Great product - but some difficulties with implementation partner

Its REALLY hard for an ecommerce business to get started on HubSpot. Everything they write for training resources is almost exclusively targeted towards soft goods such as insurance, software, consulting, etc. One of my businesses only sells product. They need a lot more resources and training on how to adapt this product to meet my needs. The templates in the marketplace are not built for e-commerce at all really. The templates they offer are kinda boring as well (from outside vendors). The conflict I run into all the time is this product is designed for persona based marketing. But we sell products so we might have ALL our personas buying from our two or three product catagories. I find I'm constantly having to "make it up as I go along" when it comes to adapting this product to my business. Its also very hard to move from a server based legacy system to Hubspot. For example we have a database with 6000 records that has customers dating back 40 years and we have 3 employees. So we just can't afford to export more than about 10% of our contacts because of the billing structure. The costs changes per 1000 emails at the lower levels. Cost certainty is important to us but that is hard to attain if you hook this thing to your web site for new leads AND try to import info from a legacy system. Its a problem with all systems but thus far Hubspot has removed all the pain points for switching except this one.

For us its taking so long to get it to a point where it actually creates results. Its probably going to be a two year project before we really start seeing an impact.

Make sure the vendor understands your needs and you have VERY focused goals that align with your budget. Spend time breaking down those goals into really small pieces.
You may have to tackle smaller portions of those goals and revisit them. The creation of a hubspot account is very time consuming and complex. And parachuting an outsider into your business and expecting them to "get it' just isn't realistic unless you can afford a year or more of their time. But as a business owner its always hard to swallow the fact that you are going to spend several thousand dollars before you see even a hint of a result.

Again no hard feelings about the vendors efforts but I feel like we were destined to fail. Had I obtained hubspot inbound certification as a condition of working with the vendor, I feel that we would have saved thousands of hours and dollars. I'm asking for data that was at my fingertips. And my vendors burning time trying to justify his existence when he could be making my hubpsot better. This experience was better than most that I've had like this. Its just plain hard to succeed in online business no matter what product you use to market it.

Any time I've had a question or issue they tackle it with a sense of purpose and professionalism. Some companies are totally hung up on policy and process at the expense of the customers needs. Hubspot has always been exceptional to deal with. Every question or issue I have asked gets addressed. If the person I"m dealing with doesn't know the answer or can't fix it, I'm referred to someone immediately who can help me. I have never had to call and ask "hey what are you guys doing about my issue..." NEVER. Thats rare.

I've demo's about 10 different CMS, marketing systems, marketing tools this past 5 years and I didn't let one of the demos get past a demo. I signed up for hubspot without a demo. When I found hubspot I just knew I had found "my solution". The langauge is simple. The help balloons are where they should be. The help content is solid and easy to find. The tools are incredibly powerful and finally gave me context to what a lot of SEO pro's were trying to help me with. Its the first time since Twitter was invented that The other thing that REALLY sold me on hubspot was the CRM. If they can do to CRM what they have done to marketing, watch out world. I love the CRM package even though its brand new and needs improvement.