Is HubSpot the Right CRM For Your Company?
HubSpot offers one of the most innovative and fastest growing CRM platforms available today. Yet is it the best sales and marketing automation solution for your organization? What questions should you weigh during the evaluation process to help you decide?
Targeted mainly at SMBs, HubSpot CRM is based on a “freemium” model combining a free CRM module with optional paid marketing services to help customers capture and convert leads through activities such as email automation, custom marketing reports, and sales prospect identification.
The CRM module comes with free versions of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub products. Even without paying for subscription services, customers receive chat and email forms, appointment booking tools, the ability to automatically track calls and add them to a CRM record, and free online help, to name a few.
Depending on which plan you choose, HubSpot’s paid CRM services add dozens of features ranging from automated workflows to predictive lead scoring, quote approvals, call transcription and recording, and custom dashboards for each account, for instance.
On the whole, HubSpot is noteworthy for its flexibility and customizability, user-friendliness, and comprehensiveness.
Some Standouts
Standout capabilities of the HubSpot sales and marketing automation tool include:
- Task management for streamlining a team’s daily workflows
- Multiple dashboards for viewing tasks, pipelines, and progress
- Contact management for simplifying data entry
- Automated data capture for automatically logging calls and emails
- Reporting tools for spotting trends
- Mobile access that lets team members log in from wherever they are
HubSpot CRM is a highly versatile environment for inbound marketing. It also includes numerous sales tools for alignment between marketing and sales departments, enabling closed-loop reporting from lead to customer or evangelist. Here are a few best use-case scenarios.
1. Easy Dashboard Navigation and Report Creation
In HubSpot, you can easily navigate dedicated dashboards for social media, blogs, and email, for example. With HubSpot’s reports tool, you can see all standard reports in your account, creating custom ones, as well. You can view records and activities for your team based on any metric you choose, such as marketing, sales, or customer service. You can send reports to relevant people either immediately or on a recurring basis.
2. Email Automation
Through HubSpot’s email automation, you can send emails to your contacts at times when your leads are most interactive with their inboxes, increasing the rates at which prospects open your emails. You can also get notifications when prospects and leads do open your emails, helping you see how recipients interact with the emails and learn how to improve the results of future email marketing efforts.
3. Identification of Sales Prospects
HubSpot is able to identify and track the IP addresses of companies visiting your website, providing you with a recorded history of pages and content they’ve viewed. You can also find out when somebody becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL).
When it’s time for the sales department to approach prospects and for the leads to become customers, the sales team will have more information about leads.
4. Automatic Updates to Leads
Whenever HubSpot receives new information about a lead, it automatically updates the records. As an illustration, when a contact downloads a form and provides a name and email address, this information is added to their contact profile. Then if they download another guide later and leave more information, such as a job title, this new information is added, too, providing even more data for a sales team to work with.
Questions to Ask in the Evaluation Process
When you’re deciding on a sales and marketing software platform, a number of factors can come into play. What are the most important criteria to consider when evaluating HubSpot CRM?
1. Who will be using the CRM?
HubSpot CRM includes many features that can be highly useful to sales departments. Beyond those already mentioned, the environment has a feature called smart notifications, for example, to analyze sales activities over the past 24 hours and make recommendations about leads and activities.
The place where HubSpot shines brightest, though, is inbound marketing. Sales managers who are primarily interested in managing pipelines, opportunities, and activities might be better served by a CRM strongly focused on sales with marketing capabilities.
2. Do you want to integrate other applications?
If you’d like to leverage your other favorite applications in conjunction with CRM, HubSpot can be a great choice. Apps that integrate well with HubSpot include Salesforce, Magento, WordPress, Slack, Databox, Vidyard, and Shopify, among so many others.
3. What are your marketing resources?
Despite HubSpot’s overall ease of use, there isn’t a sales and marketing software platform on Earth that can automatically generate leads and close deals with no human intervention.
Getting the most from HubSpot demands skillfulness in using the platform. Regardless of the size of your organization, if you don’t have a marketing person on board with expertise in HubSpot, you can benefit from teaming up with an outside partner.
Reaching New Heights with HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most innovative and comprehensive inbound marketing tools on the market today, with features that can also be leveraged by sales teams for pursuing leads and closing deals. When looking at adopting the platform, however, you should consider who will be using the CRM, whether you'll be integrating it with outside tools, and what kinds of marketing resources you have in-house.
For HubSpot to reach its full potential, the platform needs to be directed by skilled professionals. GSI HubSpot Services can help partners in areas such as HubSpot integration, intelligence and analytics, solutions architecture, onboarding, and website development with the use of HubSpot CMS. If your organization is ready for knowledge transfer, the experienced HubSpot team at GSI offers in-depth HubSpot training, too. To book a free consultation, contact us today.