What is a CRM?
Quite simply, Customer Relationship Management or CRM is business software that gives individuals and teams the tools they need to maximize customer communications and sales initiatives. Genuinely successful marketing efforts are all about building long-term relationships by improving the customer experience before, during, and after a sale. Hubspot can do that, and then some.
Here’s how it works. A CRM solution can help you record new leads, categorize them quickly, and add any relevant information that you can gather. By focusing on the most qualified leads, sales teams can make more informed decisions about the opportunities that they will pursue. By carefully prioritizing their leads, sales pros can close some deals right away while developing marketing strategies for clients that may require some extra nurturing.
How can CRM Help my Business?
In addition to keeping all your contact information organized, a good CRM can help you develop a deeper understanding of your customers and their buying habits, so you can customize offers they are more likely to respond to.
In our highly digitized world, customers expect fast, personalized support when they need it, not just during “regular business hours.” A sound CRM system can help you provide the responsive, quality service that customers have come to expect. Your sales team can see order details and a record of every customer interaction to give customers the answers they need quickly.
Improve products and services by gathering information from a variety of sources across your business segment. For example, knowing what your customers are saying about your brand and your competitors can give you valuable insight that you can use to spot problems early and identify service gaps.
And the best news is that secure, cloud-based CRM software has forever changed the way that sales professionals conduct business. Updating a central database in real-time keeps teams connected, informed, and respond quickly to customer requests. With accurate, up-to-the-minute information about clients and prospects, sales and marketing teams can access details, collaborate, and focus on the most qualified leads.
Who is HubSpot?
Every second of every day, we are bombarded with messages to buy, donate, like, or support. Branding is an inevitable part of everything we watch, read, or listen to. There’s no escaping the clutter, the noise, and gratuitous product placements. But, as fellow graduate students at MIT, Brian Halligan, and Dharmesh Shah noticed consumers were becoming more adept at ignoring ads, dodging telemarketers, and skipping commercials. Marketing tactics have become so abrasive, in your face, and annoying that whole industries have popped up to help consumers circumvent the constant bids for attention.
In 2005, HubSpot was founded by Halligan and Shah to create a sales ecosystem that combined software, education, and community to help businesses, in Halligan’s words, “grow with a conscience, and succeed with a soul.” Today, the inbound movement empowers companies to stop interrupting, start listening and return their focus to the customer.
Inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences specifically designed for them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they may find irrelevant. Inbound marketing forms connections and builds long-term relationships by solving problems.
HubSpot offers marketers everything they need in one place to stay focused on turning a prospect into a customer. This powerful, all-in-one tool combines:
- A Content Management System (CMS)
- A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution
- An email marketing tool
- A social media scheduling tool
- A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool,
- An ads tool
- A chat tool
- And analytics for all of the above
Your job is hard enough without having to juggle complicated sales software, spreadsheets, contact lists, and competing calendars. HubSpot gives you everything you need in one place to develop, cultivate, and document the sales cycle in a shared database. The cloud-based CRM can help your organization work better as a team with one common goal; build relationships and compile and share pertinent data in real-time. In addition, you can share information and collaborate with colleagues simultaneously, saving time, effort, and even a little cash on your expense reports.
With the complete HubSpot CRM platform, marketers can achieve unparalleled alignment with sales to prove ROI and validate investments. Whether it’s strategies, services, or software — HubSpot allows you to scale your company without the unnecessary complexity. HubSpot has everything you need to grow better.
Tools and Workflows
The HubSpot CRM platform has all the automated services you need to develop and implement strategies for simplifying workflows between marketing, sales, operations, and customer service. Stay in touch with your customers, collaborate with internal teams, create engaging content, and stay ahead of the competition with a suite of powerful, scalable tools.
Marketing Hub: Marketing software can help you drive traffic, convert more visitors to buyers, and run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale. Popular features include:
- Lead generation
- Marketing automation
- Analytics
Sales Hub: Sales CRM software gives you deeper insights into prospects and automates tedious tasks so you can close more deals. Popular features include:
- Advanced CRM
- Meeting scheduling
- Quotes
Service Hub: Customer service software keeps you connected to customers and can help you exceed their expectations. Happy customers become brand ambassadors. Popular features include:
- Job tickets
- Customer feedback
- Knowledge base
CMS Hub: Content management software intuitive for marketers, powerful for developers, and gives customers a personalized, secure experience. Popular features include:
- SEO friendly CMS
- Drag-and-drop editor
- SEO recommendations
- Website themes
Operations Hub: Operations software that syncs your apps, cleans customer data, and automates processes — so all your systems and teams work better together. Popular features include:
- Data sync
- Programmable automation
- Data quality automation
Additional Resources
In addition to providing a robust suite of inbound marketing management tools, HubSpot offers a number of educational resources that can help you maximize their effectiveness. Stay up to date with practical sales advice about using social media, A/B testing, and templates to craft more targeted messaging. Learn how to master Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and dispel popular SEO myths with e-books written by field experts. Create customer personas that can result in a deeper understanding of your customers and their buying behaviors.
Write a more effective company narrative and create practical guidelines to ensure that your brand is used consistently across a growing number of customer touchpoints. Using easy-to-follow templates, write blog posts, executive bios, and other original content consumers will actually read.
There are answers to just about any marketing question you can come up with in HubSpot’s resource library. With e-books, webinar courses, articles, and templates for support, your team can master the art of communicating more effectively. Building long-term customer relationships is, after all, what inbound marketing is all about.
How Much Does HubSpot CRM Cost?
HubSpot offers some of its core CRM features free, with the option to purchase additional features that small business owners can add as they grow. There’s no need to pay for features that you don’t need. Unlike some competitors that offer limited access for a 14-day or 30-day free trial, HubSpot users can start inputting their contact information, generating leads, and sending emails as soon as they sign up.
Starter
$45/month with an annual commitment
(Starts at 1000 marketing contacts)
Free tools with increased limits, plus remove HubSpot branding from:
- Forms
- Email marketing
- Landing pages
- Live chat
Get help fast with:
-
Email & in-app support
Professional
$800/month with an annual commitment
(Starts at 2000 marketing contacts)
Starter plus:
- Automate & Personalize Engagement Across Channels
- Omni-channel marketing automation
- ABM tools and automation
- Dynamic personalization
- Multi-language content
- Social media
- Video hosting & management
- Contact and company scoring
- Orchestrate Efficient Campaigns
- Collaboration tools
- Campaign management
- Teams
- Optimize Campaign Conversion
- A/B testing
- Ads optimization events
- Contact create attribution
- Build custom reports
- Website traffic analytics
- Campaign reporting
- Custom reporting
- Salesforce integration
Get Advanced Support:
- Phone support
Enterprise
$3200/month
(Starts at 10,000 marketing contacts)
Professional plus:
Manage Your Teams & Brands
- Single sign-on
- Partitioning
- Hierarchical teams
- User roles
- Field-level permissions
- Email send frequency cap
Extend the Platform
- Custom objects
- Salesforce custom object sync
- Adaptive testing
Advance Your Reporting
- Multi-touch revenue attribution
- Behavioral event triggers and reporting
Predictive lead scoring
Mastering Inbound Methodology
You’ve embraced the inbound methodology, but with limited resources, you’d typically have to hire a number of different consultants to get started, not to mention buy and install several different apps. With HubSpot’s all-in-one platform, support, and resources, you can learn everything you need to cultivate all the opportunities that come from inbound marketing.
With the HubSpot CRM platform, manage all your sales, contacts, content, marketing, and metrics all in one place. Learn with 350K certified professionals at the HubSpot Academy, explore 150 user groups to get accurate time information from other HubSpot users, and see just why HubSpot blogs generate more than 7M monthly visits. Or join 2.6M followers on social media platforms for frequent product and industry updates.
HubSpot offers services to over 113K customers, in six different languages, to at least 120 different countries. If you’re not ready to talk to a salesperson, no problem. Go to the HubSpot Website Grader, type in your URL and email address, and get a performance analysis in seconds to see how you can improve customer experience.
For more payment news and industry insights throughout the week, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.
