Due to the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis, HubSpot hosted INBOUND virtually for the first time in its nine-year history. Moving in-person events to digital experiences isn’t exactly unique anymore in 2020. Still, INBOUND’s immersive online atmosphere, filled with fun cartoon avatars and clickable “event spaces,” felt close to the real deal.
They also didn’t let the fact they had to quickly pivot directions prevent them from wowing users with new product announcements and in-depth sessions, spotlights, and more! Take a look at some of the biggest moments from the virtual two-day event on September 22 – 23, 2020:
Spotlight Speakers
Many of this year’s keynote speakers, including Chrissy Teigen, Van Jones, Alicia Garza, Jesse Williams, Sasan Goodarzi, and Scott Belsky, spoke of adaptability and flexibility in a COVID-19 world. They offered insights on how to be more empathic in all situations, scale innovation when times are tough, build a brand that consumers will find authentic, relatable, and trustworthy. All these topics – and many more – resonate deeply with marketers today, as the sales and marketing landscape has been impacted heavily by COVID-19, as all industries have.
Ask Me Anything(s)
Attendees were able to ask a slew of experts all their most pressing questions on things like advertising, email marketing, branding, social media, and more. The only possible complaint here? That the sessions were not long enough!
HubSpot Product Spotlight
One of the most attended sessions every INBOUND is Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah’s presentation. This year Christopher O’Donnell joined them for a socially distanced discussion on 2020’s events and the impact felt around the world. Yet, they had the added fun of announcing some highly anticipated new HubSpot product enhancements and launches. What we are excited about:
Account-based marketing - The ABM platform makes complex sales processes easier than ever through ideal customer profile workflow templates, target account identification tools, and out of the box ABM lists and lead scoring.
New scalable pricing – With HubSpot’s new pricing model, companies only pay for the marketing contacts they actively engage with. Companies will also have the ability to regularly modify their marketing contacts in response to any unpredictable business changes.
Supercharged Marketing Hub – One of their flagship products, Marketing Hub, got a makeover for INBOUND. Updates include more advanced personalization tools, updates to ads, automation, behavioral events, and email tools that leverage the data in users’ CRM.
Enterprise custom objects – HubSpot users have been asking for a way to define an object that’s not a standard one for years – and they responded during INBOUND. The CRM custom objects feature extends HubSpot CRM by allowing businesses to do just that. With it, you can store any data directly in HubSpot. That data can then be associated with one another, accessed by CRM users, and used in marketing campaigns and reporting. Currently, this is only available for Enterprise users.
Sales Hub Enterprise – The new Sales Hub Enterprise puts more power into the modern-day sales executive with advanced and flexible permissions, enhanced acceleration tools, quoting functionality through an accounting workflow extension, and more in-depth reporting.
Accounting integrations – With four, ready to download app integrations, HubSpot users who also utilize NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Xero, or Nubox, can improve their financial insights and turn quotes into closed deals faster.
Custom report builder – New robust and flexible dashboards let marketers pull in data from email, ads, social posts, campaigns, and more and see it all in one place. Plus, you can finally make the bar and circle graphs you’ve been dreaming about!
Solutions Directory and remote apps – Looking for a HubSpot partner will be more straightforward now with a refined profile listing experience. Customers can find the right agency for their needs, and also benefit from updates to remote work apps like Slack and Zoom to make communicating with them – and internal teams – a cinch.
And so much more – New features in Service Hub make your customer support efforts more efficient, in-app chat, multilingual knowledge base, Jira integrations, help desk automation…the list goes on! You can discover all the updates here.
What’s Next?
For Premium Pass holders, you can access every session on-demand until 2021. For now, there’s no assurance INBOUND 2021 will be in-person or not, but you can register for the next event starting now.
If you can’t wait that long to learn more, HubSpot is hosting an upcoming webinar regarding one exciting recent product launch: Custom Objects Across the Hubs Panel on October 6 at 12 PM ET. Register for it now or reach out to a Lynton expert to go over custom objects or any other product launch!
