On September 6, INBOUND 2023 officially got underway with the highly anticipated HubSpot Spotlight, where execs Yamani Rangan (CEO), Andy Pitre (EVP, Product), and Dharmesh Shah (co-founder and CTO) took to Main Stage to discuss the hot topic on everyone’s minds: generative AI.
THE AGE OF INTELLIGENCE
In front of an 11,000 strong crowd at the Boston Convention & Exhibit Center (BCEC), Rangan kicked things off by acknowledging the transformative shift facing all businesses in this new era of AI. With generative AI, the world is experiencing a transition from the age of information to the age of intelligence. How can businesses set themselves up for success?
The most intelligent way to use intelligence as a go to market professional is to drive customer connection.
She gave the audience her four tips on just how to do that.
- 🤖 Get Going with Bots: Customers don’t want to land on a webpage and filter for information — they just want to chat. Enable your website bot to answer key questions about your product, pricing, and information that your customers are interested in. Next, add a support bot. Identify the most repetitive questions and let the bot handle those right away, leaving the ones that require complex answers and expertise to your support team. The result? “Your service levels are going to improve and your customers will absolutely be delighted,” Rangan asserted.
- 📝 Hit Refresh on Your Content Strategy with AI: In the age of generative AI, content needs to be optimized for AI. Keywords still matter, but added layers of depth are now crucial. If you’re selling a product, it’s no longer acceptable to just add “best [insert name of product]” to your blog post — you now need to include additional product information like pricing, models, and locations where it can be purchased. Anything an individual could potentially ask during the buying process, needs to be answered within your copy. Take that base content and use AI to optimize it across all of your communities and channels.
- 📈 Flip the Sales Formula: Does your sales team rely on hiring numerous reps to drive a lot of activity? It’s a strategy of the past which leaves customers overwhelmed and your team overworked. The new model? “Efficient reps assisted by AI with connected tools and insights-driven activities will lead to more sales,” Rangan said. Take the data you have about your customers and let AI transform it into insights. This also allows your sales team to focus on creating more meaningful and deeper connections with customers.
- 🛎️ Be Proactive with Service: “Getting people to buy your product is not the biggest challenge facing companies today, it is getting them to use it, engage with it, get value from it," Rangan said. Don’t wait for customers to reach out with a question or concern; provide them with information on the next high value feature and why they need to be using it. AI can help make every customer touch point count with insight-rich to maximize value.
We now have the opportunity to drive customer connection with intelligence. And HubSpot, we’re there on this journey with you.
Rangan closed with that line before introducing Andy Pitre (EVP, Product) to the stage to unveil the newest product developments.
HUBSPOT AI AND THE NEW SALES HUB
How is HubSpot adapting to AI’s transformative shift? HubSpot AI. “HubSpot AI is our collection of AI features across the customer platform,” Pitre announced in front of a cheering and energized crowd.
HubSpot AI knows your content. HubSpot AI has context about your business, and most importantly, HubSpot AI understands your customers. These are the missing ingredients that will allow you to use AI to drive connection and growth.
The suite of HubSpot AI tools includes:
- AI Assistants (generative AI tools that empower marketing, sales, and service teams to be more effective — including Campaign Assistant and Website Assistant)
- AI Agents
- AI Insights (like AI-powered forecasting)
- ChatSpot (a sales and marketing assistant combining the power of ChatGPT and unique data sources like HubSpot CRM).
These powerful and easy-to-use features will help companies connect with customers on a completely new level.
Next, he unveiled the latest developments in Sales Hub.
88% of salespeople say that building personal connections is the most important part of their job, but only 1/3 of their time is spent on actually building those connections.
“We wanted to change that equation, and it starts with a better prospecting experience,” Pitre added.
With the new prospecting workspace, schedules, goals, and to-do lists are housed in one place with tools like calling and emailing embedded so less time will be spent on administrative work. The new leads experience shows every lead associated with contextual information — from their first interaction to their last communication. And to tie it all together? Brand new prospect reporting to better see what is driving connection and help teams address what’s not working.
From there, Pitre moved to deal management updates. New deal tags allow reps to see what’s at risk, deals can be filtered by priority, and preview customer context and information all in one place. The new deal management experience provides sales teams with the information they need to connect and close.
With Sales Hub, you can re-accelerate your revenue growth. In fact, sales teams who have adopted our deal management tools have seen a 109% increase in their close rates.
Lastly, he announced a deeper relationship between LinkedIn and HubSpot to offer better B2B tools for sales. What’s in the pipeline? Salespeople will soon be able to sync data between HubSpot’s Smart CRM and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Addressing the crowd, Pitre ended with how all of these new developments will impact HubSpot customers. “You have always had the passion, now you have the tools to make your customers successful and grow your business.”
YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH AI
Lastly, Dharmesh Shah (co-founder and CTO) took over Main Stage to close out the HubSpot Spotlight. His goal? “My mission is to have you all fall in love, not with AI, but with the future version of yourself that’s AI-powered,” Shah opened with. Following along the love analogy, Shah took the audience through the story of how he fell in love with AI, why the audience should, where the AI relationship is headed, and ended with unsolicited relationship advice.
The point that he was was trying to drive?
Whatever it is you do, AI can help you do it better.
After a call with Sam Altman, (CEO of OpenAI), Shah received access to the GPT AI and obsessively began coding. The result? ChatSpot — an AI-powered sales and marketing assistant, launched in March of 2023. Call it a modern day AI love story.
Next, Shah made his case for why the audience should also be enamored with AI.
This is not a once in a lifetime thing, this is once in many lifetimes, because generative AI provides cognition at scale.
He pointed to a recent McKinsey report that projected AI will add $2.6 trillion of value annually. Of the 63 use cases the report generated, sales, marketing, and customer operations were in the top 5, meaning AI can help optimize those areas of work. But, as in all relationships, Shah points to some of the red flags that can come from AI — be mindful of hallucinations, overconfidence in answers, and biased or harmful responses.
Now, where is this AI relationship going? Improvements to functionality will take months instead of years; large language models will be enriched and enhanced by real-time data; AI will eventually move to a multimodal future; and instead of reactively responding to prompts, AI will begin to proactively offer suggestions while working in the background.
Shah went on to offer his relationship advice. Think of data in the age of AI as a differentiator. Turn to your customer platform for that data. “Take an LLM [large language model], pair it with that deep contextual data and you can write the message that is the most useful and most effective for that individual customer,” said Shah. “It’s not just personalized, it’s personal. It’s a bit like understanding the customer’s love language.”
He ended by addressing the burning question in the room: will AI replace human jobs.
AI will take your job and give you one that’s much better. One that involves less cranking and more creativity, less grind and more growth, one where you have superpowers with AI Assistants and Agents.
Shah added, “it’s not about being more productive or doing things faster. It’s often about pushing open new doors.” Use AI to explore a new frontier of possibilities.
For more information on HubSpot AI and the Sales Hub, click here.
