In my organization, we are using it for account-based marketing. Basically, sales management and lead management. That's pretty much the use case at our organization.
It's a CRM, so it allows you to track all your leads and customers in a single place. The permission system is great, so you can really decide who gets what permissions.
It has a bunch of features, so it allows you to do several things, such as campaign management, marketing emails, data analytics, in addition to its core features, which are lead management, lead attribution, etc.
HubSpot is very flexible. Its user experience is really the best, in my opinion.
There is room for improvement in pricing. The pricing strategy that they have is way too clever.
In future releases, I would like to see the API rate limits increased. I would like to see it off-limits.
I have been using it for three years now.
It's very stable. In my experience, I've only had one instance of HubSpot acting up.
It's very scalable. In my organization, we have around 15 users. In some client organizations I've worked with, it can exceed 100, but it can support more – as many as you need.
It's good. We haven't had to escalate issues to them often. They have a support team and a community forum where you can ask questions or find answers.
The community is great – we've almost always found answers to our questions there, especially regarding the API.
We got in touch with customer service and support once or twice. Once was when they were deprecating a feature by a certain date, and we needed to extend the timeline for us because we couldn't meet that deadline. They were very accommodating and readily extended it for us by a couple of months.
And another time, there was some technical question. And they were fine. They did help. It was okay.
I have used many different type of CRM tools. Salesforce, SuiteCRM, SugarCRM, ERP-based portals, and more. We provide marketing tech services at my organization, so CRMs and CDPs are part of our core expertise.
So, for Hubspot's cons:
- Pricing. It's expensive, and their contact-based pricing model can make subscriptions extremely costly. Once you reach a certain number of contacts, you're put in a different pricing tier, and it increases significantly.
- Another con is the direct integration capabilities. It's pretty good in general, but integration with enterprise systems can be challenging. HubSpot started as a CRM for startups and SMBs, and it became a leader in that category. But when they started pitching to enterprises, they ran into challenges because the integrations weren't flexible enough for the complex workflows that enterprises often have.
The pros of HubSpot:
- It has a great user experience.
- It has great community support.
- The starter packages are great. Even the lower-tier packages are feature-rich.
- Native integrations with common systems like calling systems are superb. It offers sales, marketing, and support services all in one place.
In the case of our organization, it's straightforward.
But that may not be the case everywhere. It depends on the complexity of your use case.
The use case can be very simple to very complex. If it's a simple use case, like you just need to start ingesting leads and managing your funnel, it's straightforward.
But if your use case involves sourcing data from multiple sources, including your own solutions, then the integration can take a very long time.
HubSpot only has the cloud version. So first of all, we decided which functions we were going to use HubSpot for.
In our case, literally, there was no strategy. We had, let's just ingest the leads, create a funnel, and start working. But you want to keep yourself lean because that's not making you any money.
But for the clients, we would be extremely thorough. That would mean identifying the need and deciding which functions the client is going to use the solution for.
In the case of HubSpot, it could be marketing, sales, and service. If the client wanted to use the service as well, go for it. And that will also decide what modules the client is going to pay for. It has a Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub. The client may choose to save some money if you are not using the Service.
So, if you are a B2B enterprise, you don't want to use Service Hub it's because the relative number of clients would be fewer, and then the number of people to do the account management would be higher. So that could be then handled in emails or phone calls as opposed to having a D2C organization where you can keep receiving complaints, and service requests the entire day. So that requires a lot of tracking, which is where it's worth spending money to procure Service Hub. So that's that.
The strategizing and planning can take time – anywhere from one to six weeks. But the implementation itself is quite quick, usually not more than two weeks for most common use cases.
Typically, one person with functional expertise and another person who can handle integrations, if needed. For simple use cases, it could just be one person.
It's pretty low-maintenance.
Start with a CRM from the early days. Before spending money, identify what you're paying for. It's easy to be seduced by features offered by salespeople you may never use. Know exactly what you need and start with the minimal version that supports your current use cases. You can always acquire more features later.
Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.
