HubSpot is making major product announcements at this week’s sold-out Inbound Conference. Let me start with some context that ties all this together.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
As everyone is aware, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere now. AI will likely be one of the most, if not the most, transformational technology in our lifetime.
AI is not new. It actually started years ago. However, technology vendors and related jobs and services are being disrupted, retooled, and relaunched.
In addition, escalated by the pandemic, people have transformed how they work and buy products, and AI is accelerating their changing expectations.
New Buyer's Journey
Here are some things you must consider about your buyers and the new buyer’s journey:
- People are becoming more aware of brands, products, and services through social media. Search channels are still important, but social media is becoming a key channel to reach your target audience.
- Once people learn about your brand, product, and service, they visit your website. So, your website must be smart, interactive, and engaging, or they will be gone – in seconds.
- Website visitors don’t want to convert on your website; they want to converse on your website. They want to engage in online chat to find the specific information they seek. They will unlikely initiate a phone call or download a PDF at the beginning of their research.
- Website visitors want a personalized experience. They expect you to know how they got there, what pages they have viewed, and if they have interacted with you before.
- Website visitors expect you to know their past experience with you – online and offline.
- Meeting these visitor expectations will be key to encouraging them to become your customers.
- Once they are your customer and have an additional need or problem, they will return to your website to help solve it. At that point, they expect you to be proactive in helping them.
- Your customers expect you to have a website chat service to help them solve their issues and quickly receive an answer. It’s important to recognize who they are and that they are your customer in order to personalize their experience.
- All of this interaction happens without emails or phone calls.
So, What Does This All Mean For You?
It means that you will need to change how you do business and interact with website visitors. Right now, there is no AI playbook for marketing, sales, and customer service. However, you need to start evolving your “go-to- market” for the age of AI.
Start with small changes, continuously iterate improvements, and evolve quickly.
Here are the five things you should start doing now.
- Get going with bots.
Gear up your online chat with ready answers that your chatbot can handle and then have live people ready to “talk” one-on-one with your website visitors via chat when additional help is needed. Your chatbot should be able to answer questions about your product, pricing, and use cases your target market is interested in. Once you have a marketing chatbot, add your support bot. Get the most repetitive questions answered right away by the bot so your teams can focus on the ones that require complex answers and expertise. Your service levels will improve, and your customers will be more delighted. - Hit refresh on your content strategy with AI.
This entails a few different things. First, you should be asking two questions. What kind of content do I generate now, and with which communities do I share my content? Second, ensure you understand your audience’s intent when creating content so you can have the answers they are looking for. Third, your content should be optimized for AI, whether you’re creating blogs, podcasts, or infographics. That means that your content needs to have depth. What is depth? While keywords are still important, the relationship between your words and the context around these words is even more important for AI. So, the content or information your website visitor seeks must be developed and available for your AI bot to access. Then, your AI bot can help answer your website visitor's questions for you.
- Share your content.
Where do you share all this content now that you have created it? Across multiple communities, and this is where AI really helps. AI can take the base content you have created and optimize it for each community. It can schedule a post on your behalf. It can recommend the time of day that is best to post based on prior engagement metrics. Almost every part of content, ideation, creation, and distribution is ripe for change with AI. This is a great place for you to get started. Your customers use different channels. Connect them all.
- Flip your sales formula.
Sales leaders and sales reps, this is for you. Here’s the old sales formula: hire a lot of reps, give them a stack of tools, and drive a lot of activities. That strategy no longer works. Your reps are overworked, and your customers are overwhelmed with their outreach. There is a new way to sell, which is an AI-powered way. If you have a Smart CRM, then you have all the data about your customer. AI can help you convert that into insights, which means you can focus on what you do best, meaningfully connecting with your customers.
- Be proactive with your service.
This may be the most important one. Believe it or not, getting people to buy your product is not the biggest challenge facing companies today. The biggest challenge is getting them to use it, engage with it, and receive value from it. This is where you need to be proactive. Instead of waiting for your customers to call you, be proactive and make every conversation count. Your AI tool within your Smart CRM can tell you the next high-value feature your customer needs and what similar customers are doing in other industries. Share these insights to drive more value for your customers.
Every organization deserves a Smart AI-powered customer platform that can help it leverage the power of intelligence. HubSpot is building AI into every Hub (Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS, and Operations) and across the entire CRM customer platform.
So, How Do You Get Started?
Phase 1:
- Awareness – Discover what AI can do.
- Investigation – Explore use cases.
Phase 2:
- Adoption – Get things done.
- Integration – Weave AI into workflows.
- Optimization – Look for leverage.
McKinley Research has shown that the top use cases for Generative AI are:
- Sales
- Internal Development
- Marketing
- Product Development
- Customer Operations
McKinley’s research indicates three of the top five use cases are customer-facing: Marketing, Sales, and Customer Operations.
This Change Is Impacting:
- Technology
- People
- Customers
- Buying Process
- Your Company
Smart CRM
To be effective in this changing environment, you need a Smart CRM.
Luckily for you, HubSpot has you covered with a Smart CRM. And it just got SMARTER!
With HubSpot, you can use the Smartest CRM to scale your business or organization, customized for your marketing, sales, customer service, and operations teams.
In fact, HubSpot has added over 200 new attributes to its CRM this year alone across its Marketing, Sales, Service, CMS, and Operation Hubs.
Here’s a quick view of HubSpot’s latest enhancements:
- A collection of AI features added across the entire HubSpot CRM platform.
- A Content Assistant, available to help create new content in minutes.
- Campaign Assistant to help create coordinated campaign assets quickly (landing page, form, email, etc.).
- Website Assistant that can build a website in minutes.
- AI Chatbot that reads your online content and answers people’s questions.
- SMS messaging, available throughout the HubSpot CRM and Hubs.
- A reimagined Sales Hub for greater sales assistance.
- An enhanced Commerce Hub, enabling more self-service, payment links, professional invoices, and billing automation, all for no additional charge.
- Service Hub enables you to be more proactive with your customers through AI-based Support Assistant and Help Desk improvements.
Now, all your team members (Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, and Operations) have access to a single source of truth. And using the new CRM development tools, you can create UI extensions on your customer records. With new CRM extensions, you can bring more information across your systems into one central CRM record page.
Extensions help unlock integrations with third-party platforms and customers’ internal systems. These integration capabilities enable you to expand HubSpot to fit your unique business requirements and processes. In fact, you can tailor your HubSpot CRM for each of your team members.
HubSpot is quickly emerging as THE CRM for businesses and organizations wanting to scale. With integrations to 1,500 apps, the HubSpot CRM is the CRM of choice for 3.2 million users.
Curious to learn more? Click here to get a HubSpot demo and see how it can unlock the future for you.
