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INBOUND 2020: The lowdown from Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah's keynote

3 mins read

This year, Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah swapped the main stage inside the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for an empty Fenway Park to deliver their highly-anticipated keynote.

Avid watchers also swapped the venue for their laptop screens as the HubSpot Co-Founders, joined by Chief Product Officer Christopher O'Donnell, discussed how companies can thrive in the new normal and what's in store for the future of HubSpot.

inbound 2020 keynote with brian halligan & dharmesh shah

Thriving in the new normal

Brian mentioned that to thrive in the new normal, forward-thinking companies are going to have to run their office on Zoom. Both Brian and Dharmesh explained the harsh reality: life is not going to go back to what it looked like in 2019 and it's probably time for people to stop clinging to the past.

Instead, in 2022 and beyond, life is going to look more like 2020 in terms of running offices through platforms like Zoom and Slack - that's something great leaders need to learn.

They also emphasised the need to encourage diversity. From now on, companies are going to have to step up their culture game to attract and retain great people. They highlighted people want flexibility, transparency and diversity. Dharmesh said it best:

The reason they want diversity is the best people want to work on the best teams. And the best teams are diverse teams.

Their advice? If you want to thrive in the new normal, you need to build a culture that meets the demands of the best people. 

Two other standout points on how companies can thrive is build trust with customers and also deliver a purchasing experience that matches the customer's new normal, not their old normal. To adapt to these changes and to help companies, the guys then turned to Christopher to announce some big, new updates.

The all new Sales Hub Enterprise

One of the biggest announcement was the focus on Sales Hub Enterprise, allowing you to power whatever new normal you're trying to achieve. HubSpot believes a great sales CRM should be easy to use and one your entire team loves.

With the new features, Sales Hub Enterprise eliminates friction, brings tools together and empowers sales teams to stay agile. It includes:

  • Enterprise-grade CRM, including custom objects
  • Streamlined sales reporting
  • Connected CPQ tools, including accounting integrations with QuickBooks online and Netsuite
  • AI-powered sales acceleration

Scalable pricing for Marketing Hub

Dharmesh admitted there was a major bug with HubSpot. The bug they uncovered was there were lots of customers that wanted to keep all their contacts on the HubSpot CRM but didn't always need to market to all of them. What they did was put their contacts in separate places, such as Marketing Hub.

So from October 2020, Marketing Hub customers can use the CRM and store as many contacts as they want and only pay for them. This allows you to focus your budget and time on the contacts you actually need to market to, allowing you to enjoy free storage for up to one million non-marketing contacts.

Scaled contacts pricing across all tiers also makes individual contacts cheaper as you grow. If that wasn't enough, you can modify marketing contacts each month too, so you can adapt to the needs of your business.


The CMS Hub

The CMS Hub is what your developers have been dreaming off - yet easy enough for marketers to build amazing interactive experience in seconds. Now more than ever, it's important to have a website that offers an incredible online experience, something the CMS Hub excels in.

Your developers get the power and flexibility they need, marketers get the ease-of-use benefit while IT benefit from the security and speed they need. Combine all of that and customers get the amazing experiences they deserve.

It's available in two tiers, so choose the one that fits your business' needs. Either way, you can create an excellent online presence with the customer experience at the core.

New Service Hub features

You can't neglect customer delight, but you also need to keep the efficiency of your team in mind. Enter the new Service Hub features. HubSpot's customer service software eliminates the clunkiness and is super easy to use. It has out of the box automation tools that save time, automated bots manage common interactions and automated workflows trigger actions.

These huge improvements also feature a new set of tools, such as logged-in visitor identification, multi-language knowledge base, helpdesk automation, a JIRA integration and loads more. Everything in the Service Hub is specifically designed to help you exceed growing customer expectations.

Brand new ABM tools

ABM is all about sales and marketing working together to close deals at a specific set of target accounts. It's about creating targeted personalised content to attract and engage key contacts and getting your business inside the target building.

To help, HubSpot has also launched a set of new native ABM tools such as company scoring default ABM properties, company based list, AI-powered target account recommendations and ABM reporting.

These allow teams to work together to prioritise and close the right accounts while easily measuring performance.

What else?

There was a lot of excitement in the Digital 22 office when the guys announced the custom, robust report builder that pulls in even more data. Everything from campaigns, social posts, ads, emails - everything.

The dashboard are also more flexible which makes it easy to adapt while product limit on reporting has also been increased.

HubSpot's Marketing Hub also now enables CRM-powered marketing across automation, email, segmentation and much more. All of this allows you to stand out from all of the existing mediocre marketing customers currently face and ignore.

To break through, CRM-powered marketing unlocks the data you need to personalise your marketing and shine above the rest.

If you want to hear more from Brian, Dharmesh and Christopher and what they spoke about when sat inside Fenway Park, check out their keynote in full below.

 

Want to find out more about all of the announcements during INBOUND 2020? Get in touch

I know, it can be a lot to take in. INBOUND is always so fast-paced and we're all eager to put this new tools to the test. If you're at the start of your HubSpot journey, you want to find out more or if you need support on any and all things HubSpot, why not get in touch?

It's an exciting time to be on the HubSpot journey. To get the most out of the platform, hit the button below to book a meeting with a member of our team to run through your needs.