There are SO many processes and steps and interconnecting pieces involved in running a business that getting everything to run smoothly and in sync can feel like an overwhelming impossibility. Every department is working on different tasks using different software tools with different goals in mind.
Certain aspects of the business may be thriving while others are suffering, and the cobbled-together patchwork of multiple platforms makes it a futile and thankless task for anyone trying to have a clear understanding of the system as a whole.
This begs the question: how can someone wrangle vital processes like marketing, sales, and customer service together so that everyone in the business is on the same page and cognizant of the big picture? A popular solution to this common headache is the customer relationship management (CRM) platform HubSpot.
Simplifying Your Stress Points
In 2005, MIT students Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah noticed that consumers were not only tired of aggressive marketing techniques, but they were also getting very good at ignoring and avoiding them. This epiphany led to the founding of HubSpot, a CRM tool that focuses more on finding customers that need help rather than those who are vulnerable to the ‘hard sell.’
HubSpot did this by creating five major system ‘hubs’ that each focus on one major aspect of B2C businesses: marketing, sales, service, operations, and content management software (CMS). Each can be used separately, but using all five together allows you to control all related processes in one place. All five hubs are loaded with features specific to that department, along with hundreds of possible integrations and extensions, so that it can be attuned to any business’s distinct operations. No more logging in and out of one system after another to send emails, check conversions, or analyze stats. Everything is in HubSpot.
How Does HubSpot Work?
Businesses can utilize any or all of the HubSpot CRM Platform’s hubs, depending on their needs. Since all hubs are interconnectable, but also work as standalone systems, Small to Medium sized Business (SMBs) can utilize any or all of them to optimize their processes.
The Marketing Hub includes:
- Blog planning and strategy recommendations
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools
- Ad tracking and management
- Social media management
- Video hosting
- Customer activity tracking
- In-depth reporting connecting sales and marketing activities
This hub is perfect for business owners who need to boost their overall marketing strategy by creating written and video content for their website, track statistics, and maintain and cultivate a healthy online presence.
HubSpot’s sales software includes:
- Email templates & tracking
- Document management & tracking
- Call tracking
- Sales automation tools
- Customer activity tracking
- In-depth reporting connecting sales and marketing activities
Sales are king and the sales software hub can monitor every aspect of their journey here. From email marketing to file management, the sales hub can help sales staff and management analyze prospects, conversions, and the strength of the business’ sales points and pitches.
The service hub features a customer portal for:
- Service-related issues
- VoIP calling
- Omni-channel messaging
- A large searchable ‘knowledge base’ for FAQs.
Without a solid customer service plan and platform, even the coolest product on the market won’t get far. That’s why HubSpot’s service hub is so important. It gives your customers a voice and gives you the means to hear them loud and clear. Inquiries, issues, and concerns are monitored, categorized, and routed to your service employees quickly and efficiently through built-in calling and messaging protocols to ensure that you stay on the cutting edge of customer satisfaction.
The operations hub offers:
- A data sync package
- Data quality software that automatically cleans up formatting issues and curates data for reporting.
What’s the great thing about data? It never lies. You can count on math to give you the unvarnished truth about the health of your company, when your gut feeling (or even your staff) may not be telling you the whole story. The operations hub syncs, stores, and displays company data, with oodles of built-in reporting options at your beck and call. How many conversions are you really getting? How effective is your social media strategy? The operations hub can give you the answers to these questions and hundreds more!
Finally, the CMS hub includes:
- A drag-and-drop website builder with themes and templates
- Web hosting
- Custom domain connection
- Blog maker
- Unified CRM that tracks visitors and other statistics.
Need a spiffy new website to catch clients’ eyes? Then you need the CMS hub to help take you across the finish line. Forget about spending weeks painstakingly crafting a site from scratch – the CMS hub has a website builder so easy that anyone can make one. And once it’s done, the hub comes with hosting privileges, a custom domain, stat trackers, and even an included blog creator so that you can start filling your site with your expert voice!
A One-Stop Shop
These products and services that HubSpot offers are all designed to work together so that a business’ marketing, sales, and service efforts can be put into motion on one singular platform and the real-world performance and efficacy of these strategies can also be monitored in the same space. Many of these tasks can be programmed to work behind the scenes as automated processes so that you have more time to focus on the big picture instead of repetitive button clicking.
In other words, you can create and publish a post on a social media platform and then track its impressions and clicks on the same hub. Promotional emails, create automated workflows that trigger certain processes, and track who has (or hasn’t) interacted with your promotion are available at the click of a button. You can create and host a new website, complete with custom domain and fully integrated stat tracking. Even customer complaints have their own section. Pinpoint the issue, resolve it, and communicate with the customer regarding the resolution, all in one place. All these processes can be handled without ever leaving the HubSpot platform.
You Want Options, HubSpot Has Options
As stated earlier, while HubSpot is most effective if all hubs are being utilized, they can be used separately. Beyond its self-contained hubs, it also has four distinct tiers of service. The free tier is a rare industry offering, as other major competitors such as Salesforce do not offer free CRM services. Free membership comes with website pages, blogs, basic SEO recommendations, website analytics, and managed cloud hosting.
HubSpot offers three other premium tiers of varying price, from ‘Starter’ at $23/month to ‘Enterprise’ at $1200/month, with increasingly advanced tools, personalization, and adaptive applications. The customizable nature of HubSpot’s products and services means that the possibilities for streamlining your business mechanisms are nearly endless.
Ultimately, HubSpot’s defining message is short – “simplify” – and its question sweet to the ears of business owners – “What if every task and tool and statistic and metric that you hold dear could all be found and utilized on one platform?” That’s what HubSpot is – a software centerpiece for sales, service, and everything in between.
Gabe Ruzin is a content creator and digital marketer who enjoys writing blogs, solving the mystery of SEO, and working towards creating the perfect social media post someday. He lives in Colorado with his wife, teenage son, four cats, and lots of cat hair. A former movie theater programming director, Gabe loves watching movies, writing film reviews, and wondering why Michael Keaton has never won an Oscar.