Item: HubSpot CRM
Rating: 8
Author: A.J. Guedouar

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Three teams within our organization use the HubSpot CRM: Sales, Marketing, and Customer Support. We transitioned from Pipedrive (competitor) to HubSpot for advantages in lead nurturing, which have been fruitful. HS has helped us develop more targeted campaigns and nurturing workflows, providing our sales team with better-developed leads. Day-to-day work for account executives is also managed through HS, and we've found the platform to be helpful in terms of daily tasks and deal stage management.

Pros and Cons

Easy analytics and reporting.
Good user interface for pipeline management.

The search bar function is lacking, and always pulls up obscure results rather than the obvious term we're looking for.
It seems like the platform experiences niche outages every other week. Nothing detrimental, just annoying.

Return on Investment

Increased transparency between marketing, sales and customer success.
Revenue growth.
Helping onboard new team members more quickly.

Usability

It has a significantly better UX than Salesforce, but not as nice as Pipedrive. It is significantly more powerful than Pipedrive, but seemingly less so than Salesforce. Our sales team is currently moving to SF (not by choice) and the feedback is already quite negative, though the marketing team will remain on HubSpot. Unlike SF however, it doesn't require its own platform engineer which is good for a small company.

Team Alignment Benefits

We've absolutely found this to be true. Lead nurturing and automations have helped us drive better-qualified leads and more traffic to our site, helping reps conduct more product demonstrations and close more revenue. Simple as that. Marketing does a great job building campaigns, and all the sales team has to do is enroll their contacts. It's easy for the two teams to collaborate on activity workflows and optimize time spent by both units.

Alternatives Considered

Pipedrive and Salesforce Lightning Platform (formerly Salesforce App Cloud)

It's got a better UX and the team prefers it for managing their day-to-day, though it tends to do more of the heavy lifting for marketing compared to Salesforce, which is more sales-focused.

Key Insights

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

Yes

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

Shared Contacts for Gmail, Slack, Mailchimp

Likelihood to Recommend

Hubspot is well suited to bridge the gap between marketing and sales (it is admittedly more powerful from the marketing side). We've been able to significantly improve our lead nurturing and marketing campaigns (specifically ABM campaigns) leading to more inbound leads, and better-qualified leads.

Good UX and Team Favorite Out of Three CRMs

Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM