Streamline Your Sales and Marketing Efforts with Hubspot CRM: Unleash the Power of Integrated Customer Relationship Management.
HubSpot has a comprehensive free edition that outshines many paid CRMs. This sleek CRM works across marketing, sales, and customer service teams. It’s an excellent option for businesses looking to improve customer relationship management.
We compiled our extensive research and experience with the good and bad software into this review to help you decide if it’s right for you.
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What Is HubSpot CRM?
HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM platform that helps companies of all types and sizes track and nurture leads and analyze business metrics.
It suits B2B and B2C businesses across multiple industries like retail, real estate, marketing, sales, construction, accounting, and more. HubSpot facilitates monitoring outbound and inbound leads, sales pipeline management with automation, leads and contact management, email campaigning, and tracking.
HubSpot is the perfect solution for businesses seeking powerful, easy-to-use CRM software, with the lightweight but competent free-forever plan making the platform accessible for smaller or newer businesses.
Hubspot CRM Review — Features & Benefits
HubSpot’s best features are heavy on the sales and marketing side, which makes sense since the company started with those areas as the focus, but it also offers some real benefits to users wanting to take advantage of the free CRM exclusively. This mix of paid and free features differentiates HubSpot from other CRMs.
1. Quick Setup, Great Interface
While there’s always more you can do and customize within HubSpot, this SaaS provider makes it easy to set up the essentials. No-code integration with Outlook and Gmail is available, even at the free level, and click-to-install template add-ons could be easier to use.
Even the tiniest business should quickly master inputting or importing contacts and setting up users, thanks not only to the easy syncing but also to the stellar user interface.
2. Click-to-Call and Call Recording
You and your sales agents can call clients directly from the CRM system and record the entire call. The call is then automatically placed in the client’s timeline, making it accessible and searchable for future reference.
3. HubSpot Academy
HubSpot Academy is filled with resources for industrious DIY-capable businesses. You can access an extensive catalog of training materials, technical documentation, certification overviews, courses, and community user groups and discussions from the HubSpot Academy portal.
4. Sales Hub
Users who opt to use the Sales Hub can effectively round out their CRM and streamline every aspect of the sales, marketing, and customer relationship management process. The Sales Hub makes it possible to track and sort prospects (and create custom views of that information), send automated emails regarding prospects to the sales team, and gain insights through advanced email tracking and targeted email sequencing.
It also has built-in reporting and predictive lead scoring, ideal for companies with limited in-house data expertise.
5. HubSpot for Startups
HubSpot makes a concerted effort to appeal to startups, and one major way it does that is through the HubSpot for Startups program. While the application standards, qualifications, and acceptance rates are not publicly listed, HubSpot advertises that eligible startups may receive deep discounts on its SaaS solutions.
The numbers advertised are “90% off HubSpot software for eligible seed-stage and 50% off HubSpot software for eligible Series A startups.”
6. HubSpot Templates
The HubSpot Marketplace is a repository for free templates that can be added for use across HubSpot’s product line. Popular add-ons include landing page templates, blog templates, email templates, and bundled packages of templates ideal for new businesses.
While templates like this may seem minor, other CRMs offer much more limited templates, even with their paid subscriptions, and SMBs without in-house design teams often rely on timesaving templates.
7. Marketing Hub
The Marketing Hub is an optional add-on to the free CRM, and it has a tiered pricing structure like HubSpot’s other paid SaaS solutions. The Marketing Hub is where you can access the lead analytics dashboard and attribution reports, as well as blog and content creation tools.
The Marketing Hub is home to email marketing and social media tools, admin user roles, calls to action, marketing automation, and Salesforce integration. HubSpot’s inbound marketing features are worth a look for companies wanting to adopt a CRM with lots of marketing potential.
Key takeaway: HubSpot is an easy-to-use CRM system that allows you to call customers and record those calls within the software and provides various templates. You can add marketing and sales hubs that make the system even more useful.
How HubSpot CRM Stacks Up
Is HubSpot CRM Right for You or Your Business?
If you plan to start with customer relationship management for the first time, HubSpot CRM is an excellent choice as it is easy to set up and use. Created specifically for small and mid-sized businesses, its tools are designed to solve their unique challenges, like small team sizes and limited resources.
The HubSpot Free plan likely has enough tools to get you started. As you get more comfortable and proficient in using CRM, you can add tools or move to other paid tiers as required.
Hubspot CRM Review — Pros & Cons
Pros
- Core CRM software is free
- Real-time lead behavior notification
- Personalized email sequences for leads as well as existing customers
- Competitive free-forever plan
- Simple to use and understand
- Over 300 third-party app integrations
Cons
- Per-user plans can get expensive for small businesses
- Only one email per contact
- No telephone support with the free plan
Hubspot CRM Review — FAQ
What is CRM?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is software that helps businesses organize, manage, and maintain customer and prospect relationships.
Does my business need a CRM?
If you sell a product or provide a service, you have customers that you need to interact with regularly. You may need a CRM to help organize those interactions and nurture relationships to help your business grow. CRM also helps in managing leads for business growth.
Can Small Businesses Use CRM?
Absolutely. There are many types of CRM for different teams or needs, even though sales teams traditionally use them. Look for the best marketing CRM software, which includes tools to automate marketing campaigns, or real estate CRM, which focuses on in-app communication tools like click-to-call and text messaging.
Is HubSpot the best CRM?
HubSpot is great for teams new to CRM, especially if they want to take advantage of the platform’s email marketing functionality. But if you’re in the market for a customer relationship management system, you should also consider HubSpot’s competitors before making a decision.
You can check out our guide to the best marketing CRMs available today.
What should I look for in CRM software?
You should evaluate CRM software on several dimensions: pricing, business fit, sales process tools, custom reports, integration, ease of use, team communication tools, and multi-platform access.
The best CRM software for you will rate highly on the factors most important to your business.
Hubspot CRM Review — Conclusion
A powerful solution that’s also easy to use, HubSpot CRM offers competitive free and highly efficient paid plans to suit various business needs.
Start Growing With HubSpot CRM Free Today!
