There’s a lot of industry lingo floating around. HubSpot is a CRM growth platform with a lot of features for businesses to grow; it’s difficult to sum up all of these features in a single statement. So, today I’ve decided to break down its features and give some insights into its core components.
Let’s discuss HubSpot CRM in detail:-
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a one-stop CRM platform that caters to all the requirements of a marketing and sales team.
It is a cloud-based CRM that helps your marketing and sales crew to complement each other, promote sales assistance, increase ROI, and improve your inbound marketing approach to produce more competent prospects and close the existing ones.
What Do We Mean By CRM?
It is critical to be cognizant of your client’s needs and demands in today’s dynamic digital marketing age. As a result, you must be in the good graces of your buyers, clientele, and consumers in order to actually flourish and impose supremacy in your sector.
So, you might have asked yourself, “What does it take to build a loyal customer base for your company?”
Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationship management is a term that refers to the monitoring of customer relationships. It is the ideal tool for managing all customer relationships, increasing business efficiency, improving sales close rates, and providing 360-degree view of your contacts.
There is no doubt that currently, there are a lot of different types of CRM software available in the market. However, it’s an entirely different experience while using HubSpot. If you are getting curious about this platform, make sure to try it firsthand.
Why is CRM Important For Your Business?
You might be running a business, and be quite happy with outcomes. So, you might be thinking “Why should one opt for a CRM platform?”
Well to answer this question, you need to ask yourself another question, which is “Is my business growing?” and “Is it growing at a respectable pace?”
And if you have doubts while answering these questions, then you might be in a dire need of a comprehensive CRM platform. Any CRM platform will help you to better evaluate visitors. And once you build that subconscious bond, it will be easier for you to cater to the requirements of your customers.
Let’s go over some of the lucrative features of a comprehensive CRM platform:-
1. Ideal Assessment Tool
Any CRM system will help you gain a historical perspective while evaluating your clients. Since their details are automatically stored in your database, you can analyze their behavior and reaction towards your products. This will help you in reducing your time spent messing around with previous files. Moreover, since you have a brief understanding of their requirements, you can do your homework before approaching them. This will also reduce your dependency on intuition.
2. Forecasting
CRM’s store all of your customer’s information, making it simple to monitor a customer’s progress. Furthermore, it will be easier to determine which customers are likely to be profitable. This might also save some of your customer acquisition expenses.
3. Better Grouping
Grouping your customers is very important, as their requirements might depend on numerous factors. And without properly understanding what they need, you can’t make your business profitable. Customers are divided into numerous categories in CRM systems, such as location, business sectors, target locality, etc. This way, you can give adequate attention to each of your client groups.
If your business approach seems pleasing to your customers, they will definitely look forward to staying in business with you in the near future.
4. Better Customer Acquisition
A CRM system is essential not only for dealing with existing clients but also for obtaining new ones. The procedure begins with recognizing a prospect and entering all relevant information into a CRM system. After that, the Sales personnel then attempt to gain business from these consumers by checking up with them and turning them into successful contracts.
And by using CRM software, you can automate and personalize these follow-up emails, so that you can never miss any potential leads.
5. Cost-Efficient
A primary feature of any CRM platform is that it is incredibly cost-effective. The benefit of a well-implemented CRM system is that it reduces the need for manual labor, requiring fewer people to administer and fewer assets to maintain.
So unlike the traditional business approach, you don’t have to hire a lot of individuals to do basic operations in your company.
What Do We Know About HubSpot CRM?
Before going further into the features of HubSpot CRM, let me clear out a common misconception.
A lot of people tend to ask this question ” Can we use the HubSpot CRM for free?”.
And the answer to that question is a big fat YES!.
The misunderstanding is most likely due to the fact that HubSpot provides various optional add-ons to the standard subscription model that charges money. However, the basic free version provides all the elements to get you started with inbound marketing. This can be an ideal tool for small-scale businesses. You can shift to paid versions, once you get the hang of it.
But, you might need to shift towards the paid version sooner, if your business has already scaled to a certain extent.
HubSpot’s marketing automation features have proven to be game-changing for numerous companies. Now, with the advent of their free CRM, the HubSpot ecosystem has become even more appealing, since it can cater to almost all the advanced software requirements. However, to use these high-end features you might need some level of training and expertise.
It will be beneficial if you can hire a HubSpot specialist in the beginning who can share his knowledge with your teams. This will also help you to be self-dependent in the near future.
What makes the HubSpot CRM Stand Out?
Until now, you might have developed a brief understanding of Hubspot CRM. Now let’s take a look at some of the perks you will be getting if you are opting for the Hubspot CRM.
1. Unifying Data
With Hubspot, you can gather all your datasets in a unified system, however, a truly unique aspect of using a CRM occurs after the information has been gathered. As you can group these contacts based on a number of parameters. For instance, you can link particular contacts to their enterprises, the agreements you’re working on with them, active projects, and so on.
This makes monitoring and analyzing your contacts very easy. As you can immediately know what’s going on with your contacts. And apart from that, all the important information will be recorded in the machine learning algorithms, which can help you deal with similar clients.
2. Detailed Dashboard Of Your Sales Funnel
In the HubSpot CRM, you will be able to see a comprehensive dashboard, which shows more than just consumer details. As HubSpot will be the core platform for your sales and marketing strategies, you will be able to see all your sales funnels directly from the dashboard. Moreover, you will be able to analyze all the moving elements of your sales funnel.
These elements might include the screening phase, booking a demo, and even the final acquisition. So, even if your leads get stuck in the middle of your funnel, you will get to know about them right away.
3. Integrating Third-Party Applications
We all know, for maintaining a flourishing business you can’t depend upon a single element.
Your company will require more software than just a powerful CRM. You’re probably already utilizing third-party software for eCommerce, inventory monitoring, emailing, strategic planning, posting proposals, and other tasks.
If there’s client information floating around on other applications that HubSpot can’t access, a technology created to gather all your client info together isn’t particularly useful. Fortunately, HubSpot can link to all of the most prominent business software solutions via native and third-party connections, allowing them to work together as a single entity.
In fact, HubSpot’s reputation is so widespread that many suppliers offer their own connectors so that their services may successfully interact with HubSpot.
4. Improves Communications
If your business depends on inbound marketing, you will have to give priority to customer interaction. There’s no way around it!
The HubSpot CRM can help you to improve customer engagement in two ways.
The first way revolves around tracking your documents. The HubSpot CRM will send your notifications, whenever your content is opened and viewed. And in some cases, you can also identify the viewer if you’ve placed a requirement to enter their email, for accessing your content. Naturally, all of this power is built within a platform that makes file storing and sharing operations very simple.
The second is the HubSpot CRM’s live chat feature. This feature allows you and your team to interact with website viewers in real-time. One of the most significant advantages of integrating chat with a CRM is that the program will recognize who you are speaking with. If the client is an existing one, you’ll already have all of their details. And we all know that the more your database grows, the better will be your customer acquisition.
Benefits of HubSpot CRM
Now that we have a brief idea about HubSpot CRM, let’s see some of its major benefits and the value it can provide for your business in the long run:-
- Free of Cost
Before discussing anything else, one of its obvious advantages is that it has a free version. And, even though it is free, still it includes a variety of features that are an excellent place to start and familiarize yourself with its CRM platform. Of Course, you can find numerous free alternatives and tools available online that provide various perks to company owners, but their functionalities are quite limited. In comparison, the HubSpot CRM comes with a robust set of built-in features and capabilities right out of the box.
- Social Management Features
In the current digital era, a lot of firms depend on online social networking platforms to promote their products. And if you are looking forward to making a strong social media presence, HubSpot will be there to help you out. It supports various third-party integrations such as Linkedin, Insta, Facebook, etc.
You can filter out those clients’ data that are important to your business and tailor your emailing campaigns based on their needs and preferences. And, it will also allow you to monitor all the online engagements and will help you to create useful reports based on those interactions.
- Website Integration
Having an attractive website is one of the primary requirements of any business. As you have redirected your leads to your website to give them a good idea about your offerings. However, you can’t integrate your website into the free version. For that, you have to opt for the premium plan.
This website Integration creature gives you access to a lot of additional functionalities to manage your website. Moreover, it will allow you to keep track of small details such as who visited your website, or what they were looking for on your website. You can use this information, and make modifications to your marketing initiatives.
- Communicating Tracking
Communication tracking is also another important perk offered by the HubSpot CRM. It helps you to keep track of the details of your potential clients’ and develops a pipeline for sending emails directly from the CRM interface. There’s also a function that allows you to monitor and record your client’s phone calls. You will be able to draw useful insights from this data, which will help you to make lucrative decisions in the future.
Features of HubSpot CRM
There are an infinite number of tools that a marketer might employ on a daily basis. However, the true value of any successful marketing solution can be boiled down to three factors: It should increase productivity, can work in harmony with all the departments, and, most crucially, assist marketers to optimize their time and effort.
Let’s see some of the features of HubSpot CRM, which make it worth your time:-
Important Features In Sales Hub
- The HubSpot CRM comes with a unique customizable deal dashboard, which gives you an overview of real-time changes in your sales funnel.
- Email monitoring, conference management, live chat, and lead tracking are just a few of the features available.
- Compatibility with Gmail and Outlook, as well as email campaigns, make it simple to email and engage with your customers.
- Features such as email reminders, business analytics, and funnel tracking will allow you to have a clear idea about how your leads are behaving toward your initiatives.
- Client deals and sales activity are automatically logged and updated.
- A built-in activity channel that sends out reminders as soon as a customer reads an email, opens any link, or saves a key document.
- You can record around 1 million contacts in the database.
- Using the HubSpot CRM, you can also record telemarketing calls, generate emails, plan activities, and assign duties.
Important Features In Marketing Hub
- You can interact with the visitors in real-time using the live-chatting feature.
- Various features for managing your advertisements and campaigns.
- The HubSpot CRM also allows you to create your own customized landing pages and surveys to attract more leads.
- You can also track how many times your link has been opened, or analyze your click-through ratios for all your marketing campaigns.
- A unique collection of email templates, which can take care of all the stages of your client’s journey.
Important Features In Customer Service Hub
- For instant customer service, you can use the live chat option.
- You can keep all your interactions structured using a team email and a conversational inbox.
- Ticketing can be used to keep track of clients and reply to them fast. It can greatly improve the response rates of your entire customer service department.
- Email templates that boost your team’s productivity
- Detailed reports on tickets that have been closed, can suggest more areas for growth.
Important Features In Operations Hub
- The HubSpot CRM has compatibility with a lot of third-party integrations.
- The process for integration is quite simple and straightforward.
- Apart from the integration, it also has a plethora of in-built tools for managing your day-to-day business operations.
- Detailed dashboards for tracking contacts from your sales staff.
- You can customize your KPIs which are Important for your business, and make modifications to have a better output from analyzing them.
What Can You Expect in The HubSpot Paid Plans?
We already know that the free version of HubSpot offers you a lot of features. However, it has some limitations, which can come in the way of efficiently scaling your business.
So, it might be a good idea to opt for the HubSpot paid plans in the later stages. Let’s go over some of the main features of the paid versions of HubSpot CRM:-
1. Fewer Limits
The HubSpot CRM has three paid plans, and with every tier more and more restrictions will be removed. For instance, the free edition lets you use only 5 different emailing templates, whereas the advanced version has unlimited emailing templates. Even though the free CRM is completely functional, the majority of the sales-specific capabilities are restricted. These limitations are adjusted as plans are upgraded.
2. Automation Tools
The HubSpot CRM made its name in the corporate world through its marketing automation features. Therefore, it’s only natural that you can enjoy the full extent of those features in the paid versions. With each upgrade, the number of automation features that you can use will increase.
3. Tracking Records
We can’t improve ourselves today, without knowing what we have done on the previous day!
Setting and tracking objectives can help your team be more productive. The HubSpot CRM provides a wonderful way to maintain a record of your team’s performance chart. You can also evaluate this data by HubSpot’s inbuilt analytics features.
4. Custom Reporting
Keeping up with the theme of tracking your progress, the paid versions of HubSpot CRM allows you to generate bespoke insights that are tailored to your specific business requirements. You can find exactly what you are looking for and make well-informed decisions for the benefit of your business.
5. Email Sequencing
The sales email sequences tool in HubSpot lets you create a series of customized, scheduled emails to deliver to prospects. You can directly set a series of emails that will be sent to your leads once they are in your sales funnel. By using this automated approach, you will never miss out on any conversion opportunities.
How Much Does HubSpot CRM Cost?
Apart from the free tools, HubSpot offers three paid plans. These plans are namely Starter plan, Professional Plan, and Enterprise plan for each of its hubs.
You will be starting with some of the basic features of the free version. After which, the features and functionalities will keep on adding, with every upgrade.
To know about HubSpot CRM pricing and features offered in each plan, here is the HubSpot 2022 pricing guide. In summary, HubSpot Starter plans start at $25 per month, the Professional plans at $400 per month and the Enterprise plans at $1200 per month.
Final Thoughts
If you even have a brief understanding of inbound marketing, you can’t deny the sheer amount of features offered by HubSpot CRM. And after reading this article you might be intrigued about trying some of its features.
If you are new to this platform and are looking forward to learning some of its features, then feel free to contact us and book a demo session about HubSpot CRM.
