Top HubSpot Features Added in 2021

Technology continues to expand, creating more efficiencies for businesses, yet a more varied tech stack to maintain. Considering, CRMs and marketing automation platforms with exponential integration options and ever-expanding functionalities are becoming the ultimate growth tools. 

HubSpot is one of the most powerful CRMs in the market, recently announcing their app marketplace just reached over 1,000 integrations. HubSpot also continues to add on features and roll out expansions to Hubs that enable businesses to centralize their marketing and sales practices, and streamline automation for ultimate efficiency and revenue generation.  

In order to leverage the utmost value out of your HubSpot investment, it’s important to stay on top of feature updates in order to continue to propel your growth. If you’re investing in top HubSpot talent, you’ll also want to invest time and in some cases, dollars, for some of these lucrative HubSpot add-ons to give your rockstars the tools they need.

Here are some of the top features and expansions HubSpot announced late 2021 during INBOUND that are active or will continue to roll out over the coming quarters:

Elevate Your Customer & Sales Experience

1. The Feature: Customer Portal with Ticketing History
   HubSpot’s Service Hub will now provide a customer portal instance which will allow you to provide your customers with visibility to your ticketing history so they can track their interactions with your organization, improving their customer service experience. 
   
   The Value: Customer Satisfaction and Retention
   Service Hub provides your organization the ability to offer a body of knowledge for your products and/or services, as well as communicate with your customers via a ticketing system. The customer portal login will allow your customer service team and your customers to streamline communications, and access the history of your interactions to elevate the customer experience in each conversation. If you’re an agency, consider utilizing this feature with your account services team in order to keep customer communication history within the CRM, and enable account history to be accessed by new hires and core team members.
   
   
2. The Feature: eCommerce for B2B Transactions
   HubSpot understands that end users and customers alike desire the removal of time and friction from the buying experience, regardless if they’re purchasing products or services. HubSpot is enabling B2B organizations, and B2C alike, to process transactions that sync with accounting systems, and allow customization of a service or product catalogs. You will also have the ability to create and send direct, custom links for specific items and attribute the sale to the proper team member on your end. 
   
   The Value: Increase Pipeline Speed, Reduce Friction, Grow Accounts
   With this feature, not only can you increase the speed of your sales pipeline by offering your prospects a friction-free ability to purchase services and/or products, but you can enable your accounts teams to cross and up-sell easily to existing customers. In a complex industry, you can also consider offering a catalog of trainings if your team is comprised of subject matter experts whose expertise can be monetized as a stream of revenue. Scale your team, all while growing your accounts, and diversifying your revenue streams.
   
   

Automate Your Operations & Improve Testing

1. The Feature: Operations Hub Improvement & Enterprise Expansion
   Operations Hub is a critical component of the HubSpot system in order to implement and automate digital marketing and revenue operations best practices. This tool is imperative to sync systems and data, scrub data, create custom reporting, generate workflows to keep data consistent and accurate, streamline processes, and more. With the marketplace exceeding 1,000+ integrations, leveraging Operations Hub is imperative. New features and add-ons include more customizable automation, reporting and expanding the Hub to offer the anticipated Enterprise tier.
   
   The Value: Data & System Integrity, and Efficient Processes
   Enterprise organizations with the most complex of CRM systems can now invest in the proper tier of Operations Hub, taking their tech stack integrations and functionality to the next level. Other features will allow for increased efficiency with customizable automation, as well as more confidence in data integrity. 
   
   
2. The Feature: Hub Sandboxes
   One of the most impactful updates in order to enable the growth of your people and your business, perhaps surprisingly, is the announcement of Hub Sandboxes. No matter the skill set level of your specialists, developers and technologists, a safe environment to test big ideas and learn new capabilities is a game-changer for your business.
   
   The Value: Push Boundaries, Launch with Confidence
   Your team can now explore their creativity and big ideas in a sandbox environment, without the fear of implementing a change that overwrites existing workflows or sequences, or enabling something that negatively affects the CRM. Developers and technologists for agencies can also play and test new UI/UX features,  integrations, workflows, etc. that can differentiate your business from your competitors by unleashing cutting-edge capabilities for your customers websites and marketing.

Glean More Insights

1. The Feature: Behavior Events
   More granular than Campaigns, HubSpot introduces Customer Behavior Events in which you can track and report on customer behaviors that you wish to analyze. Beyond just linking assets to a Campaign for reporting, you can set a custom behavior event you want to track. This is an amazing opportunity to provide more meaningful analytics around your customer’s journey at a more granular level.
   
   The Value: Inform Future Decisions
   Really understand the components of you or your customer’s marketing that is working, and follow the buyer’s journey in detail. This will be extremely valuable in informing your marketing team’s future deliverables, and what efforts are high impact, ensuring future tactics are worth the time investment. This too, most importantly, will inform you of the buyer’s journey, spotting gaps or friction, and inversely, what your audience is engaging with. Talk about incredibly valuable data for product development, too! 
   
   
2. The Feature: Custom Report Builder
   HubSpot knows that results matter, and easy to build and understand reporting is the key to nimble marketing. The Custom Report Builder continues to evolve with more flexibility, automation and the ability to sync your data with Snowflake, one of the premium providers of data visualization reporting.
   
   The Value: Trustworthy, Intelligible Data
   Quite simply put, is there ever a reporting improvement that isn’t welcome? The more technology improves, and the more technology integrates, the more valuable the data is to help inform future decisions and QA system integrations. And if you choose to utilize the power of Snowflake, your data will become ever-more digestible with real time, intelligible viz. 
   
   

Grow with HubSpot Features & HubSpot Talent

If you’re serious about investing in top HubSpot talent, ensure you’re also keeping up with or appointing an accountable party to trend the product enhancements of HubSpot to ensure you’re leveraging the system to the utmost degree. This will not only ensure you are putting the technology to work for your organization, but that you’re considering how every feature can improve your business growth and efficiency.

Not to mention, you’ll continue to give your team the tools they need to help you grow if you also invest more in the power of the platform. The product can be utilized for incredible new revenue streams and opportunities, so be sure that you’re staying apprised of the technology.

If you missed INBOUND 2021, also be sure to also catch up with the community best practices for the coming year, not just the tech features. 

• Now that you’re aware of the revenue gaps you can fill with new features, be sure to check out our resource to help you identify HubSpot talent gaps on your team.