Commerce Hub CPQ

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Welcome to another session of the HubSpot Admins Hug. I'm very excited you are here. If you have not seen this before, this is your housekeeping. You can get all of the next upcoming events, the recordings, all of those resources that you need as an admin to get yourself to situated. We have a bunch of upcoming events. I just added another one this morning so you probably got an email about that. The only session that we don't have already scheduled out to the end of the year is on the 18th of November. That one will be coming soon, but as you can see we've got quite a few more rebound sessions. The Smart CRM next week Operations Hug, the following Content hub, the following after that and we've got another session on the sales hub. We've got qualify joining us to manage duplicates and HubSpot and then we're going to dive into the marketing hub and see what's going on there. We got OpenAI in November. Let's see what else. The show and Tell finally it's on the calendar so if you haven't gotten your submissions in, I'm going to be reaching out to those who submitted their forms. We will get that on the calendar. Let's see if you miss a session or you've missed a part of this or you want to go back and rewatch something that Ethan shared. You can go to our YouTube channel and check out one of the 157 videos that are there will be 158 after we get this one up. You can watch Rewind, find Fast Forward. If you want to move forward to something, all of those are there for you. We also have a LinkedIn group over here on the side where you can connect with all of your amazing admins. You can check that out. We have a space on the HubSpot community that you can go chat and figure out any of the things that are going on with your system. Or if you need to connect with somebody and figure something else out, that's there for you as well. Like I said, the show and Tell that form is there. You can get your submissions in. We can fit 5 ish to 6 people during one of those sessions and I really would love to get as much in there as possible so that we have options for everyone if we get too many. Never a problem. I will gladly schedule another session. The Bootcamp, it is full but they do have wait lists for the Super Admin Bootcamp and there are additional bootcamps that you should go check out. They're a great Way to learn and connect with other people who are building out in HubSpot and check those out if you've got any issues. Bevy does sometimes give us a little bit of issues. Sometimes just turning it off and turning back on helps. Again, if you don't can't figure it out, somebody can't can't hear them, we can't see them. Go ahead and put that in the chat but also try checking out the troubleshooting guide. If you've got an idea for a hug. Say this every single time. But if you don't tell us what you want to hear, I'm going to bring the people on that I want and you're going to hear about it from them. So go ahead and submit your ideas up for the week. If you want to connect with myself or Kyle, you can absolutely do that. We're happy to connect with you guys. There's our linkedins are being shared in the chat and definitely reach out if you've got us a role or you're looking for a role and you're looking for those in HubSpot there. Check out the hiring for HubSpot. There's roles posted all the time. Anytime I see something, I'm definitely sharing them there. So without further ado, we've got Ethan Kopita. Please take it away.

Cool. Well it's nice to meet everybody. I'm glad that I already seem to know many people in the chat, which is awesome. Here, let me share my screen and we'll go right into it. All right, so hey everyone, my name is Ethan and I lead product for the CBQ group which is one of three groups in inside of Commerce Hub. So Commerce Hub is like we do quoting, billing and payments, right? And I lead the quoting part of that CPQ and there's actually five teams inside of the quoting group which is pretty cool. I don't know, you know, for the, for the folks who know me, I worked at HubSpot for six and a half years and it wasn't always that way. Quotes, in my opinion, has been a little under invested in the past couple years and it's really exciting for me to see something that I've, you know, cared about for a long time and worked on for a decent amount of time get kind of the investment I feel that it deserves. So just a little bit of background. I actually started out in Sales Hub and then I came over to Commerce Hub and I was actually like the first product manager on Commerce Hub. So I've worked on most things in Commerce Hub. So I've built a lot of things that I'm proud of, and I built a lot of things I'm less proud of. Some of you have gotten a chance to interact with some of those things, but it's been a joy to be able to kind of follow the Commerce Hub journey from the very beginning. And then that makes me kind of a fun guest. Because if anyone wants to know why things work the way that they work, I often know for better or for worse. Let me see if I can change slides. No, I can't. All right, that's all right. Cool. And actually, before I keep going, let's talk about what I'm going to do today. So I want to show you guys just like six overview slides if you're not familiar with Commerce Hub or you're not familiar with cpq. And then I'm going to do a demo. And normally when I do demos, I like for people to interrupt me and ask questions and we can rabbit hole on something that's a little bit harder in this format. So I've asked Dana and Jeanette to interrupt me if they feel like I'm missing something or if I'm not going deep enough. But also, please drop questions in the Q and A and I'll finish the demo. And if a question is related to something in the demo, we can go back and do that again. And the other thing is, as a presenter, I hope this is kind of an informal conversation as much as possible. I don't have like a really structured thing that I'm trying to communicate to everybody. I'm really just trying to show you what we're working on. So feel free to ask me spicy questions or vague questions. I really want to just help everybody understand what we're building and help you understand why I'm excited about it. So, yeah, let loose. Don't let me off the hook. All right, let's keep going. So I'm here to talk to you guys about cpq. So I've been working on the. Like I said, I've been working at HubSpot for about six years and I actually worked on what we now call our legacy quotes product for about a year and a half. And now I'm here to talk to you guys about the CPQ that we launched at Inbound. And that's basically like this fresh new version of quoting in HubSpot. And I know some of the folks here are partners, and so this is maybe a little bit of recap from my partner Day Talk. But what we've done with CPQ and HubSpot is really rebuild a lot of quoting inside of HubSpot. And the reason we did that is because we want to make this massive investment in CPQ as part of Commerce Hub. But a lot of our kind of quotes is actually a pretty old tool at HubSpot. And a lot of the infrastructure that sat under it was some of the oldest at HubSpot. And so we have released a lot of new features that you guys can see on this page here, like the closing agent, a new editor, and quote tracking. But a lot of what we've also done is just reinvest in the underlying architecture so that we can build a CPQ on top of our quoting system, which is something that really just wasn't possible before. So there's a little peek under the hood for you. And then before I talk to you about cpq, I want to talk to you about Commerce Hub because I think a lot of Commerce Hub can be kind of confusing to people, transparently. I think the name is part of the problem. But that's a story for another time. But Commerce Hub is not cpq. Commerce Hub is a bigger thing. And so our vision for Commerce Hub is really to build a revenue lifecycle management system. So it's something that kind of takes that end part of the closing process and actually turns that into getting a quote created, getting an agreement signed, getting bills created, getting payments created. We want to create an entire system so that small businesses can manage their revenue all in one place, including things like analytics and even in the future, probably things like financial reporting. And so that's what Commerce Hub is. CPQ is only a piece of that. It's an important piece of that. And I think of it as kind of like the front door to that system. Right. But it is ultimately only a piece of the overall Commerce Hub. But of course, you know, we're gonna, we are, and we're going to build it in such a way where somebody, for example, can do quoting with HubSpot and doesn't need to do billing with HubSpot in the same way you can do marketing with HubSpot and not do sales with HubSpot or sales with HubSpot and not service with HubSpot. But that's our overall vision, is that, you know, connected revenue system.

Right.

That's embedded inside of the CRM. All right, and I want to talk to you guys about what a CPQ is because I think that you'd think that it's a standard definition that everyone understands, but actually, well, I won't go too deep into it, but I had some very funny conversations with like, you know, folks like analysts right, at Inbound. But anyway, you know, what a CPQ stands for is configure price quote, and it's a piece of software. This is the ChatGPT definition, by the way, which I actually like. I think it did a good job, which helps companies streamline and automate the process of selling complex products and services. So the output usually of a CPQ is a quote. And if we go down and we define what that actually means, like configure pricing and quoting, those are separated for a reason, right? Because traditionally configuration is the process of choosing the right product mix. And a big part of configuration is making sure that sales reps don't accidentally configure a basket of products that either can't be delivered or don't make sense to be delivered. Right? So like, if you're buying HubSpot, you can't buy Marketing, Hub Enterprise and the Enterprise Platform Bundle. That doesn't make sense because marketing of enterprise is contained within the Enterprise Platform bundle, right? And then pricing is, you know, making. It could involve automatic calculation of pricing. It could, you know, for example, like you could have certain types of customers that get certain types of prices or discounts. And then quoting is like the combination of configuration and pricing and the creation of this like quote or proportion document. Often it's signable, right? And then that thing is what ends up getting turned into, you know, sales orders and NetSuite or, you know, invoices in QuickBooks or whatever it is. And bring up this kind of conventional definition of a CPQ is that that is what HubSpot is building. HubSpot is building a CPQ, right? We say we're building a CPQ. I'll show you guys my roadmap in a second. My roadmap has got a deep entry of CPQ features, but we're also looking to do CPQ differently. So you'll hear Sarika, my boss, who's the head of Commerce Hub, she often talks about disrupting CPQ or ending cpq, which I think is kind of funny. But what she really means by that is that historically CPQs were built by manufacturing companies who had super complex quoting or fulfillment systems, and they needed a piece of software to make it possible for their reps to actually generate a quote in the first place. But what we've seen happen in the past 20 years is that CPQ has really just come to mean quoting, right? It's often come to mean quoting by anybody who has a large enough team where they need to put any sort of guardrails or process around quoting. And so what that's done is that's kind of, you know, it's created a huge set of people who don't necessarily need all the requirements of like, you know, a custom built, you know, SAP cpq, but who still identify themselves as needing a cpq. And so while we, you know, can and will build a lot of CPQ features, what we really want to focus on from a vision perspective is around enabling our customers to be more efficient, right? And allowing them to actually close their deals faster. That's like the core part of our vision and that's pretty different from a lot of CPQs. So I put these three things on the slide because when we kind of coach our salespeople on how to sell cpq, this is how we tell them to sell it. So we tell them it's about enabling your sales rep or the people who are actually using the CPQ to generate quotes quickly, to generate quotes easily, and to kind of keep the deal process moving. Because a lot of deals get stuck in the quoting stage oftentimes because the sales rep is constrained by somebody else or they're constrained by a lack of information. And so we see deal velocity really slow down in the quoting stage. And then we also want to increase visibility, right? We want to make sure that it's clear to different folks what is available, what has been quoted down the line, what people have actually purchased, what they've agreed to, what will be billed in the future. That's part of the kind of commerce subvision outside of cpq. And then control is obviously also important. We need to put governance structures in place so that folks aren't creating bad quotes or bad agreements. But we think of that control as a guardrail. Right? It is not the ultimate value. It is a thing that is necessary to deliver the ultimate value, which is helping people close faster. And that's a very different positioning to a lot of at least legacy CPQs. And I think that that's what you'll start to see paid off in our roadmap. For every feature that my teams put together, I'm always asking, how does this help the customer close faster? Right. And even for some of those governance features, like, you know, approvals, right. It's really important to me, for example, that when our sales rep is generating a quote that would require approval, they're able to see why it's going to generate approval or why it would cause an approval. Right. So they can maybe change the quote so it doesn't require approval. Right. Because we actually want to get the quote out faster. Right. The goal is not to generate approvals. The goal is to get the quote out in a way that is in line with the governance structures that have been put in place for the company. Okay, I talked enough. Let's do a demo. Before I do a demo, Jeanette, Dana, is there anything that you guys want me to cover?

I don't think anything yet that's going to change what you're about to do. So I think give us the demo and I think that's when the light bulbs will start going off.

Cool. All right, let's do it. Let me figure out how to. I'm going to stop sharing and then I'm going to jump over to my demo portal here. Share screen.

Cool.

So I'm going to take you guys through the way I've often talked about this first release of CPQ is that we've made investments in three major areas. So the first major area is around our quote templates. So in our, in our old quoting system we had these kind of. We had this quote builder and we had this separate templating system and they weren't connected, they didn't really talk to each other. And so we've made a lot of investments in the template infrastructure which enable us to have a drag and drop editor for templates. And I'll show you guys how to make that happen. So we invested a lot in the templating infrastructure and the way, the kind of quote building process. We invested a lot in our product library and I'm going to show you guys one example of that. And we've got a deep bench of additional functionality that's coming up and then we've also invested a lot in our governance and approvals functionality. So I'm going to take you guys through that as well. All right, so let's start actually in product land. So, you know, one of the big challenges that we've had in the past is that our product library is relatively simplistic. So that's one of the areas where, you know, we have already and we're going to be investing a lot in as part of the CPQ build out. So the thing I want to show you guys, we have this new, you know, editor for products that's full page and then we still support flat rate pricing. Right. Which is just kind of the standard pricing that was already available at the product library. But now we also have tiered pricing. And with tiered pricing, we have three different types of tiered pricing. Volume based, graduated, and stair step. Each one of those calculates prices slightly differently based on the quantities that are plugged in. I can show you guys how that works. But the idea here is to automate some of that pricing calculation for folks so that instead of them being like, oh, okay, the price goes down if you buy more than 100 units or if you buy more than 1,000 units, right. We can actually automate that for the sales rep and they just plug in the quantity that somebody needs to be purchasing and the price is calculated automatically. So just to show you guys how this works, I'll create something. Hey, everyone loves Breeze AI credits, right? Let's do that one. And then we'll say, you know, I actually don't know how much credits cost, but let's say, right, like if you buy, you know, 1 to 100, right. The price is a dollar per credit, right? If you go up, right. The price kind of decreases as you buy more and more. And the way this actually works is that volume based is like the more you buy the price, you unlock the price per unit as you kind of climb up the ladder. So usually that's done to like decrease the price as you purchase more. Right? What graduated does is graduated. Basically says, hey, the first hundred are going to be this, the second hundred are going to be this, and third hundred is going to be this. Right? So again, that often also, you know, people mostly use this to decrease prices. But it's not going to be like you change the price of all of the items. It's just going to be the price per kind of rung of the ladder that you climb up. And then stair step is basically instead of saying, hey, it's actually not per unit, it's saying like, here's the price you pay for this rung of the ladder, right? So if you buy between 0 and 199 units, you're going to pay $250, right? If you buy between 100 and 199 units, you're going to pay $350, right? So that's not a price per quantity, it's the price for the entire set of that thing. So for example, when HubSpot purchases e Signature, right, From a secondary provider, that's how we purchase it. We purchase it in kind of lots. So really excited to have tiered pricing available for folks to use. And it's just one investment that we're going to be making. The product library we've got bundles in the hopper. We're looking into things like usage based pricing and price books and many other pieces of of functionality. And we're also going to be investing a lot in the product and line item objects to make them associable to other things, to deeper plug them into the platform and workflows and improve a lot of the API endpoints. There's a huge amount of investment that's going to be going into products and line items. And this is just the start. And I'm excited for everybody to see that kind of coming to fruition because I think that ultimately the product library is what enables so much else to be possible both with our native CPQ and also if somebody wants to use, you know, another CPQ solution or even another product that isn't quoting related but still relies on the HubSpot product library. So that's kind of like a rising tide race. All right, let's see. Well, what do you think, Dana and Janet? Should I keep going or should I answer questions about products?

Yeah, go ahead and keep going.

Okay, I'll keep going. All right, so let's talk about the quote creation experience. So I told you guys that we invested a lot in our, you know, the underlying infrastructure behind creating quotes. And so, you know, in the legacy quoting product we had a wizard and like I said, that wizard was kind of disconnected from templates. So if you had a template you wanted to change something about the template, you couldn't really do that during the quote creation process. But what we have now is you can see that, you know, templates and quotes are now co located, although obviously only for folks that have the template editing permission can actually edit the templates. And then when folks go through and actually I'll just make a template from scratch here. But what you're going to see is that the template creation experience and the quote creation experience mirror each other and they look very similar. And so we have all these different sections on the quote things like by default things like a cover letter, an executive summary. And not only can you delete these things if you don't want them, so I could say, hey, executive summary, that's irrelevant to me, I don't want that. But you can also add your own rich text sections right now. So I could say I don't call it an exec summary, I call it an additional information section. And then each one of these sections is rich text. This is actually built on top of HubSpot's CMS. So we're going to get more and more functionality out of that cms. So you can see, you can insert videos or tables, or you can create huge sections of content here. You can use personalization tokens. Right now we support company and deal and we're working on contact. Contact is a little bit complicated because it can be multiple contacts in a quote. So we can talk about that later. But yeah, these sections are pretty broad in terms of what you can do with them. And you can also move them around. You could say, I want this header section right at the top. So there's a lot of flexibility here. And then something that's on our roadmap is to add more types, right? Of course you want to add rich text sections, but you might want to add other types of CMS modules and maybe even CMS modules that you've created. So that's something that we're working on as well. And this is something that's really exciting to me because when you create these templates and you go in and modify these things, the folks who are creating the quote can get this, this content or even for example, an attachment that I add. I could add a default MSA or something like that, or even Infographic or something. Folks who are creating the quotes get all that content by default and then they can modify it or remove it if it's irrelevant in that particular scenario. Another thing we're building is actually permissions on this templating experience. You might want to say, hey, of course the rep can edit the additional information section or the COVID letter, but I don't want them to edit the terms and conditions section. And we don't support it yet. But something we're working on is allowing the admin to actually lock that down and have control over what the REC can actually do with the template that they're using while I'm here. Well, actually, let's talk about attachments a little more because attachments are really exciting to me. Attachments are another new feature. And what you can do with attachments is attachments can actually be signable or unsignable. And so you can see here I added this kind of infographic. So I might say, hey, that thing is not a signable document, right? But we might say that this is a bad example because it's a top 20 questions FAQ. But we might say, hey, that top 20 FAQ is actually it's a signable document, right? Maybe that's my statement of work, or maybe that's an msa. And so we can actually have attachments that are unsignable and ones that are signable. And then if somebody goes to sign the quote that's being generated from this template, they'll actually sign that attached document. It will be included in the, you know, kind of experience that they have to scroll through when they go ahead and sign that quote. And then the templates also store settings about the quote. So, for example, you could say, hey, I have a template where I accept payments. I have a template where I don't accept payments, right? And you could turn that off. And now anybody who uses this quote will not have that payment, you know, turned on right, by default. Same thing for acceptance, right? You might say, hey, all of the, you know, this quote, right, is an E signature. But for these other quotes, we're fine accepting without signature, for example. So the template stores not just default content, but also default attachments and default settings, all to help the sales rep get quotes created and send them, you know, more quickly and have them be accurate. All right, let's go make a quote. We talked about quote templates. Let's go make one. So you can make, you know, most folks create quotes from deals. So that's what I'm going to do here. And then the new experience here, when you go to create a quote, right, it still forces association with the deal. And then you just select a template that you want. I want to build in some automation for that, but that's a conversation for another time. And then when you go here and create the quote, you can see that we're just pulling in whatever default content that we're getting from that template, and that's showing up to the sales rep, along with information that's coming in from the deal, all of which is editable. We've got some work to do in the next couple of weeks to make more and more and more of this easily customizable. While I'm on the quote, one thing I want to flag for you is, well, one, we've actually released inline line editing to make things a little bit easier. So that's kind of a cool ease of use thing that we've done here. And one of the things we tried to do is make the editing of quotes a lot simpler because one thing we noticed with our old quoting system is it was taking folks a long time to actually generate quotes, which is true for a lot of quoting systems. And so not only have we tried to introduce things like inline editing, but we same thing for these term sections, right? We have the same functionality that we had in text template editing, but we've also Enabled AI creation of content. So you can see that like I just click this, right? So we can actually generate things like cover letters or I can generate default content, right? So I could say, hey, can you generate me some language or can you generate me a schedule that does this? Oh, okay. Looks like it doesn't have.

Something that was brought up is if the rep is. Or if someone is changing the text on the quote, does that change the template? Is it something that you can lock down? What are the guides?

So changing the quote doesn't change the template. That's like the cool thing, right? Is the template is just a template. So any quote you create from the template will have content from the template. But if you change the quote, that's not going to change the template. If you. One thing we like, what we allow right now is you can change any content on the quote that's coming from the template. And what's going to be kind of a fast follow for us is to allow the admins to actually lock down sections of the template, right. And say no part of this is customizable. Right. So I hope that helps. Does that help, Dana?

Yeah, that definitely helps.

Awesome. And so anyway, yeah, we support, you know, AI generation of content here, you know, you know, and then we also support, we also support things like even line item editing via Breeze, right. This copilot. So we could say I'll do that after I try to generate a cover letter here again. But, you know, you can even. This is one of my favorite things to do with the inbound demo booth is. Here we go. So like, here's an example, right, of our. Of the AI generating a cover letter which then can then be modified and you could remove things and add your own stuff. We also support snippets, by the way. So it's not like you have to use AI to generate content. You're welcome to use preloaded snippets, but the AI can also do things like add a 20% discount across the board. And the reason I'm so interested in AI editing is I'm hopeful that this is going to create a new user experience that might even make it, for example, easier to draft quotes on things like mobile. Right? So you can see that Breeze reasoned for a second and then added a 20% unit discount across the board for the line items here. All right, I don't want to go too deep into this. I want to save plenty of time for questions. But another thing I want to flag for you, everybody is closing agents. So this is an agent that the team produced. And what it does is it basically sits on top of the quote. Totally optional. You can store lots of information inside of that agent, like information that it has access to. And then you can actually answer questions for your buyer on the quote, especially things that are like, do you really need an AE, for example, to provide a copy of your SOC2 report? Or to explain warranty language. So we're hoping this is another feature that will actually help customers close the deal more quickly and allow the rep to spend more time on things that a human should really be spending their time on. Cool. There you go. Here's an example. And then the. The closing agent can also obviously pass folks over to a human if it can't reason on what to do. And then soon we're working on the ability for it to actually book meetings on behalf of the. The account executive as well. Awesome. Let's talk about approvals really quick. So I'm actually going to. Well, no, I'll go ahead and show you guys. So you guys can see that right now this quote does not require approval, but I actually do have approval set up in this portal. So if I go ahead and update the unit discount on this quote to 50%, that's going to go ahead and trigger this quote for approval. And so what's happening here is as the person creating the quote, I'm seeing. Oh, shoot, right. Like, the total discount percentage on this quote is greater than 20%. So Andy Fisher is going to need to approve my quote. And the discount percent on one of the line items is greater than 50%. And that's going to cause this quote to go out for approval to Adam Wainwright, Andy Fisher, and I'll show you guys how to configure this in a second. But this is a huge area of investment that we've made in the CPQ is really making it possible for admins to create a lot of governance around what folks can and can't do with quotes and then actually feed that back to the sales rep in a way where, you know, they could, they could then modify the quote, you know, down to 19%. Right. And this quote should no longer require approval. And then I can just go ahead and share it if I want. So anyway, all right, in the interest of time, I'm going to show you guys how to configure those quote approval workflows. And then let's chat. Let's just do questions for as long as we can.

Sounds great.

So let's see here. Quote approvals. So in our new in the New CPQ system, we have, you know, significantly more advanced approval functionality than we had in the old system. So obviously you can do, you know, you can have no approvals on all your quotes. You can use what we call standard approvals, which are, these are basically like there are older legacy approvals, but on they're just better. So rather than, you know, you're still having all of your quotes approved in the portal, but you can actually pick individual approvers, approvers and say like all of these people must approve all of my quotes or any of these people must approve any of my quotes. So we actually expect a lot of people will use this given how, you know, given the usage patterns that we've seen in the past. But right, for more advanced use cases, this is where we have our advanced approvals. And so that's what, that's, you know, advanced approvals is where I was showing you guys that I could trigger certain types of discount approvals. That's what this is here. This is our quote approval workflow. And I didn't. But somebody on our team actually custom created this whole system. And you can branch this infinite numbers of times, right? And you can have the quote approval workflows can access any data about the quote and then also any data about the associated objects. So things like deals and line items. So you're able to create approval workflows that are doing essentially infinite numbers of things. And something we really want to work with customers and admins like you guys on is how to improve this. Right? Because it's a relatively challenging thing for a lot of folks to use and there's probably use cases or data that's not available that we want to make available. We just don't know what it is. So kind of an ask for everyone here is, you know, don't be a stranger and please tell us about, you know, if there's a use case that you're not able to do, if there's data that we need to create for you, if there's things that we could be making easier to do, that's definitely an area where I really want to be engaging with admins. So. All right, I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing and I'm happy to reshare if there's any particular questions there.

Definitely particular questions for sure. I'm going to give everybody a couple seconds to go over there and upvote their favorite questions or add the ones they haven't added yet. I keep refreshing and the numbers, they just keep going up, which is great. I Love it. I love the engagement and I love the curiosity. So I think I'm giving you enough time to go over there and upload. So let me resort and we'll tackle some of these questions. Let's see. Alexia says, will there be a way to add contacts associated to deals with association labels into specific parts of the quotes, I.e. shipping contact, billing contact, etc.

So the short answer is like, I guess no, but that's not quite true. We actually already have an out of the box billing contact label. And supporting more out of the box association labels that then would show up on the quote is something that I'm pretty interested in. So for quotes, often billing contact doesn't necessarily make sense. Right, because you don't know who the billing contact is yet. I might be quoting Diana, but Jeanette is the billing contact. So we have those association labels, at least on the quoting side, for capturing a lot of that information. So for example, you can imagine in a signature situation, Diana is signing the quote, but then either she, you know, or maybe she forwards the signing experience or the end signing experience onto Jeanette. And that's where the billing contact actually gets labeled. And that's something we're working on right now, the ability to capture billing contact, shipping contact, stuff like that while you're doing the signing experience. So no, that's not available yet, but it's something that we're building. And then the idea, right, is like through those labels we'd be able to pass that information on downstream. So maybe that's available to you if you're producing like a sales order in netsuite, but it's also available to you if you want to produce like invoices, for example, in HubSpot or subscription HubSpot. And that billing contact is being pulled automatically. And again, most of the time we expect that billing contact is not going to be the same person necessarily that's signing the quote. And so that's why there's like that separation point.

Makes sense. Let's see. Chris says, and that just shot up to 16. Product library management. Does it require a commerce seat.

Product library management? No. So the product library is saying it's free, you know, so there's nothing. And we'll talk about the legacy system in a second. But you know, one of the things we're trying to do with this launch is not disrupt anybody. And I know that that's maybe like hard to hear or it's like you don't believe me. But that really is actually the intention with a lot of these launches. So we're not trying to move anybody's cheese or take things away from people. And so that's really important to us. Actually, if you're feeling like we are taking something away from you or it's disruptive, I want to know, because that's not the goal. And sometimes there are edge cases, like somebody on LinkedIn pointed out that we had this edge case around preventing potential new users from creating a legacy quote and a deal. And so we want to know about those things so we can make them easier. But no, the functionality that's already available in the product library does not require a Commerce hubsee as we add more and more functionality. So you can imagine like the tiered pricing already requires one Commerce Hub seat in the portal to make you a commerce professional or enterprise user so that you can create tiered pricing, but you just need one and then everybody in the portal can create those on deals. The folks who need Commerce Hub seats are the people who are actually creating quotes. And so, you know, as we produce things like bundles and price books, right, we're probably going to package in the same way, which is we need to be like a Commerce Pro or enterprise portal to make them. But you don't necessarily need to be like a seated Commerce Hub user to use them on deals or to report on them or do a lot of those things. That makes sense.

If not, guys definitely put that in the chat. Is it possible to use calculated properties within quotes so custom formulas applied to line items? If not, what's the recommended workaround to implement these calculations through?

Yeah, so the team is actually like we have a whole roadmap theme which is like basically making the product line and quote objects more first class and part of that is supporting more property types. So I can't give you guys like an exact timeline yet, but the team is currently digging into how do we support things like roll up properties and calculated properties line items on quotes as soon as we can. And the team is also working on right now making the line items table more flexible. So right now you can only use kind of our different default line item table configuration, but transparently, that was mostly just because we didn't want to ship a super complicated feature right before and on. I'd imagine we make that much more customizable very, very soon. And so if you were to, for example, be able to create calculated properties, you would then be able to display them in the customized table. So neither of those features exist quite yet, but they're right around the corner that's going to be my answer for a lot of this stuff. Unfortunately. I will tell you if we're not going to build something and I'll also tell you if something is further away. Like for example, if somebody asks me about hey, are you guys going to build like a no code configuration builder, right where I could build kind of like that configuration experience and almost like a workflow style thing about almost like a form builder for generating quotes. That's the thing that I don't plan on us building probably on a six month timeline. And so I will tell you if we're not going to build something in short order.

So appreciate that. What are the differences between custom quotes on Sales Pro versus the quotes on Commerce Hub?

That is a great question. Let me share my screen because I think I actually have an appendix slide for this one. Oh, I don't have an appendix slide for this one, but I will show you I do have an appendix slide elsewhere. So let me pull that up. Give me one second. So let's, let's talk about. Let's talk about. Let me grab this. Sorry guys. Give me one second there. Alrighty, let's talk about legacy quotes here. Dan and Jeanette were just telling me how prepared I was. I now they see that's not true. So the first thing I want to talk about, I will totally address that question, but I just want to say kind of a rehashing of what I already said, which is so the new CPP system and the legacy quotes system are designed to coexist as much as we can. And the reason for that is to try to avoid people who want to use both or who are, who need to use both. So the systems actually run separately, right. So things like apply approvals, for example, like if you're using code approvals and you turn on and you try out CPQ and you turn on the new approval system that's not going to mess around with your legacy approval. So things like approvals and templates and obviously the product library, right? These things are all kind of, you know, not intertwined and so you can use them without using the other. The main kind of difference in terms of how you access them. I'll talk about features in a second. But the way, the way the main difference in how you access system is through the commerce seat. So if somebody has a commerce seat assigned to them, they will kind of have the CPQ experience, right? So when they go to create a quote that will be in the new quote builder using the new quote templates, right? Running through the new quote Approval system. Right. If they don't have a Commerce hub seat and they do have access to legacy quotes, which the vast majority of our existing customers do, and they go to create a quote that's going to be on the quote system. Right. And so that's the main difference is like, do you have a Commerce seat assigned? Yes or no. And if you do, the answer is we'll kind of push you into that CPQ experience. And in terms of like, well, what's the main differences between them? There's actually a lot of differences between them. I'll give you guys a. Oh, shoot, it looks like I can't scroll here. But you can see there's, you know, there's this whole slide that we have. There's many, many differences. But the, I think the salient differences are. Well, here, let me, let me pull another one. We have a simpler slide for this one. There's a couple areas where. Sorry. Well, anyway, I'll just speak to it. Some of the main differences in terms of like, positives for the CPQ system is like I said, the new template system is drag and drop. The new approval system is significantly more advanced. We're going to be adding more and more pricing capabilities into the new system. The closing agent, the AI features are available inside of the new system. Many of the new investments we're making are all on that CPQ side. Although some of those changes, for example, we rolled out the ability to no longer force ESIGHT signature verification. That went out to everybody. So we do feel like we're actually going to be making the legacy system a little bit better through the process. But the vast majority of our investment is going to go towards that CPQ system. On the legacy side, you have that wizard type editing experience. And then actually the legacy has. Even though the templates are much harder to use, they are technically right now more customizable because you can do things like custom code your own modules. Now I actually do want to bring that functionality to the new system. We just haven't done it yet. That's one of the biggest differences is on the legacy system you can actually custom code modules into the templates. And I noticed that somebody asked, hey, for those of us that have really highly customized quote templates, are we going to have to move or are we going to be forced to shift over? And the answer is like, no, at least not for the foreseeable future. Continue doing exactly what you're doing. And also, things won't break because the two systems are separated. Using the old or reporting or Workflows, none of that should break. And the CPQ also uses the same underlying objects. So, for example, if you wanted to use Legacy and CPQ side by side, your quote reporting should still work because it's just quotes objects behind the scenes. If you're making API calls to the Quotes API, those things should continue to work because it's the same object behind the scenes. I'm sure there's edge cases to that that we haven't found, but again, please share those with our team and we'll try to figure out how to make that possible because there's no intentional gaps in that way.

Sure. Ethan, is it possible that slide that you couldn't scroll on, that you would share with me and I can share that with the group?

Yeah, I wanted to find you guys a simpler version of it because that one is really in depth and it doesn't really lend itself very well to a conversation. But yes, I will find you guys a slide. Break that down. Very much appreciated. But yeah, just to kind of restate it for everybody, the templates are drag and drop on the new system, right? And you know, we're going to be adding more module support. The approvals are significantly more advanced. We're going to have more pricing functionality, and the new system is built AI first. You know, the old system lacks all those things. And then on the old system side, you know, technically templates are more customizable, but I think that's going to. That differentiation is going to drop over time. And there's also like random little gaps. Like, for example, we haven't. We don't yet support. Support automated sales tax on the CPQ quotes. But again, that was just like a feature we couldn't ship. So I think the differentiation is going to fall away in the coming weeks and months.

Okay, let's see. We've got Martin with Is it possible to export quotes as PDF files? And if so, how is correct formatting IG I page breaks insured?

You can definitely export quotes as PDFs. Can you do it in bulk? I'm not sure, actually. That's a good question. I'll have to check on that one and get back to you. My guess is it's probably possible via the API, but I'm not exactly sure if that's possible with the ui, so I'll have to get back to you on that one in terms of proper page breaks. Again, another reason I like the new templates is because they're a little bit more structured. It's much easier for our team to make sure that the outputted PDFs look good right when you can change everything about the template, you control how it downloads and how it prints. And so often that leads to kind of not very good looking PDFs or for the folks that are really good at coding, it's great PDFs but that doesn't necessarily work for everybody. So if you're finding that the PDF version doesn't look good again, just please flag it to our team. Talk to your csm. You can email me and we would love the feedback and we want to make it better and the new system allows us to do that much more easily and also make changes without breaking everybody's points in the process.

All right, you asked for feedback, so Christoph has Will Commerce Hub address the following issues with subscriptions that you cannot set end date on subscription in status and furthermore, will subscriptions cover automated appliance of yearly price increases per line item behind subscriptions? Thanks for covering.

That's a great question. So unfortunately I am not the subscriptions pm, but what I can do is my man, this is going to be, this is recorded so I'm not sure if I should say I'm just going to do it.

Anyway.

My email is ethanubspot. It's pretty easy to remember. We can edit the video, edit that out so I don't get hit up by spammers or something. But I know that both of those are things that we're looking into and we're putting a ton of investment into the subscription product as well as a contracts product which is kind of a wrapper around things like subscriptions. So rather than me start off with a vague answer, email me an I'll hook you up with the subscriptions PM and we'll get you a much better answer to that question.

Love that. And I put your email address in the chat so it's there. Let's see get revoted because I saw some more votes come in. Will it be possible for the recipient to comment or ask for changes?

That's a good question. So right now we don't have any like out of the box kind of collaboration functionality. Again, please email me because I'd love to talk about like the right way to do that because I think that the I've thought about it and the challenge is that a lot of times when folks are asking for changes, if they're simple changes like you know, can you add a line in them or something like that, like that's, that's a different category of changes than for example somebody like redlining an msa. And if somebody wants to redline an msa, they're probably going to want to do that at something like Microsoft Word, right. In their legal department. So I would love for you to email me and for us to talk about that one a little bit more in depth because I think I want to approach collaboration in a nuanced way because I don't think that there's kind of a one size fits all solution to collaboration. And I want to make sure that we're actually solving the underlying customer needs.

Got some mic issues going on.

Oh, you guys, I think you want.

To knock your mic.

Oh, sorry about that. One thing I was going to say is I do see if we can, if we can lean into AI for a little bit of some of the stuff. Like I'm interested. I mean, again, for redlining and msa, AI is not going to do anything. Like the legal team is just going to want to do track changes in Word or whatever it is.

Right.

But for things like, hey, you know, I want to switch to annual pricing or something like that, I'm in. Actually be kind of a facilitator for some of those changes within allowable limits.

Okay. Cassie wants to know, can you configure if this then that scenario? So, for example, if we quote a software subscription component, then a related service fee can be populated automatically.

Those are called product rules and we don't support them yet. And I'm looking into it and I'm interested to. That's one that I would like to work on, but it's a pretty large body of work. And so I think it's going to take us a while to figure out how to do that at scale. So the short answer right now is no, you still have to add the products individually. However, we're also working on bundles, which I'm hoping helps with that a little bit. So you can be like, hey, here's our software subscription, which always comes with an associated service fee. So I'm hoping that bundles solves problem, part of that problem. And then, you know, I do want to explore things like product rules. I have a feeling in the short term that's an area where we're going to other providers or our partners for some kind of interim solutions. Because yeah, that's a, that's a chunky one, but we definitely care about it and I do want to build it. It's just like stacking that up against things like price books and, you know, making and for example, adding more module types to the template like for their us, there's so much stuff to build and so it's really just a question of when and priority.

So speaking of price books, Alexi wants to know, will there be more price books feature in pricing? Although the volume pricing on products is fine for some folks, it makes no sense for us. We need pricing based on that on the kind of customer dealers or clubs.

Or agreements versus yeah, we've heard that from a lot of customers and the team is scoping price books right now. So it's not being built, but we're kind of exploring how to handle it because there's a lot of different ways that we could build that inside of HubSpot and we want to make sure we're covering easy to use and you can pipe them in from other systems and it makes sense and it's connected to the other objects in HubSpot. So that's another great example of please reach out to me and I'd love to connect with that team because that's a feature that we definitely want to build. We're hearing that from a lot of folks who want to build it.

I love that. And folks, I added the feedback for today's session in the chat. So for things like that, if you know you've got additional feedback or you want someone on Ethan's team or Ethan himself to reach out to you, definitely add that to that. I do share all of the feedback with the teams after the event so that we can continue the conversation after we're done here. All right, you guys got a lot in here. Will there be any validation rules we can set up, for example, requiring a billing company to be selected before a quote can be submitted?

Validation rules before the quote can be submitted. So the thing about our quotes, right, is they don't get like submitted, they get like published and signed. And so I can imagine we could potentially build something like that with approvals, right? Like looking at associations and saying there has to be a certain sort of object associated for the quote to be published. But going back for that specific example, I think that's another area where like helping capture things like billing contact information is probably a more useful solution because you may not know who the billing or shipping contact is or you may not know the PO number at the time of creating the quote. So we want to enable that information to be captured either via an embedded signature experience or a form type experience. Or maybe the AI is capturing it. Somebody can say the code closing agent can prompt people to give them a PO number and then it feeds it back. So I think there's two sides to that, which is like, we do want to allow you to do that via approvals, but we also want to make it easier for you to capture that information once the quote is published. Because if something's embedded into approvals, you can't even publish the quote until that information is provided. So I think we should take a hack at it with quote approvals and see how far we get. But like I said, I also just want the quotes to enable more information captures during the signature process or even before the signature process. Like it could happen, you know, before the signature process.

Let's see. Pete made us a list of questions for the roadmap. So we'll go through those line items in Sections.

That's another one that we want to build pretty quick. So I imagine what that means just to like play that back to you. Right. Is like you might have a hardware section and you might have a software section and you might have a services section. Right. And this all totals up into one big quote total where you're able to create sections. The team right now is working, like I said, on making the line items table more customizable. I don't know if Sections is included as part of that work. Definitely things like changing the columns and some of the default values is. But Sections is something we hear from customers all the time and I want to figure out a better solution to that. And I would imagine we work on that inside of Q4.

Yeah. And I think that kind of plays into the rest of the items in the list of bundles. Customer selectable, optional line items, configurable line items, and smart content based on included SKUs.

Yes. So those are some different pieces, like the smart content. That's more like if this line items are included or if it's this type of customer, we want to incorporate this type of language. I think that one's going to come a little later. Just because we have to first allow you to create a library of that type of content. Somebody pitched me on the idea of using snippets to do that, which is pretty cool. But there's kind of like a whole set of development that has to happen before that automation is possible. It's something we want to do. It's just probably going to come a little bit later. For some of the optional product stuff. I'm pretty interested in that. We hear that from a lot of customers and there's a couple types that I see that coming up. But there's a couple of ways I see that Coming up, which is there's optional products, which is like, I want to add this one thing. There's different quote options, like option A, option B, but you can't modify either option. And then there's like, here's the quote. But you want to allow the buyer to change certain parts of it. Like, for example, update the quantity. Right. Like, I was chatting with Jeanette. Jeanette just misheard me and quoted me 26 licenses when I actually want 24. Right. And rather than like, emailing Jeanette and taking a day, why don't I just change the quote? Right. Obviously, all these things are governed by settings, and you, as the quote creator, would be in control of a lot of this stuff. And that theme of work is super interesting to me because going back to our vision, like, we want to help the. We want to help the deal get done faster. Right. And it's like, it's not a very good use of Jeanette. The AE's time to edit a quantity from 26 to 2. Right. That's kind of silly. Or, like, if Jeanette's already done the work to prepare an option A and option B, like, just let the customer choose. Right. And so I can't give you, like, an exact timeline on that stuff, but that's something we're super interested in because it really aligns with that goal of helping the deal get done faster. And also, you know, I showed you guys how templates can store things like default settings. They can also store default lineups. So I can imagine you can even have a world where the templates themselves store multiple options. And so you can go really quickly from somebody being interested in something, and then you're configuring a little bit of one of the two options. Maybe you're adding a discount to one or modifying a discount on one, and then you're shipping the quote really fast again. Unfortunately, my answer is not yet, but that is something I'm very interested in building, and you should email me, and I would love to work with you on it.

Sure. And I think. I think based on some of the feedback that you're sharing and like, the roadmap, it's saying we've got some feedback that's saying that these changes justify the seat cost. So really getting into the understanding of where the seats are and how much are they costing. And, you know, I think that's pretty much the summary of the last couple of questions in the Q and A panel. So I know we said we'd leave some time at the end to talk through what those seats look like and the pricing and how that, how that is going to impact everyone moving forward. Do you want to talk to it? And then we can have everybody ask additional questions or we can.

Yeah, I, I don't know. Like, I'm really bad at knowing how much to share, so I'm just going to kind of overshare with you guys. Hopefully I don't get dinged for this one. But I'll tell you some of the strategy of how we decided how to package cpq because, you know, it's, it's technically above my pay grade, but it is ultimately my responsibility. So I wanted to show you guys, like this is how also I actually have a roadmap slide that just, you know, if folks are interested, like this is the stuff that's kind of being worked on right now. Product bundles here I'll share my screen here I'll slide show. But yeah, like, you know, some of the things that we talked about, right? I said, hey, those are like already under development. Some of the things we didn't even talk about. Like for example, to me it's crazy that the quote index page is not customizable, right? That's something where you work on immediately. And then we've got a bunch of stuff that's being scoped, right? More template customization, price books. So anywho. But going to the packaging. So the first thing, like I said is I want everybody to hear from me that if you're using the legacy quote system, we are not trying to disrupt you. And if you're experiencing that, I want to know and we want to fix it because the goal is not to sneakily make people pay for things or rip things away from people that they pay for. That is not the goal at all. If you want to keep using the legacy quoting system, we. I think that like again, it's going to kind of accidentally get even a little bit better, but most of that is going to go towards the cpu, right? And so that's the first thing I want to say about the packaging is our goal is for there to be really no impact on anybody who's using the legacy quoting system. And this is the like list prices for the seats, right? Professionals at 85amonth and enterprises at 140. And I know a lot of people are like, hey, that's super expensive. And so I want to explain to you why we package it this way. So the thing we're trying to communicate to everybody is that we really are trying to build a cpq, not a CPQ Lite, not a cpq but worse. Right? We really do want to build a CPQ and we are missing a lot of features right now. Right. Like I'm very open with everybody, right? Everybody's asking for these wonderful features that we really need to build and we're going to build them and that's why we have so much capital invested in inside of CPQ right now. So I would ask you to just be a little bit patient with us and give us feedback and also hold us accountable if the pace of development isn't right or the features aren't polished. But that's why we put the pricing there is we really want people to ultimately compare us with real CPQ solutions out in the market. And that's how other CPQs are priced and packaged is like at that level on a seed basis. And then just to give you guys a little bit more, you know, thoughts there, we considered, you know, investing all this into the CPQ and then, you know, keeping it inside of Sales Hub where it is and just raising the price of Sales Hub. But what that does is force everybody to pay for all these new features that they don't necessarily want to use. Right. People who are using legacy quotes would have to pay for them even if they aren't using them. Right. And so having a separate seat allows folks to purchase a la carte. And it's also similar to the other things that, like which, you know, it's sometimes hard for folks outside of HubSpot to understand this, but it's really difficult for HubSpot community and other folks to understand something that's just different than how everything else works. Like we struggled with this with HubSpot payments for so long, right? Where like no one could figure out how HubSpot Payments was priced because it wasn't a perceived model. And so that's why we stuck with this. And then a lot of folks have been asking us like, well, am I going to have to pay for invoices now? Do I have to pay for subscriptions? And the answer is no. There's no impact to anything on, you know, billing our payment side because not only do we want to not disrupt folks, but we actually have an incentive, right? Because we make money when folks process payments. We want people to process payments, we want them to run bills. We have no incentive to prevent them from doing that by locking them. I hope that helpful everybody.

Yeah, there, there's just, there's some feedback on the quantity of seats and the, you know, for a small, medium sized business having seat upon seat upon seat.

So I totally get that. And I mean like, you know, you guys already have my email. Like please do send us feedback about it. You know, packaging is like, it's part of the product, right? It's not. It affects your experience with the product and if you have feedback on it, I would, you know, I would, I would love to hear it and I'll make sure that it gets seen by, you know, everybody who's involved in that decision. So, you know, I would, I would love for you to email me. I would love to meet with you and talk about it and I'm open to different ways of doing it.

Remember to fill out that feedback form again. I'm going to share everything with Ethan and make sure that you have connection made. I appreciate you coming Ethan and sharing all of the details and admins again. Also appreciate you guys coming every single Tuesday. I will see you you all next week.

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