HubSpot Updates Rolled Out in August 2021

by Melanie, on 24 Aug 2021

Over the last few years, while there have undoubtedly been updates to HubSpot's Marketing Hub, it has seemed that a large bulk of updates have focused on Sales Hub. This makes sense as HubSpot wants to compete more and more with CRMs that have been viewed as better for large enterprises (I'm looking at you, Salesforce and Dynamics).

However, I am excited to see more updates being rolled out to Marketing Hub in the past few weeks.

Some of this functionality – such as chat – might be used by users of multiple Hubs. For simplicity, we've listed it under whichever Hub we think will make greatest use of it.

If you have questions about any of these updates and how you can take advantage of them, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at info@strategicpiece.com.

Marketing Hub

CREATE NEW CONTACT RECORDS VIA WORKFLOWS

This will come in particularly handy if you collect more than one email address on a form. For example, where you ask for open-ended feedback such as a list of referrals or for multiple names, such as who the right contact points are at a new customer for particular aspects of a project.

If the new emails weren't already in your database, you previously had to use a manual workaround to connect the new contact information to a contact record. Now, you can set up a workflow to do this for you.

Display Your Custom Chat Avatar throughout Entire Chat Conversation

This functionality will definitely make the user experience more cohesive and company-focused.

If you need some inspiration for fun chat avatars, check out Snowflake and Gong...

Chat Bot - Snowflake

Chat Bot - Gong Or, take a more serious route like Okta...

Chat Bot - Okta

Display Ad Campaigns in Marketing Calendar

Just a few months ago, we would have recommended using an external calendar to coordinate your marketing efforts, but this is quickly changing. HubSpot has made several updates to the Marketing Calendar of late, making it a significantly more powerful tool.

You can now pull information about Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn ad campaigns into your marketing calendar, along with other assets and marketing details.

Improved alt text recommendations via SEO Tool

If you use images on your website – and if you don't, what are you even doing with your life?? – then you need to associate alt text with each of your images.

Alt text impacts your SEO rankings by helping search engines understand what your page is about. So, make sure not to skip this step or use generic text like "Screenshot August 22".

HubSpot's SEO tool now gives more direction on what you should include in your alt text.

Conversations Will not Update Contact Lifecycle Stage

HubSpot offers a lot of out-of-the-box automation around lifecycle stages and updating this property for both contact and company records.

But as more and more companies use HubSpot and create a plethora of different use cases, HubSpot is making the software increasingly customizable rather than automatic.

While there are some downsides to this – many of our clients appreciate lifecycle stages updating automatically – your HubSpot admin can set up simple workflows if you want to preserve this functionality.

CMS Hub

CMS Starter

HubSpot CMS Hub can seem prohibitively expensive for early-stage companies, with WordPress, Webflow, and Squarespace offering lower-priced alternatives.

Each tool has its pros and cons, and the total cost of ownership of HubSpot quickly becomes more favorable as your business grows, but that sticker shock is hard to overcome.

In response, HubSpot has introduced CMS Starter at a price point of just $25 per month, helping cash-conscious companies avoid the awkward choice between spending more or having a clunkier tech stack.

Sales Hub

Deal Probability & Weighted Amount

When setting up your sales pipeline in HubSpot, you will have assigned a win probability to each stage. For example, once you've given a demo, you assign a 50% chance of closing the deal.

However, after giving a lot of demos, you may find that some prospects are only really a 30% chance while for others it's more of a formality, and they should be at 75%. HubSpot now allows your users to manually override the preset probabilities.

Or, if you can think of appropriate rules, your HubSpot admin can set up workflows to automate correcting the deal probability.

Sales reports often display weighted pipeline values at an aggregate level (i.e. for all deals at a given stage) but not at a per-deal level. The new Weighted Amount property allows users to see the weighted amount of each deal at any given point in time.