INBOUND Blog

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.

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.

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 At INBOUND 2025, Jay Schwedelson shared why so much of the advice marketers rely on today is outdated, misleading, or actively holding teams back.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.

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.

If there’s one skill marketers should commit to mastering in 2026, it’s using AI to scale 1:1 email personalization. At INBOUND, Ari Echt-Wilson, Director of Global Prospect Email at HubSpot, shared how her team has driven over 10,000 qualified meetings per quarter and achieved a 45% year-over-year increase in email conversion rates with the help of AI-personalization. Here’s what she and her team learned throughout the process and the actionable skills every marketer can start practicing now.

Everyone’s talking about AI agents and workflow automation, but at INBOUND 2025, Varun Anand, co-founder of Clay, brought the conversation back to what really drives growth: go-to-market strategy. Only this time, he reframed the fundamentals through a new lens as: The Three Laws of GTM Physics. What actually powers sustainable, scalable growth in the AI age? Turns out, it’s about adopting a new operating system for how you grow. If you're leading a startup, owning revenue, or shaping B2B strategy, this framework will help you build a growth engine for speed, differentiation, and scale. Let’s break it down.

Search has changed. Have you? Google is no longer just a ranking engine and if you're still optimizing for blue links and waiting for traffic to land on your site, you may already be invisible. At INBOUND 2025, Fire&Spark’s Dale Bertrand challenged marketers to adapt to how AI is changing search behavior or risk being written out of the conversation entirely.

On the Main Stage at INBOUND 2025, Neil Patel, co-founder of NP Digital, came with hard data that challenges where we're all spending our marketing time and energy. His topic: 30 Charts That Will Change the Way You Do Marketing. His message: Most companies are focused on the wrong things and missing real revenue opportunities because of it. If you’re navigating search behaviors, AI-generated content, or performance plateaus, here’s what you need to know from Patel’s session and how to act on it now.

Email marketing is either dying or thriving depending on who you ask. But if you were at Jay Schwedelson’s packed session at INBOUND 2025, you walked away with zero doubt that email is changing fast, and marketers who test (not guess) will win. In a rapid-fire 45 minutes, Schwedelson delivered a tactical, data-packed session backed by insights from over 6 billion emails a year sent through his agency. He shared what’s working, what’s not, and what to test next for teams looking to move the needle using email.

At INBOUND 2025, HubSpot's EVP of Product Karen Ng sat down with Olivier Godement, Head of Platform Product at OpenAI, to pull back the curtain on what they're seeing, building, and betting on for the future.