But wait a minute ... HubSpot was that tool for marketers, right? Built as a tool for marketing automation, which lets you monitor social media channels, quickly set up an email campaign andlanding pagescreate. That's right, that's how HubSpot started in 2006 and that's what many people still associate the platform with. A tool to simplify the lives of marketers. That promise still stands, but the platform can now do much more. As co-founder of Webs, EMEA top 3 HubSpot Consultancy Partner, I've seen HubSpot grow significantly over the years. In this article, I'd like to take you through these developments.
For those who don't know, the popular term 'inbound marketing' comes from the minds of HubSpot founders Dharmesh Shah and Brian Halligan. It is the title of their 2014 bestseller. The marketing principle states that you should help customers with meaningful content instead of ads, direct mailing andcold calling. HubSpot has added more and more software components to the platform over the years. These included a Sales Hub for account managers and a Service Hub to properly manage all customer inquiries. HubSpot also added a CMS Hub that allows businesses to set up a website. A logical move, since thebuyer journeyincreasingly starts there.
All these new steps led to a change in direction for HubSpot four years ago. From just a marketing automation tool to a CRM platform for scale-ups. Why? Because these companies need the right technology to keep up with their rapid growth. Partners across large parts of the world are now hooked up. It created a huge growth spurt for HubSpot. It took the company fourteen years to hook 100,000 customers and thunder through the €1 billion revenue threshold. Within four years, both those numbers had now doubled. Pretty clever in a market dominated by a number of big players, including Salesforce and Microsoft.
HubSpot today bundles all the basic elements you can use to manage the customer experience. Each element is built in exactly the same way and consists of a data component, a content component, a messaging component, automation component and reporting component. This makes it easy for the user to follow. As a result, the platform works easily and is built intuitively. And HubSpot doesn't say so itself, but you can find this inmore than 10,000 reviews from commercial professionals.
In addition, HubSpot has developed every component in-house. No external platforms were taken over and linked to HubSpot with software tricks. That is often the case with other parties. There, it is usually a purchased silo of separate components. To get these to work as a single entity requires considerable investment, including expensive consultants. TheHubSpot CRMPlatform is much more a matter of plug & play. There are really only implementation costs if you want to link HubSpot to existing systems in your company. Although these are still lower than with other brands, I know from experience.
Ok, and so then you have such a plug & play CRM platform running. Account managers, marketers and customer service staff make full use of it. What new insights does it reveal? In other words, what does it actually deliver for you as a company? To properly answer these questions, let me sketch a situation where a random scale-up organization has several systems running: Each department has daily contact with customers. The resulting data is stored on different islands. Someone from marketing, for example, cannot see when a customer last contacted customer service. This results in annoying situations in practice.
The other day I spoke to an account manager from one such company. He was with a customer to talk about the update of a product he had recently sold to him. Only then did he learn that his customer had expressed complaints to customer service five weeks ago. He was at a loss for words. The example shows how valuable it is to have one CRM platform where different departments share all their data with each other. For example, this account manager could have gathered the information with a few mouse clicks before visiting his customer. How different would this conversation have been?
So it is these insights that HubSpot is using to help not only more marketers, but now account managers and customer service representatives move forward. Insights for sharing good content, entering into a sales conversation in the right way and helping a customer with the answer to his question. Thus, the HubSpot CRM Platform helps you anno 2021 in every stage of the buying process and you always have the right data at hand to make good decisions.