HubSpot’s INBOUND 2021 was an absolute blast, with lots of awesome sessions featuring incredible speakers, the 3-day virtual event exceeded our expectations. The fully immersive platform including a 3D city made the event even more engaging, and we had a bit too much fun choosing outfits for our avatars.
To open the event, HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah kicked off the first Spotlight session, with Yamini Rangan making her debut appearance as the newly appointed CEO. The session reinforced the overall message of INBOUND, which is centred around making a meaningful difference to the lives of real people, by helping them to achieve success.
The overall theme of this year’s event was focused around the importance of understanding your customer, and making their needs a top priority - summed up perfectly in this quote by Dharmesh Shah:
“Embrace the idea that we’re in the age of the customer. Embrace the idea that over time customers are going to have more and more power and they’re going to be equal partners in their relationship with us.”
— Dharmesh Shah
Highlights from INBOUND 2021
We especially enjoyed hearing from some of the keynote speakers, and getting unique insights into their individual journeys towards success. Listening to the challenges that each of them faced along the way, and picking apart how they navigated through these obstacles, was truly inspiring.
Hasan Minhaj shared his experience coming onto the comedy scene and how it taught him to represent himself in the most authentic way. He expressed that it's not about trying to convince anyone, or pulling them to your side - it's about telling the truth and being as human as possible. The same can be said when it comes to connecting with your audience, and aligns perfectly to the overall theme of INBOUND 2021.
The session with the legendary Spike Lee was another one we really looked forward to, and it definitely didn’t disappoint! He opened up about his never ending quest for knowledge and how it has driven his ambition throughout his entire career.
To close out the event, the one and only Oprah Winfrey held a session focused on the premise of leading with intention and compassion to forge your own road to success. She unpacked her thought process, and how it helped to align her team - they only went ahead with a project when the whole team understood the main intention or objective driving that project.
5 Important HubSpot Updates
A CRM is now more than just a sales tool - instead it's at the core of a scaling business. During the event, HubSpot shared these exciting announcements, with the aim to help customers and partners grow better together.
1. HubSpot Payments
This feature is now in open beta (and only available in the US), and will allow you to give your customers an easy way to send payments - from one-time payments to recurring monthly memberships. It’s an end to end solution that removes friction from buying, and is the first step in helping companies sell online. Payments brings the innovation we see in B2C to all customers, so they can sell in a customer-centric way.
2. Operations Hub Enterprise
A new tier of Operations Hub launches in November. Ops is critical in go-to-market (GTM) organisations - they are the heroes that connect data, as well as build automation and reporting. We’re especially excited about datasets, which allows Ops to manage data, find deeper insights, and share them downstream.
3. Service Hub Customer Portal
This is also currently in open beta, and is a mini-portal that unifies all open tickets so customers can follow up and manage them from one place. The best part? It’s no-code - so anyone can do great work, whether or not they have an army of developers and IT team.
4. Custom Report Builder
The new custom report builder allows you to create reports that align more with your business objectives. It will help you navigate the reporting process, with the aim of collecting only the most relevant data. The custom report builder will also make it easier for individual team members to access the data when they need it.
5. Sandbox Environment
Enterprise level users will be able to test and experiment with integrations, themes, and more, in an all-new sandbox environment. This will allow developers and other team members to explore different changes outside of the customer portal, to avoid risking the client's trust or their customer experience.
There were so many great takeaways from INBOUND 2021, and the key messaging behind each session drove home the importance of buyer empowerment. It’s exciting to see marketers and sales teams shift their perspective to be more customer-centric, and as the leading HubSpot agency in the APAC region, we're fully equipped to take your business to the next level by putting your customers first. Whether you need to put some awesome automation in place, or map out your ideal sales process to deliver your business objectives – we can help, so reach out today.
