If you logged into LinkedIn at all last week, you are probably aware that HubSpot’s annual conference, INBOUND, just happened. You've probably seen a million headlines, and with over 200 new product announcements, it's easy to get lost in the noise. And I get it. You’re busy. I am honored you are even reading this newsletter. So, I will distill INBOUND down to the top 5 most important updates you should pay attention to – the foundational shifts that will make our lives easier, our work more impactful, and our businesses more competitive.
So, grab your coffee and let's break down the top 5.
1. Data Hub & Data Studio
What is it?
Operations Hub has officially been renamed Data Hub. It’s a nice simplification of branding for a set of tools that were difficult to understand. But, it’s also a realignment of HubSpot's focus on data. If last year’s INBOUND was all about Breeze, this year’s was all about data, and how it needs to be cleaned and structured in order to get the most out of Breeze and other AI tools.
The big news here is the launch of Data Studio. Think of it as a powerful data manipulation and enrichment tool, similar to what you might get from a third-party tool like Clay, but now it's all native to HubSpot.
Data Studio allows you to connect to external data sources and then transform, clean, and enrich that data right inside your HubSpot portal. You can pull in information from various places (like a list of attendees from an event management tool or product users and activity from your data warehouse) and use that data to create new data for properties, segments, or to trigger workflows. It’s all about making your data work for you, no matter where it lives.
How does it impact your business?
This is a massive step forward for anyone doing serious marketing and RevOps. The ability to pull in data from external sources and then manipulate it without leaving HubSpot is a big step up from the data sync integrations and Format Data workflow actions we used to be stuck with.
Imagine being able to automatically enrich contact records with company-level data from a third-party source, or cleaning up messy property values across your entire database with a single, repeatable process.
This feature is going to streamline data operations and provide a powerful new tool for hyper-personalization at scale. It means less time spent on manual data cleanup and generating new, novel data, and more reliable data for our sales, marketing, and service teams. It directly addresses the "dirty data" problem that so many of us face, turning our HubSpot portal from a simple record keeper into a strategic data engine.
Why should you care?
This is the tool that’s going to make you a data wizard. You’ll be able to solve complex data challenges without writing a single line of code or relying on a developer. For years, we've had to cobble together solutions using custom coded workflows or expensive third-party tools to handle data enrichment. Now, it's a built-in feature. It gives us the power to create a truly unified and clean customer database, which is the foundation for everything we do.
2. SmartCRM Packaging
What is it?
HubSpot has made a significant shift in its pricing and packaging model. They've decoupled their core Smart CRM features from the other hubs. What does this mean in practice? It means you can access powerful extensibility tools, like Custom Objects, Custom Events, or Sandbox environments, for half the price of a Service Hub Enterprise seat, previously the least expensive way to get these tools. Now, with the new Smart CRM Enterprise seat, you get all those powerful features for just $75/month.
HubSpot has come under fire for the complexity of their pricing and packaging, but this change speaks to how HubSpot is reevaluating how they think about their CRM. They are making their most powerful deep customization and complex process building features accessible to a much wider audience. It's a clear signal that the CRM, not Marketing, is the true center of the HubSpot universe, and they want to empower every user to build a platform that fits their unique business needs.
How does it impact your business?
This change lowers the barrier to entry for building a truly customized HubSpot portal. Before, a small or mid-sized company might not have been able to justify the cost of an expensive seat just to get access to Custom Objects. Now, they can. This opens up a world of possibilities for us to create tailored solutions for our business that go far beyond standard contact and company records.
If you’ve been following me on LinkedIn, you’ve seen plenty of examples of how Enterprise extensibility tools can be used to create tailored data models and automated processes to support industry-specific use cases. You can create Custom Objects for things like events, subscriptions, or whatever else is unique to our business model. This allows you to track and report on your data in a much more sophisticated way, without having to pay for an entire suite of features we might not use.
Why should you care?
This is a huge win for anyone on the ops team. It gives you the power to build a better, more accurate CRM without having to go to a multi-billion dollar company that forces you to choose between paying for the platform or paying for a developer to help you manage it. It's an opportunity to build a CRM that is a perfect reflection of our business, and a way to solve our team’s biggest CRM pain points without having to break the bank.