Mostly unreliable; not worth the effort
December 05, 2013
Mostly unreliable; not worth the effort
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction
Pros
- Social media publishing - when it worked, it was nice to be able to publish everything from within our MA software.
- Source reporting - tracking where our leads came from (which channel).
- Salesforce integration - usually worked well, with some inconsistencies in reporting. For the most part our leads got where they needed to go via the HubSpot/SFDC integration.
Cons
- Both the blog and landing page tools are not worth the effort. In an entire year of paying for and using HubSpot, we were never able to get either tool working to the standards that we needed. We continued to host our blog in WordPress and our landing pages externally, despite continual requests for help to style and launch both. Because of that, a lot of the other reporting and data within HubSpot was incomplete, and we still had to rely on other sources to get complete marketing reports.
- Overall reliability - at the end of the day, the information our leads filled out in a HubSpot form successfully dumped into SFDC, generally without an issue. That being said, we had multiple problems with duplication; data syncs are painfully slow; there has often been strategic data missing or recorded incorrectly (like lead source information or conversion data); the social media tool frequently posts the wrong thing or an incomplete message (and occasionally just doesn't post it at all); and their reporting was consistently inaccurate, despite how often we went out of the way to make sure the tracking codes were functioning correctly on our side.
- Support & documentation - I can't count the number of times we had to ask for help doing something, and we would receive back a loosely-related article link from the support team that really didn't answer our question. If a client is presenting an issue specific to their business requirements and integrations with other software, then it really doesn't make sense for HubSpot's support team to continue sending out the same cookie-cutter articles over and over again. Their actual tech support team has some great people on it, but we never had much luck with anyone else in customer support or account management. I can remember several occasions when we were told that a certain thing wasn't possible (or "wasn't a best practice"), only to find out on our own later that it was completely possible (and in some cases, really straightforward). Needless to say, we learned not to rely on most of their staff for practical or strategic help.
- The list and "workflow" concept is pretty clunky. Compared to other providers, who have a logic-based campaign/segmentation structure, HubSpot's methodology is pretty low-tech. It's impossible to handle things like behavior-based segmentation with any measure of agility and competence when the tool you have isn't able to understand user behavior, account for strategy changes, or even report accurately on its own performance. Thankfully, our marketing team has some great problem-solvers on it, who could come at an issue like this from a lot of different angles until we could figure out how to make the list/workflow structure behave the way we needed it to. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who has any complexity to their segmentation or lead nurture strategy.
- Increased engagement from cold leads once we could automate the email nurture process.
- Increased visibility into what channel our leads were coming from.
- Overall, we spent more money to use HubSpot than we saw back from any of our efforts actually using it.
Product Usage
5 - Marketing: product manager, web design, social media manager, digital marketing coordinators.
1 - Knowledge of your CRM for integration purposes and problem-solving how to get HubSpot to dump the data you want into your CRM; problem-solving in general if you need to do anything outside the general scope of HubSpot's simplistic parameters; basic html if you want to manipulate your email/landing page templates; web design expertise if you want your emails/landing pages to actually look like your brand and not a knockoff.
- Social media scheduling & publishing to improve brand awareness and streamline our social voice.
- Segmentation and targeted lead nurture programs for our different prospect types.
Evaluation and Selection
The price was reasonable; we were promised great account support, increased ROI, and all of our tools under one roof.
- Price
- Product Features
The price was good, but at the time we didn't do enough research into what other companies occupied the marketing automation space. If we had, I think we would have chosen a different provider. The price is reasonable for a medium-sized business and we were swayed by the way that they had succeeded in using their own software to market to us.
Do more research on competitors and the marketing automation space in general. There's a lot going on among the MA software companies, and for a tool that you're going to a). spend a lot of money on, b). sign a contract for, and c). have everyone using to do marketing tasks, then you should take a lot of time to test-drive the different tools that are out there so you don't end up with one that's not a good fit for you.
Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Kept well informed Immediate help available Quick Initial Response | Slow Resolution Poor followup Less knowledgeable Problems left unsolved Escalation required Need to explain problems multiple times Support doesn't seem to care |
Yes - There have been a few bugs we reported; some of them were taken care of without much issue (like when HubSpot duplicated an entire list of contacts in Salesforce.com), but others were never taken seriously. Several times, something we published on Facebook via HubSpot would come through with no text or no link or no thumbnail image (sometimes for days at a time it would repeatedly do this). Each time, when we called to report it, we were told no one else was having that issue and so it wasn't an issue. It still happens, and they've never addressed it.
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