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HubSpot means business with its Sales Hub updates!
During their annual Inbound conference held in Boston, MA, HubSpot pulled back the curtain on sweeping changes set to revolutionize their Sales Hub. These changes encompass a myriad of automations, new features, optimized tools, and advanced reporting capabilities. If you’re able to master these functionalities, you won't just elevate your current sales processes — you’ll uncover tangible improvements in both conversions and revenue figures.
Broadly speaking, HubSpot's Sales Hub is gearing up for a substantial transformation. Whether you decide to deploy it independently or seamlessly integrate it into your existing CRM, or even purchase it together with a CRM platform, this 'makeover' encompasses multiple elements. And, of course, it might take a while to get used to.
That’s why we're dissecting the various components, showing you how each part can streamline your sales processes, leading to improved outcomes and better productivity for all parties. Our top 9 are:
- Prospecting Workspace
- Leads Management
- Sequence Analytics
- Book Meetings on Behalf of Others
- Lead Form Qualification
- Lead and Prospect Reporting
- Forecast Insights
- Deal Inspection View
- Playbook Updates
- Coaching Playlists
- QR Code Scanner
Let’s dive in:
1. Prospecting Workspace
We reckon this might be the strongest sales update announced by HubSpot this year!
The Prospecting Workspace is designed to be a standalone workspace for sales reps that consolidates the entire prospecting experience within HubSpot. Now, reps can organize their day efficiently — whether they’re focusing on their daily activities or surface new or urgent activities requiring their attention — and still tie everything to their big-picture goals without ever having to switch between apps. No more dealing with clunky schedules, jumbled tasks, slow load times, or too much clicking – those days are over.
2. Lead Management
Everyone acknowledges the significance of lead management in the entire sales process. Thankfully, HubSpot is adding a new lead management functionality, with a new lead object connected to the prospecting workspace. Users can now create leads from contacts like they can with deals. No more trouble assigning leads to reps and no manual workarounds are needed. The ability to track Leads separately from contacts will be incredibly valuable, not to mention the substantial time savings for your team.
3. Sequence Analytics
If email sequence is the heart and soul of your sales outreach, you will need all the insights you can get to finetune them and meet your goals!
For example, with step-level analytics, you can report on every single step in your sequence to understand how reps are executing the steps and how they are converting into meetings booked. HubSpot is going a step further and adding two new metrics to Sequence Reporting:
- Deal Rate - the % of contacts enrolled in a sequence that resulted in a deal being created
- Total Revenue - the # of revenue from closed won deals influenced by the sequence
Finally, you’ll be able to leverage A/B Testing in Sequences, where you can split test two different emails in a sequence and compare performance by templates or even other attributes.
4. Book Meetings on Behalf of Others
Meeting assignments for the sales team can feel like a whirlwind – we speak from experience!
HubSpot’s new Sales Hub feature enables reps to book meetings on behalf of other reps and essentially provides round-robin routing functionality right on the contact record. You can book a meeting for the rep that is next up in the rotation, and still distribute credit to both the person booking the meeting and the person hosting the meeting.
How neat is that! 
5. Lead Form Qualification
Imagine routing a lead to book a meeting directly on a salesperson’s calendar from a form submission!
As per the Sales Hub refresh, you can actually create conditional redirect rules within HubSpot Forms to automatically qualify and route your leads to the right rep. Plus, for each form submission, users can have conditional logic set to present specific thank you messages, URLs, or meeting scheduling pages.
Now, this right here is what you'd call customization taken to a whole new level!
6. Lead & Prospect Reporting
Many changes are in store for HubSpot Sales Hub's reporting – how can we even cover them in one section?
In terms of Lead Reporting, you can expect two new reports:
- Lead contact rate report - uncover how reps are engaging with your quality leads and why they convert.
- Lead source report - measure how your inbound, sales, or product-qualified lead sources perform and contribute to high-value leads.
You’ll also be able to access Prospect Activities Reporting, which delivers insight into your teams’ and reps’ prospecting activities, such as booking meetings, enrolling contacts in sequences, making calls, completing tasks, and more. Here's to a more straightforward way of gauging the efficiency of your sales processes!
7. Forecast Insights
HubSpot Sales Hub is already recognized for its exceptional forecasting capacity, and the recent updates undeniably raise the bar.
The new embedded forecast insights data demonstrates how your revenue is trending against your sales targets for the month, quarter, and/or year. So, you can easily monitor how the forecast and pipeline are trending throughout the quarter. Plus, with accuracy tracking within the forecasting function, you can pinpoint trends, patterns, and factors to improve the performance of your forecasts.
Oh, and we haven’t even addressed AI Forecasting yet! Yes, HubSpot’s new AI-powered forecast uses historical sales to project future sales, improving accuracy for some teams to 95%+. Sales managers can even evaluate the team’s call against the AI-powered projection, which continuously learns and improves based on sales activity.
8. Deal Inspection View
Do you want to identify deals that have been stagnant or taken too long to move through the sales process?
Now, there is a quick solution! You can now see insights on pipeline health and sales velocity when managing Deals. Sales reps can prioritize more easily, and managers can coach more effectively – everyone is better off! Just make sure you carve out time on a weekly basis to regularly review these insights, as they’ll give you an “at a glance” view of the health of your sales pipeline and sales process.
9. Playbook Updates
Brace yourself for a lineup of innovations set to transform playbooks!
- With Advanced Playbook Recommendations, you can recommend playbooks using any property in any object (including custom properties and properties in custom objects). It’s never been easier to deliver the exact enablement content your teams need at exactly the right time!
- Snippets support in playbook note fields can save commonly used phrases as snippets and reuse them in playbook notes with ease. You can also format your notes using rich text editing tools.
- You can now easily access playbooks on custom objects and leverage all the same process guidance and tools you're used to.
10. Coaching Playlists
Ever had a sales call that felt like winning the lottery? And you feel like you want to wrap it up, put it on display, and cherish it forever? Believe it or not, there might be a way.
Coaching Playlists enable users to save call recordings to playlists, making it easy to onboard and upskill reps at scale. You can share them with specific reps or the whole team, and just help them improve their soft skills, while demonstrating successful selling tactics.
11. QR Code Scanner
QR code scanner enables your sales reps to quickly create and save new contacts in their CRM through a simple two-step process by easily reading a QR code. It’s a little like HubSpot’s mobile app business card, where you can simply scan digital codes when meeting in-person prospects and leads at conventions, conferences, or trade shows.
Ready To Use The New Sales Hub?
Certainly, these updates are enticing, but do you wonder how they will be implemented?
Join our upcoming virtual Post-Inbound Recap & Next Steps to see how these tools operate in real-time. We'll be providing strategies for integrating new sales capabilities into your platform and achieving some quick wins. We even have a Helpdesk set up to guide you through all your HubSpot queries — including the latest updates — and deliver free customer support. Register ASAP to get access to all the details, not to mention a freebie or two!