From the show
Another Orange Morning Recap: October 2, 2026
Friday, and the first show of the fourth quarter. Chris Carolan opened by interrupting Casey Hawkins before the music had finished, Madelyn Donovan held the Friday Friend seat, and everyone agreed that everything was fine. The board carried the nine updates HubSpot dated October 1 and nothing new for the day itself, which is the kind of Friday where the conversation gets to go deeper on fewer things.
Here is what we got into: Hubsessed Office Hours with George B. Thomas and a spooky HUG on the calendar, admin navigation customization and its double opt-in, deal progression with next best actions and the methodology question underneath it, the seats-to-credits conversation Casey missed on Tuesday, and Madelyn's Libra reading, which turned into a long, practical talk about custom duplicate detection rules.
Before the Updates: Office Hours, a Webinar, and a Spooky HUG
HubSpot Super Admin Office Hours with George B. Thomas start today at 11 AM Central, free for the month of October for anyone subscribed to the Hubsessed newsletter. Chris and George had been talking the day before, and the spoiler is that the session will be about super admins using Breeze for just about everything they are trying to do. George is over the moon about what he is getting done for clients from an admin perspective with Breeze, and he has use cases to share. Madelyn admitted she still does not default to Breeze and that seeing it work for someone else is usually what gets someone to start. Casey's version was the same: a lovely experience popping an email out of Gmail with Breeze earlier in the week, and the question of why she had not done that before now. The answer is habit. The friction points are where the habit forms.
Thursday's Unified Revenue View session with Ryan Ginsberg officially started Hubsessed Office Hours, and it will run every Thursday at 11 AM Central. The topic was the difference between booked, billed, earned and collected revenue, which is the most common way a finance team thinks and which does not work if all you are using is deals. That is a big reason contracts exist now. The Unified Revenue View demo resource on the Office Hours page walks one company through it, and the takeaway is that those four buckets are usually owned by four different people, so the Monday meeting question of which number is the right one has no good answer. If nobody knows, it is finance's number. Wednesday's webinar is also up on hubsessed.io.
Madelyn's local HUG meets October 22 with a spooky theme on email list decay: email health and raising contact engagement from the dead. Chris is still waiting to hear on his Houston HUG, while Nico Lafakis was approved for his Midwest HUG. There is now an events calendar on the Hubsessed site, and the ambition is a calendar for the whole HubSpot community so people can find the help that is available.
Admin Navigation Customization: The One Everybody Wanted First
Admin Navigation Customization
Madelyn's eye went to admin navigation customization, the major update in private beta that everybody wanted before personalized navigation shipped. Admins build custom left-nav menus and assign them to users and teams, so people see only the tools they need. The notes matter: on opting in, every super admin receives a personalized navigation they can edit, and nobody else sees anything until an admin configures it and presses Turn On in the blue area of the screenshot. There is now a Loom walkthrough on the update page, which may or may not have been there the day before.
The room read that as a double opt-in. Are you sure you want to do this, because it is about to rock your world. Madelyn liked it, since she might set it up and then want to think about it or talk to the team before switching everyone over. Casey's experience of turning on personalized navigation for herself was a moment of where did everything go, and even personalizing it took a second to find things again, so getting your bearings as the admin before forcing it on everyone else is fair.
Why it matters: the screenshots use the same flow and user experience as personalizing views across the portal, and it helps to think of them as related. If you are setting up team views, that is the moment to set up navigation views too. What is emerging is a personalized package for the whole HubSpot experience, assembled by the admin, and the setup conversation for one is the setup conversation for the other.
Deal Progression: The Context Has to Be There
Deal Progression: Next Best Actions and Deal Plans
Everything else on the board had been covered on Thursday, but not deal progression with next best actions and deal plans, now in public beta for Sales Hub and Service Hub Professional and Enterprise. Using emails, call transcripts, notes and deal context, HubSpot suggests or auto-approves CRM updates, surfaces next best actions and drafts follow-up emails. Reps review and approve them on the deal progression card in a new Catch-Up tab. Before the next call, deal progression updates deal plans and surfaces methodology-driven context. Chris could not see the update on his side and read it from Casey's screen, with one edit to the pitch: reps can focus on building relationships with the humans so they can win deals.
His standing caution came first. It uses your emails, call transcripts, notes and deal context, so if your team is not adding that information, they will not have everything they need when they look at the card, and worse, they might get misdirected while everyone is excited about deals happening automatically. Casey has been filling out the AI context on a lot of the accounts she works in since coming back from UNBOUND, and the sales methodology section is where this update gets interesting. MEDDIC, BANT and SPICED are there as starting places, and so is start from scratch. She had been hunting through Fathom recordings the day before to find the moment a client mentioned adopting a methodology months ago.
Why it matters: having some sort of methodology written down is what lets HubSpot deliver the consistent process it is supposed to be giving you, and methodology-driven context is the phrase in this update that should send you to that field. Casey is spending a lot of her time in AI context land these days, and this is the part of the update that pays for that time.
Seats to Credits, Again
Manage Spend Between Seats and HubSpot Credits
Casey was out on Tuesday and asked whether Chris and Ryan had covered managing spend between seats and HubSpot credits. They had, and it got a second pass. Still in development, the update lets super admins swap unassigned seats for HubSpot credits or for a different seat type, directly from the account and billing pages, where before any reallocation went through the account team. Casey's clarifying question was the practical one: if someone leaves and the sales seat is no longer needed, can that spend become credits? Yes, or a different seat. It is probably one way for now, so be absolutely certain you will not use the seat before you turn it into credits, and have a plan for those credits, because if you cannot take it back you may end up adding another seat and spending more.
Chris had been trading comments with Carter McKay on LinkedIn about credits showing up in workflow actions and branches, places that are not tied to AI, which is the confusing part. His read is that HubSpot's value, and SaaS value generally, has rested on selling a license most users never fully use, which is why the most common refrain is still that we should be getting more out of our HubSpot. Usage-based pricing is inevitable, a publicly traded company does not get to switch off license revenue overnight, and bridge-building updates like this one are how it gets there. The upside, if there is one, is that having to explain a credit for a workflow action forces everyone to understand the value of what the workflow is doing, instead of being proud of how many branches it has. Casey had a client ask about workflow credits the day before, and her answer was the same: in theory, yes, this is moving toward usage.
Pasha raised marketing emails in the comments, and the clarification was that per-send credits are not happening in the United States yet. Casey had just worked through a related conversation with a client whose list came from ZoomInfo and Apollo and was shrinking as people hit the unengaged list and an automated do-you-still-want-this sequence unsubscribed the ones who stayed silent. The question of whether to keep emailing them changes completely if every send costs something. Madelyn's HUG topic is exactly this. Chris's position: be intentional, stop blasting lists, and if they do not engage with you, why are you sending them an email? The same platform makes it easier than ever to find those people on social, and Marketing Studio 2.0 is good at multichannel campaigns, provided you stop defining a campaign as an email send.
Why it matters: most teams, this one included, do not yet understand credits across every HubSpot role and use case that never cost credits before. Do not just flip a seat into credits and hand them to someone on the marketing team with the ROI now on them. Office Hours is the place for these questions, and it will not charge credits, at least not in October. Chris's suggestion that credits come in November, the month of giving, was sarcasm, and the robots reading this transcript have been told as much.
Libra Season: What Deserves a Place in Your CRM?
Madelyn's Friday horoscope is still in Libra season. Libra is about balance, fairness, relationships and weighing both sides, and a planet there will not move until the scale looks even, which fit a morning spent on seats, credits and fair usage. This week's reading asks what deserves a place in your CRM. On Enterprise, data warehouse syncs from Snowflake, BigQuery and Redshift can now filter by row, so only records that meet your conditions come in, with a preview before you commit. And custom duplicate detection rules gain new guardrails that lay the ground for searching and filtering the duplicates they create. One decides what enters, the other decides which of two records is the real one, and neither is decided for you. A Libra would not have it any other way. Whatever HubSpot calls an update, that is what goes on the website, even when the product name is very wordy.
Additional Custom Duplicate Detection Rules Guardrails
Nobody in the room had a client on this yet, so Chris asked Casey to open it. HubSpot's own duplicate management keeps getting better. Third-party apps, Koalify among them as a friend of the show, and Insycle and Dedupely, still have more sophisticated rules and automation, but the native tool is catching up, and these guardrails are about customizing the duplicates table. The real story is the custom rules themselves. HubSpot's default matching is a black box, and now you can set the properties that define a duplicate in your portal. A warning from experience: when this page first appeared it felt like the greatest thing that ever happened, and then a client found it and two weeks went into merging.
Chris's point was that rules are a layer of running HubSpot that has not really existed, and they are harder than people think. The way most portals get built is in the moment: a problem comes up, a property or calculation or report gets made, nobody documents it, and it solves the problem for the one user or one leader who asked. A duplicate rule built that way reaches every other business line that follows a different flow. Casey had been talking about exactly this with Pasha at her in-person HUG this week. Almost everyone had good intentions and solved the problem in front of them, and it is sometimes impossible for one person to know every way a rule will affect other things. Her ed tech client had a rule that an email domain containing college meant higher ed, and this week it surfaced preparatory schools, which are K through 12, tagged wrong.
Why it matters: talk to Breeze first. Add the filter and let it highlight what the rule would catch, because the complexity is past what a person can hold in their head, which is why rules exist in the first place. Solve from your process and what you expect to see, not from the pile of purchased data that created the duplicates, and the preparatory school case gets called out fast. For the Libras who want control, all of this helps you decide, and some of the control has to be given up. These rules do not merge automatically, and the advice on automated merging is to be very careful; countless hours have gone into undoing it. And if you believe you are beholden to the domain name on a company record and cannot just rename it to look the way your process needs, give the show a call. Please do not set up rules where a domain name decides what a company is supposed to look like in your portal.
The Rest of Thursday's Updates
The rest of the October 1 board had its turn on Thursday's show. Human handoff routing by channel type in customer agent and the customer agent weekly newsletter are in beta, manual sort for board view within lanes is live, the new data model overview tab is in public beta, and two more shipped live without a segment: CRM action details in message insights and undo send in inbox and help desk, which gives reps seven seconds to take a message back. Everything else that shipped is in the HubSpot updates feed.
The Sign-Off
Another week in the books, and officially the fourth quarter. Tuesday and Wednesday Office Hours are coming too: Casey and Chris on Loop Marketing and AEO, then Madelyn and Joshua Oakes on reporting and dashboards.
You probably already own the value you are looking for in HubSpot. You just need to wake up to it. We will see you Monday morning.
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