You’re on the hunt for software to support your business’s marketing and sales efforts. You’ve probably looked at a handful of different customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and you’ve probably seen HubSpot come up a number of times. There are lots of powerful software options around, but if you’re looking for an effective CRM that lives in the same ecosystem as your content management system (CMS), marketing hub and service hub, then you’re looking for HubSpot.
HubSpot remains one of the most powerful and effective software suites available for businesses at the moment, connecting every department of your business in a single platform. You might be asking yourself what the most important reasons to choose HubSpot are? They’re numerous, and probably quite personal to your specific business. But to help you understand how it can support your business, we’ve rounded up the six most important reasons why HubSpot is the right choice for you.
1. Make informed decisions from customer data
One of the best reasons to invest into HubSpot is its ability to identify users and track their activity on your digital and offline platforms (i.e. website, apps, phone calls, email, etc.). HubSpot uses customer IDs and IP addresses to gather and analyse this information on your leads, prospects and customers, giving you all the information you need to close or retain clients.
HubSpot offers this information in straight-forward dashboard views and customizable reports housed within a central platform. It also allows you to automate planned communication based on prospect and customer data, giving your marketing and sales team time to spend on the tasks that require a more human touch. Not only that, but it can also be used to notify your marketing or sales team when a lead, prospect or customer is looking for something in particular, about to convert, appear disengaged with your company, views a particular page or piece of content, becomes a marketing or sales qualified lead, or any number of other vital situations that’s needed to nurture your customer relationships.
2. Ability to track and analyse ROI
With everything that HubSpot offers in one centralized platform, an added benefit of its connected ecosystem is the HubSpot Reports tool. From this single tool, you can create standard reports with provided templates, customize reports to your needs, and even automate when you want the tool to draw and send reports.
Better still, because it exists within the HubSpot ecosystem, it can draw data from marketing, sales and your content management system to provide analysis on… meaning that you are able to get an holistic view of your business operations at any given time.
3. Usability to all type of users
We all know the regret of investing in a new piece of software that promises to revolutionize your business, only to discover that the learning curve is so steep most employees can’t even use it. That’s a big pain point with CRMs at the moment, and one that HubSpot has dedicated itself to addressing
In order to illustrate the great pains that they went to, a fun fact about HubSpot’s UX and UI research is that it included testing a drunk user. They wanted to make sure that, even inebriated, you would be able to navigate and use their platform effectively. After watching and listening carefully, they got it right.
There are no complicated steps to accomplishing a simple action, no strange settings that need to be adjusted every couple weeks, and there is an enormous library of educational content to aid you in any confused moment or to provide free staff training (as well as HubSpot support agents).
4. Automation of customer centric tasks
We mentioned automation in the first “reason to choose HubSpot”, but it’s worth mentioning again and in detail.
HubSpot was built with automation in mind, for both marketing, sales and service teams. Whenever new information comes in on a lead, HubSpot is smart enough to update its own directory without you needing to lift a finger. This means that, over the lifetime of your lead relationships with your business, you can continually build out the information you have on them without ever having to manually enter data.
The upside of this is how you’re then able to use the data in HubSpot. Whether through workflows, sales sequences, emails, or whichever medium you’re choosing to communicate with your customers and leads, your data allows you to automate these tasks. You could create an automated workflow to serve leads with particular emails at particular times, or only after downloading a particular resource, or even share personalized content with them based on job title, interest or industry.
This same tool can be applied across HubSpot, whether you’re in marketing, sales or service departments. Need to follow up with a list of prospects regularly, but only after they’ve read a particular blog or email—an automated sales sequence is the perfect solution. Need to provide personalized service to website visitors? An automated chatbot using personalization tokens to converse directly with each user on their interests and questions is how you’ll do it.
This kind of automation saves you time, money and, best of all, frustration around admin.
5. Integration in your technology landscape
An effective software suite that can automate customer conversations, prove ROI and onboard new users easily is great… only if it integrates with technology you need to use in other parts of your business. The good news about HubSpot is that this is no longer an issue—it houses every software and tool that a business needs within a single platform. You no longer need to log in and out of various apps and websites each morning; instead, you only need one.
HubSpot is a holistic solution for businesses, because it houses a CRM, CMS, marketing hub (with landing pages, email, forms, workflows, and more), and a service hub (email ticketing, chat bots, service enquiries and more) within a centralized platform. Despite this, even if you still want to use other software, HubSpot can integrate with other major platforms like WordPress and Magneto (and many, many others: Slack, Shopify, Vidyard, Databox, etc.). But the strength of HubSpot comes in that you don’t need anything else to run your business successfully — it’s an all-in-one solution.
6. The business fit for SMBs
The last question that you’ll have when looking to invest is probably one that’s quite unique to your business. What does it cost, and can it scale with us?
While HubSpot isn’t the cheapest option on the market, it is one of the more affordable because it scales with your business. The cost of the platform is proportionate to the size of your business, meaning that small to medium businesses don’t end up paying what enterprise clients do, but still get access to the same great features.
Most of HubSpot’s scaling pricing is dependent on the number of users that need access to the platform, as well as the number of contacts within your CRM. This means that smaller and more agile teams pay less but still access all the features they need to manage their contact base. As your business grows, HubSpot will grow with you.
It’s a big decision and not one to be made lightly. But if you identify with any of the six reasons above, then HubSpot just makes sense. There’s no point in holding back either. With HubSpot’s free CRM, you can dive right in and get started with testing parts of their platform at no risk to your business. With the benefits of informed customer data, provable ROI, holistic usability, advanced automation and integration with all your current platforms, you can’t go wrong in choosing HubSpot.
