Got a soft spot for HubSpot. It stole my heart and that's not easy to do.
July 28, 2015
Got a soft spot for HubSpot. It stole my heart and that's not easy to do.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Software Version
Enterprise
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot
We use HubSpot both in our company and we manage it and provide services for clients as well. It's used primarily by the marketing team to generate leads, warm them up and nurture them, and get them sales ready. The sales teams are starting to use them more and more as well and they find that they are able to look back and review the prospect's activity and determine what kind of information they were seeking and it makes working with them much easier.
- Closed loop analytics. Unless every component of your marketing is tied into one place you'll never get an accurate "start to finish" view of your marketing. HubSpot does this better than any other I've seen.
- Intuitive interface. HubSpot's put a lot of effort into making their tool easy to use. I find this is where a lot of companies struggle. They make these tools so powerful, but operating them can also be a challenge. HubSpot's done this really well.
- Top notch service and support. If you do have problems or questions, support is a phone call away. I have never waited on hold longer than about 2-3 minutes and most times my calls are answered inside of 60 seconds. And the best thing about support is they'll roll up their sleeves and dive into the problem with you. They're not going to send you a link to a help article and move on to the next person like so many other companies do. Support is incredible.
- I'd really like to see a "library" where evergreen social updates (such as links to blog posts) can be stored and reused over and over on a set schedule. There are other social softwares that have this functionality and I find that so useful and such a time saver that I don't do all of our social publishing through HubSpot anymore.
- I think there is a disconnect between their package levels. The Basic level is pretty much useless because it lacks marketing automation and the ability to do drip sequences. That means that the entry level package really is at the Professional level but that's not always affordable for smaller businesses. The difference in price between Professional and Enterprise is ridiculous (sorry guys, I still love you!) There are some valuable tools in Enterprise but the jump in price isn't reflective of the added value in my opinion.
- There's room for improvement in the workflows. Creating a list that shows people who have completed a form is easy to do. Creating a list that shows people who have completed a form, and have NOT completed any other forms is not so easy to do. Some competitor platforms have introduced tagging where behaviours and activities can trigger the system to apply a tag to a contact record. Marketing automation can then be triggered by tags. This opens up a ton of possibilities and might be worth looking at.
- Continual intake for our marketing funnels. New leads are created daily and are automatically nurtured until they're warmed up and qualified for a sales call. This saves us a ton of time and allows us to only pursue the warmest prospects.
- I don't know our specific ROI for HubSpot but what I do know is that in applying the tool and an inbound strategy, our business has increased at least 50% year-over-year for the past two years. We don't do any other advertising other than inbound marketing and referrals.
- The biggest positive impact is the analytics it provides. We know exactly how well our marketing is working, where the weak points are and what we need to do to remove bottlenecks and keep the "machine" well oiled and running smoothly.
Infusionsoft is a platform that we started using before HubSpot and we still use today. There are specific features that I like better with Infusionsoft than with HubSpot. The biggest feature that Infusionsoft has that HubSpot is missing is the integrated eCommerce and order forms/landing pages. If HubSpot had those built in natively then we'd probably dump Infusionsoft. However Infusionsoft isn't really a fair comparison to HubSpot because Infusionsoft lacks the social publishing, blogging, calls-to-action and the reporting ability that HubSpot has. HubSpot is the clear winner if you're looking for a solid all-in-one marketing platform in my opinion.
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