HubSpot Review

HubSpot is the creation of fellow MIT graduate students, Brian and Dharmesh, in 2005. The founders created an inbound marketing platform, HubSpot CRM, designed to empower business activity by focusing on the customer.

Sales CRM

HubSpot’s sales hub is geared towards saving time at every stage of the sales pipeline. HubSpot’s sales CRM allows businesses to connect with more leads, uncover new leads, close deals quicker, and manage the entire pipeline with greater ease. The sales hub facilitates greater outreach with a series of automated, personalized follow-up emails. Repetitive emails can be transformed into templates, and all of the performance metrics can be tracked and shared with relevant team members.

From a control perspective, the sales CRM allows for instant notifications when prospects (potential customers) open emails, attachments, or click on links. This naturally leads to higher engagement levels, and more meetings. The sales CRM automates many of the functions that businesses routinely do such as manually entering each prospect and their relevant information. With HubSpot, all of this is done automatically, leading to time and cost savings benefits.

Lead Management

• Easily see your website visitors in real-time
• Draft customized emails and reminders
• Automatic follow-ups of prospects
• Instant notifications when prospects open emails, links, or attachments
• Follow up with the right messaging at the appropriate time
• Prioritize outreach to prospective leads
• Generate automatic email template responses for immediate follow-up
• Easily schedule email responses for maximum engagement

Sales Pipeline

The HubSpot CRM allows for a frictionless system, where sales teams can grow by streamlining outreach initiatives. It’s seamless to make calls and send once-off emails from a central inbox. This allows for easier management of the sales process. This also creates a better experience for buyers and allows businesses to close deals much quicker.

• No need for professional consultants to manage sales pipelines
• Drag-and-drop functionality to manage all deal stages, records, and info
• Automatically complete deal records
• Create customized reports for instant access to pipeline health, and productivity metrics

Reporting processes are easily accomplished with a set of resources crafted by HubSpot. On-screen meetings with calendars, schedules, and personalized feedback make it easy to automate business meetings. Reminders and confirmations can be sent by filling in basic information that can be shared with team members.

With HubSpot’s sales CRM, deal revenue leaderboards can be created, and recent deal amounts by source can be set up. Each powerful function is designed with user-friendliness in mind, for easy implementation and adoption by teams. HubSpot makes collecting relevant data on leads a breeze, such as who they are, and what services they are requesting.

Many useful features are included in the sales CRM for uncovering new leads, connecting with them, closing deals, and managing the entire pipeline. These include a set of powerful features such as inbox profiles, meetings, quotes, conversations, playbooks, pipeline management, email sequences email templates, calling, scheduling, prospects, and email tracking.

Import/Export

 

With HubSpot, it is possible to import a variety of files from creating/updating products, deals, tickets, context, or companies. There are 3 primary ways to import objects to HubSpot:

• Import a single file with a single object type
• Import a single file with many object types
• Import 2 files, each with 1 object type, and associate the objects in each of the files

The export process can be completed just as easily. You can export files, contacts, and pages from HubSpot. Businesses can export a wide variety of content, including website data, analytics, CRM data, sales data, forms, social information, and customer feedback.

• Zip file exports are possible by navigating to Marketing > Files and Templates > Files > Export All Files in Zip Format
• HTML file exports are possible by clicking on > More Tools >Explore All Pages and Posts > Export
• Analytics can be exported by clicking on Reports> Analytics Tools> Next, click on Traffic Analytics, Events, or Campaign Analytics

Exports of workflows, prospects, site map, URL redirects, dashboards, CRM data, quotes, sales documents, customer feedback, forms, social, CTA analysis, tasks, companies, deals, tickets, contacts, and custom reports are easily done.

Customer Service Tools

HubSpot offers a variety of expertly crafted email templates for each current customer or prospective customer. These include email responders for angry customers, welcoming new customers and subscribers, thank you emails, technical support emails, questionnaire emails, customer complaint response letters, refund letters for customers, customer service follow-up emails, stay in touch emails, account manager introduction emails, free trial emails, transition emails for new job prospects, renewal email reminders, customer review requests, and customer referral emails.

Contact management

HubSpot prioritizes contact management as a key component of marketing strategy. Contact management forms the bedrock of your sales and marketing strategy. With contract management, HubSpot defines three key areas of contact management, including the following:

• Intro to contact management
• Targeting the right people with buyer personas
• Management of contacts and companies

Database management of contacts is also predicated on three core tenets, including the following:

• Database health
• Defining the content strategy
• Contact segmentation to target the right people

Lead Nurturing to manage contacts and drive success is based 3 key elements:

• Sending the right emails to the right people at the right time
• Evaluating emails and responses to creative behavioral email strategy
• Establishing a lead nurturing campaign

Conversion of contacts for marketing initiatives features the following elements:

• Defining CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization)
• Evaluate the success of your marketing initiatives
• Grow your business with a content management strategy

Live Chat Functionality

HubSpot offers live chat software to enable businesses to communicate in real-time with their visitors. This is a nifty resource for providing customer support, closing deals, and converting new leads. The HubSpot live chat function automatically connects with customers and respective team members to enable targeted messaging, engagement, and effective marketing resources.  The live chat function is free, with no integrations needed.

Unlimited Chatbots are readily available, making it much easier to have personalized communications between team members and customers. The bots can perform many routine functions such as booking meetings and qualifying leads, allowing team members to focus on more complex interactions with customers. The free HubSpot CRM allows for contextual messaging, on the go, with full Slack integration included.

Calling

HubSpot makes it easy for call tracking and calling, for quick and easy prioritizing of sales calls. Plus, calling and call tracking can easily record details of calls and have them logged to the CRM.

* For any assistance with the calling function, customers can get in touch with HubSpot customer support by contacting the support engineers at the following telephone number: 1-888-482-7768 X3. The professional support representatives are standing by to field your questions, queries, and comments in this regard.

Marketing Tools

Email marketing

Marketing emails can easily be processed. This tool can help businesses notify subscribers of offers, promotions, or news items. A drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to create marketing emails and send marketing emails via the complimentary CRM account or Marketing Hub starter account.

To get started with email marketing, simply follow these steps:

• Navigate to marketing, email
• Click create email
• Pick a template
• Enter a name for email and click create
• Edit details for email subject/sender info
• Click the pencil icon to edit content
• Click module icon for a full listing of modules

It is easy to modify email settings by changing the internal email name. Additional advanced settings are available for the footer of the email message too. Team members can select a listing of included and excluded contacts by clicking on the recipient’s tab.

The review option allows for quick and easy checking of missing items on the email and the resolve feature allows the email to be updated according to references. A preview of the email marketing message can be viewed before a test email is sent out. All of this guarantees that the perfect email will be sent to the appropriate prospect, or customer. HubSpot also provides recommendations for businesses to improve their email marketing strategy.

Website integration

To integrate HubSpot with your website, navigate to your account and then click on settings icon from the navigation bar. From the left panel, navigate to domains & URLs and click Connect a domain. Next, choose the type of domain you want to connect and then click the Connect button.

Every HubSpot account has its own tracking code. This is used by HubSpot for all web traffic. It is featured on website pages, landing pages, and blog posts. If pages are hosted elsewhere, the tracking code must be manually entered for analytics of those pages. This is how your website can be integrated with HubSpot.

Analytics tools

Inbound marketing software can analyze data across multiple channels. HubSpot makes it easy to analyze the performance of marketing campaigns with a powerful set of analytics tools. Businesses can track the whole customer life-cycle from inception to loyal customer. Reports can be drilled down into contact or company level properties, while discovering data-based trends over time.

HubSpot analytics tools can quantify/qualify all web traffic on a page-by-page basis. This allows businesses to monitor performance, identify traffic sources, and filter analytics by URL structure or country. Detailed reports can be analyzed for each of the marketing assets, including LPs, social media accounts, emails, CTAs, and more.

CMS

The content management system (CMS) at HubSpot is crafted to allow businesses to create a fully optimized website across PC, Mac, Android, and iOS devices. The integrated CMS makes it easy to create and manage emails, website pages, landing pages, and blog posts. Content can be optimized for SEO, and SEM purposes with secure socket layer (SSL) technology built-in for added peace of mind.

The CMS allows for personalized content to ensure a more productive and efficient experience for customers. The CMS system supports full customization by language, device, source, visitor, or location, and thanks to smart insights, HubSpot users can find relevant information about users to make for an effective browsing experience.

Landing pages

HubSpot makes the process of creating visually appealing LPs (landing pages) really easy, with no IT assistance needed. It is possible to publish professional-looking landing pages in double-quick time. Thanks to all-page editors, it’s easy to build pages, insert images, and implement conversion forms.

Full customization of landing pages is possible, with calls to action (CTAs) for every visitor, and dynamic content based on customer demographics, device, and location et al. Landing pages can be optimized from a centralized dashboard with full A/B testing of all aspects of each landing page.

Apps/Integrations

Email integrations

For email integrations, HubSpot requires businesses to navigate to MxToolbox to determine your email service provider

• Click Settings
• Navigate to Integrations> Email Integrations
• Connect an Inbox
• Choose Exchange

HubSpot Sales can be installed on Outlook desktop, Office 365, and Gmail with extensions and add-ons.

Social media integrations

Social media software is supported with powerful social tools for YouTube (Marketing Hub Enterprise customers only), Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Posts can be scheduled and monitored accordingly. Various social reports can be pulled, from a central location.

Packages and Pricing

*Please note that HubSpot Offers Free Tools and CRM – with a variety of powerful options for businesses.

HubSpot plans include Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and HubSpot CMS.

• Marketing hub – Starter at $30 per month, Professional at $800 per month, and Enterprise at $3200 per month.
• Sales hub – Starter at $30 per month, Professional at $300 per month, and Enterprise at $1200 per month.
• Service hub – Starter at $30 per month, Professional at $240 per month, and Enterprise at $1200 per month
• HubSpot CMS – starts at $300 per month

Options are available for growth suite at 50% off and creating a bundle. HubSpot allows prospective clients to contact customer support for tailored pricing options.

Support

HubSpot support is available in multiple languages, including English, Chinese, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. It is possible to contact support via the knowledge base with pre-populated questions/answers. Other HubSpot support options include call-in support via country-based telephone numbers, or the default telephone number 1-888-HUBSPOT x3.

For social media contact info, customers can contact @HubSpotSupport, or simply contact a support rep via the customer forum. Ticket options are also available and customer support representatives strive to reply within 1 working day. Other contact options include dedicated social media pages on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and ThinkGrowth.

Additional services

HubSpot offers many additional services such as the HubSpot Academy, Onboarding, classroom training, migration services, inbound consulting, technical consulting, classroom training, and the like.

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Free online training of HubSpot CRM
• Easily integrates with other features and work tools
• A-Z lead management and advanced marketing tools
• CRM program can be integrated with Google programs
• HubSpot CRM conveniently stores all contact information
• Gain deep company insights while building your company records

Cons:

• Less flexible for businesses with complex sales processes
• Lacking in features compared to other established CRMs
• There is an onboarding fee depending on the package you choose
• HubSpot database needs to be cleaned out and reconfigured from time to time
• Businesses will have to implement significant configuration with workflows for automating marketing