HubSpot CRM Isn't Perfect, But It's Darn Close For Us
August 16, 2016
HubSpot CRM Isn't Perfect, But It's Darn Close For Us
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM
We are using HubSpot CRM primarily for the sales team, but others in the company use it as well. We keep track of prospects, deals, customers, and contacts within HubSpot CRM as well as linking our meetings, emails, phone calls, and notes. It's a great way for the sales team to keep track of our activities, and it provides a spot for other people in the company (project managers, developers, etc.) to see what interactions/conversations have been had. It also ties in nicely with our marketing efforts using the HubSpot marketing automation platform. All in all, it has been a great asset for streamlining our processes and increasing the quality of service we're able to provide.
- The best thing about HubSpot CRM is the ability to track all activities (emails, phone calls, meetings, etc) and link to other documents (quotes, meeting notes, etc) so we have one place where we can access anything we need to best serve our prospects and clients.
- The integration with the HubSpot marketing platform is a huge plus as well, since we can easily see what workflows a prospect has been through, what downloads they have made, and when they reengage on our site. It's great for helping know when they're ready for another call or email.
- HubSpot CRM is a fantastic single point of entry for prospect/client information so other people within the company can see what interactions have been made, when, and what was said/agreed upon. It helps if a client contacts a project manager with information they discussed with their strategist for example. The PM can go right into the CRM and see that email or read notes from the meeting/phone call.
- The ability to schedule tasks has also been a huge help. It's super quick and easy to schedule a reminder for a follow up call or email right after sending an email or making a call, so you don't have to try and remember or clutter up your calendar with all those reminders. Helps make sure things don't fall through the cracks.
- The biggest thing would be to have functionality in the calendar syncing similar to what's done with email syncing. Right now, every calendar appointment that shares a HubSpot contact gets added to their contact record, whether it was a meeting to discuss a deal, or a shared chamber of commerce event that doesn't need to be recorded. I'd love it if I could check which appointments to track in HubSpot and which to ignore like with the email tool.
- The way deals/dollars are forecast and how recurring sales and things are handled could also use some improvement or at least some ability to customize it to our company's needs. It's not terrible, but it doesn't exactly fit our model for how we sell things and track our sales, so pulling the right reports to get the right numbers we need can take a little time.
- The ability to merge companies would also be a big help. Sometimes a company gets doubled up (see my next point about emails for an example) and currently the only recourse is to delete the company that has the fewest interactions after moving those notes over to the record you want to keep. It would be great to be able to merge them and keep all the records like you can with contacts.
- The ability to add multiple email addresses to a single contact record would also be a huge help. We have situations where someone will initiate a conversation via their work email, but then send something via a secondary or personal email address, and you can only track that in a separate contact record. In addition, when you try to add that contact to the main company, it will often create a NEW company if the email URL is different. For example, we have a contact with xyz.com as the website URL, but we received an email from them with an email URL of @abc.com. It's a secondary URL which just redirects to the xyz.com URL for the websites, but if you try adding bill@abc.com as a contact under the company that has xyz.com in HubSpot, it will create a new company listed with abc.com as the URL. You then have to add that contact record to the company under xyz.com and delete the company in HubSpot with abc.com listed as the URL. Essentially this could be fixed easily if 1) HubSpot just put the contact under the company you choose instead of reading the email URL and deciding to create a new company or 2) you could merge companies, so when abc.com gets created you can just merge it and the contacts into xyz.com.
- We've seen a major increase in number of calls made and emails sent because of the automation functionalities within HubSpot. We also attribute it to the visualization of how many calls we're making or emails we've sent.
- We've seen a decrease in the number of clients missing information or feeling like they've been forgotten about because we're able to set notifications to follow up rather than relying on some other form of reminder. It's been a huge help.
- We've been able to do a much better job of standardizing what information we collect about clients and then prioritizing a call or email sequence based on the information we have on a lead or prospect. We can go for the largest benefit opportunities with the highest likelihood of closing first, and work our way down the line from there.
We had already started using HubSpot by the time I started here and it was a natural fit to use the HubSpot CRM alongside the marketing platform. It's been hugely successful for us, so I don't have any experience with another CRM here. At previous companies I've had experiences with software like Sedona Office, Shafer's, and SmartService (which tied into QuickBooks). HubSpot CRM has the best user interface of any CRM I've used, and been the easiest to work with. Sedona was probably the only other CRM that had comparable flexibility and could do some of the things we do in HubSpot, but the interface was much older and clunkier (it was also more industry specific). HubSpot CRM is the best CRM tool I've used over the last decade of experiences across a number of companies.