HubSpot Sales Hub vs. Skype (discontinued)

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.

Having interacted with a new replacement tool, Microsoft Teams, it is challenging to recommend Skype, as it lacks some essential features, such as being less equipped with the latest updates, and it is not platform-independent, causing issues on PCs and phones, as well as during calls that might hinder work.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The instant chat function is great. Very straightforward, easy to use, easy to learn, no technical issues.
• Video calls are pretty easy also, user friendly and a mostly stable connection with no issues.
• Voice calls are easy also, eliminates the need for an external landline or the need to use your cell phone. Clear connections, not really any dropped calls.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Skype is a RESOURCE hog. People who have limited bandwidth will have poor call quality.
• It is hard to figure out how to use emojis and upload images in the chat.
• The background images do not fool anybody....it is clearly not your real background.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have given this rating as this need to give more than that as it's very helpful for us and makes our work more efficient and fast.

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!

Incentivized

Skype is not as good as Facetime in terms of ease to glance at it and figure out how it works. I think that's a result of Skype trying to be too many things at once. A lot of the menu and UI could be streamlined, and I would jettison some of the additional functions that have been tacked on over the years to simplify. That being said, while some options are slightly hard to find, they all work flawlessly once found.

Incentivized

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!"

I am not aware of the current support level for Skype for business, as I have never used even though I have the product. However, the support for Skype's personal paid users is not where it could be. Users who pay for Skype features do not have a clear path to reach out to support. So, rating 6, can be better as soon as I need to use Skype for business support and get a good experience. I will say that I will renew Skype for Business subscription, which is a significant inconsistency on my end. The explanation is that Skype for Business comes bundled with Office for Business, with no additional cost, so why not.

Incentivized

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

It can be used on the phone via mobile application as well as on the desktop by logging in to the website. Easily installed and ready to use.

Incentivized

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.

We use Skype in combination with Grasshopper. While Grasshopper acts as a routing toll free number with extensions, if we are making calls directly, we do it through Skype. Skype's desktop and mobile apps are easier to use, and provide unlimited local calls at a flat, affordable rate. Allowing our team to use their existing mobile or desktop devices without additional hardware for business office phone calls is important, and Skype makes that possible

Incentivized

The service provided is up to date, as discussed before buying.

• Lead Response Time:
• 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.

• Skype made keeping in touch with an advisor in Mexico very easy. The initiative there resulted in 5 new partnerships.
• Skype has helped me with account management for at least 3 customers in LATAM--usually it's a fast way to answer a question about a support renewal.
• For about 9 months Skype helped me stay in touch with a colleague in Prague. We would meet once a week to go over sales activities.

Incentivized