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Imagine a place where innovation meets inspiration, where industry leaders converge to share game-changing ideas, and where the future of marketing unfolds before your eyes. That's exactly where I found myself last week at HubSpot's electrifying Inbound conference!
Traction AI was delighted to once again be part of this event, and I was privileged to speak at the education session "Best Practices for Unlocking the Power of Integrated Data".
Of course, in lockstep with the AI movement, HubSpot’s announcement of Breeze Intelligence took up most of the headlines. While there's no doubt the new agents, data enrichment, and content creation features will help streamline business' GTM activities, there were some major updates that got buried below the fold.
HubSpot announced some major updates that Traction AI believes will greatly support our clients and our community by eliminating technology silos, enabling better performance measurement, and reducing the work required to increase revenue while using HubSpot. Here are some of the most impactful updates you may have missed from Inbound 2024:
Datasets unlocks many advanced reporting capabilities within HubSpot. Its advanced data transformation functions enable you to report on metrics that previously were not possible in HubSpot reports. At Inbound, two major Datasets updates were announced:
Datasets being an Operations HubEnterprise feature meant many customers couldn’t make use of this feature. With the announcement that Datasets is now an Ops Hub Pro feature, many more HubSpot customers will be able to produce advanced, bespoke reporting tailored to their business needs. This is a great development for SMB companies.
While HubSpot's Custom Reports generally do a good job combining data from multiple objects, it doesn't always do what you want or expect it to do. Certain objects, like Line Items, would interact in unintuitive ways with other objects if they were combined in specific configurations. With the announcement of advanced join functionality in Datasets, users will have much more control over how data is connected within their reports. Additionally, this will enable more reporting use cases because data can now be connected in ways that were previously not possible.
ServiceHub has always had an interesting place in the tech stack of Customer Success teams. CS teams often use Service Hub to track specific processes, like onboarding or implementation. But many Customer Success teams feel they need to adopt additional tools to do their jobs. Service Hub had some feature gaps to fill before it could be considered a fully-fledged solution for Customer Success.
With the introduction of the Customer Health Score beta, HubSpot is working to address one of the biggest gaps for Customer Success Teams. Customer Health Scoring is the #1 feature we hear CS leaders cite as a requirement when selecting a software solution. This feature will enable companies to centralize their Customer Success reporting alongside their Sales and Marketing reports in HubSpot. It will also enable greater automation of Customer Success processes because changes in Health Scores can trigger Workflows.
Traction AI is excited to partner with our clients to start integrating this feature into their work streams. This could be the most impactful Service Hub update in quite some time for Customer Success teams!
When Traction AI assesses a new client’s HubSpot accounts, one of the most common bad habits we see is the use of Custom Properties to report on how a property value has changed overtime. HubSpot doesn't give users an easy way to report on the historical values of properties, except for some deal properties in the default sales reports, so customers who want to track how a property changes are forced to adopt some klugey strategies.
Many HubSpot users work around this limitation by creating multiple properties, one for each "period" they want to track for the property. They then use workflows or manual imports to update these properties when a new "period" occurs. Finally, they consolidate these properties in a table report so they can "trend" how the property has changed.
While this is an ok short-term solution, it gets quite challenging to maintain these reports as the number of "version history" properties grow. We've also seen users create Calculated Properties to track the time between each event, requiring their CRM admin to update which fields are being compared manually before pulling the monthly report. Talk about a process that doesn't scale!
Those days are over now. Ops Hub Pro customers can now set up Custom Events to track when changes to a property occur automatically. These Custom Events appear on the record timeline and can also be used in Custom Reports. This means customers can identify the properties they want to track and set up a single Custom Event. No more single-serve properties you need to manage each month to keep your reporting updated!
You might be wondering, “What functionality upgrades are available to OpsHub Enterprise get now that Datasets is migrating to the Pro tier? Well, some extremely powerful integrations with data warehousing tools!
Snowflake is a major player in the data warehouse machine learning space. The recently announced bi-directional integration with the HubSpot CRM unlocks a great deal of potential for businesses who are using Snowflake as their data warehouse. Now the learnings from your Snowflake-trained Machine Learning models could be used for targeted marketing campaigns. You could perform complex data transformations in Snowflake and sync the results back to your CRM. This integration also enables you to easily feed in your CRM data to empower your AI models in Snowflake without the need for a custom integration.
Traction AI partnered with HubSpot to evangelize this newly announced feature at Inbound 2024. Click here to read more about how to incorporate Snowflake and HubSpot into your Integrated Data strategy.
The Overview tab within HubSpot records now support App Cards. These are custom cards created by 3rd party developers to deliver relevant information from other systems without needing to leave HubSpot. These function similarly to the Custom Cards that Sales and Service Enterprise accounts could develop for their private use, but AppCards are available to any tier of HubSpot customer who has installed the 3rd party app.
Like other Overview Cards, the cards that appear can be customized by team, meaning your Customer Success team could see only the App Cards from their systems, while Sales sees only their tools. The level of customization possible means you could create entirely new and personalized experiences in the CRM.
Traction AI was excited to witness firsthand incredible demos at Inbound demonstrating the vast possibilities with App Cards, but we're just scratching the surface here. App developers will be able to offer cards that could completely change the way we use the CRM. We can’t wait to see what developers do with this new functionality.
Think we missed any major updates? We'd love to hear your thoughts about your take on the most impactful announcements at Inbound 2024. And, should you ever need some help bringing some of these features/functionality to life, Traction AI would be happy to help. Just hit us up here.
