The first week of September was chaotic, entertaining, and FULL of buzzwords to get attendees (and the poor souls who didn’t come) thinking about HubSpot’s latest and greatest. Fortunately, we’ve been in this ecosystem for long enough to cut straight through the FaNcY jArGoN and get straight to the point.
INBOUND 2025 TL;DR - HubSpot has a lot of balls in the air. Their pace of updates and new features is unmatched and while it's incredible, it's overwhelming as a user and admin. Remember though, half of the new features are in beta, so expect them to change over the next 6-12 months.
But buried in the hype are three things that actually matter:
That's basically everything you need to know so, if you want, you can close your browser tab right now and we won't be offended (at least not completely). If you want more detail on what's all hype and what's bringing us joy, keep reading our novel of a blog post! But don't worry, we're not monsters - we at least broke up our stuff up by chapters. You're welcome.
For years, we’ve been struggling to understand the value proposition of Operations Hub. It’s gotten a glow up and is now “Data Hub” and has some exciting new features including Data Studio. This new spreadsheet-like playground allows you to join your data sources together and scroll through everything. Data Studio doesn’t use any credits when you’re previewing your data and setting up your joins but if you want to use that data from other platforms inside of HubSpot (like syncing a property to a Contact record), that will cost you HubSpot credits. Your subscription comes with a bundle of credits and they’re used based on how big the external source is that you’re joining in. If HubSpot needs to use a lot of computing power to figure out which contacts it needs to pull data for, you’ll blow through those credits pretty quickly.
Picture this: you’re 6 filters deep into a contact view and want to count how many contacts are in each lifecycle stage within the view. Now, with 1 or 2 clicks, you get exactly the bar chart you were imagining without leaving the page. You can even save that report and add it to a dashboard!
Anyone who has used the lists tool has been through the “clone group” exercise where they’ve needed to go through every. single. group. to update that one property that you needed applied to every group. NEVER AGAIN! This little update finally allows you to group and layer filters similar to how they function in report filters.
Marketing Campaigns… still need some love. BUT, this new Marketing Studio view allows you to visualize all of your campaign assets and how they work together in a single canvas experience. It’s like a process diagram but with thumbnails of your assets and some lightweight metrics. This view facilitates multi-user collaboration with comments and statuses for each asset. Now, we cross our fingers that this feature expands into the other Hubs!
Finally! Videos are not just dropped into the “files” black hole! You get a dedicated video library with tools to help use those videos. Most of the coolest features are in Content Hub Pro or Enterprise like the clip editor and AI-suggested clips. If you’re a Descript user, you can now export your video from Descript right into HubSpot.
HubSpot's new AI-powered CPQ in Commerce Hub seems like it is what sales teams have been begging for! It pulls context and conversation history to auto-generate branded quotes. Sales reps customize via drag-and-drop, buyers review and pay on one page.
Why are we cautious? It’s still in beta so we’ll expect some changes in functionality over the coming months (like the fact that it’s still missing the ability to group products and add them in bulk).
HubSpot’s tasks leave a lot to be desired but work for some basic reminders and tracking things like sales follow up. And remember Services? It was supposed to help with service delivery hand off, but it really only made people overcomplicate the onboarding handoff.
The UI changes within the projects object seems to offer a cohesive connection between deals and delivery while reducing (maybe eliminating) handoff chaos. NEATO! Also, the new Marketing Studio collaboration experience seems like it will plan nice with Projects.
Why are we cautious? We’ve got another beta. HubSpot was kind enough to admit that this feature is in the “early stage” and only facilitates the “groundwork” of this process, so we’re looking at this as an MVP, not an Asana killer. But it shows positive signs about the direction: projects are part of the customer journey, not an afterthought.
Write a prompt once and every email sends out with a custom message tailored to each contact. This level of personalization feels like a dream come true for email marketers. HubSpot writes, “Generate unique content for every recipient using your unified CRM data automatically.”
Why are we cautious? When have you copied and pasted an entirely AI-generated asset and published it without editing? It feels like a big red button that blasts you off into the unknown. This is intended for short snippets so maybe it really can turn personalization tokens into a more human-like statement but it’s difficult to trust when you can’t QA every message.
Enterprise features at $75/month? It’s real! Some of the core features you could previously access in any hub have been shifted into a new Smart CRM package. At the enterprise level of Smart CRM, you unlock a sandbox, custom objects, login as user, higher limits for custom properties and reports…it’s all accessible in this new package.
Why are we cautious? You’ll definitely still feel the squeeze in some of the other Hubs. These features can be essential in properly representing the structure of your business and relationships. But activating those contacts into a buying cycle may still take some other tools locked behind role-specific Hubs. Hopefully this doesn’t turn into “FreemiumSpot.”
Self-contained AI doing things for you - sounds like you should start building your virtual team and lay off those expensive real humans! But really? Do you really trust AI to just start blasting out emails on your behalf? Will you trust every recommendation that the research agent tells you? Do you have the time to invest in creating a custom-built agent with enough detail to be your clone?
It takes a LOT more than just flipping a switch to make these agents useful and trustworthy. Just like any update, they’re great to play with and test and learn from, but use caution in adopting them more broadly.
HubSpot’s Loop framework has 4 parts: Express → Tailor → Amplify → Evolve. HubSpot’s Flywheel framework had 4 parts: Attract → Engage → Delight → Growth
Is there a difference when you really dig into the meaning of those words in a marketing context? All the Loop says is, “do good marketing, keep improving, and your customers will love you for it and tell their friends. Repeat.” That’s the same thing as the flywheel, just using different words.
When we heard this announcement on stage, our group chat immediately started making jokes. Despite our memes and nonsense, there is an underlying message to the Loop – linear funnels are dead.
A free lunch is never actually free. HubSpot’s company insights were sunsetted in 2024 and it felt like a big loss until you realized that data wasn’t the most reliable anyway. We’re very happy to see that free enrichment coming back to help fill in the blanks and not require credits but know that it probably won’t be the level of detail or accuracy that your team actually needs.
If you're feeling FOMO: Don't. You're not falling behind by waiting because a lot of this will continue to evolve in the coming months (years, even).
If you want to be strategic: Pick ONE thing that addresses your biggest pain point. Quotes taking forever? Look at CPQ (in Q2). Handoffs causing chaos? Test Projects (carefully). Data living in 47 places? Jump into your Data Hub trial so explore what tools you have for clean up.
If you're skeptical: Test what looks interesting and give feedback. The product team is fairly accessible in social channels and those little pop up smiley faces mean a lot to them. The direction they're heading—unified operations, not just marketing—is great to see and worth keeping an eye on.
The real winners from INBOUND 2025 won't be the companies that implement everything HubSpot announced. They'll be the ones who recognize that, while the tools are evolving, the fundamentals haven't changed: know your customer, solve real problems, and don't let shiny objects distract you from what actually drives revenue.
We hope you enjoyed this absolute novel of a “blog” post.