Sales Hub made waves this year at INBOUND as Andy Pitre, HubSpot's EVP of Product, unveiled some of the biggest updates in its 10-year history. This post explains why and how Sales Hub has been redesigned to power your sales team's productivity through relevance - so they can connect with buyers so they can break through the noise.
Taking Sales to a New Level
Sales Team Have a Productivity Problem
The sales teams of the past two decades have relied on "more" to drive growth: more reps, more software, more activities. In spite of this, buyers have changed along with the times. Deals are taking longer to close, budgets are tightening, and prospects are becoming harder to reach. Due to this, growth stagnates and teams feel discouraged.
But don't take our word for it. Earlier this year, we surveyed over 1,000 sales leaders worldwide and found that their top challenges this year come in the form of standing out from the crowd and meeting quotas. Sales productivity has become a critical problem for sales organizations to respond to and “more, more, more” is no longer cutting it. In fact, replying by upping the volume only pushes buyers away even further as it so often comes at the expense of value.
Bringing AI to life: From Challenge to Solution
The gap between buyers and sellers is set to widen even further as AI enters the fray. As a result of generative AI, buyers now have access to readily available information at their fingertips, transforming their expectations of the sales process. It is no longer enough for salespeople to provide simple product descriptions to buyers; they want to feel heard and have their challenges truly understood.
When harnessed properly, generative AI can alleviate the mounting pressure on sales teams. By automating time-consuming busy work, but also by unlocking new levels of customer relevance. With the help of generative AI, sales reps can transform simple personalization into meaningful connections.
A Better Way to Win
The solution to this productivity problem lies in focusing on the quality of your sales engagements rather than the quantity of those engagements. We examined the industry, listened to our customers, and believe that the best way to solve this productivity problem is to stop clinging to the quantity of sales activities.
In this new era of sales, there's a better way to win. A place where sales teams can reclaim their productivity and rekindle what they love most: selling. Because of this, HubSpot has reimagined sales. Crafting authentic customer connections at scale is the best way to win.
That starts with HubSpot's AI-powered Sales Hub, built for productivity and powered by relevance. It helps sales teams prospect smarter, accelerate revenue growth, and scale insightfully with a number of new features. Let’s dive in!
The Grand Tour of the New Sales Hub
With the new features revealed at INBOUND23, Sales Hub solidified its position as the core of your modern sales stack. Based on HubSpot's Smart CRM, Sales Hub revolutionizes sales engagement, deal management, and reporting/coaching. Here’s how:
18 New Sales Hub Features You Should Know! | HubSpot [INBOUND 2023]
Prospect Smarter
Let’s start with the sales engagement tools in Sales Hub that equip your business development teams with the means to start relevant, contextual conversations that captivate prospects and convert them into deals. By adding a new prospecting workspace, unifying lead management, upgrading sequences, and simplifying lead handoffs, Sales Hub empowers your sales teams to prospect smarter, not harder, and deliver a world-class buyer experience.
The Prospecting Workspace
The sales engagement tools in Sales Hub give your business development teams the tools to engage prospects in relevant, contextual conversations that convert prospects into customers. Sales Hub adds a new prospecting workspace, unifies lead management, upgrades sequences, and simplifies lead handoffs to empower your sales teams to prospect smarter, not harder.
The workspace also makes sure your sales reps never lose sight of their leads. It surfaces CRM data of upcoming meeting participants, displays relevant context in task queues, suggests the next best activity, and ensures your sales reps always have the most relevant context at their fingertips to create meaningful customer connections.
Unified Lead Management
That's right. We are redefining lead management in HubSpot by introducing leads. Lead records can now be created just like tasks or tickets. Leads are not a standalone object. Rather, they are records associated with a contact or company that you can use to track and report on the journey prospective customers take.
Prospecting workspace is where you manage your leads. It's almost completely automated, which is great. When your sellers engage and connect with your leads, they will move seamlessly through their stages. When you contact a lead, they will automatically move from New to Attempting. As soon as they respond, they'll be moved to Connected. Are they qualified? Here’s a deal creation panel so you don’t waste any time and immediately turn them into a deal.
Smarter Sequences
With HubSpot sequences, you can automate entire prospecting strategies. They let you create and manage a series of steps (like automated emails, tasks, calls, and more touch points) that help salespeople effectively engage prospects at scale. To improve the effectiveness of sequences, here are some new features to help you turn the art of prospecting into a science.
For starters, your reps are now able to directly tie sequences to business impact. The new outcome reports let your reps see how good their sequences are at generating meetings and closing deals. Found a sequence that’s underperforming? Then use the improved step analytics to find where your sequences are falling short. Step analytics now lets you analyze each step in your sequence, anything from an automated email to a manual task. Found a step that needs some optimization? Use the new A/B testing functionality to experiment with different options and figure out what works best for your audience.
Seamless Handoffs
Using Sales Hub, your sales team can create delightful buyer experiences by removing friction from lead handoffs.
One benefit of introducing books on behalf of others is that your prospecting reps will be able to capitalize on successful qualifying calls. Meeting rotations allow them to book the next meeting on behalf of an account executive or simply rotate the meeting host to be the next best salesperson in line.
But there’s more! HubSpot's lead form routing enables your marketing team to generate sales meetings on behalf of your sales reps. Simply add conditional rules to your form to qualify website visitors and redirect them to a meeting scheduling page.
Mobile Prospecting Updates
In addition to prospecting, a lot of things go on outside the desk as well. With the HubSpot mobile app, your sales reps don't have to wait until they get back to their desks to get things done. With QR-codes replacing traditional business cards, sales teams can now import vCards and add contacts directly to their HubSpot accounts using the QR-code scanner in the HubSpot mobile app. Lastly, HubSpot's AI content assistant is now available on mobile so your reps don't have to spend hours typing emails on their phones. Enroll these new leads immediately and start nurturing them right from the mobile app. Your reps will be able to generate relevant sales emails quickly with the help of the AI assistant.
Accelerate Revenue Growth
We know that closing deals quickly is a top priority for every account executive. With HubSpot's deal management and automation tools that’s always been a given. Sales Hub’s deal board helps your sales teams streamline their sales processes, ensuring that opportunities move seamlessly from qualified all the way to quote.
Now your sales reps can keep track of all deals in their pipeline even easier. They can now organize their deals at a glance with the new deal inspection view. Instead of going directly to the deal record page and losing sight of your pipeline, just click on any deal you want to inspect and you'll see a summary of all recent touchpoints and relevant activities associated with that deal. In this way, sales representatives can more quickly identify which deals need their immediate attention by looking through their deals.
To keep an eye on the health of your pipeline and deal velocity, sales reps previously needed to find and access the right report within sales analytics. The newly surfaced deal insights now prevent those extra steps and remove the need for keeping multiple tabs open. The insights are displayed at the top of the deal board and can be hidden at any time. They’ll give your salespeople a direct overview of some key pipeline metrics like deal amount, new deal amount, and average deal age.
Scale Insightfully
The path to scalable success lies in accurate goal setting, prediction, and attainment. With HubSpot's integrated reporting and coaching tools in Sales Hub, your sales managers can accurately set, predict, and hit their revenue targets and effectively uplevel their teams with insights. Here’s what’s new in the world of sales reporting and analytics:
Forecast Intelligently
Forecasting is getting an upgrade in the form of the new accuracy tracking (Professional+) view. Sales managers can now leverage their sales reps’ historical forecast data to track the accuracy and reliability of their manual submissions over time.
With the newly surfaced forecasting insights (Professional+), managers can quickly look into the state of their revenue predictions. The insights tell you how your forecast and pipelines are trending across teams through key metrics like team goal, closed won, gap, and forecast submissions.
Prospecting Analytics
Improving your sales engagement efforts requires optimizing prospecting activities for conversion. Sales managers can now see a holistic view of their reps' prospecting activities with the new out-of-the-box prospect activities report (Professional+). Track progress across different activity types like sequences, calls, and meetings, and then analyze key performance metrics like conversion rates, activities per contact, or activities per day to determine which sellers are doing well and which ones need more coaching.
It provides a comprehensive view of the contact-to-lead-to-deal conversion rate and the time spent by leads at each stage of the lead funnel (Professional+). Sales managers can identify areas for improvement, optimize lead nurturing strategies, and even evaluate the effectiveness of different lead sources by analyzing lead conversion. Using this new out-of-the-box report, managers can assess the performance of their sales reps and make data-driven decisions to drive revenue growth.
Deeper Deal Reporting
A deal’s path through your pipeline isn’t always linear, which makes measuring conversion rates and finding improvement areas really difficult. With the improvements made to the out-of-the-box deal funnel report (Professional+) your managers can now rest easy knowing they’re reporting on accurate and reliable metrics. The deal funnel report accounts for skips, conversions, and time-in-stage metrics, and with the help of deal journey analytics (Enterprise) your managers can go even further and customize the deal funnel report by visualizing it as a Sankey chart and by leaving out certain stages.
As a final point, sales velocity is one of the most important metrics to track in sales. In addition, it helps uncover weaknesses in the sales process and showcases sales team productivity. Salespeople can optimize their sales strategies with the help of the new sales velocity report (Professional+). With this out-of-the-box report, sales teams can set realistic goals and allocate resources effectively based on how long it takes to convert leads into customers.
Essential Apps for Sales Hub
Finally, you can now leverage a collection of recommended sales integrations (Free) in the HubSpot app marketplace. With Sales Hub at the core of your modern sales stack, you can seamlessly integrate your other sales tools with HubSpot. These integrations include ZoomInfo Inbound Enrich, Gong.io, PandaDoc | eSignatures & More, Aircall, and many more!
Announced and Coming Soon!
That might be it for everything that’s new in Sales Hub today, but we also announced some big upgrades that our product teams are still building and testing. Most excitingly: AI forecasting and a completely rebuilt LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration.
AI Forecasting
Your sales managers will soon be able to compare the accuracy of their manual revenue predictions to an AI-powered projection. AI forecasting (Enterprise) will look at your historical manual forecasts and your closed-won amounts and give you a best and worst-case scenario of where you’re likely to end up for that month. Early testing has shown that AI forecasting helped some teams improve accuracy by up to 95%!
A Better LinkedIn Sales Navigator Integration
Soon, your sales reps will be able to enjoy an entirely new LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration (Professional+). HubSpot is working closely with LinkedIn to rebuild this integration and has been chosen to be one of the few providers in the market to get this kind of exclusive integration. The new LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration will be able to sync data two-way between the two platforms – giving reps more insights and managers deeper reporting capabilities so they can prospect more efficiently, build deeper relationships, and close deals faster.