Ainhoa Rodriguez-Muguruza
Someone needs to say it… There are only 8 weeks until the end of the year! It might seem that 8 weeks is not a lot of time, not enough, at least, to get something meaningful done, but that is not necessarily true. When supported by specialised consultants, platforms like HubSpot can make a difference in less time than we think, allowing you to start the new year with the best platform currently available for marketers, sales and service representatives, and operations managers.
If you have not read my blogs before, my name is Ainhoa, and I am Insynth's Head of Platform Consulting, or, in other words, their in-house HubSpot expert. Since last April, I have been gathering the platform's updates monthly to make sure that you are not missing anything from HubSpot. You can find a round-up of 2021 here! And you can also check the January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August , September, and October updates.
Marketing Hub
#1 Monitor All your Social Media Channels from a Single App
The social scheduling calendar is probably my favourite tool within HubSpot. It makes reporting on social media efforts and marketing outreach easy and straightforward, with all information being gathered and recorded in one single place. This place used to be the HubSpot desktop app but, that is not the case anymore! Marketers can now view how the posts they have published from HubSpot are performing from their phones both iOS and Android.
With this solution, users can have a sense of their performance from anywhere, taking full advantage of HubSpot Social features. They will be able to see at a glance the reactions and metrics of their published posts. If they want to go further and see all the metrics, they can go to the post details page where they will see all the metrics available for the network selected. If you are interested in this feature, you will need to update to the latest version of the iOS and Android App, they will be able to see this menu under the Marketing section.
#2 Track changes with an improved File History feature
Content is being constantly updated to guarantee that relevant information is being conveyed in the best possible way. Yet, as organizations grow, it can get difficult to keep track of who is doing what and, ahen several people work together on a platform it can get a little bit confusing. With this new feature, all users will be able to view what changes have been made to an image, document, or video that lives in the HubSpot Files Tool. No more “what happened to my file” or “when was this file deleted” questions being asked!
Some of the data tracked includes who has made a change to the file, when the change was made, what kind of change was it, but that is not all! This feature will help teams have more visibility into each other's work, and add transparency to the Files tool.
Sales Hub
#1 You Can Now Add Line Items when Creating Deals in Workflows
If you are a HubSpot user, it is very likely that you joined the HubSpot family because of the popular automation tool of “workflows”. Workflows are automated processes that allow you to trigger for certain actions to happen automatically once a criterion has been met. It can be used for marketing, sales, service, and operation processes and, from this month, will allow users to create deals in a timely, personalised, and automated way.
Users can now add line items to the deals that are being created in automation, cutting out those manual tasks so users can spend more time on things that matter most, selling in a personalised and relevant way! This means that, if a particular prospect fills up a form enquiring about the specification of windows for a 120-house development, you can automatically create a deal with those characteristics, guaranteeing your sales reps have all the information they need.
#2 Start seeing your Pipelines in your Preferred Currency
As a digital-first approach develops within the construction industry, we find that more of our clients are working internationally, establishing teams that look after different regions that often deal with different currencies. When you operate multinationally and in multiple currencies, things can get tricky quite easily! Until now, you could only set the “company currency” on your portal, and different teams had to compromise using the very same currency, but that is not the case anymore.
If a user works in a currency that is different from their company's currency (e.g. they work for the France division for a company based in the UK), they can now edit their board view to show their pipeline's totals and weighted totals in their chosen currency. Hover your cursor over the footer of the board, where it shows Total and Weighted amounts. A pop-up will appear, with a link: View in your preferred currency. Select your preferred currency and you are all set!
Service Hub
#1 Improving the Usability of Customer Portals
Customer portals were launched last year and, since then, the number of users utilising this feature has skyrocketed! A customer portal is a home behind a login where customers can view, open, and reply to their support tickets. Customers can access the customer portal and check what exactly is happening with their ticket. You can manage the customer portal's branding, preview the ticket listing, and ticket detail page templates, and add a support form to your customer portal.
This already sounds amazing, right? But it can get better! Customers can now display detailed custom ticket stage information in the customer portal instead of just "open" and "closed" stages to help end users get better visibility into their ticket status. Displaying granular ticket information in the customer portal is a highly requested functionality from customers using the customer portal and it allows for the end user to have a fantastic CX.
#2 Start Giving Service Credit!
Customer service teams often go unnoticed but, how many deals did they actually start? How many sales opportunities did service enable? It is time for service reps to get some credit for the enquiries that they convert into sales qualified leads! HubSpot now allows you to list important collaborators that helped you move a deal to close. Deal management is collaborative, and your CRM should reflect that!
Once added as a collaborator, a user gets view, edit, and delete permission on the deal, to allow for as much information to be included for the sales reps to progress the deal. Collaborators can access relevant deals quickly via the new default view, "Deals I am collaborating on."
CMS Hub
#1 Developers can now build using GraphQL
This update is a little bit technical but bear with me. If your website is built on HubSpot, it is likely it has been built using HubL. HubL is a powerful, proprietary language for our CMS developers to build on the platform. CMS developers use HubL to query for data to render on their CMS pages. Whilst this feature is great, developers want to use open and popular technologies to build on that they may already be familiar with, rather than investing into proprietary technologies or frameworks.
With that in mind, HubSpot has made a GraphQL layer available to query for, and display, their HubSpot CRM object and HubDB data on pages, emails, external content, integrations, and more. GraphQL allows developers to easily query for all of their HubSpot data in a simple yet powerful way, using a technology that is open and widely accepted in the developer community. Allowing developers to build using GraphQL will enable more sophisticated solutions, with less work and time.
#2 You can now Sort HubDB data by columns
Another technical update, but a really helpful one! HubDB is a relational database that allows you to create tables with flexible schema to store data you can use on your website pages, or query externally via the HubDB API. When editing data in a spreadsheet-style editor, it can be helpful to sort data based on the cell values of a given column. This can help organize data to manage, view, and edit it more easily.
Users can click on column headers of sortable column types, and row data will sort ascending, or descending. Column sorts do not persist between table loads, or for different users, and do not propagate to live website data, so it is a fantastic tool for internal managing and data access.
Operations Hub
#1 Business Units Limit Increases to 100
Business units were an incredible revolution when they were first introduced to HubSpot users. Business units are sub-portals within the same platform that allow users to manage multiple brands in one HubSpot account. You can customize the branding for each business unit to streamline content creation. Users can also keep assets such as forms, pages, and more organized by associating them with a business unit.
Most companies used business units for regions or sales divisions, which meant that they had quite a few of them added onto their portal. Aware of this, HubSpot has increased the limit of business units to 100 so a company can manage up to 100 different branches of their same group or company from a single place. Please note you may need to manually opt-in to access certain tools related to business units, so if you cannot find this, send us a quick message.
#2 You Can Now Import Activities to your Portal
HubSpot is aware of its limitations and, one by one, is overcoming them! If you have every imported data into HubSpot, you might have noticed that you could import contacts, companies, deals, and tickets or even products! But you could not import activities… You can now import sales activities into HubSpot and associate them with other objects. These activities include sales emails, tasks, meetings, and calls.
Now, with the ability to import tasks, calls, sales emails, and meetings into HubSpot, users can quickly and confidently reflect their business processes within the CRM using the import flow they’re already familiar with. For example, if you’re importing contacts and calls in a single file, any contact and call information on the same row within your import file will be associated together. This is a real gamechanger!
About Insynth
At Insynth we deliver a predictable flow of leads, customers, and specifications for building product brands through our inbound marketing approach, proven to reach a technically demanding audience.
We use the latest marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to equip building product companies to grow sustainability in this era of digital transformation.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major in construction marketing. We have a proven formula of bringing a variety of functionalities together including CRM Implementation, Web Design, Sales Automation, SEO, and Email Marketing to achieve your ultimate aim: Growing your business and gaining new specifiers and customers.