Item: HubSpot CRM
Rating: 9
Author: Nick Ward

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HubSpot [CRM] is used within the sales, account management and marketing areas of EdSmart. It is the central point of knowledge about prospects, customers and suppliers.

Pros and Cons

High levels of automation, particularly of logging emails and calls, ensuring information is accurate and complete.
It has a good balance of structure and customization, allowing the system to fit with specific industries while keeping to some basic rules.
It is cloud based, making it accessible anywhere, and is cleverly integrated into other third party products, including Slack and Google Suite.

There are some little things which go wrong from time to time, as with all software. As a user, the path to follow to report these is not immediately obvious.
The flipside of flexibility and customisability is that things can get cluttered over time. Fields which are no longer used make the properties list cumbersome. It would be beneficial to recommend removal of long unused fields.
It doesn't automatically check email addresses are valid, yet there are third party solutions which do just this. That could be an interesting addition.

Return on Investment

Better organized lead management.
Accuracy in customer information.
Revenue growth.

Usability

Much much better. Used a competitor system at my last place of work, and when I started using HubSpot [CRM] I was in a 'Wow' place. So much more automation and management of customer journey.

Team Alignment Benefits

It has helped significantly. Email campaigns and sales activity is a seamless flow from one to the other.

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Siebel CRM

It is a huge step forward, much better usability and integration with email and marketing.

Key Insights

Do you think HubSpot CRM delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with HubSpot CRM's feature set?

Yes

Did HubSpot CRM live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of HubSpot CRM go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy HubSpot CRM again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Atlassian Confluence, Slack, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Microsoft Excel

[HubSpot CRM] is perfectly suited to a B2B sales environment, particularly IT sales. It is probably less well suited to an environment where sales are being made and prospected with entities which are small or don't have online presence, as a lot of automation is drawn from the online presence of companies in the system.

The wishlist from my last CRM all in my new CRM!

Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM