HubSpot Product Update: May 2022

Welcome to our HubSpot Product Spotlight for May! In this blog, we’ll explore some of the teams’ favourite HubSpot updates from the last month. Ready? Let’s dive in!

Now Live

These are all the features now live and ready to use in your HubSpot portal.

Updates to HubSpot Calling

What is it?

Starting today, we've updated HubSpot Calling minutes limits, and introduced HubSpot provided phone numbers. This new feature allows users to make and receive calls that are automatically logged in the CRM. Learn more here.

Why does it matter?

What's Changing:

Previously, calling minute limits were set on a per-user basis, and using those minutes did not require a paid Sales or Service Hub seat. Beginning on May 2, minutes will be shared across the entire account to give you more flexibility in how you use them. Users will need a paid Sales or Service Hub seat to tap into those minutes. (Free users/accounts can now access 3rd party calling integrations.)

Available on:

• Sales or Service Hub Starter: 500 minutes per month and 1 HubSpot phone number
• Sales or Service Hub Professional: 3,000 minutes per month and 3 HubSpot phone numbers
• Sales or Service Hub Enterprise: 12,000 minutes per month and 5 HubSpot phone numbers
• Professional & Enterprise accounts are able to purchase limit increases for minutes, and phone numbers.

Inbound Calling

What is it?

Businesses can now acquire a US, UK or Canadian phone number within HubSpot! These phone numbers can be used to place outbound calls and receive inbound calls forwarded to your phone. All inbound and outbound call records, recordings, and transcriptions live in the CRM.

Why does it matter?

Previously, HubSpot only offered the ability to place outbound calls using your personal phone, so inbound calls and records existed entirely outside of HubSpot. Now you can connect with customers using a HubSpot number and centralise all conversation records in your HubSpot CRM.

Available on: Sales and Service Hub Starter, Professional and Enterprise customers.

Manually trigger a data sync

What is it?

All integrations that are powered by Data Sync just got better with the inclusion of a "Sync now" button. This gives you more control over when the sync fetches new updates in the third party app.

Why does it matter?

Wait... don't data syncs run automatically? Should you now always click this button manually? Of course not!

Whenever a change occurs to a record in HubSpot, data sync would always wake up instantaneously. But what about changes happening in your other app? That's where it depends.

Some apps send out web hooks and those would nudge HubSpot to start checking for changes. But a lot of apps don't have a nuanced way of nudging us through these web hooks, which is where a fall back mechanism springs into place. This involves HubSpot periodically - every 5 minutes - polling the other app to see if anything's changed.

5 minutes is a perfectly acceptable delay for a sync that runs in the background. However, when you're still actively configuring a sync, having to wait a full five minutes for the next sync cycle to take place can seem very long. That's like Elton John's song 'Rocket Man' and then some. It's going to be a long long time.

Available on: All Packages

Dashboards in Global Search

What is it?

You can now search for dashboards in HubSpot, making it easier than ever to pull up the information you're looking for in seconds.

Why does it matter?

In order to succeed with your CRM, you need to be able to find what you're looking for quickly and easily. This includes your reporting content.

Now, you can search for saved dashboards using the search bar within the top navigation of HubSpot, helping your team save time and create a more efficient reporting process.

Available on: All Packages

Buyer Selected Quantity on Payment Links

Available on: All Packages 

New Workflow Action Log Filters

What is it?

New advanced filtering options in Workflow action logs. This includes viewing logs associated with a specific revision or action within a workflow.

Why does it matter?

As workflows are modified and optimised over time, it can be difficult to track down potential problems with performance. With these changes, customers can now easily filter workflow action log events by a specific workflow revision and even view activity by a specific workflow action. This allows for easier, more targeted automation troubleshooting.

Available on: All Packages

Mobile QR Code Scanner

What is it?

The QR code scanner enables salespeople to quickly create and save new contacts in their CRM through a simple two-step process by easily reading a QR code.

Scanning QR codes complements HubSpot’s mobile app business card scanning offering when meeting in-person prospects and leads at events, such as, conventions, conferences or trade shows.

Why does it matter?

QR codes are nowadays everywhere, more than ever. Events, for example, are no different. More and more this technology is being rolled out by event organisers to facilitate contact info interchange among buyers and sellers when attending events.

In person events are back again and our sales reps are now getting out more on the field to network in person at these events. Scanning a QR code is a straightforward way to capture contact information directly into your CRM.

Available on: iOS and Android to All Customers

Audience Targeting Improvements - CSAT/NPS Web Surveys

What is it?

We are happy to release an exciting update to CSAT and NPS feedback surveys. You can now have more control over which web pages to show the web CSAT/NPS surveys and also when to show them. We are also introducing more consistency in the targeting options available for both the web surveys.

Why does it matter?

Currently, you can either show the web surveys on all web pages or in the specified list of web pages. You do not have the ability to exclude a specified list of surveys. This limits your ability to have full control over the survey audience.

Also, different web surveys such as CSAT/NPS offer different levels of control to target the survey audience. For example, the CSAT web survey allows to show the survey on 50% page scroll whereas the NPS web survey does not allow that option.

With this update,

• the targeting controls have been expanded and
• the navigation tabs and the targeting options have been made consistent

Available on:  Service Hub Professional and Enterprise

Associations Limits Increase

What is it?

We’ve increased the number of associations you can make between one object type to another from 10,000 to 50,000. For most object type pairs (e.g., contact and company), you will now be able to create more associations than ever before and leverage those associations across HubSpot.

Why does it matter?

Historically if you tried to create more than 10,000 associations to a single object, associations would stop being created. Now you’ll be able to associate up to 50,000 records to a single object (like 50,000 contacts to a single company!) and use those associations across the HubSpot platform.

These associations will be visible on record pages and can be used across HubSpot’s workflows, lists, and reports to drive your business and support your growth.

Available on: All Packages

Playbooks and Call Transcription & Coaching

What is it?

New and existing Sales and Service Hub Professional customers now have access to two exciting features - Playbooks and Call Transcription & Coaching.

Why does it matter?

Customer conversations are the richest source of actionable insights for both sales and service leaders and reps. Until today, Sales and Service Hub Professional customers were expected to lead engaging, meaningful calls with prospects and customers while also scribbling down notes of the most important information. This can be distracting and result in unfocused conversations, not to mention countless hours of lost customer data.

Now with Playbooks, reps can have focused conversations with customers and managers can rest assured that reps hit all of the key points. Playbooks make it easy to take notes as you go, keeping the customer responses in the context of the questions they answer.

With Call Transcription & Coaching, you never have to worry about losing data you don’t write down. The added ability to search within a transcript or across all your transcribed calls makes it easier than ever to find exactly what information you need. Managers can use transcripts and search to provide focused feedback for reps without having to listen to an entire call.

Available on: Sales and Service Hub Professional

Ad Performance Metrics in Custom Reporting

What is it?

If you have a connected Facebook, Google or LinkedIn ad account, you will now be able to see ad performance metrics in custom reporting. The power of custom reports coupled with your ad performance metrics data means you can now create reports that show year over year spend. You can also drill into specific campaigns and add them to a dashboard, or drill down to the ad level and compare spend across ads in a single report! The possibilities are endless.

Why does it matter?

By allowing this data into custom reporting, you can now fully utilise the power of custom reporting to take your ads reporting to the next level. The new metrics that will now be surfaced in custom reporting are:

• Ad account currency code
• Ad account ID
• Ad account name
• Ad accounts properties
• Ad campaign end date
• Ad campaign ID
• Ad campaign name
• Ad campaign start date
• Ad group end date
• Ad group ID
• Ad group name
• Ad group start date
• Ad ID
• Ad name
• Ad network
• Amount spent
• Amount spent in portal currency
• Clicks
• Count of ad accounts
• Count of ad campaigns
• Count of ad groups
• Count of ad performance metrics
• Count of ads
• Created by user ID
• Daily budget
• Engagements
• Impressions
• Lifetime budget
• Likes
• Network conversions
• Object create date/time
• Object ID
• Object last modified date/time
• object_id
• Portal currency code
• Report date
• Status
• timestamp
• Updated by user ID
• Video Plays at 25%

Available on: All Packages

Collaboration Tools: Commenting Upgrades

What is it?

A huge feature upgrade to Commenting is now in public beta, allowing support for comment threads, and attaching/highlighting comments directly to individual parts of the asset you're working on.

Why does it matter?

As collaboration continues to shift more and more to online, you'll often have questions or thoughts while working on an asset in HubSpot. While there has been a commenting feature in Marketing Hub for a little while, the feature hasn't been integrated into overall work flow in-app as much as we'd like. We've heard feedback about this too, almost all the feedback we've received is directly related to the features we're releasing in this update:

• "It's very practical but I would appreciate a function like in Google Docs that you can highlight sections as reference to each comment."
• "I like that I can comment. I wish I could attach comments to specific parts of the email."
• "It would be nice if we could highlight and comment on a specific part of the email while reviewing. It makes it more difficult for a sidebar to open up for comments, and then closing it out to keep reviewing content."
• "I like the text formatting ability. Would be nice to be able to have more prominent comment indicators on screen or almost like Microsoft Word comments feature functionality."
• "You cannot comment/highlight specific parts of the email which in my mind defeats the purpose of having the comment feature."

With that, we are upgrading our collaboration tools, specifically commenting, to answer these long standing feature requests and make commenting substantially more useful for you!

Available on: This feature is available as part of Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise.This is now available inside of Forms, Campaigns and Workflows (available inside Professional and Enterprise of all Hubs for Workflows).

Review Recordings on Mobile Enhancements

What is it?

Customers can now enjoy an improved experience on mobile conversation intelligence across all mobile platforms as Android is now fully live on all the latest features and on-par with iOS.

We have added new and enhanced features to improve the overall user and discoverability experience. Sales managers and reps will have an easier way to discover what recording to review next as well as an elevated experience when doing so. Sales coaching on-the-go was never so easy!

Why does it matter?

As a sales manager, finding time to coach reps is hard. As a sales rep finding time for self-coaching is hard too. Thanks to mobile conversation intelligence, sales managers and reps can coach and onboard wherever, whenever. We’ve just made it easier now!

Improving how sales managers and reps discover recordings to review as well as their experience doing so is critical to increase adoption and make this a useful feature for them to boost their overall sales team and individual performance.

Available on: These new features are now live to 100% of all HubSpot mobile app customers, both on iOS and Android platforms.

Apps for Conversation Intelligence

What is it?

The App Marketplace now has a Conversation Intelligence collection highlighting several third-party calling apps that help you gain valuable insights from your customer calls. Built on HubSpot’s Conversation Intelligence, these apps support playable recordings and, depending on your HubSpot plan, transcriptions and call analysis. These apps include:

• Aloware
• Callingly
• CallRail
• Fusion
• JustCall
• Kixie
• Zoom

Why does it matter?

Call recordings are an important way to gain insight into your customer calls and to coach and train your service and sales teams. Previously, it was difficult to gain insight from recordings of calls placed via third-party calling apps because there wasn’t a secure way to load and play the recordings within HubSpot. This restricted the amount of insights your team could gain from calls and limited your opportunities for coaching.

Now, you can use these Conversation Intelligence apps to send authenticated recording URLs for playback inside of HubSpot, so all of your call recording data is securely stored in one place.

Available on: All Hubs Professional and Enterprise

Website Grader Widget Updates

Available on: All Packages

Multi-select in data sync filters

What is it?

When using our supported data sync apps like Dynamics 365 or Zoho CRM, the filter allows you to limit the records that are involved in the sync.

On the HubSpot side, you filter on the basis of the lists, which have advanced filtering logic built-in. However, for your third-party app, we cannot offer the same type of granular filtering. You can only filter one property at a time.

While we are building out an advanced filtering component to construct complex filters, we've pushed live a smaller improvement to the current filter: a new operator called 'is equal to any of'.

Why does it matter?

Previously, we would only offer the operator 'is equal to' . This severely limited how you could leverage the single data sync filter and didn't allow for much flexibility when filtering on certain properties.

For example, when using Google Contacts, you could only choose to sync contacts carrying one certain label, with the alternative being syncing over all contacts, or none at all.

Available on: All Packages

Apps for Partner Relationship Management

What is it?

The App Marketplace’s recently added Partner Relationship Management category now highlights several apps to help you grow your partnerships. You can use these apps to create partner portals, share content with partners, scale partner programs, and track partner engagement, deals, referrals, and other key data. With these integrations, essential partnership information is synced back to HubSpot, so you can easily track ROI from their partnerships while keeping HubSpot updated as their source of truth.

Available PRM integrations include:

• Allbound: provide self-service tools for your partners, including training, sales and marketing collateral, deal registration, and opportunity management
• Channeltivity PRM: sync deal registrations, channel partner leads, and partner referrals with HubSpot
• Channelyze: manage channel sales and partner renewals through HubSpot
• Crossbeam: a partner ecosystem platform that finds overlapping customers and prospects with your partners
• Crossbeam to HubSpot sync: push Crossbeam overlap insights into HubSpot to automate co-marketing
• Impact.com: automate and manage partnerships, plus track and attribute partner value
• Impartner PRM: manage, optimise and accelerate the partner journey
• Kiflo PRM: centralise and track your affiliate, referral, and reseller partner tiers
• Partner Deals Portal: partner deal registration now managed directly in HubSpot
• PartnerPortal.io: self-service, plug-and-play platform for managing partnerships
• PartnerStack: all-in-one partnerships platform for B2B SaaS companies
• Reveal: monitor partner-related opportunities, map accounts with each partner, and more

Why does it matter?

Previously, it was difficult to find PRM apps that integrated with HubSpot. Now, you can leverage the App Marketplace’s Partner Relationship Management category to find apps to manage and grow your partnerships.

Available on: The HubSpot Marketplace is available on all packages, Access will vary depending on which app you use

Line Items now support fractional quantities

What is it?

Starting today, Deals and Quotes users can now add fractional values (e.g. 1.33, 2.2567) to their Line Items' "quantity" field. So, for example, they can sell their customers 1.5 hours of consulting, or 2.225 tonnes of concrete. Or, maybe they get fancy and offer 3.1415926 crates of pie. No matter what they sell, users now have up to 7 points of decimal precision in their quantity fields.

This update is available to all HubSpot portals (i.e. Free+) and all users within those portals.

Why does it matter?

Customers have been asking for greater precision in the quantity field for years. Forcing customers to use whole number quantities increases the number of Products or custom Line Items they need to create in order to build an accurate quote or deal. For example, a user selling hours of consulting could not offer 1.5 hours. They would either need to (1) break their offering into its smallest possible units (e.g. 15 minute or 30 minute increments in this case), or (2) have duplicate Products for the same product/service, each in a different quantity (e.g. one product for "hours" of consulting, another product for "minutes" of consulting.

This restriction forced users to do unnecessary data entry, or revert back to using a tool like Excel, which does support high decimal precision.

This update helps customers use their Products and Line Items the way that makes sense to them and reduces the amount of work they need to do to represent their offering in HubSpot.

Available on: All Packages

Flexible Report and Dashboard Email Scheduling Options

Available on: All Packages

Slack integration updates: Customise properties shown when creating HubSpot objects via Slack

What is it?

You can now customise which properties are shown when you create HubSpot contacts, companies, deals, and tickets via Slack using HubSpot’s Slack integration. This helps ensure the most important, relevant properties are added to HubSpot objects as they are created via Slack.

Try out this new functionality to increase team productivity and seamlessly keep HubSpot up-to-date while working in Slack.

Learn more about HubSpot’s Slack integration.

Why is it important?

Previously, only default properties such as name, status, etc were available when creating HubSpot contacts, companies, deals, and tickets via HubSpot’s Slack integration. That meant other important info would be missing and would have to be added retroactively to the newly-created HubSpot object.

Now, HubSpot’s Slack integration shows the same properties that you’ve set up for the creation of contacts, companies, deals, and tickets within HubSpot. This helps your team ensure that all of your HubSpot contacts, companies, deals, and tickets are filled out with the same information no matter how they were created.

Available on: All users of HubSpot Slack integration

Users and Teams Partitioning for Social Accounts

What is it?

Social accounts can now be assigned to teams and users. In your HubSpot Social tools, you can now filter on the Manage and Analyse tabs by teams or users to see social account data that matters most to your teams.

Why does it matter?

Marketing teams often run multiple social accounts within HubSpot. However, not every team should have access to publish or see data from every connected social account. In the past, a super admin could only restrict accounts on a single user basis. This has been super painful for teams that need the ability to see this data too. Now with the assigning of teams and users to social accounts, you can ensure that only the right users have access to see and publish to certain social accounts.

Available on: Marketing Hub Enterprise

Beta

These updates are currently in the works and nearly ready to be released on your HubSpot Portal.

Simple eCommerce Recommendations for Product Module

What is it?

The new Product module now supports simple product recommendations, which means you can easily pull products manually from the Product library, or recommend products based on categories such as: Top sellers, Latest products, or Price high to low/ low to high.

Accompanied with the email Abandoned Cart module, you now have a simple and powerful way to market your eCommerce offerings through HubSpot’s marketing email tools.

Why does it matter?

Being able to identify trends in a customer's purchase history is crucial for any marketer working in e-Commerce. Combine that with the ability to market similar products based on that historical data, and you'll see higher ROI, and an increase in customer lifetime value (LTV).

The HubSpot eCommerce email modules give you an easy and simple method to pull the products that matter to your customers into marketing emails.

Marketers no longer need developer assistance to build modules and manually work through product library inventory to find the products to present to their customers.

Available on: Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise

Social Composer Full Page Experience

What is it?

The ability to subscribe to workflow email notifications and receive a weekly overview of enrolment changes.

Why does it matter?

Today, users managing and reporting on workflows are required to manually check each workflow individually. With this change, users will be able to subscribe to email notifications for any workflows they would like to monitor. This now allows users to proactively report on their workflow performance and easily identify potentially problematic changes. From the email notification, users can go directly into any workflow to take action.

Available on: Marketing Hub Enterprise, Sales Hub Enterprise, Service Hub Enterprise, or Operations Hub Enterprise.

New critical action - GDPR Delete

What is it?

When a user "GDPR Deletes" a contact, the action is now logged in the "security activity history" logs under Settings > Account Defaults > Security.

Why does it matter?

GDPR Delete irreversibly deletes a contact's data, so it's important that you know what data was deleted and by whom, so that you may investigate any suspicious activity.

Available on: All Packages

Alpha

These updates are currently being tested and only released on a select few portals.

Flexible Report and Dashboard Email Scheduling Options

Sunset

These products have been removed from the HubSpot ecosystem. 

Replacing inbound links in Content Details

What is it?

The "Inbound links" tab in Content Details, under the "Optimise" tab is going away. You will be able to see your referring domains in the "Performance" tab of Content Details

Why does it matter?

We are no longer able to get full inbound link URLs accurately after Google's default referral policy change.

Previously, our web crawlers were able to get the full inbound link URLs from browser referral information, and show these under the "Inbound Links" tab. However, Google recently changed its default referral policy. After the change, Google only makes the referring domain available in the request header information, not the full inbound link URL.

Referring domains are already available in Content Details under "Performance," so we will be removing the "Inbound Links" tab.

Adding non-user emails to Form submissions email notification

What is it?

We are sunsetting the ability to add non-user email addresses to the Form submissions email notification recipient list.

Why does it matter?

Currently, you can add Teams, Users, Contact owners and also any email address that are not portal users to the Form submissions notifications recipient list from under the Forms Editor and CMS Editor as shown below.

• This could lead to accidental personal data breach as someone could mistype an email and leak data to an unauthorised party
• A customer could have an employee leave, and forget to clean up their email address from the recipient list, especially if it is a personal email id, resulting in the ex-employee continuing to receive the form submissions notifications.

If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you grow with HubSpot, click below to book a meeting with our Growth Consultant.