HubSpot - Outstanding CRM for single operators and small businesses
September 15, 2017
HubSpot - Outstanding CRM for single operators and small businesses
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot Sales
I am a sales operations consultant and needed a CRM system to manage my contacts and business activity. HubSpot sales does everything I had as a bare minimum requirement and quite a bit more and would recommend it as an excellent CRM to anyone working as an individual or managing a small sales force.
- Excellent e-mail and calendar integration with Gmail. I believe it also does it with Outlook.
- Templates are excellent for emails. I use a standard template to reach out to people that have downloaded collateral or signed up to my mailing list which I then customise based on my research. It really saves time by having a standard format with some verbiage I've written.
- Super easy to customise fields and add items to picklists, etc.
- I really like the ability to know who has viewed my documents and track that.
- It tells me prospects in terms of which domains are on my website.
- With a growing organisation there is a limit to the size and complexity of business that would use HubSpot. Once you want to look at things integrated company and contact data, incentive automation, sales enablement content platforms, CPQ, etc you will really be looking to move to Salesforce. That being said, Why buy a Ferrari when you just need a bicycle? Hubspot is an excellent solution to provide small, immature sales businesses a way to track activity and deals.
- Support for free licenses isn't great (which is fair) but finding training material isn't as intuitive as it should be.
- Can't think of any others!
- Better efficiency to track customer conversations (always look in HubSpot not Gmail) as I can also see who has opened - saving loads of time
- Reminders setup mean I never forget to dos as well as following up on early stage deals to never forget anything
I have used Salesforce Sales Cloud extensively. It still remains the absolute gold standard for CRM. There are hundreds of companies who have built solutions to plug into it, most sales reps will be familiar with using it, and it really is great. If you are a medium sized business and on the fence, consider if you will use Sales Cloud you need someone to be a full-time sales admin/developer (to get the most out of customising) as well as full-time sales operations - to manage process and data analysis. Trying to this on a shoestring would be very silly. HubSpot is a fantastic program your business can grow with for years and the huge plus is when you decide to move to Salesforce, your HubSpot data is exportable and would make that possible.
When I was looking for something for my personal use I looked and evaluated the following:
SalesforceIQ - WAAAAAY too expensive for what it is and the CRM functionality is total rubbish - would NOT recommend this as a CRM OR as an email tracking tool bolt on to Salesforce
Google ProsperWorks - integrates nicely with GSuite, not sure about Outlook. I felt it didn't have the functionality I wanted and the price point wasn't there.
Zoho - too complicated to setup and too simple to be helpful, didn't use extensively but didn't like almost immediately
When I was looking for something for my personal use I looked and evaluated the following:
SalesforceIQ - WAAAAAY too expensive for what it is and the CRM functionality is total rubbish - would NOT recommend this as a CRM OR as an email tracking tool bolt on to Salesforce
Google ProsperWorks - integrates nicely with GSuite, not sure about Outlook. I felt it didn't have the functionality I wanted and the price point wasn't there.
Zoho - too complicated to setup and too simple to be helpful, didn't use extensively but didn't like almost immediately