HubShots Episode 320: High Impact HubSpot Updates | Leading into UNBOUND

🌱 Shot 1: Growth Thought of the Week

Using AI inside and outside of HubSpot

There seems to be a divide happening with how HubSpot users are using AI:

• On one side, you have users who like to stay inside the platform. They use Breeze Assistant (HubSpot AI), and agents within the platform.
• On the other you have users who live outside in tools like Claude. They use the HubSpot Connector in Claude or connect to the HubSpot MCP via other tools (eg Cursor, Claude Code).

There are advantages to each, and they can be complementary. However, with all the breathless noise on LinkedIn and other social, you’d be forgiven for thinking that external access via Claude is the only way to go. Using AI within the platform is not getting much love.

I want to challenge that thinking (see Shot 9), and suggest making sure you are aware of what Assistant and workflow agents are capable of, before you head for the Claude experience.

Why doing it inside HubSpot can be better

• HubSpot Assistant can query across your portal, create properties, pages, and lists, and act on deals/lists directly.
• Keeping it in-product means you can verify and sanity-check results against the actual record (activity log, properties, deal context). Doing it externally in Claude removes that visibility.
• Doing it in-product provides context, the AI knows what page you are on, what tool you are using, and shapes its response accordingly
• Claude's knowledge of HubSpot's current capabilities is often out of date, so it over-engineers solutions that native features already cover.
• It’s better from a security perspective too, as you know that it is all managed inside the platform

An adjacent real-world example:

• A client wanted to track link clicks on their website. They turned to Claude. Claude confidently advised them and generated custom JavaScript, manual footer implementation, and logging logic. And completely missed that the whole thing is achievable with HubSpot's built-in Data Management > Event Management. No code, no maintenance debt. See Shot 6 for details.

Why the confusion exists

HubSpot's relentless promotion of agentic AI and its positioning as an ‘AI-enabled CRM’ seems to overshadow education about the basics. Sometimes I feel HubSpot just takes their playbook from whatever Salesforce is doing and follows suit.

Some Partners and the discussion ecosystem jump on, amplifying MCP, ChatGPT, and Claude connector content while rarely covering what HubSpot can do on its own.

✨ Shot 2: Quick Promotion of the Week

One of the services we offer businesses who are overwhelmed with HubSpot update velocity is our XEN - HubSpot Updates that Matter / Search & Be Found - HubSpot Updates that Matter offering.

• We discuss your business goals, plans and pain points
• We analyse your use of HubSpot in your portal
• We curate all the thousands of updates down to the key 20-30 updates that are most relevant to your business (provided as detailed slide deck)
• We highlight 3-5 key updates we recommend as your next step
• We’re available for support implementing if needed

It costs $2,000 AUD (+ any applicable taxes). You can view details, and an anonymised example slide deck on our site here.

🚀 Shot 3: HubSpot Marketing Feature of the Week

Form Redirect to Meeting Scheduler

This is increasingly popular with sales teams on high-intent pages. After a form submit, based on their response in a form field you can redirect them straight to a meeting booking form:

💰 Shot 4: HubSpot Sales Feature of the Week

Tasks and Subtasks

You can now create subtasks on tasks.

You can create them in workflows as well:

👨‍🔧 Shot 5: HubSpot Workflow Feature of the Week

Formatting Phone Numbers

There's a nice Workflow Action called 'Validate and format phone number'

It ensures that phone numbers and mobile numbers are formatted consistently (eg adding the +61 if you are in Australia, or +33 in France, or +55 in Brazil, etc)

The action provides an output that you can then use in a subsequent action (usually an Edit record action).

The action is usually applied per country (and you'd likely have a workflow for each for your main countries for the most granular control).

After running, it will also keep a log of errors, which you can then manually review (usually the errors are because the initial number was incorrect, a missing digit is the common culprit).

🔥 Shot 6: HubSpot Content Hub Feature of the Week

Auto Capture Website Events

HubSpot has built-in event capture functionality.

It is ‘hidden’ away under the Data menu:

One of the nice features is custom events.

From the top right choose the ‘Create custom event’ option:

And then run the visualizer. It will guide you through selecting an element on a page (can be a button, link, image etc):

It takes care of everything. No need for additional Javascript or coding.

You get a ton of events included (eg 30M per month in our portal):

🏈 Shot 7: HubSpot Service Hub Feature of the Week

Auto Create Ticket When Replying to an Email

If you send a message from an email that is a help desk channel within HubSpot (like from a contact or deal record), a support ticket will be created automatically.

You can now stop forwarding emails to a team inbox just to create a support ticket. Simply reply directly from HubSpot, and it will automatically generate the ticket for you. This saves you clicks and streamlines your process.

A few important notes:

• When sending emails from HubSpot, always double-check that they're associated with the correct records. We've noticed that emails created directly from a contact record can sometimes incorrectly associate to an existing ticket.
• You won't see the ‘Send and create ticket’ button when you're writing an email while viewing a ticket record. That button only appears when you're composing an email from other objects (contacts, deals, companies), not directly from a ticket.

🎨 Shot 8: HubSpot Design Tip of the Week

Brand Kit Tools

One of the handy timesaving tools in the Brand Kit is the simple way you can import the colours from your website.

Go into Brand (from the Marketing Menu)

Scroll down to the Colours section. Click to Edit Colours.

Then use the Import button.

✨ Shot 9: HubSpot AI Feature of the Week

HubSpot Breeze Assistant

Or is it Breeze Assistant? (It’s not Copilot)

I keep saying HubSpot Assistant is the best AI tool in the platform, but hardly anyone (when we’re chatting with them) uses it anywhere near what it deserves.

And it’s currently free.

I use it every day to organise, summarise, learn, and implement. And we train clients on it in almost every call.

It’s really, really good.

A few examples recently:

• Preparing a reverse brief for a client
• Reviewing the project history for a client
• Preparing an implementation plan for a client

Here’s how simple the prompt can be: ‘please review all the meetings with [client name] and her team over the past weeks. pull together a comprehensive brief of all the main requirements, the desired outcomes, and next action items for each department. Prepare a full proposal for the implementation phases to be performed and the priorities for each’

HubSpot Assistant gets you 70% of the way there. For the reverse brief I then spent less than an hour reviewing, cleaning, tweaking and (most importantly) reducing, to get a useful doc prepared.

For the implementation plan, we spent a few hours reviewing, culling and tweaking it, but the heavy lifting had been done by AI, likely saving 5+ hours at a minimum. It had analysed 7 in-depth meetings with the client, across various departments.

While everyone on LinkedIn is breathlessly talking about agentic this and MCP that, excitedly connecting Claude and blindly querying without context, they are often missing the basics. Just getting your meetings recorded, transcribed and analysed automatically in HubSpot is such an easy first step. No shade on all the agentic stuff, but don’t get dazzled with shiny object syndrome and miss the easy unlocks.

Ideal for new Marketing Managers

Are you a new Marketing Manager at a company that manages their website in HubSpot?

Try this prompt across your content:

‘please review the content of the last 10 blog posts on [yourdomain.com] and pull together the main topics we discuss. please prepare a full content strategy analysis including who our ideal listeners are, and the key value or differentiation we provide’

⚙️ Shot 10: HubSpot Streamline Item of the Week

Capture All Your Meetings

Part of streamlining your business is consolidating your tech stack.

One of the easiest processes to streamline is your meetings, putting it all in HubSpot:

• Replace manual follow-up after a form submission with automatic routing to a calendar booking (requires Sales Enterprise) (Shot 4)
• Replace Calendly with HubSpot’s Meeting Scheduler
• (Replace external payment with Payments on the last step of the Meeting Scheduler)
• Replace Gong (Avoma, Fathom, etc) with HubSpot’s Meeting Recorder
• Replace analysis across meetings with HubSpot’s Breeze Assistant
• Replace To Do lists with HubSpot’s Tasks (now with up to 60 sub-tasks!)

Unless you have very specific requirements that aren’t available in HubSpot, this is one of the highest impact processes you can implement.

✍️ Shot 11: Listener Feedback of the Week

“There are only a few really good HubSpot related podcasts. Love the format, love the synergy between Ian and Craig and appreciate the visuals in the youtube that are simple enough, but do also not feel required, so the audio podcasts still work well. Appreciate you both!”

• Willem

📚 Shot 12: Thought of the Week

Zero-click is now the default, not the trend

Fresh data shows that approximately 68% of Google searches end without a click, AI Mode sessions are approximately 93% zero-click.

Rand Fishkin's analysis shows fewer than a third of searches send a click anywhere.

But, AI-referred visitors convert at roughly 2x organic.

Tip: measure AI referral traffic in your sources report, invest in being cited (AEO).

SparkToro, Search Engine Land

💡Shot 13: Quote of the Week

The value of looking at old things in a new way:

‘A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points.’

~ Alan Kay - Computer scientist

🎓 Shot 14: Training of the Week

HubSpot Pivot Table Custom Report Walkthrough

In this Substack article we walkthrough how to create a Client Revenue by Year pivot table based on Deals:

Or watch the walkthrough on YouTube here.

💪 Shot 15: Have You Signed Up for the HubShots Daily Tip?

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🏋️ Shot 16: Have You Downloaded The HubShots Framework?

HubShots Framework Poster

Download a copy of the HubShots Framework.

🧲 Shot 17: Follow Us on the Socials

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Connect with Ian Jacob on LinkedIn and Craig Bailey on LinkedIn plus check out his personal YouTube channel.

HubShots, the podcast for marketing managers and sales professionals who use HubSpot, hosted by Ian Jacob from Search & Be Found and Craig Bailey from XEN and XEN Create.

HubShots is produced by Christopher Mottram from Podcastily.

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