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There’s a lot of buzz about HubSpot online, but just because HubSpot works for others and generates a positive return on investment, that doesn’t necessarily mean HubSpot is right for you. In this article, I’m going to show you who HubSpot is right for and by the end of this article you’ll have everything you need to decide whether HubSpot is a good investment for you.
In particular, we’re going to be covering:
What is HubSpot?
HubSpot is an all-in-one Marketing, Sales and CRM powerhouse for your organisation’s activities. From a systems point of view, HubSpot has the following ‘hubs’:
- CRM and Sales tools, called ‘Sales Hub’.
- Marketing tools such as email tool, landing page tool, chat tool etc called ‘Marketing Hub’.
- After sales support, ticketing and knowledge base tools called ‘Service Hub’.
- Ability to build your website in HubSpot called ‘CMS Hub’.
- App connector, database clean and business process automation tools called ‘Operations Hub’.
Hubs can be purchased on their own or in combination with each other.
From an outcomes point of view, HubSpot, when setup correctly helps organisations:
- Increase the bottom line
- Take advantage of opportunities more effectively and quickly
- Close more deals faster
- Prospect more effectively
- Manage deals more effectively
- Increase company growth through the union of marketing and sales
HubSpot has various functionalities which make it perfect for organisations looking to utilise their resources more effectively for growth.
Benefits of HubSpot
Before you decide whether HubSpot is right for you, it’s important to understand the benefits of HubSpot.
The major benefits of HubSpot include:
- Automated marketing helps manage deals more effectively
- Single customer view
- Helps sales reps close more deals, impacting the bottom line
- Helps sales reps spend more time on sales and less time on admin work
- Saves cost on other tools
Automated marketing helps manage deals more effectively
Automated marketing based on user behaviour can help sales reps manage deals more effectively and thus close more often through effective nurturing.
Examples of automated marketing includes:
- Sending cleverly timed emails based on a prospects actions / behaviours
- Sending cleverly timed SMS messages based on a prospects actions / behaviours
An example of a cleverly timed email: say an inactive prospect visits your pricing page out of the blue after ghosting your sales team. HubSpot could send the prospect and/or your sales team an email.
Not only does this help nurture prospects down the buyer journey to close more deals, but it also helps sales reps better manage their deals. Having automated marketing like this in place takes some of the mundane work off the hands of the sales rep, saving them time so that they can spend more of their time on selling.
This ends up having a snowball effect on the business, leading to more sales, increased growth, and a nicer looking bottom line.
Single Customer View
HubSpot touches almost everything sales and marketing, including but not limited to:
- Email marketing
- Landing page development
- Social media publishing
- Blogging
- Reporting attribution to report on ROI of marketing activities
- Diverse range of highly effective sales tools i.e. CRM, call-recording, task reminders, calendar syncing
By combining all of these aspects, it gives marketers and salespeople the ability to do everything they need to from a single portal. This has a positive impact in four ways:
- Because every marketing and sales activity is captured in the one place, it allows marketers to report on the ROI of these marketing and sales activities, giving the CEO or senior leadership a clear indication of how specific efforts are impacting the bottom line.
- Because marketers and salespeople work from the same portal and have full visibility over everything it’s easier for marketing and sales teams to collaborate and work together as a unified revenue team, which ultimately leads to increased growth.
- Gives CEOs and senior leadership full visibility over marketing and sales, which has a myriad of positive benefits.
- Gives managers the ability to view performance of sales teams and team members by viewing metrics around number of calls made, length of calls, and number of closed deals.
- Helps sales reps close more deals, impacting the bottom line
Helps sales reps close more deals, impacting the bottom line
HubSpot helps sales reps differentiate between which leads are warm and ready to convert and which are not, allowing them to more effectively utilise their time by focusing on the leads that are most relevant.
It does this by providing them with information such as:
- What specific website pages a prospect has visited
- How many website pages a prospect visited
- When the prospect visited these pages
- How the prospect interacted with these pages
This also has the added benefit of shortening the sales cycle as sales reps can use the above mentioned information to utilise sales techniques like assignment selling. An example of this in action is explained by one of the sales reps working here at RedPandas:
“We’ll have a lead, we’ll have a good conversation with them, but they’re not interested. But in six weeks or a month I randomly get a ping that this person has opened this email and read a specific article on our website – why would they do that? I haven’t spoken to them in six weeks…they’re interested, or their CEO has asked about us. So I’ll call them and follow up, and this makes all the difference in closing the deal”.
Jonico, Sales Rep at RedPandas
In this way, HubSpot helps sales reps close more deals and positively impacts the growth of the company.
Helps sales reps spend more time on sales and less time on admin work
HubSpot provides a versatile range of sales automation tools, including but not limited to email and SMS automation capabilities. Sales reps generally spend their time on selling, and then on the admin work around selling (following up with clients, sending emails, SMS messages and so on).
Because HubSpot automates most of these admin tasks, it saves the sales rep significant amounts of time, allowing them to spend more of their time on selling and less of their time on admin work.
Saves cost on other tools
HubSpot is not your only marketing automation option. There are a bunch of HubSpot alternatives out there that we talk about openly at RedPandas.
Over the past 10 years we’ve worked with and on every major marketing automation tool out there and although there are alternatives that quite frankly, almost do exactly what HubSpot does, they are incredibly difficult to use and technical.
On top of this, in order to get the same results that you can from HubSpot, you’d need to invest in more than one tool because there isn’t really anything on the market that unifies marketing, sales and CRM like HubSpot does. By using HubSpot’s technology stack, you end up saving costs on all of these other tools.
Is HubSpot Right for You?
In considering whether HubSpot is right for you, we need to consider three things:
- Does the price work for you?
- Will you be able to get a return on investment?
- Will the benefits of HubSpot positively impact your company and solve current problems that exist for your business?
Does the price work for you?
To get a full breakdown of HubSpot pricing, read our guide here. Below, we’re going to take a quick look at the Marketing and Sales Hub costs.
As you review the below costs, you will need to ask yourself whether this investment is actually possible for your company. If it is the only thing that should stop you from using HubSpot is whether or not it will produce a return on investment for you and whether the benefits of HubSpot make sense for your business.
Sales Hub
Marketing Hub
Will you be able to get a return on investment?
After you review the cost, you’re going to want to consider whether you can actually generate a positive return on investment with HubSpot.
Without knowing your current visitors, leads, leads to opportunities and opportunities to closed won sales – it’s difficult to share in an article whether you will or will not get a return on investment.
Short of having a conversation with you, there are a couple of factors to consider when determining whether HubSpot will have a positive ROI in your business. These include:
- What industry you are in
- Typical conversion rate improvements when HubSpot is setup correctly
- Organisation mindset
What Industry you are in
Although HubSpot may say it can work for every industry this is not true.
Sure, HubSpot can work for some FMCG businesses, but this is not HubSpot’s sweet spot.
There are also a lot of B2C businesses that you will struggle to get ROI out of with the sticker price of HubSpot. Consider for instance B2C ecommerce sites that have small margins and small sales volumes. This pretty much excludes all small solopreneur start-ups running ecommerce sites.
It’s not B2B or B2C where HubSpot performs best. It’s more about considered buying journeys. For example, Childcare, Education, Pest Control – all B2C businesses but all businesses where the buying decision is considered and not an impulse buy. Why is this the case? Well consider the job of marketing automation and nurturing. Nurturing implies there are decision making criteria points that your buyers care about that you can communicate via well timed emails and SMS’s.
To put a long story short, HubSpot’s paid automation hubs are not ideal for:
- FMCG businesses
- Start-up ecommerce stores
- Affiliate marketers
- Impulse consumer goods
- Low volume/low purchase value goods
Typical HubSpot Conversion rates
When you consider the typical HubSpot conversion rate improvement, it’s easy to see why for low volume/low priced goods, HubSpot is not a right fit. There just isn’t enough there to justify the cost of the software.
Having said that, based on HubSpot’s own data for APAC, typical improvements for HubSpot customers include:
- 190% improvement in website traffic
- 16% improvement in website visitors to leads
- 2.5x improvement in leads to customers
- 2.5x improvement in revenue
In our experience, for HubSpot portals setup professionally:
- HubSpot has little impact on improvement in website traffic. This comes down to your marketing strategy, content marketing and SEO efforts
- 16% improvement in website visitors to leads is conservative, you should expect your conversation rate to double
- 2.5-3x improvement in close rate is reasonable
- 2.5x improvement in revenue goes hand in hand with close rates so this is also possible
If HubSpot is used correctly, it should most definitely produce a positive ROI and result in many benefits for your company over time, as already mentioned in this article. However, if you’re still unsure about whether HubSpot will be worth it for you, then you can use the free HubSpot ROI Calculator to determine whether HubSpot will be worth it for your company.
Organisation Mindset
The mindset factor goes for any marketing initiative really. The question is does leadership see marketing as a cost centre or a profit centre?
If the organisation sees HubSpot as a cost centre and therefore a necessary evil, then they’ll likely never get the benefit of HubSpot. This is because for these types of businesses, marketing messages and comms tend to be overly salesy, too bottom of funnel and salespeople are expected to hound every contact in the database whether they asked for a quote or just downloaded a top of funnel eBook.
For businesses that see marketing as a profit centre, they are open to nurturing and educating buyers in their journey. They understand that a download of an eBook or a brochure isn’t necessarily a license to start selling, it’s a right to start a conversation of value and nurturing. It’s these businesses that tend to see the most results from a suite like HubSpot.
Will the benefits of HubSpot positively impact your company and solve current problems that exist for your business?
Just because the price works for you and you can generate a positive return on investment with HubSpot, it doesn’t necessarily mean that HubSpot is right for your company.
We need to ensure it solves more problems than implementing a new software in your ecosystem might create.
Some problems that HubSpot can solve for your business (which also double over as positive benefits) include:
- Unify marketing and sales into one space to provide full visibility
- Give CEOs and senior leadership the ability to see ROI of every marketing and sales activity
- Give CEOs and leadership the ability to review performance of sales teams and team members
- Give sales teams all of the tools they could possibly need to close more deals faster
- Give marketers all of the tools they need in one space
- Reduce costs significantly on other marketing and sales software
If any of these benefits positively impact your company, and if the price is right and you believe you can generate positive ROI from HubSpot, then we can confidently say that HubSpot is a good investment for you.
When HubSpot wouldn’t be right for you?
If the price hurts to pay, or if it’s likely going to be significantly difficult to achieve or report on a positive ROI, or if the benefits of HubSpot won’t likely add any value to your company, then HubSpot probably won’t be the right fit for you for.
Still unsure if HubSpot is right for you? Get on a call with one of our consultants and they’ll help you figure out whether HubSpot is a good investment for your company.
So, what’s next?
So, now that you know whether or not HubSpot is right for you, you might be wondering
- You’re working in an enterprise company and after reading this article are wondering whether HubSpot will actually be powerful enough for your company. Check out our article on whether HubSpot is powerful enough for large enterprise companies.
- You’re sold on HubSpot but your CEO or management isn’t ready to make the commitment. Read our article on how to convince your CEO or management that HubSpot is a good investment.
- You’re ready to use HubSpot and want to get started. In this case, you’ll need to get familiar with the different ways you can get onboarded on HubSpot. Read our article which discusses the different HubSpot Onboarding paths you can take.
- You’re familiar with HubSpot onboarding and have decided to work with a partner agency to help you get set up. In this case, you might want to review why RedPandas is your preferred HubSpot Partner.
- Despite discovering why RedPanda’s is the best option for HubSpot onboarding, you’ve decided that you want to work with another agency. In this case, read our article which reviews the top HubSpot Agencies in Sydney.
And now, you should be all set on your journey to using (or not using) HubSpot!
