Highlights from HubSpot's INBOUND 2020 conference

HubSpot held its annual user conference on September 22 and September 23 this year—and it was packed with new updates. Here's a roundup of some of the big announcements they shared. 

Custom objects

Available for: Sales Hub Enterprise, Marketing Hub Enterprise, and Service Hub Enterprise customers

As an existing HubSpot customer, you are likely familiar with the four standard objects in HubSpot: Contacts, Companies, Deals, and Tickets. Now, with custom objects, you can store virtually anything in HubSpot and build relationships between objects. 

This has been one of the biggest asks by larger organizations and one of the big things keeping HubSpot from being labeled as an "enterprise" CRM. 

While custom objects require a bit of dev work to get going, everything else—managing properties, reporting, and building out automation—related to those objects can be handled in the UI just like you would manage a contact.

You can learn more about the setup involved for custom objects in the HubSpot API doc here.

New "marketing contacts" pricing model

Available for: Marketing Hub Starter, Marketing Hub Professional, and Marketing Hub Enterprise customers

Starting October 21, if you are a HubSpot Marketing Hub customer, you will be able to opt in to a new pricing model where you only pay for the contacts you intend to market to through email or ads. For HubSpot customers with large databases that include contacts that aren't prospects or customers, this will ensure you can store all of your contacts in HubSpot without the additional price tag associated with doing so.

Field-level permissions

Available for: Sales Hub Enterprise customers

Prior to this release, any user in HubSpot with permissions to view or edit Contacts, Companies, Deals, or Tickets, would have access to all of the properties contained in each of those objects. Now, HubSpot Sales Enterprise customers can control access to individual properties on an object. This can be done at the individual, role, or team level, giving you granular control as to what each person in your organization can see or modify.

Other highlights

Below is a list of other great features and enhancements that were announced at INBOUND:

• New proposals feature with more customization for proposals and quotes.
• Advanced sales analytics capabilities with a sales forecasting report.
• Enhanced report builder with a library of new reports across sales, marketing, and service.
• CRM-powered marketing using new custom objects for more personalized marketing content in emails and ads.
• Advanced help desk automation features.
• Identification for logged in app users to help route to the right service agent.

For all the announcements from INBOUND this year, check out HubSpot's website.