If you plan to implement a modern CRM platform for streamlining your business processes, it is essential to understand the functionality and benefits HubSpot offers.
What Is HubSpot?
HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM platform that helps you record, track, and analyze your business data using automated tools and features. It allows you to manage your contacts and all the attributes related to them to provide them with personalized services. In addition, HubSpot allows you and your team to stay with your prospects at every stage of their buying journeys until they convert into loyal customers.
HubSpot provides businesses with different products depending on the processes they need to streamline. Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub are the most popular HubSpot offerings designed to leverage sales, marketing, and customer services.
The specialty of HubSpot lies in inbound marketing. It helps you create targeted inbound marketing campaigns by considering the requirements of your customers and prospects. With HubSpot, you can cater to your target audience across multiple channels and attain your business goals with the help of advanced tools.
Launched in 2014, HubSpot has carved its niche in the industry over a considerably short period. Over 30,000 organizations across 90 countries are implementing the CRM platform to drive digitization.
What Are The Benefits Of A CRM Like HubSpot?
Now that we are thorough with what HubSpot is and what its offerings are, let us have a look at the benefits you can achieve by implementing a CRM like HubSpot:
Free CRM Solutions
One of the most significant benefits of implementing HubSpot is that it provides businesses with free CRM solutions. Unlike most of its competitors, the basic edition of HubSpot is free for all to use. It provides you with robust sales, marketing, and customer service tools to leverage your processes and manage your customer database in the best way possible.
The free trial offered by HubSpot never expires. Businesses can use HubSpot and its offerings for free for as long as they need. Until you need to scale up the platform and enhance your processes, you can keep using HubSpot for free and store up to 1 million contacts within your database.
Ease Of Operation
HubSpot is easy to use. Most CRM solutions come with complicated UIs and are not the best options for non-technical users. With an intuitive UI, HubSpot can be used by anyone with little practice and knowledge of the CRM platform. This saves you money and effort in training your team members to use HubSpot.
Collaboration Across Departments
HubSpot facilitates seamless collaboration between your marketing, sales, and customer service departments. It allows members of different teams to work on a single unified platform and deal with identical business records.
Working on a centralized CRM platform makes your processes more organized. For example, the leads captured and qualified by your marketing reps can be transferred to the sales reps to be converted into customers. In addition, the same customers can be handled by agents belonging to the customer service department of your organization.
In the age of digitization, no department can exist in isolation. HubSpot makes it easy for all your employees to interact with each other, irrespective of the department they belong to.
Automated Workflows
HubSpot workflows help you automate a plethora of business processes. The CRM platform enables you to set pre-defined rules for performing specific tasks. Process automation prevents your team members from putting in more time and effort than required. This helps them focus on the more productive aspects of your business.
Critical Features Of HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM provides various features that help you enhance your processes and attain your business objectives.
Let us have a look at some of the major features offered by HubSpot CRM to businesses around the world:
Centralized Database
HubSpot allows you to record and store all details regarding your prospects and customers within a single unified CRM platform. You can keep as many as 1,000,000 records within your HubSpot database without any time limit or expiration date.
A centralized database prevents you from looking for your contacts on different platforms. Instead, it makes all your contacts available at the click of a button, enhancing the speed and efficiency of your business processes. It also saves you from spending hours working on tedious and messy spreadsheets as it organizes all your data on a single platform.
HubSpot stores a range of different datasets that provide you with varied information, including:
- The name, address, and contact details of a customer/prospect
- Past interactions of your prospects and customers
- Number of orders made by your customers and fulfilled by your team
- The medium of capturing leads
- Other relevant information regarding contact, once added to the database
Robust Dashboard
HubSpot provides businesses with a robust and customizable dashboard to comprehensively view the sales pipeline. In addition, the dashboard is visible to professionals from different departments to enhance collaboration.
The interactive and customizable dashboard allows you and your team to analyze several factors regarding your records. For example, it makes it possible for everyone to see the number of active deals in your sales pipeline and the status of every deal. It also makes the progress of your business transparent to obtain valuable insights into your processes.
Email Integrations
Sales, marketing, and customer service representatives rely heavily on emails to interact with customers and prospects. HubSpot readily integrates with platforms like Gmail and Outlook to leverage your emails and help you with holistic email marketing.
The Gmail and Outlook integrations that HubSpot offers users access to sales productivity tools that include meetings, templates, sequences, and more.
HubSpot users can use the sidebar to see the complete CRM details about their contacts without leaving their inboxes. This prevents your marketing and sales reps from switching between multiple platforms for sending, receiving, and analyzing emails. Moreover, HubSpot would notify you when a lead opens your email and allow you to track the clicks on your emails in real-time.
The Final Word
A CRM like HubSpot provides a centralized cloud-based platform with a free basic edition for streamlining your marketing, sales, and customer service processes. It helps you make the most of your customer records, keep track of customer journeys, and create your niche in your market.