You want your sales team to deliver a great experience for prospects, creating relevant, personalized and valuable touchpoints for your leads. Then, you want your reps to guide contacts down the funnel, nurturing them and building trust. Eventually, you want your sales to efficiently close deals, generating customers who will become evangelists for your brand.
However, in order to reach these goals for your company, your sales team needs to be empowered to produce such results. That empowerment begins with equipping your team with the right tools.
To fuel your sales team’s success, a CRM is an invaluable tool. A CRM is essentially a database that stores a catalog of your contacts and all the information you’ve collected about them. It allows users to track interactions and see which tactics are working and which could be employed.
It’s intended to help users find what opportunities exist for a person or company and how to improve their relationship with them. If they’re a customer, you should also be able to see what they’ve purchased.
At New Breed, we use the HubSpot CRM. As with any tool, there are pros and cons of HubSpot, but we believe the pros far outweigh the cons. To demonstrate, we created an infographic to help you determine whether HubSpot is for you.
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Pros of the HubSpot CRM
Connectivity
Most CRMs need to connect with other tools, so your sales team can reach out to contacts. Because of this, sales acceleration or sales enablement platforms are common in many tech stacks. The HubSpot CRM avoids this problem. You can connect it directly to the Marketing, Sales and Service Hubs without worrying about maintaining integrations. In combining the tools, you can create a comprehensive customer engagement platform.
Track Pipeline
HubSpot allows you to see your entire sales pipeline in an organized dashboard. If you need to sort deals, create reports or track performance, those tools are readily available. By analyzing your sales team’s success, you can help them become more efficient and generate more conversions. By seeing projections for the future, you can optimize your strategy in the present.
Log activity
HubSpot tracks your interactions with prospects. Information on each touchpoint is saved in its database. With a record for each contact, you can review what’s working and what isn’t, determining how you can improve your outreach. By leveraging the breadth of data you collect, you can personalize your engagements, providing more value to contacts at each stage of their buyer’s journey.
Free
The HubSpot CRM is completely free. It’s a low-risk, high-reward time investment to make for your company. Beginning to use the CRM now is also a great way to start migrating to the HubSpot growth suite. It lets you test the waters to see if its functionality is right for you, while accomplishing a vital step in a potential, future migration.
Cons of the HubSpot CRM
Basic Reporting
For a free platform, HubSpot’s reports provide more than enough functionality to be worthwhile. The company is constantly attempting to improve its reporting features. With that in mind, there are limitations.
One such limitation is that it’s difficult to report on data that wasn’t collected in HubSpot. For instance, at New Breed, we use Drift.
While we can embed chatbots on our web pages, we get more depth by reporting on their performance natively in Drift. There are other, more minor issues like not being able to compare a metric over two different time periods without manually creating two reports. Overall, HubSpot’s reporting tools don’t offer as much depth as they could, but this has been improving over time.
Newly Emerged
Since the HubSpot CRM hasn’t been around as long as other platforms, it doesn’t have all the features that some CRMs do. With that in mind, HubSpot is constantly trying to improve. From our perspective, they’re succeeding. They regularly add new features to their software, allowing users to reap more benefits from their product.
Limited Depth
Because HubSpot offers a wide range of functionalities, individual tools may have a comparatively limited depth. HubSpot is such an extensible, diverse platform that they haven’t dug into as much detail in certain areas as their competitors that only focus on a singular function.
The reporting section above is a good example of this. Normally, however, the depth they provide for any given tool is more than enough to cover the large majority of use cases. The CRM just may not be enough for extremely specific operations.
Lacks Flexibility
Companies with highly complicated sales processes might find it difficult to adapt the HubSpot CRM to their needs. There are definitely areas where you can customize the platform around your team and the work you do, but sometimes it doesn’t provide every exact function. For example, the CRM is perfect for growing companies but might not be advanced enough for larger organizations with many revenue streams. Having large amounts of information from numerous sources flowing into the system can become difficult to organize.
Key Takeaway
The HubSpot CRM offers connections to different platforms, an easy-to-analyze pipeline and a powerful database to store information about your contacts. It provides these features and many others for free, maximizing the value for your company and mitigating any of the system’s cons.
With the HubSpot CRM, you’ll make your sales reps’ lives easier. They won’t have trouble finding contact records or activity reports. Instead, they’ll be able to focus on closing customers. Overall, these tools can help empower your sales team behind the scenes, so they deliver a great experience for prospects.
