Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, we’ll earn a commission
What is HubSpot ?
HubSpot CRM is one of the leading CRM apps currently available on the market and a winner of our Best CRM Software Award for 2019.
Free and simple, HubSpot CRM is built to be a platform that allows sales teams to get started quickly without making much of a change in their existing workflow. It is a solution ideal for companies that are still starting to recognize the value of CRM and want to try it out or for enterprises that are not using their existing CRM systems to their fullest potential.
HubSpot CRM is a smart and easy option that carries all the necessary basic features but without the often confusing complexity many other CRM platforms have. Beginners and mid-market companies will also appreciate the fact that HubSpot CRM is currently a certified, premier Google partner, and is a solution that suits well all niches and industries.
HubSpot will help you easily create beautiful contact and company profiles, as it can neatly organize every single detail from your customers’ communication with you. It effectively assigns and tracks your deals, controls the performance of your agents, and offers a single, detailed dashboard where all team members can keep track of the company’s activities. If you are already a HubsSpot Sales user you can also use HubSpot CRM for more effective inbound sales.
At the same time, HubSpot is one of the best-integrated CRM platforms on the market and no other free CRM solution can offer the same level of integration. Some of the popular apps it integrates with are Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Zapier, Shopify and many other tools.
Interested users can also take a look at HubSpot Marketing – an advanced system from the HubSpot suite that will align their CRM and marketing efforts in the service of improved traffic and conversion rates. The system helps develop successful lead generation strategies, primarily by enabling users to optimize their website content and distribute it among the right influencers and audiences.
Overview of HubSpot Benefits
It’s free and available to you regardless of budget
What makes HubSpot CRM a better solution than most CRMs today? First of all, it’s available completely for free. Any business, regardless of budget, can use HubSpot CRM at no cost and integrate it with just as many business systems and applications as necessary.
You can link it to all locations of your sales processes
The first and most important advantage of HubSpot CRM is that you can link it to all places and locations where your modernized sales processes are taking place, including your websites, email service providers, social media profiles, phone calls, and more.
It’s a flexible and powerful solution
HubSpot CRM will help you close more deals with less work involved, because it organizes and tracks each aspect of your sales pipeline, and helps you grow it and develop in the right direction. The data insights it provides are simply unparalleled, and will certainly help your agents save time they usually spend on research. You can enjoy as much as 1,000,000 contacts and users, and unlimited storage, all available for free. Unlike what you’d normally expect from a free software system, HubSpot actually responds to effectiveness criteria even better than a variety of paid tools. On top of that, it is also flexible enough to meet the needs of individuals, B2B and B2C businesses, those operating in retail, accounting, real estate, construction, or any other industry.
It blends easily with all your ongoing sales processes
Once installed, HubSpot CRM will run in the background of all tools you are already using, and you will be able to trigger it whenever you need it. The list of available integrations is very long, and includes products such as Pipedrive CRM, SugarCRM, Bigcommerce, Gravity Forms, Base CRM, Google Chrome, Google Dynamics, Snapengage, Dropbox, and many more (see the integrations tab above for a full list). Basically, HubSpot is applicable in any software ecosystem, and blends easily in all processes and operations instead of asking you to modify those to its benefit.
Intuitive interface and lead importing
As our experts like to call it, HubSpot CRM is a restless and powerful automation system, which will eventually help businesses close deals faster and cut the time they are spending on arranging customer documentation. It also offers some of the most powerful data enrichment functionalities, thanks to which you can import leads from your emails with a single click. Another way in which HubSpot CRM perfects the art of efficient customer relationship management is with fast leads backlog, and the intuitive interface that doesn’t require any training or complex installations to master.
Overview of HubSpot Features
- Customize views
- Deal and Task Board
- Hubspot Marketing Synchronization
- Drag and Drop Communicator
- Email Integration
- Phone Integration
- Website Integration
- Enrichment
- Social Media
- Company Database
- Website Visitors
- Email Connections
- Sidekick Integration
- CRM Details
- Templates, Tracking, and Scheduling
Pros and cons of the HubSpot
The HubSpot CRM makes it easy to organize, track, and grow your contact list and sales pipeline, but like everything, it has both its pros and cons.
Pro: It’s FREE
According to HubSpot, the CRM will be free to use forever — even if you’re not a paying HubSpot customer.
Not only is it free, but it includes unlimited users – meaning you can add your ENTIRE team – Marketing, Sales, whoever!
Pro (Released in 2018): Live chat
HubSpot released their Live Chat tool (Conversations) this year to all users, free or paid.
It’s super simple to set up and manage, and you even get basic chat bot functionality to take your online visitor and customer experience to the next level.
With paid levels of the HubSpot tools, you get even more robust functionality to be able to customize and manage live chat and incoming inquiries in a way that makes sense for your team.
Pro: Better insights
The HubSpot CRM tracks customer interactions automatically, providing valuable insights into customer behavior and making it easier to know when to follow up.
With the Gmail and Outlook extensions, you’re able to track email opens and clicks to see how users are interacting with your emails in real-time.
Note: for the free CRM, you’ll be able to see the first 7 days of tracked website activity on a contact. With HubSpot’s paid Marketing Hub tools, you’ll be able to see ANY tracked data.
Pro: No customization limits
Most CRMs have annoying customization limits, but HubSpot allows you to customize everything to your brand and your specific sales process.
(We saved an IMPACT client thousands a year with a customized HubSpot CRM. Learn all about it here!)
Pro: Uses the same database as marketing platform (no integration needed)
Both marketing and sales perform best when they’re in alignment. The HubSpot CRM is natively connected with the HubSpot marketing tools, allowing a smooth transition of leads from marketing to sales in your funnel and far easier communication of data.
As you grow with HubSpot, all of your data will remain in the same place — upgrading your subscription will simply give you added functionalities and features.
Pro: can be used with other CRMs
At IMPACT, we often find that many of our clients enjoy using the HubSpot CRM for prospecting due to its simplicity and functionality (and integration with HubSpot’s other sales tools), but find Salesforce (or another legacy system) is still useful for other needs.
Luckily, the HubSpot CRM doesn’t affect anything your organization is doing in other CRM platforms, such as SFDC or Microsoft Dynamics.
They can be used simultaneously — and both can be integrated into HubSpot as well.
Con: relatively new
Since HubSpot CRM is still relatively new compared to other major CRM players, there are some feature limitations.
However, HubSpot’s emphasis on research and development has alleviated many former qualms about the platform and there are updates being made to regularly.
Con: Lightweight
Although HubSpot CRM is great for growing businesses, organizations with large sales teams might find that HubSpot CRM isn’t advanced enough just yet.
Con: Lack of flexibility
Compared to other CRMs, HubSpot’s platform is relatively inflexible. While there are certainly features you can customize around your team’s processes and needs, we’ve found that organizations with very complex sales processes aren’t able to find the flexibility they’re looking for in the HubSpot CRM.
Email Marketing On HubSpot
Email marketing, if you’re not familiar with it, is the use of email to build relationships with prospects and customers.
Modern email marketing makes heavy use of automation so that you don’t have to manually send the same email over and over. Instead, you can send certain emails automatically, which boosts your productivity.
In HubSpot, you already have a way of collecting email subscribers (lead flows), and a way of storing them (contacts). Now you just need a way to send emails to them, which is where email marketing comes in.
HubSpot offers free email marketing as part of its marketing plans.
On the free plan, you can send up to 2,000 emails a month, segment your contact database into lists, and personalize your emails using any CRM property.
You can also report on your email’s overall success and see how each contact interacted with your email campaigns using the built-in analytics.
Implementation/Integration
As a cloud-based marketing automation solution, getting started requires a simple account creation. Users can complete their HubSpot implementation in one of these three ways:
- Follow the instructions in this technical implementation guide.
- Email the guide to their IT Admin or webmaster.
- Call HubSpot directly to seek assistance from its support team.
A detailed guide on getting started with HubSpot Marketing is also available in HubSpot’s Knowledge Base.
For subscribers to its Professional and Enterprise plans, HubSpot offers access to customer success managers and implementation specialists to ensure users have all the advice and resources needed to implement HubSpot as swiftly as possible.
HubSpot can integrate with several built-in and external solutions, such as Salesforce, WordPress, Zapier, SurveyMonkey, GoToWebinar, Eventbrite and UberConference.
Customer Service & Support
Customer support can be reached via email, phone or 24/7 live chat. In addition, HubSpot encourages customers to visit its HubSpot Community for solutions to its most common problems, as well as training programs and user guides.
HubSpot verdict
HubSpot offers some of the most extensive marketing tools available in a single platform while managing to deliver one of the best user experiences around. That’s a real achievement and the quality of the tools and features across each product is genuinely impressive.
The only real area it left us wanting was in the marketing automation department, as this is really important to us here at Bestschemes. HubSpot does provide a solid set of automation features across its paid platforms but we needed more than it could deliver and this was the key reason we ended up using ActiveCampaign as our all-in-one CRM and marketing software platform.
It just excels at automation.
This doesn’t take anything away from HubSpot, though – as long as you understand the pricing model so you’re not surprised when next year’s bill lands in your inbox.
Both ActiveCampaign and HubSpot offer free trials and it costs nothing to try them out for yourself. This should tell you everything you need to know about the two platforms and what you need from an all-in-one CRM and marketing suite.
