HubSpot is a beast. If you want it to work for your business, it needs to be tamed.
In the early stages of exploring HubSpot’s inbound marketing system and wrapping your head around what it can do, the whole thing can be a bit complex to figure out.
Funnily enough, even HubSpot often find it hard to condense what their product does into one convenient medium.
To save you time, stress and possibly some hair, we’ve put together this simple guide on HubSpot’s components and capabilities to help you work out exactly what you do and don’t need if you’re considering signing up.
At this point, we’d like to mention that while we are a HubSpot marketing agency and use the system ourselves. We are by no means married to HubSpot and realise that the system isn’t right for everyone.
On that note, if you’d like a chat about HubSpot (or anything else business-related for that matter) please feel free to get in touch and we’ll be more than happy to give you some advice.
The 6 Main Components of HubSpot
There are 6 main components of HubSpot, known collectively as the ‘Growth Stack’.
- HubSpot CRM
- HubSpot Marketing Hub
- HubSpot Sales Hub
- HubSpot Service Hub
- HubSpot Content Hub
- HubSpot Operations Hub
Now, we know you haven’t got time to learn about every single bell and whistle HubSpot has to offer – it’s too big a system and you’re too busy for that.
That’s why we’ve taken the liberty of summarising the best the system has to offer below.
HubSpot CRM
Let’s start with the free stuff.
No matter whether you’re selling products or services, B2B or B2C, you need a CRM.
HubSpot’s CRM includes a very clean visual dashboard of your entire sales funnel, allowing you to view deals won and lost, scheduled appointments, proposals sent and much more.
HubSpot also automatically tracks all contact interactions and saves them in one record card, making it as easy as possible to go through their history and build up a picture of the position they’re currently in.
You can even sync HubSpot CRM with your emails to automatically capture every email you send or receive.
All-in-all, the HubSpot CRM is simple, effective and easy to pick up for any salesperson, no matter how traditional their approach. Some businesses do need more complex systems, though, which means HubSpot may not be perfect for you, and that’s okay!
In our experience, HubSpot’s ease of use and the benefits it brings means that it’s adopted by even the most admin shy of sales teams, though, which is a huge plus.
But as we say, it’s free. Sign up for it, have a play, see if it’s right for you.
HubSpot Marketing Hub
When it comes to the Marketing Hub, you’ve got 3 options: Starter, Professional and Enterprise.
Marketing Starter
This is the entry level to HubSpot’s paid platform. It’s significantly cheaper than the other packages and while it lacks some of the rich functionality we love about HubSpot, it still outperforms a lot of other platforms.
Our favourite features include:
Emails: Ability to create and distribute emails with the option to add some basic levels of personalisation. There are limits to the number of monthly sends and the helpful design manager function that’s included in the other packages isn’t included in HubSpot Starter.
Lists: The ability to segment your contact data into different lists for targeting is much more intuitive than other systems. In the likes of Campaign Monitor, Dotmailer and MailChimp, you still need to use Excel to build your lists if you want to retarget people based on their previous activity (i.e. resend an email to everyone who didn’t open the first time).
With HubSpot, however, the ability to create and edit lists is so advanced that Excel isn’t needed whatsoever, cutting down your admin time (and excel-related frustrations) significantly. HubSpot also allows you to create Smart Lists, which automatically add and remove contacts based on your criteria for the list – very clever stuff.
Forms: These are the crux of inbound marketing and allow people to sign up, contact you or download a piece of content, instantly being put into lists (as mentioned above) as a result. These can be created in HubSpot and added to your site pages or HubSpot tracking code can be added to any existing forms you have. This ensures all data captured is held in one place and can be tracked.
Conversations: If your business communicates with customers and prospects across lots of different channels, you might find conversations useful. From emails to social chats, all conversations can be pulled into one inbox so you have full transparency of all communication with all of your contacts.
Live chat: With 44% of online consumers stating that having their questions answered in real time is one of the most important features a website can offer, the live chat function is a real bonus for many businesses and is a great feature to add to your website.
Dashboard: Fully customisable, the HubSpot dashboard allows you to pull in all of the key data you want to see on your marketing performance, making it quick and easy to see what’s going on across the whole spectrum of your strategy.
HubSpot Professional
Now we’re talking. The professional version of the Marketing Hub is where HubSpot comes into its own. This is the most popular package – and for good reason too.
It’s a significant jump from Starter, but so is the level of functionality. However, you can wave goodbye to other expensive systems such as your CRM subscriptions, tracking software packages and social monitoring tools, as HubSpot Professional does it all (and more).
We won’t list all the functionality as we could be here a long time, but in addition to everything you get in HubSpot Starter, you get access to:
Email Marketing Automation:In HubSpot Professional, the email functionality is supercharged. The biggest difference is that it enables behaviour based workflows to be created.
You might, for example, send out an email which encourages people to download a guide on your services. If the recipient does download, you can then have them automatically entered into a workflow of emails as a follow up.
Some can be personal emails as though they’ve come from you, others can be marketing emails with links to related case studies and pages on your site.
This is incredibly powerful. Not only does this allow you to ensure a prospect is being educated in the exact way you want them to be, they’re also being warmed up beyond the normal level simple outbound sales would offer.
Lead Scoring: HubSpot Professional automatically gives contacts a score based on their behaviour; the higher the score, the warmer the lead.
When each prospect hits a specific score (which you can set), you can have a notification email sent to the relevant salesperson. Those contacts who achieve this score will be engaged, warm and ready for a call. Beautiful.
Ad tracking: If you’re running pay-per-click or social ads, HubSpot can effectively monitor and manage them.
This allows you to attribute contacts to specific ads, meaning that you’ll know what ads a prospect has seen, as well as the content associated with any ads.
This, again, allows you to properly tailor your sales approach to each individual (you’ll know what pain point drew them in. It’s a little Big Brother, but it works!).
Content Planning: Knowing what content to send is often a challenge for businesses.
The built-in content planning tool helps you to start with the kind of topics you think your audience will be interested in and then plan out content title ideas.
As well as this being great for email marketing, this is also a brilliant tool to look at when planning your SEO strategy, making sure you cover all bases when it comes to the keywords you want to rank for.
Social Media: HubSpot Professional enables you to schedule and publish social updates across your social platforms, which might not sound revolutionary, but the fact you can share new articles and pages in just one click without having to write a thing makes the whole process fast and hassle free.
Website Enhancements: In addition to the form functionality available in the starter package, HubSpot Professional has additional website-based functionality included.
Regardless of what technology your website is currently built in, HubSpot Professional allows you to manage your blog, create landing pages and make call-to-action (CTA) buttons in HubSpot and integrate them into your existing website.
There is also an in-built SEO tool which gives tips on how to improve your blog pages from an SEO perspective.
The drag and drop template builder is easy to use, and having these pages in HubSpot means visitor behaviour can be tracked and recorded.
HubSpot Enterprise
HubSpot Enterprise, as the name suggests, is for large organisations. The jump in price is steep, but the main benefit of HubSpot is that you can create and manage multiple websites – from one place, making it great value if you have multiple sites and a large, potentially growing team.
This removes the headachesmany website owners face when managing multiple sites and domains.
Of course, the Enterprise version includes all the good stuff from the Professional version, with the added benefit of extra custom reporting.
Saying that, unless your business has the need for multiple websites, Professional is still the best option in our opinion.
HubSpot Sales Hub
HubSpot Sales Hub has all the features of the free CRM plus some additional functionality that can be a huge, huge benefit to any sales team.
The sales teams we work with (including our in-house business developers) love this functionality as it does the large majority of the admin work for you, saving a serious amount of time and leaving your sales team to do what they do best – sell.
In addition to the lead scoring and email automation features we’ve already discussed, the most popular features include:
Email tracking: With the email tracking function in HubSpot Sales Hub, you can track your emails and get notifications when they have been opened or clicked.
This gives your sales team the insights they need into when to call, when to chase up and when to leave things for a while.
Email templates: If you tend to send a few standard emails and have to spend time digging them out and copying them across from the last person you sent it to, the email template function will be a great little feature for you.
You can save email templates in your email account, which will then be readily available in your email account. Whether it’s an introductory email or a follow up, this feature makes sales emails quick and easy to send.
Follow-up automation
Your sales people waste a LOT of time following up on leads. HubSpot can automate this for you, using the aforementioned email templates to ensure every prospect gets a tailored, well formed email, all automatically!
This lets your sales team focus on calling the hottest leads and closing deals.
Sales Documents: Saving all your sales documents in HubSpot and sharing them via email or unique links is hardly revolutionary.
But using this feature means you can get notifications when they have been opened, as well as exactly which pages your prospect has viewed and for how long, allowing you to tailor your ongoing comms more precisely to what you know they’ve seen.
Phone calls: Not only can you make calls at the click of a button, you can also record them in HubSpot, making it very easy to go back and see what was said afterwards as a reference point (great in case your pesky clients start making things up).
Commerce Hub
The Sales Hub also includes a mini ‘bonus Hub’, the Commerce Hub! This lets you:
- Manage invoices – Quickly turn quotes into cash with invoices sent directly from your HubSpot CRM.
- Payment links – Collect one-time and recurring payments with simple yet powerful payment links you can embed in web pages, forms, emails, and more.
- Quotes – Create quotes and capture signatures on beautifully branded templates, powered by data in your CRM.
Meetings: Each sales user will get an individual link for people to book calls and meetings with them. Those meetings then go straight into your calendar along with a notification into your inbox.
This is what a meeting link would look like (you’re welcome to book a meeting with me, if you like!).
Costs for HubSpot Sales Hub are as follows:
- Starting at £14 per month per seat on HubSpot Starter
- Starting at £77 per month on HubSpot Professional
- Starting at £135 per month on HubSpot Enterprise
HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is designed to help you manage your customers and provide a fantastic service (clue’s in the name!). It includes:
Customer satisfaction: Deploy surveys to gather feedback and build a better customer experience.
Processes: This gives you the ability to automate your customer service processes with ticket routing, escalation and task creation.
Knowledge base: Collate frequently asked support questions based on tickets into an external knowledge base that can help your customers without having to log a ticket/call support.
The Customer Portal
The Customer Portal is a new HubSpot feature that gives customers ownership over their service experience.
Generally speaking, customers crave information about the status of their service experience and their tickets. More often than not, they would much prefer to solve problems on their own.
By connecting to your shared inbox, the Customer Portal keeps ticket conversations going between customers and reps, provides access to your knowledge base and can be customised to suit your needs, meaning that customers can get a fantastic service at a time that’s convenient to them.
Ticket status with Automation: Track the status of support tickets and define your own sets of stages for each service process.
Shared inbox
The Service Hub provides your service team with a shared inbox, allowing all service staff to work from HubSpot to better manage customer enquiries.
This also ensures that no enquiry is ever missed or left hanging.
Costs for Service Hub are as follows:
- Starting at £14 per month per seat on HubSpot Starter
- Starting at £77 per month on HubSpot Professional
- Starting at £135 per month on HubSpot Enterprise
HubSpot Content Hub
As an agency we’ve worked with many different Content Management Systems (CMS). Some good, some bad…and then there’s HubSpot Content Hub.
It has everything you’d expect from a high-end CMS, with drag and drop template builders, SEO content checkers, the ability to categorise content, a file and image library and so on.
Where HubSpot Content Hub comes into its own is its ease of use, its full integration with HubSpot Marketing Hub and, most impressively, the ability to personalise a visitor’s experience based on information you have on them.
Smart Content allows you to have different elements (text, images, forms etc.) show based on the user who’s on your site. If we know they are in the automotive industry, we can display content relevant to them. If we know they’re a sales director, we can display content relevant to their goals and challenges. You get the idea.
The opportunities for personalisation are vast; it all relies on the content being available and the website being set up correctly. Done right though, Smart Content can have a significant impact on your conversion rates. Seriously impressive stuff.
As with any Hub, the Content Hub is split into Starter, Professional and Enterprise packages, which give you:
Content Hub Starter includes:
- Landing pages
- Website pages
- AI blog writing
- Forms
- AI assistants
- Premium hosting
Content Hub Professional includes all of the above, as well as:
- AI translation
- Dynamic pages
- Podcasts [beta]
- Content embed
- A/B testing
- Brand voice (overlay content with a voice you can customise to read out to the viewer)
- Smart content for pages
- Content remix (a way of updating old content using AI)
- Custom reporting
Content Hub Enterprise includes all of the above, as well as:
- Serverless functions
- Custom objects
- Multisites
- Limit access to content and data
- Team organisation
- Content Approvals
- Activity logging
HubSpot Content Hub prices are as follows:
- Starting at £14 per month per seat on HubSpot Starter
- £396 per month on HubSpot Professional (includes 3 seats)
- £1,310 per month on HubSpot Enterprise (includes 5 seats)
HubSpot’s Operations Hub
HubSpot’s Operations Hub is designed to enhance operational efficiency and streamline processes across various business functions. Here’s a summary of its key capabilities:
Data quality automation
This allows you to automatically sync data between HubSpot and other tools, ensuring consistency and reducing manual entry. It also makes it easier to standardise and clean data, removing duplicates and correcting inaccuracies to maintain high-quality information.
Workflow automation
Nobody enjoys doing anything manually nowadays.
The operations hub allows you to automate repetitive tasks and complex processes with customisable workflows, saving time and reducing errors. By integrating custom code within your workflows, the Operations Hub allows you to execute unique business logic.
It also allows you to implement sophisticated branching and conditional logic in workflows to handle diverse operational needs, which in layman’s terms means that there’s pretty much nothing HubSpot can’t automate!
Data integration and management
The beauty of HubSpot is that it integrates with a wide range of third-party apps, ensuring data consistency across different platforms.
Ops Hub also comes with one of the coolest dashboards you’ll ever see. Gain insights into operational performance with dashboards that track key metrics and KPIs at a glance, and export these reports to show off to clients/your bosses.
The Operations Hub aims to provide businesses with the tools they need to optimise operations, improve data management, and enhance overall efficiency. If you fancy driving better performance and growth and looking cool while doing it, then the Operations Hub is almost certainly for you..
Costs for HubSpot Operations Hub are as follows:
- Starter: £40 per month
- Professional: £630 per month
- Enterprise: from £1740 per month
Thinking of using HubSpot? We’ll help you get your subscription right
So there you have it, our sort-of-but-also-not-quite-comprehensive guide to HubSpot.
If you’ve got any questions at all about the system, feel free to drop me an email directly (morgan@wearecatalyst.co.uk) and I’ll be more than happy to answer your questions.
