InBound 25: The No-Hype News for Fran Dev
HubSpot just announced 200+ new features. Let's look at the most important ones for fran dev.
In This Executive Brief
HubSpot’s annual conference is called InBound and it just wrapped up in San Francisco. They announced more than 200 features at InBound. I’ve been evaluating the betas of many of these features for weeks to see where they can help franchises.
In the FranDev Lab we don’t believe in chasing what’s new. I focus on features that unlock new capabilities for Fran Dev and that can move the needle.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
Clear, immediate wins
Big wins, but will take time and investment
What I’m watching
So let’s do it.
What I’m Focused On:
Clear, immediate wins:
Breeze Assistants
Breeze Assistants are AI helpers that appear in Copilot, right inside HubSpot where your team works. If you’re familiar with LLM features, these are a lot like Projects in Claude. There are pre-build, customizable Assistants and the ability to create your own.
Use cases:
Create a “Process Assistant” with all your SOPs. Employees can ask “How do I…” and get answers in seconds, right where they work.
Tailor the “ICP Assistant” template with in-depth documentation of your ideal Franchisee Profile. People can bounce ideas off it—but always filter the outputs against reality.
Create a “Brand Assistant” to help team members with tone and voice when they’re crafting emails, texts, etc.
The Smart CRM Enterprise plan
This new plan at $75/mo is the cheapest way to get access to Enterprise features if you don’t already have them:
Custom Objects
Custom Events
Lots of teams and permissions features
Property-level access permissions
200 Calculated Properties
Sensitive Data properties
A standard sandbox environment
and a lot more
I upgraded FranDev Labs on Day 1.
View customizations
These features have been rolling out for a while and there are a few not yet available, but these are small changes that make a big difference.
Conditional Center Column Tabs and Cards on Records.
A new GANTT View for Index Pages.
A (still in private Beta) Map View for Index Pages.
and a lot more
These fix some long standing annoyances and make creating an awesome heads-up-display view of a record—whether its a New FA Sales Deal, a Development Project, or an existing Location—easy and powerful.
Big wins, but will take time and investment
Data Studio
I’ve been using a beta of Data Studio in client portals for a while now. It is an incredibly powerful tool. It a huge upgrade to HubSpot datasets, which you can use to build even more sophisticated reporting on your HubSpot data and unlock answers to questions it used to be very hard to answer.
It also lets you bring external data into HubSpot without huge integration costs. That can be data you want to use for reporting or data you want to add to your HubSpot records. For example, you could use it to bring in performance data and associate it with your Location or Owner data in HubSpot.
It is a more technical tool and so might require upskilling your team or outside help to make use of it.
AEO - AI Engine Optimization
This is on everyone’s mind. Prospective Franchisees are using LLMs like OpenAI, Claude, and Perplexity in their research long before they talk to you.
In the big picture, this whole space is in massive flux, but it is clear that AI needs your content to understand you. The same content that you use in your marketing and sales needs to be available to AI crawlers on your website sooner rather than later. This tool isn’t widely available yet, but with some oversight by your marketing team (see below) this should help you get coverage in the big LLMs.
Agents inside HubSpot
HubSpot announced an Agent Studio and Marketplace that put Agents right inside HubSpot. We’re in Day 0 of this transformation so it will be some time before there is a big catalog of Agents in the Marketplace.
There are some built-in Agents available now. Some of them are focused on B2B sales and won’t provide great outputs for fran dev, but there are some that are ready for your team to start testing and tuning in their workflows right now:
Blog Research Agent
Social Post Agent
Remember, no “off-the-shelf agent”—HubSpot or otherwise—”just works”. They always need to be tuned and adapted for your franchise.
Marketing Studio
This is a big upgrade to Marketing Campaigns that makes it easier to set up, organize, manage, and report on your Fran Dev lead generation efforts, even if you use external vendors to manage your ads. This is a far-reaching and powerful tool. It takes some re-orientation if your marketing team isn’t already using it. It’s a tool for a strategic, organized approach to your lead gen activity.
What I’m watching
AI Personalization and the Personalization Agent
This feature is only freshly available by special request in private beta. I’m just getting access to in production portals so I don’t have any indicators yet on how “fran dev ready” it is, but I’m optimistic.
Why I’m excited:
Producing content for fran dev campaigns, emails, and websites is time consuming and even franchises who do this well usually settle into a “one size fits all” workflow. This means you’re not serving your prospective franchisees as effectively as you could be. You’re probably leaving franchise growth on the table.
AI and agents that can help your fran dev marketing team produce content that is better tailored for your prospective franchisees can help you do a lot more with the team and tools you have.
Why I’m cautious:
Using generative AI for fran dev content also has inherent risks. AI cannot yet be safely prevented from producing content that is not “FDD Compliant”.
To get a little bit technical, the non-deterministic nature of LLMs means that even if your instructions include guidance to always create content that reflects your FDD and to never give you content that violates franchise laws, it’s still possible that AI could promise prospects ROI, tell them they can make a lot of money, or promise things that aren’t in the FDD. That doesn’t mean this feature won’t work for franchises using HubSpot. It just means that AI personalization needs at least as much review and rigor as you apply to your marketing content produced by trained franchise marketers and that this feature needs to be tested and proven.
Built-in Data Enrichment
HubSpot announced new, revised enrichment features that tie into the Data Studio and can be used to fill in data in the Smart CRM automatically using specialized data sources and AI. This might bring you better data without requiring additional tools or data entry by Reps.
Why I’m excited:
Good decisions, good reporting, and getting good results from AI require good data. This feature could help franchises get good data at a reasonable cost that they didn’t have access to previously.
Why I’m cautious:
HubSpot’s data sources and strategy here are not yet clear, but their enrichment strategy has always been B2B-centric. It is focused on Company data first. Data about prospective franchises in these sources are related to the company they work for, which is not your focus. It doesn’t capture the things that franchises are focused on when selecting franchisees during their diligence process: their leadership skills, their drive, their goals, their dedication, their interest in an industry, etc.
I’ll be digging into these and other new features more on LinkedIn and here in the Lab Report over the coming months, so stay tuned for updates and reach out if you want to talk about any of them.
See you in the next Lab Report.