HubSpot Updates: AI Homepage, CRM Views, Multi Account Tools

Good morning, HubSpot Nation! Welcome to Wake Up with Customer Platform, your unofficial HubSpot morning show where we help you discover the platform value you already own. I'm Chris Carroll, and I'm joined today by my co-hosts Madeline Donovan and George B. Thomas as we make sure you're not sleeping on HubSpot's true capabilities. If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in HubSpot today. Uh, happy Tuesday, folks. How we doing?

Doing good. How are you, George?

Yeah, I, I can't complain. Um, some updates, some good stuff. Everything's always changing. We're always growing. Yeah. How about you, Chris?

I'm feeling good. I like seeing these light lists because then it gives us an opportunity to talk about stuff that's going on in the ecosystem.

The fact that 7 updates in a day is considered light. Okay, that's all I'm going to say.

Not to mention finding hidden updates at the top of the At top of the list here, we see Impact Level, App, Product. Looks a little different. Has some filters here, and especially this app one. If anybody was watching last week, we saw a very specific app update hit this list, and I waxed poetic about the possibility of seeing all of the apps that get updated over here, especially if you haven't plugged into your portal. Man, how about that for keeping— helping admins keep the team up to speed? I wasn't even thinking about that last week. That sounds amazing, but we'll get into it today. Luckily, we only have 7, so we probably don't need to use these filters, although I'm having a hard time not clicking on them right now.

ADHD going. Yeah, yeah.

Uh, HubSpot homepage. This has shown up a couple times but not since George has added, so I'm curious, uh, for his take. Also, we've got an expanded sidebar here with about and details. So all of the updates, uh, love Easter eggs, uh, inevitable in doing HubSpot live content. Uh, what is it? HubSpot homepage. Helps you navigate to the right data as quickly as possible and take the next best action. It is a personalized home designed to make you more efficient at navigating HubSpot to get to your tasks quickly and expands the value you get out of HubSpot. Interesting words there. Clearly this matters a lot because, and it's so obvious that we don't even need to ask that question. why it matters. So, uh, how does this work, George?

Yeah, so the HubSpot Home, uh, can be accessed at any time by clicking the Home icon. By the way, you have to sign up for this beta, which, yes, I have clicked the beta button already. Um, icon at the top of the global navigation bar underneath the sprocket. The home page contains dynamic personalized content to help users. Okay, this is going to get interesting. Pick up where you left off, links to your in-progress work such as forms, emails, workflows, and more.

Oh, oh, hello.

So you can quickly jump back in. Uh, need your attention, any important items that you should review such as approvals, comments, workflows, and connection errors. to keep things running smoothly. Recommended for you: data-driven personalization suggestions for what you should do next, including the tools and features you should be using to help you get the most value out of HubSpot. Feedback: how can we improve the homepage experience for you? There's one big piece that I feel like is missing in this description. However, Before I go into Negative Nancy, or what's a guy's name that starts with N? Nick. Yeah, Negative Nick. I think this is really interesting. I think it has the potential to be super powerful. I'm curious how this is going to work if you're a human like myself or Madeline or Chris, or— and you're in thousands or hundreds or 10 portals. Um, yeah, how is— is it— is it portal specific? Is it user specific? Like, I have questions, but when I see things like where you left off and needs attention and even recommendations, um, I start to go to conversations we're always having about data cleanliness and like duplicate contacts and like all of the So I'm— I start to get excited, but I also then go to like, well, there's a piece that I teach people to go into their settings and pick the thing that they want to be their homepage because then it saves them clicks. And so does that go away because this is going to be there? And then, okay, so let me go to negative Nick. Where's the HubSpot Academy? Like, where's the next course you need to watch? Where's the next lesson you need to take? Like, anyway, but, but I think this is cool.

And, um, pick up We, you left off at the bottom.

Oh, oh, how fun.

No, um, wow. But like, I think this really expands on the bookmarks feature on the navbar, which is interesting. I really wanted to love the bookmarks thing, but it just isn't super usable to me. So I'm wondering if this would be a more effective way of like getting where I want to go. But I— my ears perked up at like the approvals, comments, things that you need to keep an eye on. Like if I'm tagging someone and things and they're not aren't often checking their notifications, or they don't really go into the marketing tools a lot, like, this is nice to have some semblance of a home base. So excited to see it.

Y'all, y'all are cute. Like, and like, the, the main thing that's missing here, like, I love, I love, like, if they did this on purpose like I absolutely love it. The fact that they do not mention this big old header. Yeah, in that description, which I will continue to say it, uh, called it at Inbound last year, like this chat-based experience for anybody logging into it, it's here already. I thought it was going to be till Inbound of this year. This is what— so like forget about the rest, forget about the rest of this page. Just imagine this. I mean, don't, but do, right? Well, that's where it's like, maybe some of this, right, is in, in, is in these suggestions, right? Like this, I feel like this is a bridge. Like, we're used to things looking like this, and before we will automatically jump into this, we need to see it like composed together. Uh, I think something to highlight is that this is targeted to marketers across all tiers in this private beta, which I think is great to, uh, filter it a little bit, filter expectations, because we see Breeze have trouble with the newest parts of the platform like Commerce Hub and the the object library and thinking that services and listings objects are like deals and tickets when you're using them, when you're trying to get it to describe stuff in reports and lists. And like, so, uh, clearly Breeze doesn't readily access the entire portal yet, the entire object structure. So I think it's good that they mentioned the marketer part, but I mean How exciting is this? I mean, somebody who's been talking about AI for a while, not one of the admins that's like scared out of their mind when they see this.

Um, I think it's interesting that you called it a bridge because I think there's a lot of us that are ready for that top piece, Chris, and I think there's a lot of us that aren't ready for that top piece. And I think there's also a lot of agencies that aren't ready for when somebody opens up their home page and it's like a HubSpot audit. For free right here. Yes, I don't, I don't think they're, I don't think they're ready. I'm just gonna throw that out there because I, I could see this quickly going to that as well, where you don't necessarily need an audit because daily it's giving you audit items that you're fixing along the way.

Yeah, beautiful. Well, apparently you found a way to turn— HubSpot helped us turn 7 updates into a whole like show talking about one. Uh, we'll continue moving, but just please keep an eye on that. That's such an impactful, uh, like medium impact. Get the hell out of here. Like, it's like the, the maximum of impact, uh, is what this release is gonna have. Uh, number 2, back to earth: receive inbound calls with calling apps in HubSpot. Uh, just now Wow. We'll focus on the other calling stuff later. Yeah. It's like, what are you even doing receiving? Why aren't we just letting AI take care of that down here with IVR? Anyways, we'll get there. Uh, sequences permissions is live and low impact. Uh, what is it? Separate permissions for creating, editing, and deleting sequences.

Oh my gosh. Okay, let's, let's get into this. Uh, well, I, I hope this is what I think it is. Um, are we doing the why does it matter or how does it work? Which one am I doing?

Yeah, apparently none of these matter today, George.

So why does it matter is here. Let's, let's have George take that one.

So, so currently a single toggle governs the creation, editing, and deletion of sequences, which can be challenging for organizations using a shared library of sales content. For example, if a sales representative needs the ability to modify sequences before now, granting them this capability also meant they could delete import sequences individually. This update, uh, gives admins greater control over their team's sequences. Oh, oh, but, but, but, okay, hang on. Um, can I keep going because I'm really curious about this? Okay, how does it work? Users that have the ability to change permissions for other users should navigate to users and teams where they can edit user permissions to determine what level of access the user should have. When a portal is ungated, existing users' permissions will remain the same until changed by an admin. This means that if a user previously had the sequences toggle on, they will still be able to create, edit, and delete sequences after the update until the permissions are modified. I still don't know if this fixes the problem that we have anyway.

I agree.

Cool. Can I talk about the problem? I feel like I'm gonna be Negative Nick on this entire freaking show. The fact that admins have to have a sales seat. Yeah, yeah, I'll stop there.

No, huge.

That's it. That's it.

All right.

Yeah, get back to us when, when you solve that part.

I'm, I'm curious. So like my gripe with sequences is not to generalize, but let's just pretend I'm generalizing. If salespeople like love sequences, it's great, but then they'll create so many clones of sequences. They'll just start a new one and start a new one. And then all of your data on sequence performance or template performance is stretched thin and you can't get any insights out of them.

Oh, we're trying to get insights. I thought we were just trying to spam the hell out of people.

Yeah.

Is that not right?

You know, the funny thing too, Madeline, does this solve that though? Uh, I don't think that solves that either, but you know, here's what's funny. Here's what's funny, Madeline and Chris, you know, you know, when sales reps, and I swear I'm holding my cross because I'm not trying to be an a-hole on the show this morning. Uh, you know, when sales reps like sequences, when super admins create them for them and they don't have to do any work, but they can just use it and leverage it in their actual daily workflow.

Oh, I didn't go there. George went there.

Yeah. So good to see progress here in management of sequences and permissions, but let's figure out the seats structure if we can. Checking out the details tab here just to see what's going to be up. I like the fact that, you know, this represents to me some standardization of what we usually find down here.

Yeah. Uh, so property dropdown instead of single line text in a description.

Yep. Yeah, so good to help the product managers out, uh, by helping them standardize these, these updates.

I feel like this is a really good segue to say I love you, HubSpot, and I'm sorry.

Okay. Oh man, Casey, well, it just No holds barred here. What if admins write better sequences? Uh, that's maybe organizational team problem. Like, oh, should your admins— like, I understand why, because we understand how the tool works better than, uh, the users, uh, usually. But is that, uh—

first of all, I don't feel bad because I commented from the host, uh, from the hotel. No, I was not at a hotel, a hospital. I don't feel bad that I commented from the hospital, uh, yesterday because Casey is commenting from vacation. So let's just—

well, she's gonna stay up to date to, to give everybody value in that 30 for 30, uh, she's doing. So she's committed for sure. Uh, number 4, mobile app device lock capabilities. Uh, what is it? You can now lock your HubSpot mobile app When not in use with device biometrics or PIN code.

Why does this matter? Uh, the new device lock feature in our app boosts security by allowing you to unlock your mobile app with a fingerprint, face scan, or device PIN. This allows for better protection of your data while using the HubSpot mobile app.

All right, I guess this is a sign that we got enough people using it out there, or we're getting enterprises to use it. That could be the other thing too.

Yeah, yeah, uh, or with all the HIPAA updates.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which again, if anybody— if any sales— can I be specific? If any sales reps out there use the mobile app of HubSpot, like, please just let us know, because I don't run into a lot of people that, that use it. It is super valuable when you do. Saw a great post about lead— the leads object today and, and how that is super useful on the mobile app. So I know there's some people— I've heard, heard stirrings, but team's putting a lot of effort into this functionality. So good to see progress on the product side, but I haven't seen a lot of user experience, um, feedback. I don't know if you guys have had different experiences out there.

It's hit or miss for me. I mean, yeah, some do, some don't. They sure do love that, uh, scan the business card thing though.

Yep, that is definitely the biggest hit. But you know what, I just had a thought. HubSpot, if you're listening, you need to make a New York Times games game in the HubSpot app, just like LinkedIn did. And then I will use it every day. I will use it every morning while I'm drinking my coffee. I'm addicted to those stupid games.

Oh, that will get some people.

Gamify the sales.

Yes.

On your—

Gamify doing your tasks each morning.

Oh, there you go. Um, number 5, multi-account management. Oh, let's see here. What is it? Connect and manage your organization's existing HubSpot accounts. With centralized governance and the ability to share assets and customer data across accounts in this release, multi-account management will come with 3 features. Organization configuration: select the accounts for your organization and then define the relationships and governance between those accounts. Data mirroring: contacts are mirrored in real time between accounts. Providing a complete view of the customer journey and asset copying. Once activated, you will have the ability to copy assets from one account to another. Hmm. I'm—

my brain is breaking. Why does it matter? Multi-account management is built for multi-organizational businesses with distinct data models and/or strict data separation needs. Who want to collaborate across HubSpot accounts. Is anybody else's brain screaming, our business unit's about to go away, or is that just me? Like, I'm like, wait a second, don't we have a solution for this already?

Good riddance. No, we don't. Let's not.

I'm not gonna argue. I'm not, but I'm like immediately without shouting it, shouting there's a change coming.

Yeah. Um, and just to give a tangible example, I was talking to, uh, a partner colleague, uh, last week and, uh, sharing— he was sharing some of the opportunities, um, that he's been a part of at the enterprise level. Um, and I think a lot of times when you think about enterprise, we think about just like Fortune 500 companies and people huge like that. Well, we were talking about retail stuff and he was telling me about deals that are like 100 and it's like 600 HubSpot portals, right? But all under the same umbrella. And that's here, that's the kind of stuff that's driving this need. So really hard to think about it in terms of old HubSpot. An SMB HubSpot. But this kind of stuff is huge for the expansion and possibilities. So very cool. I saw some posts about this one already. Voice routing in IVR. I had to look what look up what IVR was last time we went over this, and now I know. So what is it? Interactive Voice Response is a system that allows automated interactions with callers through prerecorded voice prompts and keypad inputs. First time I talked about this, I did not get that help from HubSpot, so thank you. Now customers can add voice routing to this system, enabling AI-powered voice actions for call routing and personalized self-service options.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Okay. Why does it matter? Touch-tone IVR systems are rigid, providing only a fixed set of routing options. To talk to George, speak to 1 or press 1. Anyway, which can be frustrating for customers who issues do not fit neatly into the listed categories, which, by the way, I'm the guy that yells, operator.

Yeah.

Representative.

Human. Anyway, also, users with disabilities face limitations when IVR systems lack natural language options, facts, making it difficult for them to navigate. This can result in longer routing times, inaccurate menu selections, and increased frustration. And nobody on the planet wants increased frustration. Okay, so this is interesting. I'm super curious. The AI part of this— AI-assisted. It says AI-powered. I'm going to change it. HubSpot AI-assisted voice actions. Um, because there better be a human that's coming up with what it actually— well, I don't know, maybe not. I don't know.

Yeah, that's what scares me about this. Listen to our knowledge base article.

Oh, that's like a workflow. That's interesting.

And I really hope, you know what else? That, I don't know if there's been any updates to this recently, but the chatbot flow, the UI on that experience in HubSpot is not, I'm not a fan.

The new one?

I don't know. That's what I mean. Maybe there was some updates recently.

There was a a pretty spiffy update that was not called, it's not called chatbot or anything that you'd know to like go find it in updates. Okay. I'm not even sure I could go find it right now, but it looks like a lot of the functionality we're used to in other chats where it's like, like gives you like the 3 options and go get knowledge base articles. A lot of, so I don't, so I haven't seen it. I don't know if you've seen the new chat stuff, George.

No.

Hopefully this one is just as intuitive as that new—

I mean, thinking back to the days, like maybe 2013 was the last time I messed around with stuff like this. This interface of being able to manage it like this, I'm sure this is worlds ahead of a lot of things businesses are used to in terms of like, oh, so I can actually see it and I don't have to press a button and then record myself and then replay it back.

Yeah.

And then re-record it if I don't like it. So move on and up, but only if you've got sales enterprise and service enterprise.

To speak to a HubSpot expert, press 1. Hey, can you scroll back up for a second on the about though? Because something got real interesting real quick. To that screenshot where like you're the message piece. So maybe it's scroll down. Yeah, so okay, Matthew-Neural. Uh, that's not what— that's not Onyx.

I was gonna say that.

Not Onyx. I'm just— so that intrigues me. Like if that was, uh, you know, uh, type in your message, voice George B. Thomas, like Chris Carolyn, right? Madeline Donovan. Like, if it— now that gets interesting.

Yeah.

Yep. Making it accessible. All right. Last but certainly not least, AI-generated CRM index views. What is it? You can now use AI to to create index page custom views. This is in private beta. By simply describing the group of records you want to see.

Hmm. Why does this matter? Creating custom index page views is a cumbersome process. It requires navigating across multiple menus, searching for the right properties to add, then applying the correct filters in order to see the records that you're most interested in. This process is time-consuming and ultimately hinders quick decision-making. Now you can leverage the power of AI to generate these views instantly, freeing up valuable time and accelerating your workflow. This is cool because as an admin, we know way too much nerdy stuff about, oh, this property works this way. If you really wanna know this thing about what you're looking for, you have to use this property. Sorry, you know, CEO, you didn't— you— there's no reason you would have known that, but I just happen to know that, so like, I'll create the view for you. But if HubSpot can generate the view without that process even having to happen, that's probably a lot less frustration, and that probably enables users to trust the platform a lot more.

So, and why is Nick keep coming out today? So if you look at this example, show me deals, okay, HubSpot default, assigned to me, contact owner, HubSpot default, that are over $50 amount, HubSpot default. You know where I'm going. The deal statement is a deal. I don't see nary one custom property in this thing that they're trying to do. So here's where my brain goes. I'm like, how smart has the system got behind the scenes? If I'm a user and I type a custom property wrong, if I don't even know there's a custom property for that thing, is it going to be smart enough not just to do default property pipelines, object views, but will it be able to create custom views? I hit the beta button because inquiring minds want to know. I'm just going to test the crap out of it.

Yeah, the two disclaimers. One, I think until Frame.ai, which is being introduced next month at the admin hug, is in play, that's probably going to unlock full access, uh, to the whole object structure and data structure of HubSpot. To where, like George is saying, um, it can only— it only knows like base HubSpot in a lot of cases, like, and not even base like native, like base what everybody's used to HubSpot being, and that's contacts, companies, and deals. Maybe tickets, right? But none of the customizations. And which brings me to my second point too. A lot of the AI value right now in cases like this, especially when it comes to reporting and workflow descriptions, are it's learned off of the entire customer base of HubSpot. And when 80% of that customer base is SaaS and Some kind of 80% is also like marketing hub only, right? That's what's driving a lot of the behavior that we see Breeze come up with. So I think it can only unlock that, um, and create that space for learning on top of that customer-based foundation, like once it can, once it knows how to work with the unstructured dataset. So those are, those are my thoughts.

Um, I feel like this is a good time to segue to I love you, HubSpot, I'm sorry.

Yeah, but the last point, this is why like I was so excited, uh, you know, when working with George, um, on the super admin, uh, training that he's been doing, to say like, this is why the admin role is shifting, right? Because now, said this yesterday, like these prompts, like how much trouble do you have talking to leadership teams to understand exactly what they want and how to show it in the portal, even to the point of creating properties, creating reports on the fly, which you should not be doing, right? Just to try and like give it to them the way they want it. Now I implore you to get them in here. Just tell it what you want. That's where we're going. And if we can get there, especially with the summaries where you can show a summary of a record and then just click to ask more questions about that thing in HubSpot— like, don't be the go-between, like, for people. Like, if you can show them that and then they can be empowered to figure it out It's going to be so powerful.

He implores you.

Do I have a minute?

Please.

Okay. Here's where my brain went. If you're a super admin one and you are not testing and leveraging and diving knee deep, hip deep, chest deep into AI and the AI features, shame on you. Now, Here's where I really want to go with this, is that, uh, a couple years ago, at least a year ago, HubSpot started putting descriptions for everything. If you're an admin and you go into your custom properties and you don't have any descriptions for what your custom properties do, I'll use the same word that Chris used. I implore you to go get all the descriptions very granular into those properties because guess what? It's going to look at the description to understand what the property does to answer the thing that you're going to try to generate with AI because it's context. If we've always said, that's a nice to have and we just hit save without it, you might have some work to do over the weekend. Next week. It's up to you.

Yeah, you have maybe about a 6-month period to like have control over doing that yourself before tools are going to be available to everybody to just make it happen. And if you want to be there to guide AI and really help it or help your organization, um, not cause further confusion and, and distrust, which will happen if it doesn't have the right context and other people in the platform are taking advantage of these tools. Right? That's like, you should be 100% aware of what your platform is doing so that you can help all the users use it to get their job done, including leadership. So I guess we're off of our soapbox for now and somehow turned 7 into over a half hour. So I'll make good on one of the promises I made to George and Madeline because I'm really excited. Uh, boot camp registration has recently opened, um, for HubSpot. One of the most valuable learning activities I've had is, uh, the Super Admin Boot Camp and the RevOps Boot Camp. Uh, so highly, highly recommend, um, and the value that you think you're gonna get is probably not the value you do get. Because my favorite thing was learning around other people and just the Slack channel, like goes off after every session, people sharing their own maps, their own way of doing things. Like it was such an unlock for me to understand like what's going on with HubSpot and, and really how to get the value out of it.

So I'll, I'll second that, Chris. I, Likewise, I took the same two and I recommend them to everyone doing any type of HubSpot-related role. And I'll add too, sometimes like don't, don't be overwhelmed by all of the things that you might learn. A lot of the time what I really got out of them was it validated certain things that I'm already doing as an admin or as a RevOps. You know, professional. And that just helps you feel so much more confident and so much more ready to like make decisions without thinking like, is this the right way to do this? Is there— do I need a consultant? Whatever. Like, no, you got this. Like, um, you'll, you'll feel like you know where to go. So I implore you— oh, it's my turn. I implore you to sign up for a boot camp.

Yes, George, as a, as a, as a super admin, at least previous, I don't know if you're still current super admin boot camp instructor, you make an appearance over there every now and then?

If they ask me, I'll go, I'll do like a, I'll show up. But we're kind of doing our own jam.

Yeah. What's your biggest reason for somebody to show up to the Super Admin Bootcamp, at least that you were—

Yeah, for sure. Shared learning. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's our jam, their jam, which, by the way, I helped create their jam, which is like amazing. And they've taken it and run with it, which I love. And shared learning is a superpower. It is ridiculous. Yeah. By the way, that's nothing new. This bootcamp has reached capacity. The first one we launched, we had over 300 humans in it. The second one over 300, the third one over 300. Like, as soon as you open this bad boy up, it's like, like the people that didn't make it last time and new people just flood it. And then it's like this continuous waitlist. So that should say something about the fact if you haven't done this, or especially the RevOps one yet, by all those holy, sign up.

Yes, indeed. Uh, and that's where we'll wrap, uh, for today. Uh, remember folks, you probably already own the solution you're looking for in HubSpot. Sometimes you just need to wake up to it. Join us tomorrow morning as we continue exploring what's new in HubSpot and the ecosystem. Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments and let us know what capabilities you want us to wake up next. Until then, I'm Chris Carroll.

I'm George B. Thomas.

I'm Madeline Donovan.

And this has been Wake Up with Customer Platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day, everybody.

We love you, HubSpot.