HubSpot’s INBOUND25 delivered a wave of transformative updates, and whilst the spotlight often shines on new AI capabilities, the enhancements to Smart CRM are set to fundamentally redefine how businesses manage customer data, streamline operations, and drive growth.
These changes are particularly pertinent for business leaders who prioritise demonstrable ROI, those whose focus is driving business growth through technology, and those focused on efficient system usage and successful adoption.
Significantly, HubSpot has now unbundled its Smart CRM, making it available as a standalone product at Professional or Enterprise levels. This means businesses can access advanced CRM features, including crucial capabilities like custom objects and sandboxes, without needing to purchase an entire Hub (e.g., Marketing Hub or Sales Hub). This makes sophisticated CRM functionality more accessible and cost-effective, opening HubSpot to a wider range of industries and enabling more robust data management for all.
As a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner, we’ve spent the past month beta testing some of the newly released features, and we can confidently say these aren’t just incremental updates - they represent a fundamental shift in how businesses can leverage their customer data.
Let’s delve into how HubSpot is revolutionising its CRM, making it not just a database, but an intelligent, adaptive core of your business. Here is our analysis of the most impactful releases and what they mean for your business.
HubSpot’s Smart CRM: Unifying Data, Driving Decisions, and Empowering Teams
In today's complex business landscape, teams often grapple with disparate data, rigid systems, and the constant challenge of turning raw information into actionable insights. HubSpot’s Smart CRM updates at INBOUND25 directly address these pain points, introducing a CRM that learns, adapts, and proactively supports every team across your organisation. These innovations ensure that your CRM is no longer a static record-keeper, but an intelligent, always-on partner in driving revenue and operational excellence.
These updates are designed to simplify how your teams interact with customer data, automate data enrichment, and surface critical insights, all while ensuring your CRM is the single source of truth.
1. Flexible CRM Views: Data That Adapts to Your Team
Imagine a CRM that presents information in a way that makes sense to each individual role within your company. That’s precisely what Flexible CRM Views promises - a way to display customer data in whatever way makes sense for your business - such as tables, charts, or custom views - to easily spot trends and act fast.
The Challenge Today
Currently, every team often sees the same rigid table format, manually sifting through rows of data. Sales representatives and marketers, despite needing different insights, are "squinting at identical spreadsheet views". This leads to inefficiency and difficulty in extracting meaningful insights.
The Smart CRM Solution: Strategic Insight
Post-INBOUND25, your CRM will adapt to how each team thinks and works. Sales reps can visualise pipeline momentum in a dynamic flow, while marketers can track funnel performance in conversion charts. Patterns and trends will jump out immediately through visual representations. This means that for our clients, we can configure views for sales teams to spot momentum shifts, identify drop-off points for the marketing team, and for service to predict support spikes.
Strategic Insight
When teams can see patterns immediately instead of squinting at data tables, decision-making accelerates by weeks, not days. This is a critical tool for ensuring efficient system usage and addressing diverse user needs.
This unified approach means one platform speaks every team's language while connecting everyone to the same customer truth. For those who need to ensure efficient system usage and address diverse user needs, these flexible views are invaluable. Business leaders will also appreciate the ability to receive concise, tailored reports that directly reflect business growth and performance.
2. Self-Generating CRM Data: Your CRM Becomes a Learning Machine
The age-old problem with CRMs is that they are "only as smart as the data that you manually feed it". This often leaves a wealth of intelligence from sales calls, email exchanges, and customer interactions sitting unused. HubSpot’s Self-Generating CRM Data feature changes this entirely. Your CRM is transformed into a learning machine. It automatically enriches contact and company records with HubSpot's proprietary data, AI-driven smart properties, and insights pulled directly from your team's conversations. Rather than wasting time on manual research and data entry, this feature handles the data work automatically, so teams can focus on what moves the needle - building relationships and driving revenue.
The Challenge Previously:
Standard data fields often can't capture industry-unique information, and valuable conversational data, or unstructured data, remains unutilised.
The Smart CRM Solution:
The new Data Hub is the key to unlocking the full potential of this unstructured data. Data Hub's features, like Data Studio, use AI to turn scattered context from external sources like spreadsheets and data warehouses into unified, clean datasets. This means we can now connect typically trapped information from customer conversations with structured data to give a complete picture of each customer that updates automatically. Your CRM is transformed into a learning machine, automatically extracting insights from:
- HubSpot's datases: Tapping into a massive knowledge base for enhanced context.
- Smart properties: AI-generated fields that populate themselves based on customer behaviour.
- Live conversations: Every call transcript and email exchange becomes actionable CRM data.
Picture a sales representative finishing a discovery call: before they even write a note, the CRM has already captured pain points, budget discussions, decision timelines, and competitor mentions - all automatically and accurately. This isn't just about eliminating data entry; it's about your CRM becoming intelligent enough to understand your business as well as you do. This is truly revolutionary for those who lead the data strategy and need robust, compliant systems, as well as for those responsible for human error and dirty data.
3. Smart Insights: Your Proactive Business Intelligence Analyst
With teams often spending hours of 'detective work' every week "sifting through CRM records, analysing email patterns, decoding reports, or trying to figure out what's actually happening with customers" - time which is taken away from strategic action.
Smart Insights flips this paradigm completely: instead of hunting for insights, insights hunt for you. Smart Insights now proactively analyses CRM data to identify what’s important, what’s changed, and what to do next. It continuously analyses unified customer data and proactively surfaces the most important changes, risks, and opportunities right where they're needed.
The Challenge Previously
Time spent "sifting through CRM records, analysing email patterns, decoding reports etc" = time away from critical strategy and actions.
The Smart CRM Solution
Smart Insights delivers proactive intelligence from:
- AI Catch-Up Cards (Professional+): Instantly surface shifting customer sentiment and highlight critical missing data directly on the company record. No more surprises in customer meetings. These cards provide an "at a glance" recap, proactively flagging potential issues and suggesting impactful next steps.
- Smart Digest (Starter+): Automatically alerts you the moment performance shifts or important trends emerge, spotting opportunities and risks before your competition. This can be a daily, weekly, or bi-weekly digest tailored to user needs.
- Column Insights (Starter+): Right-click any data pattern to get instant AI analysis of its meaning and significance, turning confusion into clarity in seconds.
This empowers your entire team to operate with perfect situational awareness, moving from reactive scrambling to proactive decision-making. The Smart CRM finally tells you what's happening instead of making you figure it out.
4. Projects Object: Streamlining Project Management within HubSpot
Many businesses rely on external tools for project management, leading to fragmented data and context switching. HubSpot is addressing this with the introduction of the new Projects Object.
The Smart CRM Solution
This object allows users to create, edit, and manage project management data directly within the HubSpot platform. Project data can be leveraged across HubSpot for record association, segmentation, automation, and comprehensive reporting providing an end-to-end picture when combined with other objects like deals or leads. Users can also view this data as a Gantt chart, offering better oversight directly within the CRM.
Future Vision
While initially in private beta, the aim is to connect with workplace software and eventually sync with existing project tools. Imagine a workflow that automatically creates an implementation project with tasks when a deal is closed-won.
5. Standalone Smart CRM: A New Gateway to HubSpot’s Power
Historically, the full value of HubSpot's CRM could be masked when purchased as part of a larger Hub. HubSpot is changing this with the Standalone Smart CRM SKU.
The Smart CRM Solution
You can now purchase either the Smart CRM Professional or Smart CRM Enterprise SKU without needing to buy a full Hub (like Marketing Hub or Sales Hub). While the CRM will still be included at no additional cost with any Hub purchase, this new option allows businesses to start with a world-class CRM and expand later. Our consultants have seen this offering already having "a lot of great results" during testing in the UK&I region since April 2025.
This is a significant market expansion game-changer. It offers a "new front door strategy" for businesses, allowing them to benefit from HubSpot’s unified data and AI intelligence, even if they're happy with their existing marketing tools but not their CRM.
The Cultural Shift: Beyond Implementation to True Adoption
These Smart CRM updates, from adaptive views and self-generating data to proactive insights and integrated project management, represent a profound shift towards a more intelligent, user-centric CRM experience.
HubSpot's Smart CRM is Waiting for You!
At BabelQuest, we understand that digital transformation is cultural, and the true success of these powerful new capabilities lies in driving adoption across your organisation. It’s about creating a culture where these tools are not just implemented, but become an essential, seamless part of daily workflows.
By combining technical expertise with creative solutions, we help businesses leverage HubSpot’s Smart CRM to not only improve data management and decision-making but also to foster a culture of efficiency and growth that leaders expect.
Ready to see how HubSpot’s Smart CRM can transform your business operations and empower your teams?
Gem is an inbound enthusiast and HubSpot Platform Consultant at BabelQuest, an Elite-tier HubSpot Solutions Partner based in Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
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