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 Working without a CRM usually evolves tons of outdated excel spreadsheets, post it notes, and talking to a customer but forgetting you talked to them a two weeks ago.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
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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 CMS Hub?
HubSpot CMS is a content management system you need to easily create and personalize website pages for every visitor — optimized for conversion across every device. Rely on developers as much or as little as you’d like.
HubSpot CMS Hub Features
- Drag and drop page editor
- Image and file manager
- Fully integrated CRM
- Contact attribution analytics – know where leads come from
- Multiple language support
- Build website pages, landing pages, and blog posts
- Managed website hosting and security
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.
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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?
Time-saving sales software that helps you get deeper insights into prospects automate the tasks you hate, and close more deals faster.
Get Free Sales Software
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 helps you connect with customers, exceed expectations, and turn them into promoters that grow your business.
Get Free Customer Service Software
HubSpot Service Hub Features
- Tickets
- Customer Feedback
- Knowledge Base
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What is HubSpot Operations Hub?
Operations software that lets you easily sync, clean, and curate customer data, and automate business processes. Your entire team will stay aligned with a clean, connected source of truth for customer data, and your business will be empowered to adapt to the ever-changing needs of your customers.
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 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.
