HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM (customer relationship management) platform that helps businesses of all sizes and industries streamline and optimize their sales flow.
It’s an all-in-one solution that includes powerful marketing features, customer support software and data analysis tools to help you make informed decisions.
If you’re not sure if HubSpot is the right CRM for your business or if it will truly make your team more efficient, this review can help.
Whether you’re an eCommerce store owner or you run any other type of business, HubSpot can help you better understand and engage with your customers, increasing sales and customer satisfaction.
Something that all businesses strive for.
Let’s take a look at the tools HubSpot offers you to achieve these goals.
HubSpot quick review
HubSpot is cloud-based software you’ll use mainly through its website.
It also has apps for iOS and Android, allowing you to manage your business from anywhere as long as you have an internet connection.
It’s a platform composed of 5 hubs.
Each of these hubs includes several tools or features that will help you with a different part of your business or sales process.
For example, the HubSpot Service Hub lets you implement a live chat, ticketing system or knowledge base.
All these hubs and features are what we’ll discuss throughout this review.
Pros of HubSpot
- All-in-one solution that centralizes all of your business tools and processes in one place.
- Extensive marketplace of integrations that allows you to connect your favorite apps to the platform.
- Free academy with hundreds of training resources covering topics about the software itself and many other business and marketing topics.
- Available in multiple languages and it offers documentation and phone support in German, Spanish, French or Portuguese (among others).
- The free plan allows you to start using the platform without any risk.
Cons of HubSpot
- Pricing can be complex to estimate as it varies based on the hubs you want to use, the number of team members, contacts per month and addons.
- HubSpot may be more expensive than other alternatives. You can use our 20% discount to offset this though.
- You may need to upgrade to a more expensive plan in order to access a specific tool.
- You’ll have to commit for at least 12 months if you want to pay monthly for the professional plans.
- It may require some time and effort to fully utilize all of its potential due to its wide range of features.
HubSpot features list
The best way to discover what HubSpot can bring to your business is to review each of the hubs and the most important tools within them.
This will give you an overview of what the platform has to offer and will help you determine which features are most relevant to your business needs.
This will be especially helpful when deciding which plan is right for you.
1. Create a data-driven website with the CMS Hub
Let’s start by analyzing a hub that may surprise you since it’s not usually included in many CRMs.
HubSpot offers a content management system so you can easily create a website thanks to its simple drag and drop editor.
The free plan offers many features, including:
- Website hosting.
- A HubSpot domain (domain.hubspotpagebuilder.com) but you can also use any domain you own.
- SSL certificate.
- Integrated CDN (content delivery network).
- A bunch of free themes and templates.
- Blog maker.
- Simple and landing pages creator (up to 25).
- Built-in AMP.
- Analytics.
- And so much more.
A great benefit of using this tool is that your website will seamlessly integrate with other CRM features such as the live chat, bots and email marketing tools.
Remember that you don’t have to use all HubSpot hubs. In this case you could replace this CMS Hub with Astra + Spectra + your own hosting.
A drawback of the free plan is that the HubSpot logo will be displayed on your website, which could impact your brand image.
You can remove the logo and unlock additional features in the paid plans.
Here are some of the key features of each.
- Starter ($23/month): Increases the number of pages you can create, gives you access to technical support or unlocks the feature that allows you to receive payments from customers.
- Professional ($360/month): Allows you to use dynamic content, host up to 250 videos and perform A/B testing.
- Enterprise ($1,200/month): Create web apps, sandboxes, enable single sign-on or create memberships.
The CMS Hub offers a range of features that can help you build a secure, personalized website for your business, providing an optimal experience for your customers.
2. Turn strangers into prospects thanks to the Marketing Hub
In order to nurture your leads you first need to acquire them. That’s where the Marketing Hub can help.
This is one of the most powerful hubs. By centralizing several tools in one place, you’ll have a better idea of what is going on in your business.
NOTE:
Keep in mind that the customer journey cannot be divided into completely separate blocks. As a result some tools may fit into multiple different hubs.
Website tools: Blogging, landing pages and forms
The blog that you can integrate into your website created with the CMS Hub serves as a marketing tool, as you’ll use it to create content to attract your ideal customer.
HubSpot also includes SEO tools to identify the pages that require updates and determine the necessary actions to be taken in order to improve your rankings.
One of the best ways to convert visitors into potential customers once they are on your website is by redirecting them to a landing page.
You can create those using HubSpot tools as well.
You can send them to your landing page by designing call to action buttons.
These CTA can even collect information about who has clicked on them to help you monitor and optimize their performance.
You can also add different types of forms to your website to collect contact information from visitors.
Modifying these forms is really easy as they are created using a drag and drop editor.
Submitting these forms will automatically add the visitor’s contact information to your HubSpot CRM database where you can start nurturing your relationship.
Email marketing tools
HubSpot also includes email marketing tools that allow you to directly communicate with potential customers.
The advantage of this integration is that you can create personalized emails for each recipient, as you’ll have a lot of information available to do so.
Creating email campaigns will be simple with the use of the drag and drop editor.
As with most HubSpot tools, you’ll have a detailed analysis of all your campaigns.
In this case they will be very useful to study your A/B tests, another feature that this software includes.
Marketing automation
Marketing emails can be sent manually but you’ll also find tools to automate the process.
This automation tool is very flexible.
You can create very powerful workflows with segmentation logic that end up triggering for example internal communications for your team via email, SMS, or notifications.
Ads software
Another way you can attract an audience to your business is through paid ads.
With the ads tool you can connect Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google to create and analyze your campaigns from a single place.
You’ll ideally use the data from your CRM database to create personalized and highly targeted ad campaigns.
Something you’ll easily find out thanks to the included analysis tools.
Social media management software
Thanks to this hub’s tools it’s also possible to manage all of your social networks, either manually or by automating the process of sharing new blog posts.
HubSpot also helps you stay in touch with leads and customers. It allows you to monitor social networks for mentions and manage all conversations from a single location.
You can also use the data collected from all the networks to create reports and analyze the return on investment (ROI) of your social marketing strategies.
Live chat and bots
This is one of those features that can fit in different HubSpot hubs at the same time.
Adding a live chat to your website will allow you to:
- Provide a better experience to customers by offering real-time support.
- Engage with them and close more sales.
- Reduce workload by automating simple recurring activities like booking meetings or answering common questions.
The CRM stores all chat box conversations, providing context and history for team members for future reference.
You can even set up office hours so your visitors know when you’re available, and set up email capture forms so you can follow up on missed chats.
Video hosting
Video is a marketing tool that you should definitely use in your online business.
- As a sales tool through video sales letters.
- As a support tool in your knowledge base.
- As a teaching tool to nurture your leads.
Thanks to the video hosting provided by HubSpot you’ll be able to include your videos anywhere on your website and even in your emails.
HubSpot’s video hosting offers lead capture tools and detailed analytics, although this is something you can also get with Presto Player.
Campaigns and powerful analytics
Everything you’ve seen so far can be grouped into campaigns.
A new product launch campaign can involve dozens if not hundreds of tasks:
- Writing blog posts.
- Creating ad campaigns.
- Sending emails to your contact lists.
- And many others.
With HubSpot’s campaign management tool, you can organize all these tasks in one place so your entire team works in sync.
- You can assign tasks.
- Display them in a calendar view.
- Add comments for better communication and effortless collaboration.
- And much more.
By using software that consolidates all of your information in a single location, you can create dashboards and reports to make informed data-driven decisions.
The Marketing Hub has everything you need to convert strangers into prospects without losing even the slightest piece of information along the way.
3. Close more deals with the help of the Sales Hub
This hub brings together tools to help your sales team strengthen their customer relationships, close more deals and manage their pipelines more efficiently.
- With the Marketing Hub, you were converting strangers into prospects.
- With the Sales Hub you’ll turn those prospects into customers.
These are all the tools you’ll be using to do it:
Email tracking, templates and sequences
Email can be used in a multitude of ways as you saw in one of the previous tools.
In a sales context you’ll need to use it in a more personalized way.
The information each prospect needs, and especially when they need it, is unique.
HubSpot’s email tracking software will notify you the moment your prospects open an email or click on a link within it.
This functionality integrates directly with Gmail and Outlook.
In addition to email opens or clicks, you can also track what documents your prospects open and when.
And yes, all lead activity will be recorded in the HubSpot CRM.
To effectively close a sale it’s necessary to write more personalized emails. You can use the included templates as a foundation to write faster and improve conversion rates.
HubSpot gives you access to a built-in library of templates designed for each step of the customer’s journey. You can also create your own.
1-to-1 emails are more personalized but you can also automate them.
By automating certain aspects of the prospecting process you can ensure that all potential leads are contacted while freeing up your team’s time.
Calling software
Calls are another highly effective channel for selling.
That’s why HubSpot has developed several tools to facilitate and improve this type of communication.
Starting with the meeting scheduler. A piece of software that will give prospects the ability to decide when they want to talk to you.
This scheduler can be easily embedded on your website or shared via a link.
It syncs with Google and Office 365 calendars to keep your availability up to date at all times.
You can organize all your calls within HubSpot itself.
If you connect any of the calling apps available in the marketplace, you’ll be able to call directly using your desktop browser.
By doing this everything will be automatically logged in the CRM.
This will be very useful because HubSpot has a tool called “Conversation Intelligence” that automatically transcribes the content of the call.
This lets you:
- Search for specific parts of the call.
- Add comments.
- Analyze it in detail so you can coach your team to improve their calling skills.
Quote software
It’s quite likely you’ll need to create quotes for potential customers at some point.
HubSpot offers software that can help you create professional and attractive quotes efficiently. It uses the contact information from the CRM to generate the quote with a single click.
You’ll be able to:
- Request legally-binding electronic signatures.
- Add a payment link so your leads can pay you via card or ACH.
ABM Software
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a strategy that focuses on creating personalized experiences for individual accounts (high-value companies) through the collaboration of marketing and the sales teams.
It’s an advanced strategy and HubSpot has tools to help you execute it more efficiently.
Pipeline management software
With HubSpot you can create a customized pipeline that fits your sales process. It helps with adding, editing and deleting deal stages and properties and pushing them forward by assigning them to your team.
There are sales dashboards that will let you monitor the progress and health of your sales pipeline:
- Tracking the progress of your team toward sales quotas.
- Analyzing trends.
- Seeing the overall value and status of your pipeline.
- And more.
4. Sync, clean, curate customer data and automate business processes within the Operations Hub
The Operations Hub will help you keep a healthy database synchronized with other applications that you may need to use in your business.
This way your team will always have a consistent information database to work with.
Sync
HubSpot offers one-way sync and bidirectional sync so you can store up-to-date data in multiple tools.
You can create filters so that only the information you are interested in syncs, providing full control over data flow.
Custom field mappings will ensure that each piece of data is properly synced to its intended location.
It syncs both newly created and existing customer data and can even help you to migrate historical content.
Data quality software
The data quality software will help you clean your database:
- Fixing date properties.
- Format names.
- And more.
This will be very useful when importing data or adding data manually since you’ll be able to catch errors before they reach your database.
Automation and data curation
HubSpot will let you automate many of your processes through programmable automation using Javascript.
This means that you don’t have to rely on integrations but can create your own solutions to perfectly suit your needs.
It also has workflow extensions that allow you to trigger actions in third-party apps such as:
- Sending Slack messages.
- Creating Zoom invitations.
- Creating Asana tasks.
- And many more actions.
Other features of this hub that might interest you are:
- Datasets to group and display the information you need at any time.
The Operations Hub is not intended for small businesses but more for mid-size or large companies.
5. Provide excellent support to your customers using the Service Hub
Getting customers is as important as keeping them.
Offering excellent support will help you turn them into repeat customers and help increase loyalty.
In fact, many of the tools you’ll see here may also help you convert prospects into customers.
Ticketing software and customer portal
HubSpot allows you to create a custom dashboard for clients to view, update and reply to support tickets and interact with your support team.
All tickets are organized internally in a dashboard that will prevent you from missing any customer request. It also allows you to track key support metrics like agent response time.
Shared inbox and omni-channel support
Your customers’ questions won’t just come from support tickets but can come from anywhere.
That’s why the shared inbox feature will allow you to connect:
- Email.
- Live chat.
- Facebook Messenger.
- And other contact sources
To an universal inbox where your team can view and answer all conversations.
Omni-channel support allows you to seamlessly assist your customers through various internal contact methods such as:
- Phone.
- Chat.
- And email.
While maintaining the context of each interaction.
Knowledge base
A good way to reduce the number of tickets is to create a good knowledge base. Something HubSpot is also prepared to do.
A knowledge base will help customers find the answer they need and your team to quickly link to more information about common questions.
These knowledge bases also offer insights, allowing you to discover:
- Which articles are read the most.
- For the longest time.
- Or which ones are considered useful or not useful by your users.
Customer feedback software
Customer feedback software will help you understand interactions with customers so you can find areas for improvement.
You can quickly create surveys and distribute them via chat or email, or embed them on your website.
To better visualize these results, you can create customized dashboards that allow you to easily analyze the data you are most interested in.
HubSpot integrations
HubSpot is an all-in-one platform that provides a multitude of tools that will let you replace dozens of third-party applications and services.
In the marketplace you’ll find hundreds of integrations that will allow you to further increase the possibilities of HubSpot.
We don’t think there are many tools that you can’t connect to this CRM!
The catalog is vast and Zapier is also available which multiplies the options to achieve what you need even further.
WordPress
One of the integrations that may be vital to you is the integration with WordPress.
This allows you to use HubSpot’s solutions within your WordPress website without having to use the CMS Hub.
HubSpot for WooCommerce
If you have an online store powered by WooCommerce you’ll be pleased to know that HubSpot also offers integration with this eCommerce platform.
Actually, HubSpot is the first recommendation in our WooCommerce CRM guide.
SalesForce
Another of HubSpot’s most demanded integrations is the integration with Salesforce.
Something you can achieve through a simple setup in the platform.
HubSpot pricing
Understanding the true cost of HubSpot can be challenging due to the complexity of the pricing structure.
It’s possible to use many of the tools offered by HubSpot for free:
Some of these tools may have limitations such as the requirement to display HubSpot branding on your website.
If you want to remove these limitations and access more professional features, you’ll have to pay.
There are several ways to do this:
- By buying the hub you need on its own.
- Note: Each hub has 3 different tiers.
- By buying a bundle:
- All hubs (with a huge discount).
- Only the hubs you need.
Standalone hub purchases
The CMS Hub pricing is the easiest to understand.
It starts at $23/month and goes up to $1,200/month for the most expensive plan.
The Marketing Hub starts at $45/month and goes up to $3,600/month.
Be aware that in addition to different tools, plans have a limited number of contacts. Increasing this limit will also increase the price.
Something similar happens with the price of the Sales Hub. Although in this case the price varies according to the number of users.
The price of the Operations Hub is again a bit easier to understand. It only varies from $45/month to $2,000/month depending on the tools you want to unlock.
The price of the Service Hub varies depending on the number of users.
The price ranges from $45/month to $1,200/month. Pricing may increase if you add more users.
Bundle hub buying
If you need the starter plan, the best choice is to buy the complete suite as the price is equal to some of the standalone hubs.
The professional plan offers a very generous discount compared to the cost of buying the hubs independently.
Unless you need a very specific configuration, creating your own bundle is usually not the most cost-effective option.
Get our HubSpot 20% discount!
We have partnered with HubSpot so you can get 20% off their plans when signing up through our special link.
HubSpot provides many great free features for free, but this discount will give you the opportunity to use an even more incredible set of tools that can benefit your businesses at a better price.
Conclusion: Is HubSpot worth the price and the hype?
HubSpot offers a wide range of features that can greatly improve your business, no matter what industry you are in.
How they have segmented the hubs can give you a deeper understanding of your business model, and even give you new ideas that you might not have taken into account.
Ideas such as:
- Selling by calling.
- Adding live chat or chatbots to your website.
- Creating a knowledge base.
HubSpot meets all the criteria you would expect from a top-quality CRM:
- Ease of use: The platform is easy to navigate. The top menu provides easy access to all the tools, and the hubs structure allows for a gradual learning process and implementation.
- Integrations: This CRM will be one of the central pieces of your business. It’s important that it can integrate with other tools you are already using or synchronize information with those you will need in the future.
- Customization: You can tailor the platform to fit your specific needs through custom code, custom pipelines or custom objects, among many other features.
- Scalability: HubSpot is ready to grow with your business, you won’t need to change your CRM at any time.
- Support: In addition to all the support tools, the academy and the knowledge base, HubSpot offers a team of professionals available to assist you 24/7.
The big drawback of HubSpot is its huge potential.
The sheer number of tools has created a complex pricing structure for the average user. Although you can buy the complete suite to simplify this point.
Setting up all the features, although simple, will take time. There are so many things that you can configure, it will take time to learn them all.
In our opinion, the hype around this tool is justified and we think it’s well worth trying if you’re looking for a CRM solution.
We recommend you give the free plan a try first. You can see firsthand how this software can help you improve your business before spending money on a premium plan.
Do you use HubSpot? Have any suggestions or recommendations for using it? Tell us about it below!
