HubSpot Sales Hub is designed to eliminate friction by bringing tools and data together on one platform. The solution boasts email tracking and templates, and call tracking & recording.
$20
per month per seat
Owler
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Owler is a sales intelligence app developed by the company of the same name San Mateo and acquired by Meltwater June 2021, providing competitive insights, company information, and other sales relevant information.
We selected HubSpot sales not just for the price point vs offering ratio, but also for the integration capabilities, ease of use, scalability, UI, and report visuals. Our employees actually LIKE using HubSpot, and so we have good data instead of an expensive system that does no …
HubSpot Sales HUB is well suited for teams who want to run a sales team, grow their business, and continue to do so efficiently. The amazing elements of HubSpot Sales HUB is how the UI facilitates the work to begin with. Beyond the features and capabilities, the UI helps make what you and your team want to accomplish easy. The sales teams who have 2-5 people, teams of 20-50, or 500+, the HubSpot Sales HUB will adapt to how you and your organization are structured.
This is a free service, so it should be compared to free and low cost alerting (e.g. Google Alerts) and PE/VC funding profile (e.g. Crunchbase) services. Owler is well suited for competitive intelligence professionals, named account reps, and marketing professionals tracking company news (web mined company mentions and press releases) and social media (blogs, Video, YouTube). The alerts are high precision and tag for three key events (M&A, Funding, Exec Changes). It is the alerting and social media tools which are the key strength of the service. The company claims two million profiles, but only has 60,000 with full address information. Content includes competitors, user polls, and funding / M&A data. Owler should be viewed as a free complement to other online company research tools, but it lacks the depth to replace subscription services. Missing content includes long business descriptions; financials and discrete sizing data; family tree linkage, and executive profiles (only the CEO is covered) While they offer list building functionality, it is quite thin and non-downloadable. As such, I would not recommend Owler for sales and marketing prospecting at this point. A unique feature is a set of company polls about the direction of the company and CEO performance. Unfortunately, the response rates are often too low to be statistically meaningful.
The task feature of HubSpot has been super helpful for me to organize what activities I am focusing on throughout the day. Instead of having a generalized list of the activities that need to take place today, I can organize that list by calls, emails, to-do's, linked-in, etc. That way I can take an hour of my time and focus on only doing phone calls, only doing emails, etc. It has helped me increase my productivity by making 20 phone calls a day to 100 phone calls throughout the day.
Hubspot Sequences are also super helpful in order to plug and play contacts that need similar solutions. The automatic email feature allows me to not have to spend time sending a simple email template. Instead, it automatically sends that email out at the time that THEY would most likely respond.
This gives me more time to focus on the tasks that I can't automate, allowing me to be way more productive. I can also customize my sequences to automate when I am reaching out, and what activity I am doing.
Sequences give me the ability to create a highly customized approach, with the scalability of a plug and play format.
I find the interface to be a bit unorganized and sometimes the information added about projects looks clogged which sometimes makes it difficult to access specific information.
Sometimes we have to deal with different currencies because we have clients all over the world but the exchange rate tool is not always accurate, causing us to slow down our work.
The information provided is useful but at times the variation with other websites and tools is substantial which makes it difficult to rely solely on owler
Information only about bigger companies is available not for smaller and research on smaller ones are important as there are not many tools that do that
There are few companies that appear as defunct or do not exist but in the actual market there is a lot going on with them and being in market intelligence industry owler needs to capture that
It would be great if they provide revenue or growth of the in the past three years or so. As it would save our time and efforts to some extent
They need to maintain the database in aperiodic manner with precise information
Ease of use, ease of customizability, and ease of 3rd-party integration, especially to LinkedIn Navigator, all play a vital role in our increasing reliance of HubSpot Sales for our growing sales team. Also taking into account the great training and support for HubSpot Sales available from HubSpot, including HubSpot Academy.
Since we launched HubSpot Sales Hub into our organisation's tech stack, we've experienced a smooth transition and implementation process for those using this solution. The ease of use and the interface experience is amazing and that was a main priority for us in the purchasing phase. So far, we've been nothing but very happy with the support, implementation, and ongoing development of our sales team adapting to the solution. Highly recommend it for usability and functionality!
I think it's well designed but always room for improvement. Maybe more customization in layout or information presented. Maybe even a layout that allows comparison and ranking of companies in a similar industry or vertical, or company size, and geography
I have yet to see the platform down or running slowly, but there have been multiple instances recently (Q2 2015) when the user links to a news story and Owler gives an Oops message. Users simply click on the story a second time and the story is displayed. This is a nuisance bug. I also have a sense that the system is not processing alerts as quickly as before, but I haven't tracked this closely, so I could be wrong about it.
The news precision, which is the most important feature for me, is very accurate. They have editors review the news to ensure it is properly tagged by company and event type.
Oh my goodness HubSpot Support is just amazing. I submitted a question/issue to them yesterday and by this morning I had this response:
"Hi Stephanie, I hope this finds you well and thanks so much for your patience while I was working to update the extension with my team. We were actually able to push through an update yesterday afternoon which set the default lifecycle stage to lead in the sidebar. If you take a look now, that should be in place. If it has not updated yet, I would recommend uninstalling and re-installing the sales extension so an updated version and be pushed through. Again, I want to say that I sincerely appreciate that you took the time to reach out to us and help us iron this out. HubSpot really values constructive feedback with real use-case backing to help push it along. So, thank you!"
It was not only SUPER easy to implement, we had some amazing support from HubSpot. They scheduled a call to go over each individual tool with our team and provided guidance and best practices plus answered any questions are new users had. It was wonderful and really helped them get started confidently
Focus on setting up companies that have limited news coverage first. Public companies are well covered and it is easy to track them. Furthermore, the surfeit of news around public companies can crowd out smaller companies with less news. It is smaller companies where you are most likely to see a benefit in their tracking of news, blogs, press releases, and videos.
To be honest, there are great features in all of these competitors but they aren't quite as user-friendly or robust compared to Hubspot. Hubspot's Sales hub was able to add more features to it's platform while remaining very user-friendly and easy to use. I found myself getting lost navigating platforms like Zendesk or Salesforce, there is also a much nicer onboarding experience with Hubspot.
I believe Lead411 and Owler go hand in hand, rather than one over the other. I believe Lead411's contact generation is far stronger based on the cost, but Owler allows you to broaden your horizon for prospecting whereas Lead411 is more of a user-driven search rather than an platform-driven search.
Prior to Hubspot, this was maybe 24 hours as an average. Now it is MINUTES. We immediately get back to clients and if we aren't able to then we will connect using email automation and sequences without lifting a finger. It's great!
Company Growth in difficult times:
Despite COVID causing issues on Residential Construction in Washington, we have continued to grow as a business, and part of that is thanks to our amazing Sales team, and part of that credit goings to Hubspot directly. If we didn't have Hubspot we would have shrunk or stayed the same as a company. Hubspot made sure we grew.
ROI [return on investment]
It's a hard thing to measure but our company has increased its revenue by more than 20% compared to last year. And that is saying a lot for our industry especially with COVID's impact on Residential Construction. I
can't measure it precisely but I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that HUBSPOT helped make this possible because our Sales and Marketing Teams are sharper and more capable than they have ever been thanks to this wonderful CRM.
The personalisation of emails has definitely helped us to earn a higher reply rate, with the knock-on that this will be helping with future deals.
Keeps us very relevant in our conversations with contacts. They are often impressed by the research and knowledge we have on their company and how we have aligned ourselves to help. Again, small differences at the start of calls but this will be helping with the number of opportunities created.
Reduces SDR prospecting time. Quick and easy to get updates allowing them to process a great number of accounts on a daily basis.
