Chances are if you haven’t yet heard of HubSpot, you probably will. Throughout the past 17 years, HubSpot’s popularity has grown from an inbound marketing automation tool to a robust sales customer relationship management (CRM) platform–or customer service software–and so much more. HubSpot helped to solidify the inbound marketing methodology based on the idea that customers don’t want to be continually bothered by salespeople but rather supported when they need it. HubSpot has built a world-class business tool that will help you and your team save time, effectively communicate with better context, and operate your business in a way that your customers will enjoy.
Below, we’ll cover the multiple different ways that HubSpot does this through a variety of tools. Each of these tools is available at varying different levels with HubSpot. If you would like any assistance understanding them and how they can impact your business, we’d be more than happy to guide you:
HubSpot Sales CRM
In basic terms, a sales rep’s job is to do one thing: sell. Between building reports and collecting and organizing data to present, sales reps spend only about one-third of their time actually selling. The purpose of sales software is to boost overall productivity by facilitating actions your sales team does on a daily basis. Whether it be generating or tracking leads, creating sales automation, or analyzing sales cycle performance, sales software should include everything you need to ease the path of the sales rep and, most importantly, save them time.
Rather than using multiple platforms to juggle the tools of modern sales technology, HubSpot offers the Sales Hub, which harnesses all of these capabilities in one location. In this section, we’ll look at the Sales Hub and its valuable tools that save time for your sales team to return to doing what they do best. Afterward, we’ll consider some of the many tools and benefits of using the HubSpot Sales Hub, not only as a salesperson but as someone managing a sales team.
Sales Hub Tools
Calling
With HubSpot calls, you can make calls to contacts directly from their record in Hubspot. With a HubSpot-provided phone number, an outbound phone number registered for calling, or a third-party calling provider, you can record, take notes, and save the call straight to the contact’s record. While this feature gives the salesperson the opportunity to review previous sales calls and revisit their notes, it also provides an organization the opportunity to provide sales coaching feedback and ensure your team has the right plays in their playbook.
Meetings
Hubspot Meetings ensure you don’t get lost in email chains trying to schedule a time to meet. By integrating your Google or Office 365 Calendar, you can send a single link for someone to choose a time when you both are available. The Meetings Tool recognizes when you have other things going on and will block time when you’re away or securing other great deals. Statistics show it takes roughly eight emails to schedule a meeting. With the HubSpot Meeting link, you’ll stop the back and forth, and speed up the part that matters–booking the meeting.
Sequences
The Sequences tool allows you to send and track a series of targeted, timed emails and tasks to nurture contacts over time. Most people today have been enrolled in a sequence, and they may not even know it. Salespeople know that it often takes multiple contacts with a prospect before they even have a conversation, and sequences help them automate this process. In HubSpot, you can build a series of emails and enroll contacts in that sequence. Each email will automatically be sent until the sequence ends or the contact replies. We always suggest putting some serious thought into a sequence and being creative for optimal results.
Snippets
Do you and your team find yourselves repeating the same emails or information over and over? With the Snippets tool, you can adopt short, reusable blocks of text that can be used on contact, company, deal records, ticket records, email templates, chat conversations, and when logging a note or activity. You can save snippets up to 2,500 characters, making repetitive tasks much quicker. This could include parking and directions to clients who are visiting your office, or a bulleted list of billing information you’ll need when onboarding a client. This tool saves so much time for things you repeatedly communicate.
Templates
The Templates tool, similar to snippets, allows you to create a template for a specific email type such as a confirmation or follow-up email. Templates can be created to save time for an email that is sent over and over. Instead of typing a brand new email or even copying and pasting the same text repeatedly, the Template tool allows you to create an email with the click of a button. Great examples of templates would be longer-formatted emails with instructions. While a template saves time, remember to always reread and customize the template for personalization. This will save you time and keep your communication from seeming automated.
Documents
The Documents tool is used to attach or add a document to your email, landing page, website page, or blog post. You can link a document file in any rich text editor in HubSpot. Simply by highlighting the area of text you want to be linked, clicking the link icon, and selecting “File Download,” you can upload a file to the text selected. The Documents tool also allows you to save and organize documents to share with your team. Creating this easily accessible library of content makes controlling and sharing documents across your organization seamless and manageable with respect to your brand. You and your team can send the approved documents to your prospects, clients, or anyone else within a couple of clicks. In addition, you’ll get access to reporting on what your prospect viewed, and how long they viewed. Helping to provide your sales team with information that can help guide their future conversations.
Forecast
The Forecast tool is used to track individual and team sales goals. By selecting a specific pipeline, time period, categories, and groups, you will be able to view a forecast for any users with a sales seat and deals assigned to them. This helps to track your sales team’s performance by providing a scoreboard for your team or management.
Playbooks
Hubspot Playbooks are used as a template or script for salespeople to reference. Whether you are onboarding new team members or have specific companies you sell against, playbooks are a great way to help your team with scripts and relevant information. Playbooks also provide a list of questions or characteristics that can be answered in text fields, drop-downs, and buttons, enabling sales reps to take notes with less effort. Playbooks make sales calls focused, concise, and productive. For example, you could create a playbook for the questions to ask during a discovery call, for your products or services, or for pricing guidelines. This helps ensure your team is answering and asking the right questions that can lead to a closed deal.
Products and Quotes
HubSpot’s Quote tool is another great feature and a way to let your sales team save time. Users can create an estimate with line-itemed products directly in the platform to send to a prospect where their contact and company information is directly pulled seamlessly into the quote. The best part is that all of the deal information stored in HubSpot is there for your reporting purposes, closing the loop from marketing, sales, and service into a report that attributes overall client lifetime value.
Payments
The HubSpot Payments feature gives you the ability to transact with customers digitally in a streamlined way. This helps remove friction in your business and speed up the process of working with new and existing clients. HubSpot Payments lets you collect payment through a link, set up recurring payments on a schedule for retainers or subscriptions, and use your payment links in a variety of places within HubSpot to save your sales team time.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
In this section, we cover HubSpot’s Marketing Hub and the tools within it that can enable you to automate and maximize your marketing efforts toward an Inbound Marketing methodology that will attract, engage, and delight your customers. HubSpot’s Marketing Hub has a wide range of tools and processes that allows your company to attract the right audience, convert more visitors into customers, and run complete inbound marketing campaigns at scale.
You should consider Marketing Hub if you want to streamline your internal marketing and/or communications team and processes, or if you are looking to maximize your marketing efforts and track analytics on social and blog posts, marketing campaigns, and SEO performance. The true power of HubSpot’s Marketing Hub is the connection and alignment with your sales prospects. Leveraging characteristics in a prospect profile will help your marketing team tailor your conversation to ensure it is relevant and contextual at scale.
Defining Marketing Hub Tiers
HubSpot offers three Marketing Hub subscription tiers based on your budget and service needs. These different tiers unlock different features and tools in your hub. If you need help determining which option is the best fit, our team would be happy to help you decide.
In the following section, we’ll cover some of the many different options at each tier, and some information on what tools are included, as well as their benefits:
Free–Includes the following five items, and may also include items with HubSpot branding:
- Forms
- Landing pages
- Live chat
- Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn ads
- Contact management
Starter–Includes all the features in Free, plus the following::
- Marketing automation
- Ad retargeting
- Landing page reporting
- Multiple currencies
- HubSpot branding removed
Professional–Includes all the features in Free and Starter, plus omnichannel marketing automation and custom workflows, along with the following:
- SEO
- Blog
- Social media
- Custom reporting
Enterprise–The ultimate package, including all the features of the previous three tiers, as well as high-level overviews to hone in on strategy testing and attribution, plus these:
- Account-based marketing
- Adaptive testing
- Predictive lead scoring
- User roles
- Multi-touch revenue attribution
Marketing Hub Tools and Functions
Automation and Workflows
“Workflows” is HubSpot’s automation tool, a series of automated actions that are triggered based on a person's behaviors or contact information using if-then branch logic. Automation is mostly used for lead nurturing to build relationships with prospective buyers who already express buying interest but never converted to a closed won deal. These prospects were likely in consideration but haven’t decided to engage you in a sales conversation or complete a transaction with you. Additionally, Automation and Workflows can be used internally to streamline communication between marketing and sales. Whether you’re running a marketing campaign or sending a simple follow-up email, using these functions ensure that prospects and existing customers are engaged with relevant and personalized information that leads them where you want them to go. The main automation benefit of HubSpot is the ability to have personalized and relevant conversations with prospects at scale.
Custom Properties and Fields
Creating customized and personalized marketing is a great way to capture data that is unique to your business. The first step in that process includes exploration of who your potential customers are and what data and information HubSpot should capture in order to leverage that data in the future. While HubSpot offers many standard field properties out of the box, it also gives you the ability to create Custom Properties. Using Custom Properties and Fields, you can capture data that is relevant and unique to your business for future automation triggers, as well as reporting. This custom data enrichment helps you to elevate your marketing and make it so relevant that your prospect can’t ignore it.
Ads
Highly personalized ad campaigns now come with seamless reporting. When targeted ad campaigns get relevant content to the right people, your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) only stands to benefit. Analyze campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Google to attribute revenue. Part of the main benefit of HubSpot Ads is to see exactly what ad a client clicked on to start their customer journey, while also capturing and attributing their revenue lifecycle. With this connection, HubSpot will be able to tell you exactly what is performing best and how to leverage that information in future campaigns.
Email marketing is a crucial element to successful inbound marketing. Having a well-designed email is incredibly easy in HubSpot. HubSpot’s email editor is a drag-and-drop system that is simple to use. HubSpot offers multiple email templates to start from, or the ability for a designer to add and upload their own files for customization. Once you have these, the marketers on your team won’t need much from a designer to put together a beautiful email. With HubSpot, you’ll be able to automatically add personalization tokens to improve open rates and target segmented lists based on topics that contribute to more opens and better conversations with prospects. HubSpot also makes it easy to send those email to particular segments of customers based on active lists that are based on particular criteria identified by custom fields and properties.
Landing Pages
Inbound marketing funnels rely on landing pages to help convert marketing-qualified leads. With HubSpot, you’ll have access to a landing page module that is built in the same manner as the email drag-and-drop editor. HubSpot Landing Pages give you access to pre-built templates if you don’t want to start from scratch–and they let you customize them if you choose to. In addition, you can conduct A/B tests on your pages to easily evaluate which variations of landing pages are working for you and your business when you invest in Professional or Enterprise tiers. Creating a landing page shouldn’t have to go through development, and HubSpot helps to remove that hurdle, and let Marketers create them for campaigns in a fast and easy way.
Social
Marketing Hub’s Social tool helps you schedule and manage your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn content in one place. This tool allows your marketing team to post as a team in calendar view, providing everyone oversight on upcoming social network posts. Another great feature of this tool includes connecting your team's personal social media accounts so that your organization’s posts can automatically be shared to gain optimal reach. On top of increased visibility and management in one place, HubSpot’s Social’s best feature is its ability to attribute revenue. HubSpot can tell you if a contact viewed or interacted with a social post or campaign in reporting, giving you insight past the general clicks or impressions that social media networks provide. This level of reporting provides true insight into your social media’s effectiveness.
Reporting
With multiple data points across objects, fields, and customized properties, you’ll need a robust way to use all the data. As marketing pioneer John Wanamaker said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don't know which half.”) With HubSpot Reporting, you’ll have one of the industry's most effective tools for measurement and be able to determine exactly that. HubSpot at different levels allows reporting across various points of your sales and marketing data through standard dashboards for common metrics and KPIs, as well as a custom report builder for cross-object reporting. HubSpot is built to gather data and build a robust customer or prospect profile over time. Once reports and dashboards are built, you can easily opt for automated emails that send these reports to your team. Removing the need for a person to pull data, and send reports.
If you’re considering Marketing Hub, it will benefit you to also look into investing in Sales Hub, Service Hub. This is where HubSpot’s tools contribute to better alignment and engagement between sales and marketing–and service teams–to help attract, engage, and delight customers time and again.
HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot’s Service Hub aims to connect your marketing and sales with your customer service team. Ensuring that your new or existing clients are having a great experience is important in growing a business. When your team connects these hubs, your service team will see everything in sales and marketing conversations to ensure their work is aligned. This transparency is multi-faceted, for sales and marketing can easily see this information as well.
HubSpot’s Service Hub, specifically, has a wide range of tools that will help your company automate customer service and streamline your service team’s communication. The following are some of the different features and their benefits:
Defining Service Hub at Each Tier
Like the Sales CRM and Marketing Hub’s, HubSpot offers various subscription tiers based on your budget and service needs. In this section, we’ll look closer at each tier:
- Free–Users taking advantage of HubSpot’s Free Service Hub have access to many amazing tools; however, the free version poses some challenges. Tools in this tier include HubSpot’s branding, and limitations are set on what you can create and the number of users in your hub.
- Starter–In this tier, users can unlock a few more features, in addition to an increased user limit. The first benefit of upgrading to this tier is that you can remove the HubSpot branding and add your business branding. This gives your website visitors a more personalized experience and a pipeline for customer service requests.
- Professional–Offering all of the features available in the Free and Starter tiers, Professional builds on that solid foundation with automation abilities, a knowledge base, custom surveys, playbooks for your service team, customer scoring, and much more.
- Enterprise–This is the highest tier of Service Hub. At this level, most of the upgrades pertain to recurring revenue tracking, custom goals, custom objects, a sandbox environment for testing features, and a customer portal.
Service Hub Tools
The Service Hub software divides its functions into five key tools: The Conversations Inbox, the Ticket Pipeline, Feedback Surveys, the Knowledge Base, and the Customer Portal. (Note that the Customer Portal tool is for Service Hub Enterprise Licenses only).
Let’s look at each tool and how it can be used to make your job easier and your customers happier:
Conversations
Conversations is a universal inbox that helps all your team members collaborate on customer support. With this tool, you can add all your communication platforms into this universal inbox, including email, chat, and tickets. Then, when you or another member of your team responds to a message using the Conversations tool, it’ll send a message out from whichever platform the customer used.
Conversations also is helpful because it allows you to see the context of whom you’re talking to and what you’ve learned about them from a marketing, sales, and service standpoint. This creates a single view of the customer whom you are communicating with. The most helpful feature of Conversations is that your team can all be aligned on who responded to a client and what was said in order to streamline the process and deliver spectacular customer service.
Ticket Pipeline
Every time a customer writes to you–to inquire about current services, ask for help with a billing issue, or any other use case–you can have them submit a support request. The ticket generation options offered by HubSpot are the following: emails, forms, conversations through web chats, and conversations through Facebook Messenger. Once a ticket is generated, it moves through columns in your pipeline called “stages.” Each stage has rules or conditions–customized by you or your team–which must be done in order to move the ticket throughout the stages until your team provides a solution. Then, the ticket can be closed.
During the process of responding to a customer, there also are smaller organizational tools that your teams can use to keep tickets and tasks on track. On each ticket, members of your team can add important notes, add tags, update contact information, and keep a record of updates and responses to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Users with Service Hub Starter, Professional, and Enterprise licenses also can automate ticket status and certain actions within the pipeline’s settings. For example, tickets can automatically be created for new email conversations, or the status of an existing ticket can be changed when a new email is sent or received. Additionally, you can send an automated email from the conversations inbox when a ticket is received or closed, or send an internal notification to a team member when a ticket status changes. This can help save your team time, while simultaneously responding to a client to let them know you are working on their solution.
Feedback Surveys
Feedback Surveys are one of the elements that can help improve the customer experience. These are available only with Service Hub Professional and Enterprise licenses. It’s possible to send out these surveys in two ways: by email and by displaying them on a web page. With the use of feedback surveys, your company will be able to get valuable information on the experience your customer has had with your company. This allows for checks and balances between your service team and the sales and marketing teams to ensure that clients are getting exactly what was promised. In addition, you’ll be able to track and build net promoter scores to identify folks who would be willing to sing your praises and get in front of those clients who may be less than happy–before the situation gets worse.
Knowledge Base
HubSpot has a web-based portal set up for users to brand and launch a knowledge base at the Professional and Enterprise levels. With the Knowledge Base, your company can create articles, guides, and manuals that cover internal facing standard operating procedures or external instructions for clients such as how to update your credit card information or prepare for an onboarding meeting. The opportunities are endless as to how you use your Knowledge Base, but the main benefit is that your team and clients will have access to the correct information and potentially save you time from answering questions or concerns that can be easily addressed.
HubSpot Content Management System (CMS) Hub
HubSpot’s CMS Hub will allow you to create a personalized, secure experience for users who visit your website. There are plenty of useful tools to help you build professional website experiences that will convert visitors into returning customers and grow your business. Whether you’re a marketer or developer, CMS Hub is easy to jump into–and the best part is that it’s completely free to start using. However, like all HubSpot Hubs, additional features unlock as your upgrade.
Here is more detail about some of the different features included in HubSpot’s CMS Hub:
CMS Hub Tools and Features
Maybe you’ve already thought about what the perfect website for your brand will look like, but have you given any thought to the other aspects required to take your website experience to the next level? It’s important to consider how you’ll manage your forms, emails, analytics, and more. CMS Hub allows you to take care of all of these in one place.
With HubSpot CMS Hub, you gain access to some amazing tools and features that will help you create an exceptional user experience, both quickly and easily–even if you don’t have a developer on your team. Some of the more popular tools and features include:
- An intuitive drag-and-drop page editor that makes it easy to create websites and landing pages without any previous technical experience.
- The ability to access professionally designed flexible themes that you can customize and plug your content into right away.
- Mobile optimization to ensure that your site looks great no matter what device it’s viewed on.
- Natively integrated CMS and CRM that will aid in creating and managing marketing campaigns that capture leads you can follow up with–all in one convenient place.
- HubSpot-provided website hosting, security, and server management.
That’s just scratching the surface of what CMS Hub can help you accomplish. Some other features include live chat, premium hosting, custom domains, and SEO recommendations and optimizations, among many others. If you’re willing to upgrade to the Starter, Professional, or Enterprise editions of CMS Hub, you’ll receive even more premium tools and features to take your website to the next level.
Some of the premium features of CMS Hub include:
Personalization Tokens
Personalization Tokens display personalized content to your contacts based on data in the HubSpot CRM. Having personalized content is proven to increase engagement with your website and provide more contextual and relevant content based on your customers’ profiles.
A/B Testing
A/B Testing and reporting is a way to display content in two separate ways to your target audience and collect feedback from them on what works and what doesn’t. You can use these metrics to improve customer engagement with your website, increase traffic, and reduce page bounces. This practice is incredibly helpful in optimizing and testing page designs for UX/UI and conversion testing.
Smart Content
Smart Content is a great way to offer variety to your clients. By setting different variables–such as what country a visitor to your website is from–you can display different content or a different layout of content for various modules or sections of your website.
HubDB
HubDB lets you create custom tables to pull into modules you create to display customized layouts on your website. This is great if you’d like to show varieties of different content in multiple places.
SEO
HubSpot has a built-in SEO tool that provides SEO improvement suggestions for developers and marketers. This tool specifically reports on what areas of your website are underperforming or have critical issues to ensure your site is optimized for search engine visibility. Simply run the SEO scanner in your hub, and follow the instructions in the widget to help rectify any negative impacts.
Blog
HubSpot also offers you the ability to host your blog on their platform. This powerful tool is designed with inbound or content marketers in mind. Easily plan, schedule, and publish your blog content with respect to SEO performance. HubSpot’s Blog feature makes it incredibly easy for marketers and anyone who is less tech-savvy to add or update blog content. This removes barriers within an organization and encourages all team members to become blog contributors.
The Overall Value of the CMS Hub
All the available features that come with HubSpot CMS will help you remove barriers between your development and marketing teams. This gives your team members the ability and speed to add and improve your website outside of a traditional development silo. In addition, HubSpot’s CMS Hub helps to capture and curate more information about potential customers, adding to a more robust customer profile, and marketing experience.
The CMS is constantly improved, and the support team is quick and helpful with any inquiries you may have for your account, no matter how complex they may be.
There are many options for how to go about establishing your brand, but all the tools included in HubSpot have been proven useful in one way or another, and new and better ways are being developed monthly. HubSpot’s CMS Hub helps your entire team contribute more easily to a successful website presence, and your brand will show it.
HubSpot Operations Hub
HubSpot’s Operations (Ops) Hub is one of the newest hubs in the HubSpot ecosystem. Ops Hub was created to help operations teams manage data hygiene more effectively and to ensure your company’s operations are leveraging data most efficiently. As an organization grows, data capturing can get increasingly messy. This is what Ops Hubs can remedy. In addition, Ops Hub will help you keep your data clean between different parts of your tech stack.
Here are some of the main features of Ops Hub and how to determine if it would be beneficial to you:
Data Sync
Data Sync is the latest version of PieSync, which HubSpot acquired in 2019. Data Sync enables you to connect data between 90+ different applications in conjunction with HubSpot. With Data Sync, you can ensure HubSpot and an app such as Google Contacts can talk and share data between applications. This information can be shared in a synchronized manner–back and forth, and historical and forward, as well as only the data you would like to sync. This lets you customize your data. Data Sync is available at the Starter Level in Ops Hub.
Programmable Automation
Programmable Automation allows you to edit and change workflow automation within HubSpot, create webhook actions for third-party applications, and edit chat flow bot actions at the code level. As a company or organization scales, the prebuilt options already available in HubSpot can get you far, but having the ability to customize going forward makes your personalization or communication even more valuable. With these code actions available, your team or agency partner will be able to make API calls, SQL queries, and much more.
Data Quality and Automation
Having data is great, but having clean data is even better. Ops Hub helps teams take large portions of their data and clean it. Everyone has seen those messy spreadsheets where name formats are different or items are missing. With Ops Hub’s data quality abilities, you can clean up this data in large swaths and save time. That way, your data is clean and ready to use.
Data Sets
Taking advantage of data is the entire reason you need data in the first place. With Data Sets in HubSpot, your team can generate table views of data and customize data fields or formula names, without adding complicated or confusing titles or conventions in your CRM. Data Sets will let your team gather the data they need without complicating the process.
Ops Hub is the newest and latest feature offered in HubSpot. As it grows, look for HubSpot to continually add and improve its features so that you can get the best use of your data and operations teams.
Now That You Know About HubSpot–It’s Your Turn!
As you can see, HubSpot is an extremely powerful business tool focused on three core tenants: attracting new customers, building engagement with them, and delighting them with spectacular service. When HubSpot is deployed properly for an organization, you’ll get to witness “the flywheel” effect and see your business grow.
Vendilli Digital Group is a Platinum-Tiered Solutions Partner that has worked with HubSpot since 2014. If you want to know more about how HubSpot can help you and how to get started, contact us today. We’d be excited to meet you!
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