Is HubSpot a CRM?
HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM like SalesForce, or customer relationship management software. This is the core product. But they also have bolt-on Hubs that add additional functionality. These include sales, marketing, customer services, and content management system hubs. This gives your business a central place to share information and analytics across your contact records.
What is a CRM?
CRM stands for customer relationship management software that helps companies keep track of their subscribers, leads, and customers. It helps keep everyone on the same page and know the current lifecycle of a customer so you can better serve them and not waste their time. Working without a CRM usually evolves tons of outdated excel spreadsheets, post it notes, and talking to a customer but forgetting you talked to them a two weeks ago. It is a shared brain for your business.
Suppose you are currently using Excel or a custom contact management system. In that case, HubSpot could significantly improve your efficiency and data quality to ensure everyone in marketing and sales are on the same page.
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is used for collecting, organizing, and updating customer data inside a customer relationship management system. This system is then leveraged for marketing automation, sales, customer service, and business operations.
HubSpot helps small businesses unify their sales and marketing efforts by providing CRM and marketing automation software. HubSpot is best used when following the inbound methodology instead of outbound marketing tactics.
What are the benefits of inbound marketing with HubSpot?
Inbound marketing differs from outbound marketing because it attracts and generates leads based on valuable information to help prospects consider and buy your product or service. You are making it easy to buy from you by providing answers to their questions regarding their problems and needs.
Here are some of the things that HubSpot can be used for:
- Marketing: HubSpot can be used to create and manage marketing campaigns, track leads, and measure the results of marketing efforts.
- Sales: HubSpot can be used to manage the sales pipeline, qualify leads, and track sales performance.
- Customer service: HubSpot can be used to provide customer support, track customer satisfaction, and resolve customer issues.
- Content management: HubSpot can be used to create and manage website content, publish blog posts, and send email newsletters.
Here are some specific examples of how businesses use HubSpot:
- A small business might use HubSpot to create a landing page for a new product, collect leads from that page, and send them email marketing campaigns.
- A medium-sized business might use HubSpot to automate their sales process, track their leads, and measure the ROI of their marketing campaigns.
- A large enterprise might use HubSpot to manage their customer support team, track customer satisfaction, and resolve customer issues.
What kind of software is HubSpot?
HubSpot is software that contains a lot of functionality that is often cobbled together with other tools such as Mailchimp, LeadPages, Google Analytics, PPC advertising, and SalesForce. It allows a company to have a shared dashboard to nurture existing customers and generate leads for its sales team.
HubSpot features and benefits
Below are some of benefits of using HubSpot CRM for small businesses.
- Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service Team Alignment – Shared database of customers
- Marketing & sales automation
- Reporting and contact history
- Marketing education for new employees
- One login, security, fast servers, and easy for marketing teams without development resources
- Custom online sales quotes
- Business units to help segment data and visual assets
What are the negatives of HubSpot?
- If you have a large customer database and need to use marketing automation, the costs can be high for smaller companies. HubSpot’s target customer has 10-50 employees but also seems to navigate towards enterprise-level companies with 2,000+ employees. Since cost is relative, HubSpot could be viewed as expensive or worth the value, depending on your size. I advise plotting your technical requirements and seeing if you can use HubSpot for some things and other tools for other needed items.
- If you have strict legal requirements like blocking certain countries, the HubSpot CMS will not work because they do not give you this level of control of the server.
- Requires specialized knowledge and skills to onboard a company with the required forms, workflows, lists, and templates required for a successful program.
The HubSpot platform supports the entire customer journey
The central point of any business is its contact database or CRM. HubSpot offers a free CRM or you can easily integrate with other CRM’s like Salesforce or Zoho office. The CRM and Hubs (Marketing, Sales, Service) can be used independently or grouped together to fit your particular business needs.
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What is HubSpot CRM?
HubSpot CRM is everything you need to organize, track, and build better relationships with leads and customers. But what is the HubSpot CRM used for? Does your company have an excel spreadsheet or manually updated “list of customers”? Do you share spreadsheets back and forth internally in your company and manually update them? Do multiple employees email customers and prospects without knowing who “owns” a relationship? A CRM is a powerful tool to help bring insight into these areas.
HubSpot CRM helps marketing know how to grow awareness and lead generation best. It helps sales understand what stage in the process each contact is at and who owns the relationship. It helps customer service know when and how to help customers with their needs. It helps executive leadership know how all parts of the organization work towards one common goal. Which is ultimately improving the customer experience throughout each arm of your business.
HubSpot CRM Features
- Contact Insights
- Deals
- Tasks – follow-up reminders
- Quotes and deals
- Sales process tracking
HubSpot CRM Benefits
- Free software allows you to quickly benefit from collecting valuable data on who your customers are and how to serve them best.
- Meeting scheduler and live chat make connecting with your sales prospects easier.
- Report and improve tactics that are actually working
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What is HubSpot Content Hub?
HubSpot Content tool offers a comprehensive content management solution for businesses seeking to streamline their content creation and optimization processes. This tool includes features such as content creation and editing, scheduling, SEO optimization, analytics, and collaboration tools for teams. With HubSpot Content, businesses can efficiently manage their content marketing efforts, ensuring that their content is effectively reaching their target audience and driving results.
Content Hub is an all-in-one, AI-powered content marketing software that helps marketers create and manage content that fuels the entire customer journey.
HubSpot CMS Hub Features
- Includes AI-powered content generation
- Lead capture tools
- A scalable CMS with a drag and drop page builder built in
- Video and podcast hosting
- A/B testing
- SEO recommendations
- Advanced analytics and reporting
- And more — all powered by a customer platform that allows you to build remarkable content experiences for your customers.
HubSpot CMS Hub Benefits
- Marketing and Sales can have one login and tool for their website
- Easy to use website builder without having to manage website hosting and plugins
- Can make content translation and smart content to leverage your CRM data
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What is HubSpot Marketing Hub?
HubSpot marketing automation software to help you grow traffic, convert more visitors, and run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale.
HubSpot Marketing Hub Features
- Lead Generation
- Marketing Automation
- Analytics
HubSpot Marketing Hub Benefits
- Attract more attention with SEO, social media, and paid advertising
- Nurture leads with email workflows
- Report and improve tactics that are working
The video below does a great job of showing how to use HubSpot for marketing.
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What is HubSpot Sales Hub?
The HubSpot Sales Hub offers an array of powerful features designed to enhance your sales process. With Email Tracking, you can gain valuable insights by monitoring the engagement of your emails. This feature allows you to track when your emails are opened and clicked, helping you understand the effectiveness of your communication.
Meeting Scheduling is another valuable tool that simplifies the process of setting up appointments. By providing meeting links, you can easily share your availability and allow leads to book appointments at their convenience. This feature saves time and eliminates the back-and-forth of scheduling.
Email Automation is a game-changer when it comes to efficient communication. With this feature, you can set up automated email sequences that engage your leads and save you time. By creating personalized and timely follow-up emails, you can nurture leads and keep them engaged throughout the sales process.
While these three features are indeed valuable components of the HubSpot Sales Hub, it’s important to note that there are additional features available. For a more comprehensive experience, the Sales Hub also includes features such as Email Templates, Free Calling, Pipeline Tracking, and Playbooks.
Email Templates allow you to quickly craft professional emails by choosing from a variety of pre-made templates tailored to your specific needs. This ensures consistency in your communication and saves you time in drafting emails from scratch.
With Free Calling, you can reach out to your contacts directly through calls. Not only does this feature enable you to have real-time conversations, but it also automatically logs the date and time of contact. This makes it easier for you to follow up and keep track of interactions.
Pipeline Tracking is a valuable feature that helps you monitor the progress of your leads within the sales pipeline. By understanding how warm your leads are, you can identify the best timing to close deals and maximize your conversion rates.
Lastly, Playbooks provide a powerful tool to automate workflows and ensure no steps are missed when interacting with leads or customers. By creating a defined set of actions based on specific scenarios, you can streamline your processes and deliver consistent experiences to your prospects.
In summary, while Email Tracking, Meeting Scheduling, and Email Automation are key features of the HubSpot Sales Hub, it’s important to explore the full range of capabilities offered. With Email Templates, Free Calling, Pipeline Tracking, and Playbooks, you can take your sales process to the next level, saving time and improving your overall efficiency.
HubSpot Sales Hub Features
- Email Tracking
- Meeting Scheduling
- Email Automation
HubSpot Sales Hub Benefits
- Email templates save time sending frequently used messages
- Share documents, contacts, and deals across an entire sales team
- Report and improve tactics that are actually working
The video below does a great job of showing how to use HubSpot for sales.
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What is HubSpot Customer Service Hub?
Customer service software is an essential tool for businesses to establish strong connections with their customers, surpass expectations, and ultimately transform them into advocates who can help grow the business. With the HubSpot Service Hub, you can access a wide range of features that empower you to deliver exceptional customer service.
The HubSpot Service Hub offers an array of functionalities designed to streamline your customer support operations and enhance customer satisfaction. These include:
- Tickets: A centralized system that allows you to efficiently manage and resolve customer issues. With this feature, you can easily track the progress of each ticket and ensure that no customer concern goes unnoticed.
- Customer Feedback: Gathering feedback from your customers is crucial for understanding their needs and preferences. With the HubSpot Service Hub, you can effortlessly collect feedback, gain valuable insights, and use this knowledge to continually improve your products and services.
- Knowledge Base: The HubSpot Service Hub provides a comprehensive knowledge base that serves as a reference point for your team and customers. By documenting common problems and their solutions, you can create a valuable resource that enables your team to quickly address customer queries and concerns. This knowledge base also facilitates efficient onboarding of new staff members and prevents the need to reinvent the wheel when faced with recurring issues.
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In summary, the HubSpot Service Hub offers a range of powerful features, including tickets, customer feedback, and a knowledge base. With these tools at your disposal, you can effectively manage customer issues, gain valuable insights, and provide exceptional support that exceeds customer expectations.
HubSpot Service Hub Features
- Tickets
- Customer Feedback
- Knowledge Base
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What is HubSpot Operations Hub?
Introducing HubSpot Operations Hub – the operations software that empowers your business to streamline and optimize your customer data and automate essential business processes. With this powerful tool, your team will have a clean, connected source of truth for customer data, ensuring everyone stays aligned and up-to-date. Let’s dive into the comprehensive features that make the HubSpot Operations Hub a game-changer for your business:
- Data Sync: Seamlessly sync and integrate your customer data across various platforms, ensuring consistency and eliminating data silos. With this feature, you can effortlessly keep all your systems in sync, saving time and effort in manual data entry.
- Historical Sync: Gain insights into your customer data history by syncing historical records. This powerful feature allows you to analyze trends, track changes, and make data-driven decisions based on a complete view of your customer interactions over time.
- Custom Field Mappings: Say goodbye to manual reentry of contact information across platforms. With custom field mappings, you can easily map and transfer data between different systems, eliminating the need for duplicate effort and ensuring data accuracy.
- Programmable Automation: Extend the functionality of the HubSpot Operations Hub to meet your unique business needs. Leverage programmable automation to execute code, such as JavaScript or Python, within or outside of HubSpot. This flexibility allows you to customize workflows and processes, enhancing operational efficiency.
- Data Quality Automation: Keep your customer data clean and error-free with data quality automation. Identify and eliminate duplicates, standardize formats, and enforce data validation rules, ensuring the integrity and accuracy of your data.
- Expanded Operational Capacity: Scale your operations effortlessly with the expanded operational capacity offered by the HubSpot Operations Hub. This robust solution empowers your business to handle increased data volumes, ensuring seamless operations as you grow.
With the comprehensive features of the HubSpot Operations Hub, including data sync, historical sync, custom field mappings, programmable automation, data quality automation, and expanded operational capacity, your business can unlock the full potential of your customer data. Stay ahead of the competition, drive meaningful customer interactions, and fuel your growth with the power of HubSpot Operations Hub.
HubSpot CMS Hub Features
- Data Sync
- Historical Sync
- Custom Field Mappings
- Programmable Automation
- Data Quality Automation
- Expanded Operational Capacity
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What is HubSpot Commerce Hub?
Streamline your opportunity-to-revenue process to get paid faster, increase revenue and save time. Pay as you go — with no additional monthly fees.
HubSpot Commerce Hub is an all-in-one commerce platform that helps B2B businesses streamline their opportunity-to-revenue process. It is built on top of HubSpot CRM, so businesses can manage their sales, marketing, and customer service processes in one place.
Commerce Hub offers a variety of features to help businesses sell more efficiently, including:
- Invoicing: Create and send invoices directly from HubSpot CRM, and track payments in real time.
- Payment links: Collect one-time and recurring payments with simple payment links that you can embed in emails, websites, and other marketing materials.
- Quotes: Create professional quotes quickly and easily, and track the status of your quotes in HubSpot CRM.
- Subscriptions: Manage subscriptions and recurring billing directly from HubSpot CRM.
- Reporting: Get insights into your sales performance with detailed reports on invoices, payments, quotes, and subscriptions.
Commerce Hub also integrates with a variety of other business tools, including Stripe and QuickBooks, so you can manage your entire commerce process in one place.
Overall, HubSpot Commerce Hub is a powerful and easy-to-use commerce platform that can help B2B businesses of all sizes streamline their sales process and increase revenue.
HubSpot Commerce Hub Features
- Get paid faster with revenue tools such as payment links, quotes and invoices and your choice of payment processor
- Increase your revenue with a best-in-class B2B checkout experience your customers love
- Save time by managing subscriptions and customers on your CRM
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How does HubSpot work?
HubSpot’s CRM platform is the foundation of its suite of tools. The CRM stores all of your customer data, including contact information, website activity, and purchase history. This data is then used to power the marketing, sales, and customer service tools.
For example, when you create a landing page in HubSpot, you can use the CRM data to target specific audiences and personalize the page’s content. When a visitor submits a form on your landing page, the CRM will automatically create a new lead record. You can then use HubSpot’s sales tools to nurture the lead and move them through your sales pipeline.
How to get started with HubSpot
HubSpot offers a free CRM and a variety of paid plans with additional features. To get started, you can create a free HubSpot account and start adding contacts and deals. You can also start using some of the free marketing and sales tools, such as email marketing and landing page builder.
If you need more features, you can upgrade to a paid plan. HubSpot offers a variety of plans to choose from, so you can find one that fits your budget and needs.
HubSpot Overview Video
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Here are some additional resources to learn more about HubSpot
- HubSpot’s inbound marketing methodology: HubSpot is known for its inbound marketing methodology, which focuses on attracting visitors to your website and converting them into leads and customers through valuable content.
- HubSpot’s Academy: HubSpot offers a free online academy with courses on marketing, sales, customer service, and content management.
- HubSpot’s partners: HubSpot has a large network of partners who can help you implement and use HubSpot’s software.
- HubSpot’s customer base: HubSpot is used by over 160,000 businesses in over 120 countries.
- HubSpot CMS vs. WordPress: One of the most critical decisions for a business is where to host its website, and a CMS or content management system is a crucial component. Read how HubSpot CMS compares to the most popular content management system WordPress.
Frequently asked questions
What does HubSpot actually do?
HubSpot is a cloud CRM like SalesForce. But it also has bolt on software called Hubs that help to add new functionality for marketing, sales, and operations. Some of these features include website CMS, custom quote templates, marketing automation, and service ticket system and knowledgebase.
Is HubSpot the same as Salesforce?
The main difference is Salesforce is enterprise level. More expensive and needs a lot of technical support for implementation. HubSpot positions itself for Mid market and SMB. So it is less expensive and easier to setup and use. HubSpot vs. Salesforce
Is HubSpot just a CRM?
If you just use the free version, yes it is mainly a CRM. But if you purchase a paid plan it becomes an essential business tool that can span across different areas of your company.
What are some benefits of inbound marketing hubspot?
Less hunting and more serving and answering questions. Inbound marketing is all about making your website an educational resource for your ideal buyer. You provide so much educational content that the buyer builds trust and is educated before they contact you. If you do this at scale, you will have a steady source of leads coming to you instead of you having to do cold outreach. Inbound marketing is solely dependent on creating content to attract buyers who have questions about the problems you solve.
What does HubSpot integrate with?
The HubSpot CMR platform has a large and growing list of integrations making it easy to get data into and out of it. Below is a list of most popular integrations.
- HubSpot Salesforce Integration
- HubSpot Outlook Integration
- HubSpot WordPress Integration
- HubSpot LinkedIn Integration
- HubSpot QuickBooks Integration
- HubSpot Whatsapp Integration
- HubSpot Dynamics 365 Integration
- HubSpot Netsuite Integration
- HubSpot Shopify Integration
- HubSpot BigCommerce Integration
- HubSpot Zapier Integration
What are some companies that use HubSpot?
Some notable companies that use HubSpot include: Airstream, Zapier, Crunch Fitness, Casio, Trello, and more. HubSpot customer case studies
