INBOUND Blog

What do you actually want from INBOUND 2026? We decided to go straight to the source and ask the people who know best: our community. Growth leaders, sales professionals, RevOps practitioners, customer success leaders, founders, and marketers—we heard from all of you. The theme running through our survey responses is that people want to leave INBOUND 2026 with something they can use. Real, actionable strategies they can bring back to their teams on Monday morning.

Sports marketing has a blind spot. And it's not small: it's 30 million people and growing, to be exact. For decades, brands have treated the Latina consumer as a niche, a secondary audience, or worse, an afterthought. At INBOUND 2025, Karina Martinez (CEO) and Jennifer Yepez-Blundell (COO), co-founders of DRAFTED—a sports culture media company centering Latinas and the next generation of fandom—joined Sonia Thompson of the Inclusion and Marketing podcast to make the case that this audience isn't niche at all. She's the new general market. Here's what they shared, and what marketers can start doing differently today.

Employee appreciation often looks the same: a catered lunch, a public thank-you, maybe a thoughtful gift card. Those gestures matter and they reinforce culture and signal gratitude, but for high-performing teams, appreciation alone isn’t enough. The most ambitious people on your team are thinking about something bigger as they watch how AI is accelerating the pace of work across marketing, sales, and customer experience. They’re wondering how their role will evolve over the next year and whether they’re staying ahead of it. The leaders who are winning on retention right now are building teams that are adaptable, AI-fluent, and aligned around growth. That's a different kind of appreciation and it starts with a different kind of question. Not "how do I celebrate my team?" but "how do I invest in them?"

Most founders didn't start a company because they love selling. But without sales, nothing else matters. At INBOUND 2025, Carole Mahoney (founder of Unbound Growth and sales coach at Harvard Business School), Leslie Venetz (founder of Sales-Led GTM and author of Profit Generating Pipeline), and Jaime Diglio (founder of the Win Room) led a packed 90-minute session on founder-led sales—the process of founders personally driving early-stage customer acquisition before building a formal sales team. Together, they covered the full arc, from getting meetings to running discovery calls to closing with proposals that actually land. Here's what they shared, plus what you can start doing today.

For a lot of professionals right now, something feels off. Work is busy and demanding, but it also feels heavier, more exhausting, and less human than ever. At INBOUND 2025, Jeff Harry, founder of Rediscover Your Play, took the stage to talk about how the current state of work is broken. But instead of offering another productivity hack or leadership framework, he proposed something far more counterintuitive: play. In his session, Work Is Broken. Play Can Fix It, Harry challenged leaders to rethink burnout, perfectionism, and performance culture and offered practical ways to rebuild work environments through curiosity, experimentation, and what he calls “good mischief.” Here are the biggest takeaways and how to apply them.

There’s a certain kind of energy you can’t manufacture. It happens when smart, curious, ambitious people gather in one place to share, challenge, and grow together. INBOUND, one of the leading marketing, sales, and AI conferences in the world, brings together thousands of professionals each year to learn, connect, and grow. Most of us got into our work because we love solving problems, we love building things, and we love turning ideas into impact. INBOUND has a way of amplifying that feeling. And when we asked attendees what they loved most about the event, their answers had everything to do with connection, clarity, and momentum. These are the love notes from INBOUND.

For years, marketers have been told there’s a “right way” to do things. Follow the best practices. Copy what worked before. Don’t deviate from the playbook. At INBOUND 2025, Jay Schwedelson shared why so much of the advice marketers rely on today is outdated, misleading, or actively holding teams back. In his session Best Practices Are Garbage: In Marketing and Life, he challenged career clichés, questioned how we measure marketing impact, and reframed common fears around AI. So how do we move past best practices and actually grow through change and constant pressure to perform? Read on for the top takeaways from Schwedelson’s INBOUND session.

Most marketers know that retention matters but few treat it like the growth engine it really is. At INBOUND 2025, Enrique Hoyos showed how his team at Pexels achieved a 3x increase in user retention in just two months by prioritizing what happens after sign-up. See how small changes to onboarding and activation led to massive retention gains and get some tips on how to apply the same thinking to your customer journey today.

Best practices explain the past. Next practices shape the future. INBOUND 2026 Call for Speakers opens on Monday, February 2 and if you're leading real change in AI, growth, leadership, or customer connection, we want to hear from you. Have you recently built something that made your team better, your customers happier, or your business stronger? This is your invitation to share it.

Creating awareness around privacy is one thing. Making people feel it is another. When most people think about privacy and consent management, "engaging brand experience" isn't usually the first thing that comes to mind. But at INBOUND 2025, Usercentrics designed a fully immersive Custom Experience that transformed abstract ideas like consent, trust, and data ethics into a tangible, memorable interaction. Here’s how they used a Custom Experience to turn privacy from a compliance checkbox into a brand-defining moment that led to long-term pipeline development and market presence.

Marketing today is about behavioral fluency and if you’re building strategies based on how people say they make decisions, you’re already behind. Behavioral science tells us that up to 95% of decisions are made subconsciously. In practice, that means your audience is often choosing without realizing why. Nancy Harhut, behavioral science and marketing expert, says that these decision defaults are automatic responses rooted in habit, emotion, and cognitive efficiency. At INBOUND 2025 she laid out 9 counterintuitive marketing tactics every marketer should have in their toolbox to identify and exploit common decision triggers. Here’s a breakdown of each tactic, plus tips for how to start applying them to your work.

HubSpot admins are no longer just system stewards; they’re architects of scale, personalization, and growth. And as Kyle Jepson reminded us at INBOUND 2025, the skills that made admins successful in the past aren’t enough for where HubSpot is headed next. Jepson’s session was a rapid-fire tour of new features, pro-level tactics, and thoughtful strategy for navigating a more powerful HubSpot platform. Whether you’re brand new or a seasoned admin, these are some of the skills you need now to keep your teams moving fast and working smart in 2026, straight from one of the best teachers in the HubSpot universe.