INBOUND 23 Round-up Blog: Key learnings and more

This blog was updated throughout the INBOUND 23 conference. Bookmark this page, follow us on LinkedIn or subscribe to receive HubSpot-related round-ups straight to your inbox.

Watch the keynotes on YouTube

Whilst the conference is definitely leaning back into being an in-person event, thankfully, HubSpot is still live-streaming the keynotes and some other big talks.

You can watch them on YouTube too...

Key Learnings from INBOUND 23

Key Learnings from Partner Day at INBOUND 23

Partner Day was back! After a three-year hiatus, INBOUND eve saw a return of the HubSpot Partner-only event. This is where Solution, App and Service partners gather to hear about all things HubSpot Ecosystem.

A lot of the day is centred around confidential (for now) updates on the HubSpot product and its roadmap but we can still talk about the prevailing themes and what it means for HubSpot customers.

Here are Will and Elle discussing the key takeaway of the day: HubSpot's leaning into AI in a big way and how it's there to Assist us not replace us.

The big takeaways from the day were:

• HubSpot is investing big time in widening the app and partner ecosystem even further and making the platform itself easier and simpler to use.
• This is a gear shift to set the whole ecosystem up to better solve for HubSpot customers (you) more effectively.
• HubSpot will be bringing in expert partners (solution, service and app partners) more frequently.
• Partners with Data Migration Accreditation from HubSpot will be able to migrate from a long list (precise details are hush-hush at the time of writing) of CRMs and other tools quickly for you thanks to some functionality being unlocked.
  

FUN FACT: The HubSpot App Ecosystem has gone past the 1,500 mark and is still growing. APIs that are getting unlocked are all about making our lives more productive by allowing HubSpot to talk to more out-of-platform software in messaging, reporting and automation.

It was also a chance for partners to hear from Yamini Rangan, HubSpot CEO, who was interviewed by Ingunn Bjøru, Avidly COO.

Key Learnings from Day 1 at INBOUND 23

The HubSpot Spotlight

The conference opened with the HubSpot Spotlight on the Main Stage. Three talks from people leaders inside HubSpot:

1. Yamini Rangan, HubSpot CEO, discussed the modern customer journey and how to serve it
2. Andrew Pitre, EVP of Product, announced some of the 200+ product improvements that HubSpot has released
3. Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot Co-Founder, discussed the potential of AI and how although it is coming for our jobs, if we embrace it and work in an AI-powered way, it will give us better jobs on the other side

If you saw the HubSpot Spotlight, what did you make of it? I'd love to hear from you on this post.

What were the main takeaways from the INBOUND 23 Keynote talk during The HubSpot Spotlight?

• The customer journey has changed and it has to be a whole lot more personal. Yamini’s main message was that being contextual and personal with your customer connections is an entry-level requirement now. Even using templated personalisation isn’t enough and expecting customers to bring your team up to speed during an interaction is just needless friction. So HubSpot has built a platform which helps make it quicker and easier for your marketing, sales and service teams to build a strong connection with customers more quickly.
• HubSpot AI was launched. There are a whole bunch of AI Assistants baked into the platform that help you make websites, plan campaigns, write content, generate images, analyse data, produce reports… Basically, anything we create and share out of HubSpot or use HubSpot to do now has an AI Assistant. Yowsah.
• HubSpot Sales Hub has been reimagined from the ground up. The all-new Sales Hub offers a better experience throughout the whole sales and customer journey and they've made using Sales Hub more efficient, heavily utilising AI and leveraging the centralised CRM in an intelligent, connected way… So you can spend less time working on admin tasks and more time building connections with prospects and customers.

Some of our favourite Hubspot product releases at INBOUND 23 (there were over 200 but here's what stood out to us):

Besides the reimagined Sales Hub centred around a Smart CRM and using HubSpot AI (Clemens in our German studio said, "109% closing rate improvement [that their study showed] would be quite beneficial!") there were some other standout features announced:

• Campaign Assistant: Being able to get the basics of a whole campaign planned for you in minutes not only saves you an hour or two of time but leaves you fresh and energised to put your efforts into making the execution itself the highest possible quality.
• AI Chatbot: With this one, you just need to install the HubSpot AI Chatbot and you're done. When users ask it questions, the HubSpot AI tool crawls your website and finds the answer. That's only what a junior running a live chat would be doing anyway, so they can do something more productive and creative now instead.
• AI Forecasting: When HubSpot talk about a Smart CRM and HubSpot AI, this is one of the most impactful examples. AI Forecasting will analyse all the information available on your previous deals to give you an over 99% accurate forecast of your current pipeline. And the best bit is the more accurately you use your CRM, the more accurate this functionality gets. Forecasting just doesn't need doing anymore - salespeople can just stick to building connections with prospects instead.
• Reporting Assistant: This one really symbolises how HubSpot AI can help you work more efficiently. If you can picture the report you want or know what you want a report to tell you, the Reporting Assistant can scour your data for you and give you the report back that you're imagining. Ideal for visual thinkers and wordy communicators like me who struggle wading through all the data points inside HubSpot.

Plus, as well as helping us make connections with prospects more easily, HubSpot AI and the other product updates are also going to have a positive impact on HubSpot Academy:

FUN FACT: HubSpot have released over 200 product updates as part of this year's INBOUND conference. If you want to know what they all are in a nutshell: The Sales Hub has been rebuilt, HubSpot AI has baked AI into all the tool we use in various forms of "Assistants", and everything is setting you up to spend time working more creatively and building stronger connections with prospects and customers.

Key Learnings from Day 2 at INBOUND 23

Day 2 and we're still reeling from the scale of the announcements made over the first day of the conference: 200 product improvements, HubSpot AI, various AI Assistants, a reimagined Sales Hub alongside four other Hubs (Marketing, CMS, Ops and Service) culminating into a Smart CRM.

But what is a Smart CRM? How does it all come together/

Amongst the various talks we attended on Day 2, we set out to make sure we got clarification on how HubSpot, a Smart CRM and 200 other updates come together to help you make stronger connections faster with your prospects and customers.

So, we spoke to Nicholas Holland, HubSpot's VP of Product and GM of Marketing and CMS Hubs, and he explained it to us:

Key Note from Day 2: Whilst attending over 20 talks between us as a team during the day, when sharing our favourite learnings over our evening meal, nothing seemed to beat this piece of golden advice from Marcus Sheridan: Buyers are in charge. They decide where we should market to them and how. We have to provide for them and not expect them to bend to us.

Key Learnings from Day 3 at INBOUND 23

The jet lag is real at this point of INBOUND.

Full-on days packed with learnings, networking and tasty food and drink. It's amazing, don't get me wrong. But you do need to dig deep when Friday arrives.

What's great is that there are encores of talks you couldn't get a seat at earlier in the week and a big name brings things to a close.

Reese Witherspoon saw things home this year and it was a brilliant way to end the week. Besides her magnetic character and storytelling style, she's a force for change with some amazing business learnings to share.

All that and some inspirational quotes to boot, like this...

QUOTE OF THE WEEK: "What other people think of you is none of your business," She said, "And once you do that, you're free to do what you to do."

Yep. A pretty damn good line, isn't it?

When it came to key learnings, we couldn't help being reflective of the whole week. There were certainly some consistent themes at INBOUND 23:

• HubSpot has baked AI into its tools in a biiiiiiiiiig way. Content Assistant, Reporting Assistant, intelligent automation, Sales Hub AI Forecasting with 99%+ accuracy, Website Assistant making websites in response to a few Q&As, in-platform AI image generation when writing social posts... Aw, man. So. Much. AI.
• Away from the main stage, there was a strong thread of needing to only use AI as a (very big and very helpful) stepping stone towards the finished product - because that finished product is reliant on your critical mind being the editor. Megan Keaney Anderson from Jasper AI summed it up nicely when she explained that generative AI can produce "How to" content which has been the bread and butter of inbound marketing for years, but it can't ever produce "How I" content that uses the subjective opinions and experiences of expert humans.
• In a similar vein, another big theme away from the main stages throughout the conference was the importance of selling to, marketing to and managing people in an empathetic, natural and human way. As the internet becomes more and more AI-generated, people prepared to put the hard work in to build human connections will rise to the top.

If you want to hear from a few more people who were there in person, here are Avidly's Tom Cross, Elle Calvert and Will Troup sharing their key takeaways from INBOUND 23:

Want to get more insights from INBOUND?

Join us for a deep dive at an upcoming HubSpot User Group

We will present our key learnings and takeaways from the conference at our upcoming HubSpot User Group meetings in September.

We have various meet-ups and you're welcome to join us at any of them. If you're local to Manchester (UK), Helsinki (FI) or Halifax (CA) (dates coming soon), come and meet us or you can join the Aarhus event from anywhere as it's virtual.

Find out more about upcoming events and sign up over on the Hubspot-x-Bevy pages here:

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