Item: HubSpot CRM
Rating: 10
Author: Jamie Arias

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a licensed online technology sale trade school based in Arizona, and we help untapped communities all over the US to break into tech sales.

We use HubSpot in many ways at Elevate:

We are an approved education institution through HubSpot, so our students use it daily to do cold outreach to potential employers. They send emails, make calls and move their deals through their pipeline.
Students are also required to get HubSpot certified, and they share those certifications on their LinkedIn profiles.
We use HubSpot for our Top Applicant, Inc. d/b/a Elevate side of the school to run our outbound to students. We make calls, use form signups, and send emails and email campaigns all through our HubSpot.
Elevate employees use HubSpot to connect with our Apollo to do outbound outreach to cities' government agencies and to bring on new hiring partners and internship opportunities for our students.
We also use HubSpot marketing for our outbound ad campaigns for Meta and Google.

We rely on HubSpot to send out payment requests and use Docusign, which is also connected to our HubSpot. We are getting ready to launch our new website and HubSpot forms, and the overall CRM functions will be an integral part of that.

Pros and Cons

Track our student enrollments
Tracks inbound leads for our marketing team
Provides a learning tool for our students breaking into tech sales
It helps us track our outbound lead flow for students, hiring partners and influencers

The dialing feature could be a bit easier to setup
We would like to see the dialing option available in the student portal
Adding leads manually could be done with less moving between the 'company', the 'deal' and the 'contact' screens
We would like to see a clear space to add more phone numbers because phone numbers are crucial to SDR outreach

Return on Investment

Shorter deal cycles, definitely
It has streamlined our student enrollment process
It has streamlined our partner deal cycle

Usability

I have used Pipedrive, Salesforce, and many other CRMs throughout my sales career, and it is the easiest to adopt, and I love using it to teach it to my students who are moving into SDR roles. The training and certificates HubSpot offers and the opportunity to use the Enterprise portal for students are more robust than any of the other CRMs I have used. HubSpot is also much simpler and more intuitive than SalesForce was when I used it.

Alternatives Considered

Pipedrive

HubSpot provides a much more robust product than Pipdrive. It also offers the education component that we didn't have with Pipdrive. I also looked at Salesforce, which offered a much more complicated learning tool for our students. Hands down, HubSpot is the best choice for both our business and our student learning platform.

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?

Yes

Did implementation of HubSpot CRM go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy HubSpot CRM again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Apollo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, LeadIQ, Outplay

Likelihood to Recommend

HubSpot is suited for anyone tracking leads and deals in technology sales but may be too much for a solopreneur who is running an event-based business.

Honestly, though, anyone running a business can use some part or all of the HubSpot functions. I imagine it would be a great tool for digital marketing agencies and for them to set up their clients on the platform. I also see HubSpot helping secondary education streamline the student enrollment process and making that CX run smoothly.

HubSpot for Tech Sales and for Education is #1

Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM