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BOSTON, Nov. 9, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The way that people shop and buy continues to change - so, too, must the way companies market and sell. Today, your customers are your best marketers and your website is your best salesperson. Tomorrow, we'll see a customer's entire lifecycle powered by a bot and other machine learning technologies, which will create an opportunity to deliver a more targeted, personalized, and delightful experience. That was the key message from HubSpot co-founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah this afternoon on the main stage at HubSpot's annual INBOUND event.

To help businesses tackle these shifts head-on, HubSpot, a leading inbound marketing, sales, and CRM software company, announced the availability of HubSpot Marketing Free, putting the tools built upon the Inbound Methodology in the hands of many more businesses around the world. HubSpot Marketing Free is a no-cost tier of HubSpotMarketing that provides the essentials marketers need in order to turn website traffic into leads with pop-up forms, contact insights, analytics, and a dashboard that ties it all together.

HubSpot Marketing Free is a key element of the full HubSpot growth stack - the trifecta of HubSpot Marketing, HubSpot Sales, and HubSpot CRM that provides businesses with the right tools and integrations they need to meet their growth goals. Working together seamlessly, all three components of HubSpot's growth stack are available for free to start and grow with teams over time.

Reflections on the Past, Present, and Future of Marketing and Sales

During their keynote, Halligan and Shah predicted the industry's future and reflected on the changes that have occurred over the course of the company's 10-year history.

Halligan took the stage first to discuss how customer buying behaviors have changed since HubSpot was founded in 2006. With services like Amazon, changes in SEO, and the ubiquity of social media, companies need to work even harder to differentiate their offerings and stand out among the competition. Key insights included:

• Where companies once vied for inches of physical shelf space in a store, today's shift in the balance between supply and demand means that companies now compete for "just millimeters on the infinite shelf of the internet."
• Regardless of whether you're in B2B or B2C, your customers live in social media. Businesses should be marketing to their audiences where they live or they "may as well be marketing into a trash can."
• The promise of Ask Jeeves has been realized by Google. The answer, not answers, are a single search away whether it's something you type into your mobile device or ask Alexa, OK Google, or Siri.
• Cold calling is dead. Really dead. Just don't do it.

Shah delivered the second half of the keynote by predicting where marketing technology is headed in the next five years based on where it has come in the last twenty. Key insights included:

• Today, search is bigger than just Google. Users go to Facebook to look for a specific person, or to visit Amazon to find a product. So, the way to win at SEO in this new environment is to focus on HEO, or human enjoyment optimization. Instead of solving for the search engines, marketers should solve for what creates the most joy for humans.
• With the rise of mobile, the world went wild for apps -- millions of apps. But, the vast majority of people spend their time using just a few -- most of them messaging apps. "So, unless your business has a crazy compelling, life-altering value proposition, a mobile app probably isn't worth the effort."
• Chatbots do far more than "chat". Looking to the future, sales and marketing professionals will be able to use these powerful assistants to amplify and optimize everyday tasks, such as running reports, launching social ad campaigns, or creating a blog post.

All of these advancements signal a sea change in the relationship between humans and technology:

"In the past, we told software what we wanted it to do. As AI technology evolves, that dynamic is shifting," said Shah. "Soon, software will be able to learn what we wish it could do, opening doors for businesses to transform how they interact with and serve their customers."

Additional Product Updates

HubSpot also introduced exciting new features and functionality across its Marketing, Sales, and CRM products. The additional new and improved products announced at INBOUND align under the themes of power and simplicity to better meet the unique needs of HubSpot customers.

"At HubSpot, we strive to provide our customers with the tools they need to grow their revenue, streamline operations, and create a delightful user experience," said Christopher O'Donnell, VP of Product for HubSpot. "The new products and updates we announced at INBOUND this year will help them do just that, all within the full growth stack HubSpot platform."

A Simpler, More Powerful Foundation

• Visual Workflows introduce a brand-new visual editing interface that allows marketers to easily learn, create, and enable nurturing in their business.
• Enhanced Reporting will improve analytics with a new dashboard that gives marketers deeper insights into what's working and what's not at the very top of their marketing funnels. Metrics include bounce rate, visitors by source, and more.
• The Unified HubSpot Mobile App will include Marketing, Sales, and CRM functionalities, and replaces the three separate apps that previously existed for a more streamlined and integrated experience.

Robust Tools That Drive Growth

• Content Strategy works hand in hand with two other new content tools - Collect and Composer - allowing users to curate interesting information, determine relevant and rankable topics, and create content and gather feedback within a clean, simple interface.
• To help customers serve up content in the blink of an eye, all pages published on the HubSpot COS will now be AMP Optimized.
• Facebook Ads are coming soon to the HubSpot Ads Add-On, enabling customers to create, measure, and optimize their Facebook ads right in the HubSpot platform.
• Projects is a powerful productivity tool that enables users to organize their work and collaborate with their team all within HubSpot. The tool features ready made project templates so teams can execute new tactics quickly and easily.

Integrated Sales Products for Deeper Connection

• Deeper Functionality in HubSpot CRM makes it even easier for more advanced sales teams to track and connect with their contacts. New features include expanded permissions, company merging, parent-child relationships, and more.
• Coming in 2017, a new integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator that enables sales reps to better target, understand, and engage with prospects and leads.
• Meetings makes connecting with customers and prospects even easier by enabling users to share a rep's calendar through a link in an email or embedded right on the company's website.
• During his talk, Halligan noted that a company's website has become its best seller. Following that trend, Messages lets prospects chat with a sales rep in real time directly on the company website, right when they're most engaged.

To learn more about all of the new products HubSpot created in 2016 and when they will be generally available, please visit http://www.hubspot.com/new.

About HubSpot
HubSpot (NYSE: HUBS) is a leading inbound marketing, sales, and CRM growth stack. Since 2006, HubSpot has been on a mission to make the world more inbound. Today, over 21,500 customers in more than 90 countries use HubSpot's award-winning software, services, and support to transform the way they attract, engage, and delight customers. HubSpot Marketing includes social media publishing and monitoring, blogging, SEO, website content management, email marketing, marketing automation, and reporting and analytics. HubSpot Sales enables sales and service teams to have more effective conversations with leads, prospects, and customers. HubSpot CRM helps sales teams organize, track, and grow their pipeline. All three platforms integrate right out of the box and are available for free to start. HubSpot has been recognized by Inc., Forbes, and Deloitte as one of the world's fastest-growing companies and has been named a top place to work by Glassdoor, Fortune, and The Boston Business Journal. HubSpot is headquartered in Cambridge, MA with offices in Singapore; Dublin, Ireland; Sydney, Australia; Tokyo, Japan; and Portsmouth, NH. Learn more at www.hubspot.com.

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SOURCE HubSpot