HubSpot CRM For Agencies
Updated March 13, 2019
HubSpot CRM For Agencies
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM
I selected and drove the implementation and adoption of Hubspot CRM in our digital agency, across the sales and marketing organization, which include the agency C-Levels. As an organization focused on targeting and prospecting into executives within Internet Retailer Top 500 companies, Hubspot was positioned as a tool to enable a more robust method of managing our intake and acquisition pipeline, helping us to incorporate up-to-date reporting and dashboarding to visually illustrate our penetration into the IR500. Other business needs included a seamless migration and deduplication of data from Pipedrive (our legacy tool), and the ability to track and record communications with executives at target organizations.
- Hubspot updates the product quickly and regularly, meaning that savvy users can often expect expanded functionality within a relatively short timeframe.
- General ease of data sync and importing means records can be quickly and easily updated (and deduplicated against existing records) once you have the tips and tricks of formatting down.
- Features like integration with Gmail mean that you can track and capture all conversations with target prospects, informing your activities going forward.
- Dedicated support and implementation are vital when you’re a lean team implementing a product, and Hubspot offers these services.
- Building target lists by location, vertical, and even contact role is easy and fast.
- Mass imports and exports take no time at all, meaning you can update swaths of your contact lists to incorporate new data points or changes.
- HubSpot's built-in Insights provide excellent company-level information, anchored to email domain, providing all sorts of vertical and industry information about target companies.
- The ON or OFF nature of tracking email means that you’re not only capturing conversations with prospects, but with anyone you interact with. This can add redundant or undesirable data to your CRM. It would be nice to be more selective with tracking, or have the ability to customize tracking specific types of interactions.
- Setup and Implementation calls were not extensively planned or organized, meaning we spent much of our time with the specialist going over previously discussed user requirements and troubleshooting, rather than implementing our desired state.
- Features and functionalities like data point anchoring for reporting (which were promised during the sales process), were either incomplete or did not function as expected. Once we entered a formal engagement, it was communicated to us that we could not build some of our desired reports as envisioned and that email tracking would only be possible by manually clicking a checkbox in all outgoing messages. This led to further troubleshooting and requirements gathering, taking away from our bank of allotted hours with our implementation specialist.
- Our client success manager was very helpful and friendly, however, no clear communication channels were established outside the CSM. This meant that we couldn’t always be sure where to properly route requests for setup, feature clarification, etc., as some of those responsibilities were not the CSMs.
- Once our requirements became more clear to the Services team, we were informed that we would need to invest in the more expensive version of Hubspot CRM for Premium features and customization, some of which would not be available until an upcoming release.
- We ended up having to manage most of the data migration ourselves, relying on an intern and internal project management to manually de-duplicate contact and company details from Pipedrive.
- Reporting and dashboard-building on outreach activities was cumbersome, and not intuitive, relying on an axis-system of data points that even our Implementation Specialist struggled with at times.
- Hubspot implementation definitely evolved into a much bigger project than initially scoped during the sales cycle. This was not an ideal scenario, but the tool did eventually help us to streamline and sync our acquisition activities once setup was complete. A very positive note is that despite the difficulties noted, Hubspot was very responsive to our requests, using them to inform new version releases and eventually add features such as automated email capture which were very important to our executive team. For the size and nature of our agency, Hubspot eventually delivered on our requirements to an acceptable level, with some caveats.
The ability to incorporate custom fields and objects gives great versatility to Hubspot CRM, however the lack of ability to incorporate a lot of that custom data into reporting and dashboards means that outside of list management, there isn't much upside to relying on custom fields and data as anchors
HubSpot CRM Feature Ratings
Using HubSpot CRM
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