HubSpot’s February 2024 releases include advanced forecasting with AI, new integrations and more

HubSpot’s February 2024 releases are paving the way for a transformative leap in digital marketing, sales efficiency and customer service excellence. February brought updates that introduce groundbreaking forecasting tools and service enhancements. And they are just the tip of the iceberg.

HubSpot is also rolling out a series of updates designed to refine your content delivery, optimize lead management processes and provide profound analytical insights that drive strategic decision-making.

Whether it’s through advanced integrations, enhanced email deliverability or more intuitive navigation experiences, these updates are crafted to streamline operations and boost engagement across multiple touchpoints.

Here are some of the February updates to check out:

• Centralized tracking for offline and partner event performance.
• Easier HubSpot navigation for enhanced user experience.
• Boosted email deliverability with custom tracking domains.
• Superpowered sales forecasting with AI.
• Improved customer service management with all-new Help Desk workspace.
• Centralized insights with marketing reporting collections.
• Simplified global search for email content.
• Optimizing Google Ads with enhanced conversions.
• Seamless integration with Salesforce for enhanced sales insights.
• Streamlined team productivity with actionable Microsoft Teams notifications.
• Simplified analytics with trend lines in reports.

Centralized tracking for offline and partner event performance

What’s new: HubSpot launched a new import flow for marketing events, allowing for comprehensive tracking of both online and offline event data directly within the platform.

How it helps you

This enhancement offers a significant advantage for managers overseeing marketing strategies that include offline events or partner webinars. By centralizing event data in HubSpot, you gain a clearer picture of event performance, including registrants and attendees’ engagement.

This centralization simplifies managing, automating, and reporting on your marketing events, turning HubSpot into a single source of truth for all event-related activities.

Moreover, associating marketing events with contact records enhances personalized follow-up strategies, ensuring more effective engagement and action with individuals who interacted with your brand during these events. Learn how to manually create a marketing event and import event participants.

Status: Public Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: Marketing Hub
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Professional, Enterprise

Easier HubSpot navigation for enhanced user experience

What’s new: HubSpot’s Global Navigation team has introduced updates to the navigation menu and sidebar, aiming for a more intuitive user experience with a refreshed look and organized menu structure,

How it helps you

The revamped navigation design means quicker, more intuitive access to HubSpot’s powerful features for you and your team. While it’s a significant change that may require a short adjustment period, the end result is a smoother, more efficient workflow.

This update is particularly beneficial for managers overseeing teams, as it facilitates easier navigation through the platform, ensuring that everyone can find what they need with less hassle. The vertical navigation sidebar and new menu structure are designed to help your team stay focused and productive, turning a temporary adjustment into a long-term efficiency gain.

Status: Public Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: All Hubs
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: All tiers

Boosted email deliverability with custom tracking domains

What’s new: HubSpot now enables the connection of a custom domain specifically for “Sales & Service email (tracking),” enhancing brand consistency and control over email reputation.

How it helps you

This update addresses a critical aspect of email marketing and customer communication — email deliverability. By allowing you to use a custom domain for open and click tracking links in one-to-one emails, it aligns these crucial email metrics with your brand. This not only improves the professionalism of your communications but also increases your control over email deliverability rates.

For managers, this means a stronger assurance that emails reach their intended recipients without sacrificing the insights gained from tracking opens and clicks. It’s a strategic move to enhance both the effectiveness of your sales and service emails and the integrity of your brand’s email practices.

We strongly recommend adopting this change to elevate your team’s email strategy.

Learn how to connect your domain to HubSpot.

Status: Private Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: Sales and Service Hubs
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Starter, Professional, Enterprise

Superpowered sales forecasting with AI

What’s new: HubSpot introduces AI-powered forecasting, leveraging in-month sales data to project future sales with unprecedented accuracy.

How it helps you

This feature aims to transform how sales forecasts are made. Traditional forecasting methods can be hit or miss, but HubSpot’s AI forecasting promises to improve accuracy by over 95% for some teams. This level of precision is huge, enabling more effective business management and strategic planning.

The AI forecasts offer a “most likely,” “upper” and “lower” range, providing a comprehensive view that helps make informed decisions.

For managers, this means being able to rely on data-driven insights for a more accurate sales outlook, ensuring that your team’s efforts are aligned with realistic goals. Additionally, the ability to review historical accuracy helps refine future forecasts, enhancing reliability over time.

Learn more about improving forecasting with AI projections.

Status: Public Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: Sales and Service Hubs
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Professional, Enterprise

Note: Access to the AI forecasting tool requires at least two months of deal data and an average AI accuracy threshold of 65% over two months. For optimal accuracy, it’s recommended that sales teams regularly update and input deals, aiming for consistent deal sizes and a sales cycle shorter than six weeks.

Dig deeper: Why integrations will be critical to AI in 2024

Improved customer service management with all-new Help Desk workspace

What’s new: HubSpot unveils its Help Desk workspace, a comprehensive ticket management system designed to optimize your support team’s efficiency and effectiveness in customer service.

How it helps you

The new Help Desk workspace is a game-changer for managers overseeing customer service. By centralizing tickets and conversations, your team can intake, triage, troubleshoot and resolve customer issues more swiftly and empathetically. This consolidation eliminates the need to juggle between tools, ensuring a smoother workflow and saving valuable time.

For organizations considering a transition to HubSpot for customer service, this update significantly narrows the gap between HubSpot and specialized customer success software. It addresses a key obstacle by integrating customer success with sales and marketing in one platform, facilitating a seamless experience.

This unified approach not only enhances operational efficiency but also ensures a consistent and high-quality customer service experience, leveraging AI-backed features and a 360-degree view of customer interactions. Learn more about the Help Desk workspace.

Learn how to manage and respond to customer tickets with help desk.

Status: Public Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: Service Hub
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Professional, Enterprise

Centralized insights with marketing reporting collections

What’s new: HubSpot introduces Marketing Collections, a centralized solution for monitoring key marketing metrics and reports all in one place.

How it helps you

Marketing Collections simplifies the process of tracking marketing performance by consolidating data across all channels into one easy-to-navigate space. This means less time bouncing around different reports and more time focusing on what really matters.

For managers, it’s a one-stop-shop for insights on channel performance, contact origins, revenue impact, and web traffic analysis. By centralizing these insights, HubSpot makes it easier to understand your marketing efforts’ effectiveness and make informed decisions quickly.

Plus, the ability to save reports to dashboards enhances customization and accessibility, further streamlining your team’s workflow.

Status: Private Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: Marketing Hub
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Professional, Enterprise

Simplified global search for email content

What’s new: HubSpot enhances Global Search to allow finding emails by any word or phrase in the email body, making it easier to locate specific conversations or mentions.

How it helps you

This update is a boon for managers who need to quickly locate information within email threads without navigating through dense activity timelines or remembering exact email subject lines. It simplifies the process of finding contacts who mentioned specific products or issues, vastly improving the efficiency of managing customer interactions and follow-ups.

By enabling a more intuitive search capability, managers can save time and focus on strategizing rather than sifting through emails, thereby enhancing overall productivity and responsiveness to customer needs.

Status: Live
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: All Hubs
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: All Tiers

Optimizing Google Ads with Enhanced Conversions

What’s new: HubSpot introduces Google Enhanced Conversions for Leads, enhancing conversion measurement and bidding optimization by securely sending hashed first-party data to Google.

How it helps you

With cookies’ relevance diminishing, maintaining accurate conversion tracking is becoming more important. This update allows managers to continue optimizing Google ad campaigns effectively, even as cookies are phased out. Enhanced Conversions’ secure method of using hashed first-party data (like email addresses) ensures privacy compliance while recovering otherwise unmeasurable conversions.

For managers, this means improved ad performance through better data, aiding in strategic decision-making and bidding optimization without sacrificing user privacy. This innovation helps sustain effective advertising efforts in a privacy-first world.

Learn how to create and sync ad conversion events with your Google Ads account.

Status: Public Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: Marketing Hub
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Professional, Enterprise

Enhanced integration with Salesforce for improved insight

What’s new: HubSpot enhances its integration with Salesforce by introducing bidirectional sync for activity data, including meetings, calls and email tasks.

How it helps you

This update bridges the gap between HubSpot and Salesforce, offering sales teams a comprehensive view of HubSpot-originated contact engagements directly in Salesforce. By syncing activities in both directions, your sales team gains deeper insights into customer interactions, making it easier to leverage HubSpot’s Sales Hub’s engagement tools alongside Salesforce for more effective prospect engagement.

Having a unified view of all sales activities helps in streamlining sales processes, ensuring that your team has the most current and comprehensive information at their fingertips, thereby enhancing collaboration and efficiency.

Status: Public Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: All hubs
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Professional, Enterprise

Streamlined team productivity with actionable Microsoft Teams notifications

What’s new: HubSpot enhances its Microsoft Teams integration by enabling the embedding of action shortcuts in custom notifications. This allows for direct actions such as task creation or updating a record directly from the notification within Teams.

How it helps you

This update is offers increased team productivity and responsiveness for Microsoft Teams users. By integrating actionable notifications within Microsoft Teams, HubSpot empowers teams to act swiftly on critical updates without leaving the Teams environment.

Whether it’s following up on a deal, logging communication, or updating records, these shortcuts reduce the time spent switching between apps and ensure important tasks are immediately actionable. For managers, this means streamlined workflows, enhanced efficiency and the ability to maintain momentum on projects and client engagement directly from their Microsoft Teams notifications.

Status: Live
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: All Hubs
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: Professional, Enterprise

Simplified analytics with trend lines in reports

What’s new: HubSpot now offers the ability to add multiple types of trend lines in the single report viewer, enhancing visual data analysis.

How it helps you

Trend lines simplify the process of identifying patterns and forecasting future performance directly within HubSpot reports. For managers, this means a clearer understanding of data trends at a glance, facilitating more informed decision-making.

Whether it’s tracking sales performance, marketing engagement or customer service metrics, trend lines offer a concise way to visualize data progression over time. This visual tool is invaluable for predicting future performance, helping managers to strategize more effectively and adjust plans based on data-driven insights.

Status: Public Beta
Applicable HubSpot Hubs: All Hubs
Applicable HubSpot Tiers: All Tiers