Topic:
HubSpot,
Sales Tips
(4 Minute Read)
There’s no shame in being bamboozled by HubSpot. Almost everyone who’s considered getting it has a moment when they open up HubSpot’s product page and back swiftly away before they get a migraine. So let’s break it down.
HubSpot currently divides its offering into five different products or Hubs:
Each of those has four different tiers:
With me so far? Great. Now for the controversial bit…
In HubSpot’s ideal world, you’d jump in at Professional or Enterprise with each of the five products (Hubs) and build one big machine that works beautifully together.
The good news is that you can cherry pick what you need from each Hub and tier to create your own unique version of HubSpot. If you don’t want or can’t afford them all – you don’t need to get them all!
If you can only take one right now, I’d recommend Sales Hub because it will have the most impact by itself. That’s just my opinion but it’s an opinion based on years of experience, so let’s just say it’s a very, very good opinion. So let’s dig into the tiers…
If looking at all your HubSpot tier options is sending your brain into a spin, I don’t blame you. It’s pretty confusing stuff even when you work with it day in, day out.
First piece of advice? Don’t think too hard about the tier names. They can be helpful in some ways but they can also turn people off from getting the tier they actually need. If you’re a new company starting out, there’s nothing stopping you from using a higher tier than Starter. Likewise, if you’re an enterprise-level company that doesn’t mean you have to take the Enterprise tier.
So now, let’s actually dig into Sales Hub’s four tiers…
I know I just said not to worry about the names of the different tiers but with Sales Hub Free the clue really is in the title. It’s a free way into using HubSpot and comes with all the foundational features a sales team needs: keeping track of contacts and their activity on your website, managing deals, gathering data insights and reporting on them.
One thing to note is that unlike with so many tech products, in this case “free” doesn’t mean this tier is some kind of trial or limited-time demo version of HubSpot Sales. It’s a legitimate piece of business software that you can download now and use forever if you want to.
That being said, Sales Hub Free is designed to be a sample of what the higher tiers can do – an amuse-bouche for CRMs, if you will. In reality, what that means is once you start finding joy in HubSpot’s basic functionality, you’ll quickly hit the limits of what Free can do and start seeing the value in Sales Hub Starter and beyond.
Because of the limitations of the Free tier, the move up to Sales Hub Starter can feel like a pretty big leap in a lot of ways. For example, with Starter your email tracking notifications go from 200 per user per month to unlimited, while the amount of document and email templates shoots from 5 each per user to 1,000.
If Sales Hub Free is meant to whet your appetite, Sales Hub Starter is what it was teasing. As well as raising the limits on what you could do before, Starter introduces some automation and productivity features to start making things slicker, as well as more ways to report on your data.
If you’re looking to give your sales process a thorough makeover and dial up the efficiency, you’re going to want to look at Sales Hub Professional.
Where Starter lifts the limits on what you can do, Professional is where some of the more advanced HubSpot features start coming into play. I’m talking sequence automation, integrating with other platforms, more reporting dashboards, AI to root out duplicate data entries – all that geeky stuff that helps you sand off points of friction and put your team’s talents to more value-adding use.
In other words, where Starter gives you the tools to make your current sales process better, Sales Hub Professional points the way to what your process could become. Honestly, it’s really very cool.
Alright, let’s talk about the big guns. As I said up top, Sales Hub Enterprise isn’t just for the global mega-corps to enjoy. Ambition is more important than headcount here – Enterprise is built to support large organisations but what it really delivers is total clarity and control over your sales pipelines.
That means that on top of the previous tiers, you get all kinds of bells and whistles to fully streamline your sales team. What does that mean? It means tools like custom objects to store any kind of data. Predictive lead scoring to hone in on the customers most likely to close. A library of playbooks and resources to train up new hires fast.
If you are a company with a large team on your hands, Sales Hub Enterprise really pulls through on data privacy too. This tier comes with faster and more secure sign-on options, and the ability to lock customer data to specific stages in the sales process so only the relevant people can access it.
Ok, that was the quick and dirty whirlwind tour. What did you think? Ready to make a decision? If so, great! And if you’ve still got questions about your specific situation and what will work best, don’t worry.
Even if you’re really clear on how you want to combine your tiers and bundles, it’s always a good idea to speak to a HubSpot consultant about your options. HubSpot can be a hefty - albeit worthwhile - investment, and there’s no point making it if you’re not going to get the best value out of it.
If this is your first time making sense of HubSpot packages, going in blind and trying to get it right is going to be virtually impossible. A savvy HubSpot partner can help take the guesswork out of the journey – find out how Noisy Little Monkey and HubSpot can help.
Founder and Technical Director of Noisy Little Monkey, Jon blogs about SEO and digital marketing strategy.