HubSpot’s August 2023 releases: The manager’s guide

HubSpot’s August releases include additions to its AI tools, numerous reporting and forecasting improvements, commerce updates and more. Many updates were beta-released in preparation for HubSpot’s annual conference.

Save time and prevent errors with AI 

HubSpot released many AI capabilities in 2023. The releases for August include generative AI additions but also AI-powered data tools. 

Efficiently create and edit social media captions using the AI assistant for highlight commands (beta), now available in social media tools. This capability can summarize information, change tone, rephrase sentences and perform other grammatical gymnastics.

To more easily create social media posts from blog content, the AI assistant (beta) can quickly summarize and suggest social post content for all channels.

Mobile users can now experience the efficiency of the AI content assistant for social media (beta). The tool is now available on the mobile devices that many social media managers use to do their work. 

Summarize long email threads in the Conversations Inbox in one click using the AI-generated conversation summary. This feature gives team members the necessary context and history when transferring the customer to a new rep without needing to read every message. 

Add more context to call reporting by using the AI-powered automatic associations (beta) for calls to meetings and calls to tickets, which tie the records together to give teams the information they need while reducing manual work.

Improved reporting and forecasting features 

New forecasting and reporting functionality was released just in time for 2024 annual planning. Companies with multiple sales pipelines can experience greater forecasting accuracy now that HubSpot allows users to manage goals and forecasts across all pipelines. You can now forecast more accurately and make better business decisions using the new forecast accuracy tracking.

Reduce technical setup time using the new creation wizard and Goals template library, which lets you focus on achieving the goals instead of spending time configuring them.

To prevent reporting inaccuracies when deals don’t move across stages in order, the sales report for deal funnels (beta) has been updated with options for skips, conversions and tracking the time in the deal stage.

Better evaluate your sales team’s productivity and sales process performance using the new sales velocity report (beta), which shows an overview of key metrics, including conversion rates, the number of new leads and the time to close.

Analyze and improve sales email sequences to close more deals using two new sequence reporting metrics. 

• Deal rate measures the percentage of contacts enrolled in a sequence that resulted in a deal being created.
• Total revenue measures the total revenue of the closed won deals that were influenced by the sequence.

Reach your internal stakeholders where they spend their time by sending automated recurring reports to a Slack channel instead of sending the report via email. 

Two campaign metrics will be sunset. The campaign performance tab will sport a new ‘Revenue’ data section, which reports revenue, deals with revenue and contacts with revenue, replacing the influenced revenue and closed deal metrics. To retain the data from the sunsetted metrics, export the information before October 2, 2023.

Commerce/Payments updates

Speed up your sales and payment collections, reduce the possibility of human error and collect more reportable revenue data using HubSpot Invoices.

For companies that start subscriptions with free trials or have a sales process that ends before payment is received, use the new release to schedule a subscription with no upfront payment. 

Save the time of manually creating invoices for recurring payments with the release to automatically generate invoices for subscription payments (beta). This is especially useful if your accounting software is integrated into HubSpot and relies on invoice reporting.

Accurately charge customers for sales tax, shipping or other fees now that payment links support write-in fees. Though this write-in still requires manual work, it takes less effort than creating multiple payment links to charge the correct fees or manually reconciling the taxes and fees later in the accounting software. 

Eliminate the need for sales reps to manually describe the different product pricing and durations included in a payment link with the new, clearer totals experience, which was introduced to quotes and line items in July.

The Sales Hub overhaul continues

Streamline your meeting booking process with the new release to customize the lead form routing to book a meeting (beta) instead of using the previous one-size-fits-all option. This feature includes conditional redirects based on the form data to provide visitors with the most relevant meeting link for their needs. See more common use cases of this highly anticipated release, which may eliminate the need for a third-party meeting scheduling tool.

Experiment and optimize your sales email sequences using A/B testing of sequence steps (beta). Save your team time and frustration from manual ad-hoc testing methods and workarounds that were difficult to accurately measure. Learn more in this video.

Increase efficiency by keeping Salesforce-focused sales reps in one platform now that the HubSpot-Salesforce integration includes the ability to enroll in a HubSpot sequence and book HubSpot meetings directly within Salesforce (beta), expanding the capabilities of the HubSpot Salesforce embed released in April. 

Service Hub user availability

Streamline your Service Hub Shared Inbox with the release to automatically assign emails and forms based on availability (beta). Customer emails and form submissions will only be assigned to team members who are available based on their availability status in HubSpot.

SMS and workflow email enhancements

To reduce the need for third-party tools and communicate to your customers where they prefer, native bulk-SMS tools (paid beta) are now available for customers in the U.S., with reply management and inbox connectivity. SMS functionality has also been added to HubSpot’s campaigns and workflow tools (beta).

HubSpot now further protects email sender reputation and deliverability by canceling emails in workflows (beta) when they are underperforming and adding visibility to which emails were canceled and why. 

Enablement updates

If you’re onboarding or upskilling current team members, you can now curate educational playlists in HubSpot Academy to serve the right content to the right team members at the right time.

HubSpot Academy has grown to include a wealth of content that can be confusing to navigate, so enable your team by making it easy to identify what to learn next, easy to bookmark their own playlist and easy to share playlists with users outside of your account (such as educating your clients).  

Customize HubSpot to personalize the middle record pane for individual teams and users, gaining efficiency by helping them focus on the information they use most often with the new CRM record pane editor (beta).

Create playbooks more easily to give your team the best real-time insights and coaching by using the embedded HubSpot content tools in playbooks, which include drag-and-drop question reordering, snippets, rich text formatting, embedded files, personalization tokens and more.