| As we move into Q4, into the holiday sales season, and into an uncertain future, it seemed a good time to look back. We spoke to Meghan Keaney Anderson, HubSpot’s VP of Marketing, as well as to Taylor Schreiner, Director of Digital Insights at Adobe (where the regularly updated Adobe Digital Experience Index is created), and Craig Rosenberg, co-founder and Chief Analyst at Topo, with a focus on B2B. Here are three key quotes. “We certainly saw sales pause across not just HubSpot but all industries. The world took a collective breath. What we were surprised by was that we saw marketing activity really rise. We saw huge records being broken in terms of website traffic, not just to our site but to our customers’ sites. We saw giant leaps in engagement with our free educational materials. We saw email open rates go up, and we also saw big spikes in website chat for our customers.” -Keaney Anderson “Buying cycles have been faster, with fewer decision makers. There are people who are buying and people who are not; it’s binary, there’s no middle ground. Those that are buying are making top-down decisions to transform, and they’re doing it really quickly.” – Craig Rosenberg “What we’re seeing is a shift to a new normal, and what we’re all wondering is what that new normal will be in terms of online commerce. In March and April, everyone was going online – maybe for the first time – to buy clothes, pajamas, groceries – things they would normally have gone into stores for. We saw online sales rocket up 80% [year on year]. We’ve seen that come steadily down through July, August and September, to where we’re more in the 30% to 45% range depending on the day. The question we’re all asking ourselves is, is this the new stable place – at least for this phase of the COVID era?” – Taylor Schreiner Read more » | 