What is HubSpot?

Quick overview of HubSpot

HubSpot is a powerful CRM (customer relationship management) system that enables businesses of all sizes to grow. HubSpot is made up of five Hubs, these are: Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Operations Hub, and CMS Hub.

Most B2B (business to business) companies can run their entire business on HubSpot, without the need for any other sales, marketing, website, or service tools. Essentially, HubSpot is a whole business platform and is much more than a CRM.

We were going to make our own video to give you a quick overview, but this video by HubSpot does a much better job than we would.

HubSpot 'Hubs' and what they do

A 'hub' in HubSpot is a suite of tools desired for a particular business function. These functions in HubSpot are:

• Marketing
• Sales
• Service
• Operations
• CMS

Marketing Hub

Marketing Hub is designed for marketers and specifically developed around the inbound marketing methodology. The number of features in Marketing Hub depend on your subscription tier, with free marketing tools available all the way through to advanced marketing automation. The top features in Marketing Hub are:

• Ad Management across Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google Ads
• Email marketing, higher tiers also give you access to email previews and dynamic email marketing content too
• Marketing automation across all marketing channels
• SEO to help you build search authority
• Live chat and chatflows with lead scoring
• Landing pages built within HubSpot
• and so much more.

Looking to setup HubSpot Marketing Hub? Speak to us first and we'll get you going in no time. We can also help you with traditional digital marketing too.

Sales Hub

Sales Hub has been built to help sales teams grow. It's an all-in-one east to use platform with features designed for busy sales teams. Aimed at reducing friction and ensuring sales alignment across teams, Sales Hub is the ultimate tool to help you focus on your customers instead of tripping over messy internal processes.

The most powerful HubSpot Sales Hub features are:

• Document tracking, that shows you who looking at your documents and for how long
• Email tracking, so you can see when your prospect opens an email and engages with it
• Email templates, so your teams can move faster and remain on-brand at all times
• Sales automation, to make your teams more efficient and remove repetitive admin work
• Pipeline and deal management, to keep deals moving and teams aligned on progress
• Meeting and task scheduling, to delight your customers by letting them book their own meetings with you

Sales teams that use HubSpot see efficiencies almost straight away. Want to see how powerful it could be for you business? Book a HubSpot demo with us and we'll show you.

Service Hub

Take your customer service to the next level with HubSpot Service Hub, the most powerful customer service software on the market. This hub enables you to delight your customers with simple and easy to use service tools.

• Build a secure customer portal to empower your customers
• Run an NPS Survey with HubSpot
• Develop a Knowledge Base to help customers support themselves
• Bring in Live Chat and chat bots to help customers and your team
• Get feedback from customers with customer feedback surveys, all within the HubSpot platform

Service Hub is designed to bring customers closer to your business, and deligh them even more with clever tools that empower them.

Operations Hub

The newest 'Hub' to join the HubSpot platform, HubSpot Operations Hub is designed to keep data in check, empower integrations, and ensure integrity across your business systems. For businesses looking to automate, Operations Hub is essential to ensure your business runs smoothly and your data retains integrity. Top features and benefits of Operations Hub are:

• Programmable automation and workflow extensions to tools like Slack, Asana, and Zoom
• Keep customer data clean with data quality automation
• Keep data in datasets so it's approachable by all teams and even easier to use

Operations Hub is still finding its feet within HubSpot, but mainly off-the-shelf HubSpot Integrations are available now in the HubSpot App Marketplace, which is easy to use and install.

CMS Hub

Did you know that you can build a fully optimised and powerful website with HubSpot? No? Well you can with HubSpot CMS Hub. In fact, this website you're on now has been built with HubSpot. HubSpot's Content Management System is easy to use for beginners and hugely powerful for more advanced users.

CMS Hub Professional is the essential CMS Hub for growing websites, enabling more pages to be built and even better features to be enabled across the website. As it's all built within HubSpot, there's a powerful variety of features that help engage customers and improve conversions:

• There's a whole library of HubSpot website themes to choose from
• Your CRM is fully integrated, so you can see if your contacts browse your website
• It's drag and drop
• However it is more expensive than something like Wix or SquareSpace, but it's much more powerful

If you're looking to go all-in on HubSpot (like we are) then you'll love HubSpot CMS Hub. It's fast as well, so your customers will be delighted by fast-loading webpages and easy to read blogs.

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What are the benefits of HubSpot?

We've created an in-depth overview of the benefits of HubSpot, but here are our top five HubSpot benefits:

1. Keep everyone aligned

As HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform, it helps to keep teams aligned around a single source of truth. Customer data is in one place, with email marketing, sales emails, customer service tickets, website visits, and document views, all in one place.

2. Easy reporting and analytics

Reporting within HubSpot is easy to setup and saves hours across teams by enabling automated reporting. There are over 200 built-in reports and over 20 pre-built dashboards. You can integrate Google Analytics and Search Console with HubSpot too, for brilliant SEO reporting. If your website is on Wordpress, there's also built-in Wordpress analytics too.

3. Powerful marketing tools

There are not many tools where you can get email marketing, social media scheduling, ad management, account-based-marketing, and more all in one place. HubSpot brings it all together, empowering marketers to be more efficient and bring in better results through CRM-powered marketing.

4. Helps you delight your customers

Customers love businesses who use HubSpot, as HubSpot has customer service at heart. Want to send a follow-up email to someone who left a bad support ticket review? Easy! Our favourite feature is the new Customer Portal feature in HubSpot, which empowers customers even further.

5. Unbelievably good support

There are 3 main options for HubSpot customer support: live chat, email, and phone call. The team are incredibly friendly, knowledgeable, and offer a huge amount of go-to support on the Knowledge Base too. We've yet to see a global company with better support than HubSpot.

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HubSpot Alternatives

In our opinion, there is no real alternative to HubSpot on the market right now. Well, apart from maybe Salesforce but even then you're not getting an all-in-one system that does it all.

It may look intimidating for big businesses, with multiple systems, to move to HubSpot but that's why the 'Hub' layout makes it much easier.

For example, if you're using Salesforce and Zen Desk, you could use Marketing Hub as your marketing tool and sync to the other tools. Or, you could migrate from Salesforce to HubSpot easily and leave Zen Desk in place; or you could migrate everything across. It's flexible and it's up to you.

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Integrate with HubSpot

In 2018 HubSpot moved from being a product to becoming a platform, and this has enabled hundreds of integrations with other awesome providers.

Popular integrations include:

• Bullhorn and HubSpot Integration
• Drift and HubSpot Integration
• Zapier and HubSpot Integration

Need a hand with integrating your systems? As a HubSpot Partner Agency, we can help.

Alternatives to consider

• Zoho CRM
• Pipedrive
• Salesforce
• ActiveCampaign