HubSpot AI
Product research, UX, Customer research, UI Design
Sales teams struggle with the time-consuming nature of prospecting and the tedious task of crafting personalized outreach. With this project I sought to increase sales teams capacity by researching and executing personalized outreach strategies for prospects within HubSpot's Smart CRM, using the companies data to create personalized outreach. This AI-powered agent is always on, driving pipeline for teams 24/7.
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A little context
HubSpot went big on AI in 2024. This work supported key business objectives. Leadership tapped teams to work on 4 new AI agents. My role was to lead the design for the sales prospecting agent in collaboration with my product management parter and engineering team.
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Our objective
The goal of the prospecting agent is to free up valuable time for sales reps. As technologies advance and customers become more accustomed to personalized outreach our product offerings need to advance and meet the demands our customers are facing.
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The result
The team delivered a prospecting agent that can handle tasks on behalf of sales reps autonomously. The tool can be set to fully autonomous or semi-autonomous to account for varying degrees of comfort with automation.
After the launch of the AI agents in Q3 - HubSpot saw a 20% uptick in subscription revenue in Q4 and total customers grew by 10,000
The problem to solve
Sales reps who are losing deals due to time consuming, inefficiency of tasks and customers falling through the cracks because of delays and problems with the outreach process. Reps and organizations are up against the time consuming training process, capacity and budget restrictions and the hyper personalized outreach that consumers today are used to receiving across multiple communication streams.
My first step - Understand.
I typically start a project by first understanding and defining the problem and then understanding our customers and what the competitive atmosphere looks like.
I then like to step back and think about the big picture. In a perfect world, what would this product be? If timing and resources were no issue - what is the perfect tool we would build? This is often a combination of documenting my thoughts in some sort of vision statement or deck and some initial visuals that help me bring my vision to life. I find this helps to define our goals, relay our story to stakeholders and we can begin the scoping process.
My design iteration process
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Wireframing
I use figjam to map out key user flows, content, and the IA - usually at this stage i’m working with my PM to identify core use cases and we’re defining product requirements together. I am communicating and collaborating with our engineering leads to ensure we are all in agreement on direction
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Low fidelity design
Once the IA and key user flows feel solid I start on some low fidelity screens so we can bring the vision to life and start designing user interactions. At this stage I am frequently sharing with my product design team in UX critique and reviews, posting updates on slack and soliciting feedback in 1:1s. I can also start sharing with real customers which will help to influence higher fidelity designs
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Higher fidelity design and prototypes
As designs are validated with UX and customers - I move into higher fidelity design and prototypes. I’m partnering with engineering at this point to strategize shipping and releasing to customers. Once customers are using the product we are gathering feedback through calls, surveys, support and success teams to make prioritizations for enhancements and improvements
Initial user flow design
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A user enters the outreach center by setting up accounts to reach out to in the CRM
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Users can review and edit their selling profile that is created using information from the companies website
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We can add company profiles out of the box based on contacts in the users CRM
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When companies are added as target accounts - the agent immediately starts research and updates the profiles using the data it finds
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As the agent finds data - the fields are updated in real time
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Users can hover and click an account to view more details
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Emails are drafted using smart content and the user can choose to edit or not. A side panel displays how we are composing the email
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Messages are composed - a user can now select contacts to enroll or choose to auto-enroll contacts based on defined criteria
Part of my design process to meet with other PD/PMs especially if their products overlap with or could be influenced by any work i’m doing. In this case I met with teams to run through the flow and gather thoughts/concerns/ideas as I was developing the screens.
