Item: HubSpot CRM
Rating: 7
Author: John E. Miller, MBA

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

HubSpot CRM is our main CRM platform at the moment. We use it to store all our client contact information and engagements. We also use it to help us keep track offuture scheduled engagements with clients so that we ensure that our clients are receiving a good (and appreciated) number of contacts from us. We also use it for our list creation and sorting for marketing purposes. We have a listing of all out partners and projects and the nature of the relationship with those partners and the progress of the projects we have with them.

Pros and Cons

The interface is pretty user friendly, location of the different features isnt hard to find.
Not too techy, so I dont need to moonlight as a computer programmer to create fields, lists, and tasks.
The seem to cover everything, it is pretty industry agnostic, whereas you can find/or create what you need to support your business.

I wish that more data can be automatically pulled just from a Linkedin, Facebook, or Twitter profile. Another platform Insightly automatically inputs information once you capture a linkedin profile.
It's waaaaay too segmented for price point. Because its industry agnostic, you may not be able to access all the features you need in order to conduct business. Like, sometimes I am curious about what I just bought and the services I get from that?
I wish there was some à la carte feature so I can pick and pay for the things that I need. Sometimes it feels as though its an Xfinity feel, where you have to buy 12 things just to get the 1 thing you actually need.
No payment services for Financial services businesses. Stripe won't give permissions for it, didn't know that until after I bought into a contract.
The contract to stay on for a year or suffer penalty, it shouldn't be there.

Return on Investment

Well, I cannot speak to how is added to ROI but it has made the firm more efficient. Productivity is up say 24%

Usability

It is much easier than most of the platforms I have used in the past. But it does miss a few features that every other CRM has had. 1) Relationships between contacts. I cannot effectively or see on a page how many contacts are related to a given person. It would be nice to know if 2 contacts are co-workers or family members. There doesn't seem to be a way to do that. 2) It would be nice if the information could be drawn in from a Linkedin address or other social media platforms. There seems to be a way with business URLs but not Linkedin/FB profiles. 3) The segmentation makes it hard, I don't wish to jump up to the next customer segment, which could be 100s of $$'s just to get access to one thing.

Alternatives Considered

Insightly

Insightly gets it done, but its too wonky and complicated, maybe the appropriate word is modernized. It would seem as though Hubspot is much more user-friendly and has a better dashboard. Although I think Insightly does a better job of capturing or pulling in data from outside social platforms.

Key Insights

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

Are you happy with HubSpot CRM's feature set?

Yes

Did HubSpot CRM live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of HubSpot CRM go as expected?

Would you buy HubSpot CRM again?

Other Software Used

Insightly, Salesforce CMS, Wealthbox CRM

Likelihood to Recommend

Well, it's well suited to capture a lot of data, as much data as you want. If you are looking to be very granular about client data you can absolutely do it. However, in order to do workflows or some industry-specific things, it can be hard to piece that together between the paywalls and segments. As a financial services business, I do not have access to payment serves, its just not allowed at this time. But that's not all Hubspots fault, they go through Stripe and they wont allow it. I like HubSpot CRM and they are working on it but, this is my honest critique at the moment.

It's great because it's not industry specific, but that could also be a problem for you.

Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM