpot to seamlessly track and transition those customers from the free trial into their payment period.

Add a terms of service link to HubSpot Payments

If your finance or legal team previously did not approve using HubSpot Payments, you may win them over now that a terms of service link can be added to the Payments links.

You can mandate that customers agree to the terms before allowing them to complete a checkout.

Schedule meetings faster using calendar view

Inspire more adoption of HubSpot meetings to track and use data better now that there is a calendar view when scheduling a meeting on a contact record in the CRM.

Previously, users could not view their calendar’s availability inside HubSpot, so scheduling meetings required multiple tabs and tools. 

Get a more complete view of customer interactions with inbound calls (beta)

Prevent the loss of valuable data and the stress caused by juggling multiple devices and systems by using the new release to accept inbound calls within HubSpot. This release includes managing missed calls and voicemail. 

Having all the call data in HubSpot will provide a complete view of the customer’s interactions with your company and give more context to your team members for a better chance of selling to or delighting the customer.

Manage user security in one view

Understand your risk of security incidents in your HubSpot account using the new Security Center‘s score, built off a checklist or security criteria related to the users and permissions.

As a manager, you may need to ensure your team and your customers’ data is not at risk, especially if your company does not have a robust information security team. 

Onboard and change notification settings by team preset (beta)

Onboard multiple new team members and ensure current team members see the information they need using the new Team presets for settings such as homepage, language and email signature. Previously the presets had to be applied one-by-one to users.

This includes presets for notifications, which previously could only be set up by each user inside their own preferences, making compliance difficult.

When notifications are set up incorrectly, your team will either be overwhelmed with unnecessary information or not receive the information they need to succeed, especially team members who are not logging into HubSpot daily.

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The reasons cited were a downward trend in business and a “faster deceleration” than expected following positive growth during the pandemic.

Layoffs follow swift growth. Indeed, the layoffs need to be seen against the background of very rapid growth at the company. The size of the workforce at HubSpot grew over 40% between the end of 2020 and today.

In 2022 it announced a major expansion of its international presence with new operations in Spain and the Netherlands and a plan to expand its Canadian presence in 2023.

Why we care. The current cool down in the martech space, and in tech generally, does need to be seen in the context of startling leaps forward made under pandemic conditions. As the importance of digital marketing and the digital environment in general grew at an unprecedented rate, vendors saw opportunities for growth.

The world is re-adjusting. We may not be seeing a bubble burst, but we are seeing a bubble undergoing some slight but predictable deflation.

The post HubSpot to cut around 7% of workforce by end of Q1 appeared first on MarTech.

HubSpot Reporting now supports customizable fiscal years, dashboard property filters and parent-child calculated properties

Is your fiscal year different from the calendar year? HubSpot for fiscal year forecasting and goals now lets you customize reporting for your fiscal year, eliminating the need to download forecasts and goals and manipulate them manually. 

Without asking your admin for custom reporting changes, you can see the info you need for specific properties and segments of your CRM on dashboards using the new property filters (in beta). Previously, the date range was the only filter available for the entire dashboard.

If you target multi-location businesses or have other parent-child company profiles, you can now get a more accurate view of the parent company’s entire business in your reports, saved views and more using calculated properties for parent-child companies (in beta). For example, the sum of the revenue for all the parent’s child companies could be a calculated property used in a report. 

Internal communication improvements for team efficiency and centralization

Managers can make sure the most important information is stored on the HubSpot records for contacts, companies, deals and tickets by using the new feature to convert Slack messages to Notes. 

This is especially helpful for teams using Slack’s free plan, where older messages disappear and for important transaction-related communications between teams that need a date-stamped record, e.g., when a client cancels a contract. Previously, HubSpot supported sending notes to Slack channels via workflow, not sending from Slack to HubSpot. 

Remote team members can more easily contact other team members from their phones, sending you to relevant records to quickly solve a customer or internal issue, using the new internal “@” mention notifications in the HubSpot mobile app. 

Previously this feature was only available for desktops or laptops, causing a lag in communication time for team members working from mobile devices. 

To improve internal communication and customer experiences, non-admin team members can quickly and efficiently find, share or clone each other’s meeting links. In addition, managers or team leads without Super Admin access can now be given permission to create, edit and delete these meeting links on behalf of other users.

HubSpot Payments updates increase sales and adoption potential

Reduce friction for customers to increase upsells and cross-sells with the new optional products featured in HubSpot payment links. This feature eliminates the previously manual, time-consuming and confusing process of creating payment links for each product or product bundle you offer. This release may make using HubSpot Payments more effective than issuing invoices or quotes and attributing additional revenue to a specific sales, marketing or customer success activity.

Increase sales, decrease the sales cycle and reduce manual work for your team by using the new release to sell multiple subscriptions on different frequencies in one checkout experience. This feature is especially helpful for professional services firms with recurring client payments on different billing frequencies or different term lengths in one contract.

Previously, your team had to create multiple quotes and invoices that could potentially confuse customers. This functionality could increase the likelihood of your company using HubSpot subscriptions, which allows you to monitor recurring revenue from different products.

Does your finance team use QuickBooks? HubSpot Payments now supports the creation of refund receipts in QuickBooks, increasing the chance of financial approval to use HubSpot Payments to enable non-finance managers to report on revenue in HubSpot. 

Improve marketing accessibility, conversions and campaign insights

Improve your Facebook advertising performance, personalization and measurement with the new Facebook Conversions API for Forms (in beta). This functionality may lower your ad spend by linking your website and Meta’s marketing data, which yields increased control of content and times for sharing. 

Gain more visibility and efficiency into event and campaign performance by storing your marketing event data as an object in HubSpot, which you can now associate with your HubSpot campaigns. Offline events data association is not supported. 

Make your content more accessible and comply with regulations for hearing-impaired access using the new video subtitles feature. 

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Also, last month: 

• Marketing emails can now be prevented from sending without approval first.
• Campaign reporting is enhanced by an improved “influenced contacts” metric.
• gaining actionable insights from calls is easier with more specific clipping.
• Data collection is more efficient using required properties when creating new deals and tickets.
• Plus, several Payments and Playbooks releases allow managers to access the information they need.

WhatsApp integration for HubSpot

Increase the likelihood of prospects and customers engaging with your content by using their communication method of choice — which now includes WhatsApp. 

The new WhatsApp integration for HubSpot helps you serve the 2 billion people who prefer the app while allowing your team to use a WhatsApp Business account as a channel in the conversations inbox for text or voice messages. 

You can also use approved WhatsApp templates inside HubSpot, add WhatsApp messages as workflow actions, and view reporting on WhatsApp activities. See how it works.

Approvals for marketing emails (beta)

To better safeguard your business against costly mistakes in emails and streamline any existing approval process using multiple tools, you can use the new approvals feature inside HubSpot’s marketing email tool. 

Your HubSpot admin can turn on this option and set it for the appropriate people to be notified to approve before the email can be sent or scheduled. Learn more about best practices to begin using this new release.

Updated Campaigns ‘influenced contacts’ metric

To give you better insights for managing campaigns and adjusting strategy based on what’s working and what’s not, HubSpot’s “influenced contacts” metric has been improved to remove previous limitations. 

The latest release in HubSpot’s Campaigns 2.0 improvements, this updated metric shows the number of contacts that engaged with campaign content to understand how each contact was influenced. 

Content that influenced the contact is now visible when viewing a list of contacts. The campaign details page and campaign analytics reports can use an influenced contacts filter, and you can use the data to create active lists of who was influenced or what influenced them. 

Call releases that eliminate confusion and manual work

It’s now easier to train team members using actual call recordings in HubSpot, and improve marketing content based on the voice of the customer, by sharing specific recording clips with your team. 

Previously, you could define the start time but not the end time. Defining start and end times to the recording clip should help you highlight the relevant part of the call for that specific learning. If the clip is shorter, the team is less likely to become confused or lose interest since they can’t see what’s relevant. 

Similarly, a new release attaches comments on call recordings to the specific section of the call the commenter is referring to, preventing back-and-forth user messages for clarification.

An additional calls-related release eliminates manual work and prevents overlooking important customer information. Inbound (incoming) calls are now automatically associated with the existing contact and/or company record. Previously, the calls had to be manually attached.

Payments releases for taxes, fees and subscription billing dates

HubSpot’s Payments features now enable you to see revenue information more easily, reduce friction from the customer purchasing experience, and attribute revenue to marketing more directly.  

Here are enhancements that may aid you with getting started or using Payments:

• Businesses can now add taxes and fees to quotes.
• Your HubSpot admin and accounting team will be able to communicate more easily now that the payment settings in HubSpot have been simplified and the language clarified.
• To match your company’s billing cycles for a particular day or allow for your company to service onboarding before beginning recurring payments, you can now set a future first payment date using Payment links for recurring subscriptions. Previously, the subscription billing date would be the same day of the month that the customer chose to make their first payment. This release will soon apply to Quotes, too. 

Playbooks releases ensure adoption and better use of collected data

Collecting data via Playbooks can help marketing teams gain insights into what customers and prospects are talking about during calls. Here are some of the latest updates:

• To create a better customer and user experience, Playbooks can now update properties on associated records. This ensures all teams and users find the information they need, no matter which associated record they are viewing. Previously, the properties were only populated on one record directly attached to the Playbook. 
• Another release makes it easier for your team to know which playbook to use based on the value of the deal stage property, contact lifecycle stage property, ticket status, or ticket category. This increases the chance the teams will use the Playbooks, fulfilling the goals for which it was created. 
• The Playbook editor experience is now more intuitive and less frustrating, making it simpler to improve Playbooks more often or create new Playbooks as needed to increase the success of your teams.

Set required properties for new tickets and deals in every stage

To ensure you have the data you need for accurate reporting, outreach automation and personalization, you can now require certain properties to be filled out before a deal or ticket is created for each stage. 

Show only the relevant required properties when creating a deal or ticket to collect the information you need more easily without the team wasting time manually inputting irrelevant information.

Previously, team members could avoid inputting the required information by creating new deals or tickets instead of moving existing records to new stages. 

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The ability to customize lifecycle stages and goals for business-specific success metrics was also introduced last month, along with improvements for importing complete sales activity to HubSpot, tracking campaign spend and exporting campaign data.

In addition, several HubSpot Payment improvements were rolled out and data governance was improved for better security, compliance and trustworthy reporting.

Customer journey analytics launched in beta

The customer journey analytics reporting tool provides a visual depiction of the touchpoints that are moving customers toward conversion and those that are not. This functionality will allow Enterprise users to filter down to specific campaigns, forms or pages to:

• Optimize any area of the customer journey.
• See the average time it takes for contacts to go from one step to another.
• Allow you to answer questions not included in legacy funnel reporting.

The feature was announced at INBOUND22, where Nicholas Holland, general manager of Marketing Hub and VP of Product, said individual customer journeys can be fragmented and unpredictable, but you can see a clearer path if you track a similar group of customers. He also said by compiling disparate data in one place, the need for additional tools, a CDP for example, is eliminated. 

Want to know more? My colleague Liam Redding takes a deep dive here. 

Customize HubSpot to match your business terminology with custom lifecycle stages

Getting everyone in your organization to speak the same language is difficult, especially when your business terminology doesn’t match that of your key software vendors. And let’s face it, they never match. 

But customizing HubSpot to match your business terminology is now possible with the custom lifecycle stages feature, which lets users name the steps in the customer journey. Combined with the custom journey analytics, users get a more tailored and accurate view of prospects and customers.  

Changing stage names to match your company’s terminology and removing unused stages may be the easiest first step to implement. At the other end of the spectrum, adding lifecycle stages would be more complex, and require a thorough audit of your HubSpot portal to update reports, forms and other tools. 

Custom lifecycle stages is a long-awaited feature and in beta for many months. During that time, HubSpot discovered that almost 40% of businesses had created workarounds to compensate. As a result, there may be complex changes to make in your system to use new options for the built-in stages. 

Payment updates for QuickBooks integration, discount codes

Several features were introduced for Payments users: 

• An integration with QuickBooks that creates an expense for HubSpot payments processing fees, ensuring revenue/expenses is properly booked without additional manual work. 
• If you use discount codes for promotions, rewarding loyalty and tracking groups of people who purchase, HubSpot Payments now allows for discount codes. 
• Viewing payment history is sometimes necessary for your team to gather context about the status and actions that occurred. HubSpot Payment activity is now in the activity timeline for deal, contact and company records associated with the payment.

Improved governance enhances security, data and reporting 

Limiting users’ abilities to make changes eliminates errors that could corrupt your data or make reporting inaccurate. Several features were introduced to limit access to authorized users and enhance security: 

• Deal data is now more protected by limiting user access to make changes to deals in certain pipeline stages, such as locking down the Closed Won deals from any changes to amounts or dates. Only Super Admins have access to edit these locked deals, while other users may have read-only access. 
• If you are checking user behavior, assessing the adoption of tools or considering letting a team member go, you can use the audit log and security log to view certain user actions. This information can now be viewed in-app instead of exporting a CSV file.
• When investigating an unexpected change in a HubSpot file, you can now see file history to see who edited files and when. This includes seeing when videos were deleted, which folder images were moved to and which user performed these actions.

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Use Campaign templates to recreate successful campaigns quickly

Continuing the Campaign tool enhancements from July’s releases, you can now set up templates based on successful campaigns or best practices. This feature enables you to give your team guidance on the steps to create a standardized campaign while allowing for customization as needed. Opt into this public beta using this feature in your HubSpot portal.

HubSpot CRM records improvements

Save time by editing records directly on the index page (beta) within the table’s column, like editing a spreadsheet. Previous methods of editing Contacts, Companies, and other object property values required multiple clicks into or around each record. Users accustomed to spreadsheets will find the interface familiar, encouraging data cleaning and completion for more useful reporting. 

Dig deeper: HubSpot pairs community with a connected platform

Get a more accurate picture of customers’ and prospects’ journeys when your team manually logs new sources of interactions in records, including SMS, LinkedIn messages, WhatsApp messages, and postal mail. Logging these interactions yields a complete view of customer actions, reducing the instances in which customers need to repeat themselves, which improves their experience. Logging more communications can also help ensure team members receive credit for their outreach.

Give users and teams the right information with fewer distractions while protecting sensitive information by setting specific view permissions on Notes (beta). This release builds on improvements in viewing permissions added in August.

HubSpot Reporting updates

Create more transparency across teams and eliminate additional steps of logging into financial tools by utilizing a new, pre-built Gross Payment Revenue dashboard to report on revenue from HubSpot Payments.

Prevent the need to log into multiple tools by tracking your website’s organic search performance using Google Search Console from within HubSpot’s SEO tool in the new Analyze tab. This release also may be a step towards reconciling the differences users have reported between HubSpot and Google’s data.

Improved video forms, CTAs and segmentation

Make better decisions based on video interactions now that the Forms and CTA overlays on HubSpot video more closely match the functionality of other HubSpot forms and CTAs. Video forms and CTAs can now be included in campaigns, email notifications, automation, and more. These overlays will adopt any new capabilities introduced to forms and CTAs in the future. 

To better serve the right customer the right message at the right time, you can now segment your database based on video plays, using media interactions as filters to take an automated action based on a user’s interactions in a video. 

Streamline and standardize new user and team setup

Create peace of mind that your teams can access what they need, and know that reporting on their efforts will be accurate by using these new features related to user setup. You can save your onboarding admins’ time and increase the adoption of the tool if everything is set to the new user’s needs before they start working.

Standardize the setup of meeting link pages using the new release to clone meeting link pages. This will help ensure all users follow standards, prevent errors, and allow for more accurate reporting. It also allows users or admins to provide multiple scheduling pages for different contexts without building the meeting link from scratch each time.

Make sure your team is sharing the appropriate contact information with prospects and customers by creating default settings and preferences for groups of users, such as email signatures. 

This release also includes the ability to set up the HubSpot home page for each user or team, so the most relevant page for their role is the page they see most often.

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CRM records improvements

The CRM records received a variety of updates in functionality useful for managers to quickly find the information they need. 

• The Activity timeline has a new tab called Overview, where you can quickly see important information. You can conditionally configure the cards and tables to show only the most relevant information, and create custom cards for the middle pane and sidebar to show any additional information you need to track often. 
• You can manage your CRM developer’s work in one place, inside of the new CRM development menu included with the new CRM card beta. 
• You can now display different properties on deal cards in each sales pipeline board. At a glance, you can see the information most relevant for advancing the deal, such as showing different properties for each product’s pipeline.
• Linking to specific activities in the CRM records, to better communicate exactly what you are referring to, has been added. This functionality could be used in HubSpot tools where new commenting isn’t available. You can also add links to HubSpot activity such as logged emails or Notes to documentation in other software.
• Managers can now create manager-only views and limit what information their teams see with the “no viewing access” permission feature.

CMS tools and dashboards collaboration

The commenting mode and sidebar features, recently introduced in the email editor and other Marketing Hub tools, have expanded into CMS website tools and reporting dashboards.

This feature will enable you and your team to clearly communicate questions and efficiently address quality control issues, instead of sending someone a link to the entire dashboard or CMS screen.

These two tools are specifically important to managers because work in the CMS is eventually public-facing, affecting customer experience and becoming visible to your leadership and board for potential negative feedback when a mistake happens. The CMS tools now have a comment sidebar but do not yet have the new “comment mode” which allows communication attached to specific modules in the tool.

Similarly, dashboards are often created for leadership, so this improvement in collaboration can ensure the reporting is illustrating the story you want to tell. Leaders can then ask questions directly on the dashboards asynchronously instead of waiting to pepper you with questions during a real-time meeting, which can reduce meeting time and stress. You can comment on any type of module in a dashboard, including the video and text boxes you might use to further tell the story with your dashboard data.

This article shows you all the tools with commenting collaboration features, depending on your subscription level.

Compare date ranges in the custom report builder

With the new “date part” feature in the custom report builder, you can now compare time periods in the XY reports and KPI reports. Use this to compare performance and spot trends better.

This release lets you see performance by day of the week, day of the month, day of the year or other granular time periods. It could answer questions such as “Which day of the week do more customers engage with our emails?” and optimize future performance based on the answers you find.

New workflow actions for date delays and deleting contacts 

Two new workflow actions are useful for compliance, reducing unwanted contacts and ensuring actions happen at the right time: delay until a specific date and delete contacts.

You can now set the delay for a workflow to a specific date, which would be useful for the launch of a campaign or other workflow full of tasks and actions to be set at a specific date instead of a varying number of days from now. This eliminates the potential for human error in calculating delays and makes certain delays easier to configure when they don’t have to be based on a previous event occurrence date.

You can also delete contacts with workflows, which keeps your database clean and relevant while reducing manual work. If you are using Marketing Contacts, this release ensures you don’t go over your contact limit (which would result in a larger subscription bill). This also helps your company stay in compliance with privacy laws and eliminate free email domain addresses from your database. Be cautious if you enroll in this public beta. Contacts can be restored, but it can be a time-consuming effort to undo a mistake.

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It was an ambitious message to deliver. The last few years have left many of us feeling disconnected in our homes and work lives as well as increasingly intolerant of disconnected digital experiences, whether as consumers, as B2B buyers, or both.

But the first in-person Inbound conference since 2019 seemed the right forum to articulate it.

Bringing us back together

“Everything we do tries to be a reflection of the world and the customer,” said HubSpot CMO Kipp Bodnar. “We started by looking at ourselves and thinking how we were feeling – and man, it’s been really hard. But we weren’t the only ones feeling that. We saw Inbound as starting to bring us all back together and we wanted a message and an experience to reflect that.”

The twin message was almost too neat. Two kinds of disconnection — personal and technological — two solutions — building community and building a natively connected marketing, sales and service platform.

“Software is necessary but not sufficient,” explained Bodnar. “There are some problems software can’t solve that need to be solved for our customers and for the broader B2B go-to-market community — and those are problems that really need to be solved by communities and networks.” HubSpot’s community initiatives, including the new connect.com networking space, respond to a perceived need to build not so much a community of product but a community of practice; spaces where marketing, sales and other professionals can explore common challenges. “We have a great foundation,” said Bodnar. “The content, the HubSpot Academy; it’s not an overnight thing for us.”

Indeed, HubSpot’s content offerings have burgeoned, not least through last summer’s launch of the HubSpot Podcast Network. As we reported yesterday, the network is seeing some nine million monthly downloads. “That’s audio only,” said Bodnar. “Once you start taking those things to YouTube, that’s several more million.”

Dig deeper: Why community could be the next big thing in marketing

The network effect

It’s early days for connect.com. It features several thousand early adopters who have created profiles designed to indicate their interests, skills and certifications. In some ways, it almost looks like a nascent LinkedIn. Is HubSpot going head-to-head with LinkedIn, at least within the parameters of marketing and marketing operations, sales and service?

Bodnar balked at that. “There are probably some overlapping use cases, right? I don’t think the two will be mutually exclusive, it’s not going to be an either/or situation. There are more focused use cases we think we can deliver from a community perspective that LinkedIn under-addresses today.”

There are, of course, many highly focused — not to say niche — use cases to be found in private Slack channels. Is connect.com looking for a sweet spot between Slack and LinkedIn? “I think that’s a really nice way to describe it,” Bodnar agreed. “The Slack channels are too decentralized. There’s great communication but there’s no network effect. To discover new things to learn, new people to learn from, people who can help you, people who you can hire for your business, you need the network component more than just the base community that exists in a private Slack channel.”

The platform effect

HubSpot proselytizes not just for connected communities but for connected technology. After all, if technology is not sufficient, it is at least necessary. Perhaps uniquely among the big players in the marketing suite space, HubSpot has built its offering for the most part natively rather than through acquisition of existing third-party solutions. In HubSpot’s view, this is something that can increasingly be turned to their advantage.

“Data is hard, it’s messy,” said Nicholas Holland, general manager of Marketing Hub and VP of product, looking back to the decision to rebuild the early Marketing Hub offering on the then new CRM platform rather than leave them as two separate but integrated platforms. “We weren’t having system A talk to system B. Everything was on the singular, unified data layer.”

The opportunity Holland saw was to leverage CRM data, which is much richer than list data, directly in the marketing automation part of the solution. “Every piece of data should be available in reporting, every piece of data should be available in automation, every piece of data should be available in content.”

Competitors, Holland said, are in a different position. Marketo marketing automation needs to integrate with a separate CRM; the various separate Salesforce clouds need to synch together.

It’s this connected platform that it supporting the new Customer Journey Analytics tool announced at Inbound. “If you have the object data — contacts and companies — the event data — everything they’ve done across the journey — and you can string that together in a reporting framework, now you have everything you need [for attribution].”

While an individual customer journey can look fragmented and unpredictable, tracking a cohort of customers can deliver a clearer path. Having the common data layer, Holland argued, obviates the need for yet another product, like a CDP, to pull disparate data together.

As for attribution models, there are many out there, as well as plenty of disagreement about which are most insightful. “Because something is not perfect,” said Holland, “doesn’t make it not valuable.” Despite noise and complexity, he said, attribution models can be directionally accurate.

Dig deeper: Why marketing automation is both a challenge and a necessity

Evolving concerns, evolving leadership

HubSpot registered some 50,000 audience members for Inbound 2022. That includes virtual attendees, of course. The in-person crowd seemed less of a crowd than usual — partly perhaps because some of the expo floor was turned over to small stages; audiences tended to appear when the stages were in use, then disappear to other parts of the enormous Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Bodnar admitted that in-person attendance was somewhat down: “It’s slightly smaller, like 10-15% smaller than 2019.” In many ways that’s not surprising.

There have also been significant changes in leadership since 2019. Chief Customer Officer Yamini Rangan succeeded to the CEO slot last year, with co-founder Brian Halligan becoming Chairman. “Brian gets to still be Brian in the Chairman role but doesn’t have to do as much of the day-to-day admin stuff you have to do when you are the CEO of a business like this,” said Bodnar.

It’s interesting both for HubSpot users and users of other platforms and solutions to contemplate the deliberate evolution of the offering, especially over the last eight or so years as it has both added new capabilities to its original inbound marketing solution, and elevated its market focus to include the enterprise.

“We’ve always been clear about where we’re trying to go and we’re just evolving the next step of leadership to get us there,” Bodnar said.

The post HubSpot pairs community with a connected platform appeared first on MarTech.

Identify over/under budget campaigns

The soon-to-be-released Campaign ROI feature includes a “campaign budgets” report to track which campaigns are over or under budget. It should help users allocate budgets and demonstrate ROI.

Campaign budgets has two new features: a numeric field and a currency setting. This is a marked improvement from the previous version which had a text box for inputting both the currency and numbers. This made impossible to use it as a calculated numeric field for reports.

Your team may need to complete clean-up work on past campaigns to use this field for historical reporting. Fill in the new budget field with the values from the old, read-only budget field before the old budget field disappears on September 8.

Tracked terms automates

Voice conversations are rich sources of information and insight for managers, but they’re extremely difficult to mine. Few managers have time to join or listen to all of their team’s calls. The new tracked terms feature looks to help with that.

It lets users define phrases — tracked terms — that HubSpot’s Conversational Intelligence functionality can find. These terms can be set to trigger automated workflows (i.e., refer the contact to customer service for follow-up) or send her manager a notification (i.e., additional training is required). 

Creating lists based on tracked terms can make it easier and faster for your team to personalize outreach.

Read more about Conversational Intelligence Tracked Terms or watch this video.

Email collaboration feature (beta)

The Marketing Emails commenting feature allows teams to collaborate on email creative and settings. Modifications and corrections can be made more efficiently by adding comments and tagging other users on sections of emails. This is an improvement on the previous cumbersome process for reviewing and modifying email creative which usually required multiple browser tabs or windows.

In our previous release notes, we reported the commenting feature was expanding across more tools for better collaboration between teams, departments and managers.

Watch this video about commenting. 

Cookie scanning (beta) and dismissing

As a manager, you’re likely responsible for ensuring your team’s work complies with an alphabet soup of privacy laws that require blocking cookies until consent is given.

The cookie scanning feature lets you scan, categorize and block cookies until consent is received. It works on all cookies: external, third-party and HubSpot. 

If you don’t use this feature, HubSpot’s cookie banner will only manage cookies from HubSpot and native integrations.

Also. there is now a built-in dismiss button that closes the banner if your website does not use the “Require Opt-in” functionality. This option previously required custom code, so this release can improve both user and customer experience if it complies with applicable privacy policies.

Read more about scanning and managing cookies or watch this video. 

Read about using the cookie banner dismiss button.

Sign up for beta features yourself (beta)

How’s this for “meta”? HubSpot is rolling out (in beta) a feature that makes features in public beta more accessible.

Super Admins will soon be able to opt-in to beta features themselves instead of contacting your HubSpot rep or locating buttons in obscure locations in the user interface. 

Have your Super Admin check out this video tutorial to get started. 

Dig deeper: HubSpot’s roadmap for building community through content

The post HubSpot’s July releases: A manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.