HubSpot, the customer platform for scaling businesses, has released new data revealing Australian businesses are struggling to drive growth as costs increase, while outdated techstacks and slow AI adoption exacerbate economic pressures. 

High costs and expenses are now the number one challenge facing Australian companies (40%) with one in five (19%) saying it’s the biggest challenge they are facing. This is closely followed by data security & compliance (31%), slow growth (29%), intense competition (28%), and difficulty generating actionable insights from data (28%).

The data follows the recent news that Australia's economy is growing at the slowest pace since the 1990s recession.

Yet while businesses battle economic headwinds, barriers to productivity are also clear, as 20% of Australian businesses admit they “haven’t started talking about generative AI at all”, and a further 27% say managing multiple channels and content types is a challenge. 

“Increasing costs have resulted in Australian businesses doing it tough,” said Dan Bognar, Vice President & Managing Director of JAPAC, HubSpot. “More than ever, brands are competing to deliver a best-in-class customer experience, and nail their right-time communications. On average, Australian employees have to switch between over 17 distinct applications just to manage their customer interactions. This suggests the teams interfacing directly with customers may be struggling to deeply understand and build meaningful relationships with them. These teams really need a unified customer platform to leverage right-time, right-channel connections, that empower positive customer relationships.” 

“While organisations are starting to recognise the potential of AI in alleviating these challenges, there is plenty of room for CX improvement. By adopting generative AI into their day-to-day, businesses will quickly see an increase in customer connection, and a decrease in hard costs,” said Bognar.

To help businesses grow better in today’s environment, HubSpot is committed to building easy, fast and unified tools. That’s why, at INBOUND 2024 and in our 2024 Spotlight, HubSpot has unveiled its easiest, fastest, and most unified version yet. Everything is built so that GTM teams can unlock growth for their businesses.

Our new, biggest releases include:

 

Breeze, HubSpot’s AI to power the customer platform. Includes: Copilot, HubSpot’s new AI companion to boost productivity and make work easier. Four AI agents to get work done fast, from start to finish, including Content Agent, Social Media Agent, Prospecting Agent and Customer Agent.Plus 80 more features embedded across the platform, from remixing content to predicting sales forecasts. 

 

Breeze Intelligence, HubSpot’s data enrichment and buyer intent solution. Includes: Data enrichment which pulls from a database of over 200 million buyer and company profiles to enrich company and contact records in HubSpot’s Smart CRM. Buyer intent to help customers identify which prospects are best fit. Form shortening to increase conversion by automatically adding information Breeze Intelligence already knows.

 

Updates to Marketing Hub and Content Hub, the combo that’s giving marketers everything they need to to launch full campaigns from start to finish, from finding an audience to measuring impact, including tools to capture attention like Content Remix for video, which uses AI to turn a single video into a full campaign of clips, audio and written content. Tools to generate leads and convert prospects like Lead Scoring to find high engagement, high-fit prospects and Google Enhanced Conversions to leverage first-party conversion data from HubSpot to improve campaign performance. Tools to measure impact like the new Marketing Analytics Suite, which brings all marketing metrics and reporting in one place to improve campaigns and get results faster.

Learn more about our major launches with product deep dives:

Visit the 2024 Spotlight here.