Wake Up Customer Platform - Mar 25, 2026

[00:04] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good morning, Hubspot Nation. It is time to wake up customer platform with your unofficial Hubspot Updates Morning Show, where we help you discover the platform value you already own. I'm Chris Carolan, joined by my co-hosts, Casey Hawkins and George B. Thomas. We're here every weekday morning to make sure you're not sleeping on Hubspot's true capabilities. If you're joining live, drop a hello in the comments and let us know what you're building in Hubspot today. Uh happy Wednesday, George B. Thomas.

[01:01] **Happy Wednesday** George B. Thomas: You waited till now to say that. Son of a gun!

Casey Hawkins: [inaudible] Chris Carolan: [inaudible] George B. Thomas: Well, let's move on to the first update.

Casey Hawkins: I like that. I was late, so Chris and George sat here for five minutes waiting for me, and Chris didn't [inaudible] Chris Carolan: I did not catch it. It is definitely my responsibility, but, uh, definitely missed it in the moment. Casey Hawkins: Oh, I thought you, I thought you were just, like, [inaudible] Chris Carolan: No, I would never set George up like that. Uh, I really wouldn't. I was like mid, mid, uh, you know, intro script. I was like, oh oh. Casey Hawkins: He's more prepared than. Chris Carolan: He's, he's agile, right? Um, he's ready, ready to go in a moment's notice, uh, because he's excited. George B. Thomas: Tada. Casey Hawkins: That was impressive. Chris Carolan: To talk about things like connections insights.

George B. Thomas: Tada.

Casey Hawkins: That was your Rob Jones transition. Chris Carolan: [inaudible] We wear orange. Yes, we do. on Wednesday folks. Uh, and if you want to wear orange with us, um, uh, all day. Uh, which you probably will do if you are already wearing orange. Um, uh, join us for the Hubspot Help Line uh, later today at 10:15 Central, uh, where the three of us will be with Rob Jones and Kyle Jepson, uh, handling your Hubspot business live, uh, the best that we can. If you got problems, challenges, interests in new, uh, updates, uh, come hang out, um, with us, and we'll have some good conversation. George B. Thomas: Yeah, we will.

[02:43] **Connections Insights** Chris Carolan: That's on LinkedIn Live at 10:15 Central. Uh, meanwhile, Connections Insights. What is it? Uh, it's a new tab in connected apps that provides a high-level centralized view of how your apps are behaving across Hubspot at a glance. It brings together global insights about activity, automation, involvement, disconnect history, and API usage, with links that guide you to the relevant areas of the platform for deeper investigation or action. George B. Thomas: Well, that's nice. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? As accounts grow and more integrations are added, it becomes harder to understand overall app behavior without navigating across multiple tools and pages. Connection Insights helps by giving you a single place to see what's happening across all apps, making integration behavior easier to understand at a high level, reducing time spent hunting for information across the platform, helping you know where to go next when something looks off, by clearly surfacing signals and pointing you to the areas of Hubspot, Connection Insights helps you move from awareness to action faster without overwhelming you with details.

Chris Carolan: This is so good. Like in such a huge need. Like the most common reason for for bad data in my opinion, uh, in Hubspot is some integrations and people don't know how they work. They don't know who set them up. They don't know which data is being moved around and when. Uh, and it's been hard to like understand that, uh, up to, up to now, and what the team has been doing, you know, with the developer platform, and just all the things related to apps. Casey Hawkins: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Uh, so much progress has been made over the last. Casey Hawkins: And like these integrations have gotten more powerful, which I think is a big part of why this is needed, like as we you have these more powerful integrations, I'm think, like, the screenshot has OpenAI and Anthropic right in there, which are can be really powerful integrations. Um, but if you don't, if you can't see what they're doing, um, and how they're interacting with Hubspot, um, it can be difficult to manage, to trust those, to, um, know how your team's using those. There's a lot of to uncover there, too. George B. Thomas: Yeah, can I yes and you? Casey Hawkins: Of course. George B. Thomas: Always. Casey Hawkins: [inaudible] George B. Thomas: Cause I agree with you. Yes and. My favorite. I don't know if you've noticed, if you haven't, just go look at the menu structure of your Hubspot on the left hand side of your screen, or go into the settings cog. Uh, Hubspot has grown a little bit. Uh, so my favorite part of this is with links that guide you to the relevant area of the platform. Like, thank you. Like come. We need more of that in areas. Like, can we get some internal Hubspot linking strategy happening, please? Casey Hawkins: You know what I've noticed that I don't feel like I've talked about enough is now when you click the settings, the gear, it'll take, in the top right corner, it'll take you to the settings based on where you are. George B. Thomas: Oh. Yeah. Casey Hawkins: Which is like, no, I know. It's been like that for a while, but like that was such an, like that's such a nice little update that I haven't talked about enough. George B. Thomas: I've been teaching that for three years. Casey Hawkins: I, I don't, I don't talk about it enough. George B. Thomas: Yeah, we, yeah, if you didn't know, like one of my favorite ways to get to social settings is to go marketing social, then hit the settings cog, and it takes me to social settings, or like, if I'm going to do, like, go to the thing in the menu, then hit settings. It's like, I, it's, it's almost a little, AI before AI, like it's contextual navigation. I, I agree. I, I love that. I've loved that for a while.

Chris Carolan: Yeah. And even like if you look at the nav of, uh, of the screenshot, like these are things that just have not been connected into the rest of the system, right? API call usage, in academy. Man, so many product manager calls, like you have all of this resource, all of this resource and somehow it's not right next to where we need it, like just go do that. Uh, and they're doing it. So, kudos to the team for for making all this stuff more visible for us. [Inaudible cheer].

[06:49] **Contact Send Time Optimization** Chris Carolan: Contact send time optimizations is in public beta for marketing Hub, marketing email. What's changed? Uh, new post send chart showing email distribution over time. George B. Thomas: Nice. Chris Carolan: Uh, what is it? Send time optimization analyzes recipient behavior and automatically sends emails at the ideal time for each individual recipient, maximizing engagement and campaign performance.

Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Sending marketing emails when customers are most likely to engage increases open rates, click through rates, and overall campaign effectiveness. By aligning email delivery with distinct recipient's behavior, businesses can improve engagement, reduce unsubscribes, and maximize the impact of their marketing efforts. George B. Thomas: I would love to know if this has another name. I've looked in all, I've looked in new to you. I've looked in your betas in beta. Uh, I've looked everywhere. This is not in my portal. What is happening right now? Chris Carolan: I don't know. Casey Hawkins: I'm not having this. Chris Carolan: You have marketing enterprise? George B. Thomas: I have send time. Oh. Chris Carolan: That's why it's not. George B. Thomas: I'm guessing not. Chris Carolan: No, I don't have marketing enterprise. So I've got marketing pro, because I'm just over here slumming it with marketing pro, you know, like. Yeah. Casey Hawkins: Well, I've used this beta. Um, I really like it. Um, one thing I like about it is it takes some of like the guesswork out of, you know, what time to send emails. I hate that part of sending an email. Like, I don't know. Does it matter if I send it at 9:35 or 9:36? I don't know. George B. Thomas: 9:36, you're a millionaire. 9:35, you're just living life, I guess. Casey Hawkins: [inaudible] Chris Carolan: Because that's the difference, uh, between engagement and performance. Uh [inaudible] Casey Hawkins: I had trouble finishing the sentence. Chris Carolan: Because I realized that [inaudible] I did hear it. It maximizes potential engagement and potential performance. It does not, just because you're sending it the right time if your email's not good, still not going to get engagement or performance, okay? So, I think it's called value and relevance. Casey Hawkins: Chris, you're dashing people's dreams. I do have a word of caution with this specific update, though. Um, Hubspot in the, um, update itself, like when you go to use it, um, it recommends you use a 24-hour window so that you can see, like, when, it's not going to let you do like, well, it will let you, but it's going to tell you it's the best thing to do is the 24-hour window, not a 12, whatever, whatever. Um, however, if Hubspot does not know the optimized time to send the email, it will use the earliest time in that window. So, don't do midnight to midnight. George B. Thomas: Oh. Ooh. Casey Hawkins: I usually do 9:36 to 9:36. Chris Carolan: There you go. Casey Hawkins: Whatever. And a good tip. am to be clear. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: Uh, that makes sense. Yeah. Chris Carolan: Yeah, and that's like step number two, are you willing to give up control over that time window, um, uh, when there's an AI that probably knows better than you do? George B. Thomas: There's that word. Chris Carolan: to, uh, to do that stuff. George B. Thomas: You'll better get a grip on control in the next six months to six years. I'm just telling you. [Inaudible]. No, I'm just telling you that's a different podcast. I'll shut up. Casey Hawkins: I should have waited for my comment from here.

[09:27] **Notifications that Take You to the Right Record** Chris Carolan: Uh, notifications that take you to the right record across all CRM objects is in development. Uh, mentioned it a couple times now. Yeah. Uh, we've improved, they are improving at mention notifications to link directly to the exact CRM record where the mention happened. Uh, we're also expanding notification support to additional CRM objects, including appointments, carts, contracts, courses, listings, marketing events, orders, services, and subscriptions, which now support at mention, follow, and assign notifications. George, George B. Thomas: Yes. Chris Carolan: Was this in development yesterday? I feel like this was in a beta. George B. Thomas: I I thought it was in beta yesterday. I'm not sure. They're confusing me on this one, but we're excited every time we read it. We just don't know exactly where it is in the pipeline of using it. Chris Carolan: It's in development now, I guess. Uh, so, yeah, let's, let's just move on, I think. George B. Thomas: I wonder. Chris Carolan: That was like. While you're moving on, I wonder. Chris Carolan: [inaudible] Yeah. Uh, so a lot of old classics coming back today. Exclude weekends from time between calculated properties. Uh, what is it? You can now exclude weekends when using time between calculated properties. This option allows you to calculate the time between two dates while skipping weekends. Those weekends are defined as 12:00 a.m. Saturday through 11:59 p.m. Sunday, based on your account's time zone. This update is available when creating or editing a time between calculation property. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? For many teams, weekends aren't working time, but until now, time between properties counted them anyway. This made it harder to accurately measure things like response times, resolution times, or internal SLAs. By excluding weekends, you can better reflect actual working time in your calculations, get more accurate reporting for operational and service metrics, reduce the need for workarounds or manual adjustments. This is especially helpful for teams that want clearer insights into how long work actually takes during business days.

Chris Carolan: [inaudible] sense. George B. Thomas: Chris, just so you know, I've closed the loop. Uh, when you're done here, or when we're done with these updates, I'll share my screen. And we'll have a conversations about notifications that take you to the right record. Chris Carolan: I love that sentence. George B. Thomas: all CRM objects. We'll, we'll have a combo.

Chris Carolan: Uh, on the way there, we'll talk about email property. Uh, what's changed? We, they've clarified that email validation options are only available for custom email properties. Hubspot default email properties are not supported in this release. What is the email property to begin with? You can now create a dedicated email property type with built-in email validation, including checks for a valid email format, such as a required at and domain structure, and additional validation options like restricting values to specific domains. This validation, these validation options are available for custom email properties, giving you more control over how email data is captured and stored. Once again, this does not include Hubspot default email properties, uh, for validation. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Accurate email data is key to running effective sales, marketing, and service processes. Built-in validation helps prevent invalid or malformed email addresses, while domain restrictions let you enforce business rules, keeping your CRM data clean and reliable, no matter how records are created. George B. Thomas: Nice. Chris Carolan: Makes sense. George B. Thomas: Nice. You know what? We've got a major update. George B. Thomas: Now, we'll see how major it is or not, but.

[12:04] **WhatsApp Home** Chris Carolan: WhatsApp Home. A lot of work happening on the WhatsApp front. Um, George B. Thomas: It's also a beta. Chris Carolan: What is it? We're introducing a new WhatsApp experience designed to align more closely with Hubspot's core messaging tools. WhatsApp will now have its own dedicated home alongside our other primary Hubspot messaging channels. This update includes a new WhatsApp messaging management page, a template management experience, a comprehensive reporting suite, additional enhancements to support day-to-day needs. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? These changes are in response to customer feedback in order to make WhatsApp more discoverable, easier to use, and ultimately drive more success for customers as a core messaging product within Hubspot. George B. Thomas: Welcome home. WhatsApp Home. We greet you with open arms. Chris Carolan: Uh, we do. Uh, and, uh, yeah, one, one of not, like, if not one of them, one of the most popular messaging, um, you know, apps in the world. George B. Thomas: Yeah. Chris Carolan: So, good to see we're able to leverage this. Things like this is like make it hard to get some teams into Hubspot, uh, when they're so used to talking, you know, in life and in business via their WhatsApp, you know, um, messaging platform. So, uh, check out these screenshots, like WhatsApp analytics. Uh, yeah, this is going to be super powerful. Um, so figure out, folks, how you're going to, uh, take advantage of this. Who gets it? Marketing Hub professional, marketing Hub Enterprise, and Service Hub professional and Service Hub Enterprise. Uh, yeah, that's, uh, I'm excited for that. Got a number of clients that can use that right away. George B. Thomas: I'm guessing sales don't use WhatsApp, but, okay. Chris Carolan: Apparently not. [Laughter] Chris Carolan: Okay.

[13:33] **Set Default Property Values** Chris Carolan: Set default property values is our last one, uh, today. What is it? You can now set default values for properties in Hubspot. When creating or editing a property, admins can define a value that will automatically be applied whenever a new record is created. Default property values are applied consistently across Hubspot, whether records are created manually, through workflows, or via APIs, so commonly used values are automatically set, saving users a step and keeping data consistent. Casey Hawkins: Why does it matter? Many teams rely on the same values being set repeatedly when creating new records. Without default values, this often leads to repetitive manual entry, inconsistent data, or complex workflow builds just to put, just to fill in the blanks. With default property values, you can save time by pre-filling commonly used values, reduce data gaps and unknown states, uh, eliminate workflow workarounds used solely to initialize data, improve overall data quality and consistency from the moment a record is created. This makes record creation faster for end users and data management simpler for admins. Um, I like it. Yeah. Casey Hawkins: Yeah, I got to use this just last week. I love when like a fairly, like a beta, especially a public beta, cause that makes it easier, is available for a client. Chris Carolan: [Inaudible] Casey Hawkins: When it's a private beta, sometimes I'm like, ooh, George B. Thomas: It gets a little dicey. Casey Hawkins: [inaudible] Yeah. All right. Uh, let's see. George B. Thomas: Chris, not 24 hours ago or about 24 hours ago, we were on a show, and we talked about this update, much like we did today, notifications that take you to the right record across all CRM objects. Today, it's in development. Chris Carolan: Yeah, look how excited I was. George B. Thomas: You were excited about this. Chris Carolan: [Inaudible] I talking about this. Um. Yeah. Yeah, so the team moves, the team moves quick. Apparently, not all is well with that beta, and they, they need to pull it back. So, uh, just know that if you were excited about it as well, it is now in development. Like Chris, development. Uh, remember, folks, you probably already own the solution you're looking for in Hubspot. Sometimes you just need to wake up to it. Join us tomorrow morning live at 7:30 a.m. Central or catch us anytime on Spotify and Apple Music, or come hang out with us on the Hubspot Help Line later today at 10:15 Central on LinkedIn Live. Drop your biggest takeaway in the comments and let us know what capabilities you want to wake up to next. Until then, I'm Chris Carolan. Casey Hawkins: I'm Casey Hawkins. George B. Thomas: I'm George B. Thomas. This has been Wake Up Customer Platform. Now go build something amazing. Have a great day everybody.