1. Home
  2. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
  3. HubSpot CRM Reviews
  4. User Review of HubSpot CRM
HubSpot works for an economic development non-profit, not just sales companies
July 07, 2023

HubSpot works for an economic development non-profit, not just sales companies

Matt Zimo | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM

We're an economic development non-profit, and we use HubSpot to track each of our unit's projects. We market our state to companies looking to relocate or expand using marketing tools and sales activities and deals. We also use hubspot to track and categorize all of the bioscience companies in our state. We have hundreds of custom properties for each of our different units, but the conditional logic on the record pages makes it easy to only show the relevant properties on each record.
  • email marketing
  • deal pipelines
  • custom properties
  • simple/easy interfaces
  • it would be nice to be able to send marketing emails to companies
  • associating objects only has room for a label, but it would be helpful if there could be a brief (one line) description as well. For example, we use the "former employee" association between people and companies, but it would be nice if we could add something like "(2010-2015)" as well, so we can know the most recent former company.
  • Reports output all company and people names to lower case. It seems like it should be easy to keep the case of the records in reports.
  • more engaged user base
  • more expensive than our previous solution
Like all software, you have to know where to look to do some things if they aren't glaringly obvious. But the records/index views are very easy to use and understand. The interface is appealing. The biggest problems are with the integrations with Outlook email and calendar. Syncing meetings that you didn't create doesn't seem possible, and it's rather cumbersome to log emails that you received.
InterAction was very slow with product updates, didn't have a built-in marketing system, and the interface was really aged.

Insightly looked great and our team was deciding between it and hubspot. In the end, we went with hubspot because we were told that it could do something (pre-fill form landing pages based on a single url query parameter) that Insightly couldn't. That didn't strictly turn out to be true. Insightly was even easier to use than HubSpot right off the bat, and I'm sure we would have been just as satisfied with it had we chosen that CRM instead.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of HubSpot CRM go as expected?

No

Would you buy HubSpot CRM again?

Yes

If you're a sales or marketing organization, HubSpot really shines. You wouldn't even have to customize your instance. It integrates well with lots of other apps either natively or via make.com/zapier. It makes it easy to have a single source of truth, which all the other systems feed into. However, if your organization needs to keep some information confidential, then hubspot is pretty difficult. You have to really work hard to make only certain teams access specific objects/pipelines.

HubSpot CRM Feature Ratings

8.0
Customer data management / contact management
9
Workflow management
10
Opportunity management
10
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)
6
Quote & order management
8
Interaction tracking
5
8.5
Case management
10
Call center management
Not Rated
Help desk management
7
10.0
Lead management
10
Email marketing
10
9.0
Task management
10
Billing and invoicing management
Not Rated
Reporting
8
8.5
Forecasting
Not Rated
Pipeline visualization
8
Customizable reports
9
10.0
Custom fields
10
Custom objects
10
API for custom integration
10
8.0
Role-based user permissions
6
Single sign-on capability
10
10.0
Social data
10
Social engagement
10
10.0
Marketing automation
10
Compensation management
Not Rated
9.0
Mobile access
9

Evaluating HubSpot CRM and Competitors

Yes - LexisNexis InterAction
InterAction was our on-premises CRM that didn't handle project/deal management very well. It was costly to maintain and update and had an ugly interface. It also coudn't do math, so reporting was limited.

Vuture was the marketing application that worked with InterAction. Replacing two subscriptions for 1 was an easy choice. Although vuture handled event registration much better than HubSpot.
  • Integration with Other Systems
  • Ease of Use
Each of our business units work with other applications to do their main work (giving loans to start-ups, awarding grants to researchers, promoting our state to companies looking to expand or move, hosting events at our conference center). That creates a lot of information silos. We want to break down those silos so that we don't end up "double dipping" on the same companies/people without each others' knowledge.
I would want to demo the outlook email and calendar plugins. I would also try to set up custom objects and see how we can track relationships between different objects.