Topic:
HubSpot,
Sales Tips
(4 Minute Read)
You’re a switched-on marketing professional who's good at their job, and you’ve got a hunch that HubSpot will save you buckets of time and drastically improve your marketing ROI.
The good news is you’re right. The bad news? Your boss isn’t buying it - both figuratively and literally. This article is designed to equip you with all the answers you need to convince them that HubSpot is the right thing for your business.
We’ve structured this around common pushbacks we’ve heard from prospects. Feel free to repeat any points or paragraphs in zoom calls as if it’s your own answer, or just save time and send it straight to your boss.
If you are the boss in question - Hi. Your hair looks great. Here’s why you should get HubSpot...
This is probably our most regular objection, and it’s a fair one - savvy people don’t want to waste money. If you only have a quick look over the complicated pricing packages, HubSpot can seem like an expensive option.
Though confusing, HubSpot’s complexly packaged pricing means that it comes out quite affordable if you properly analyse what you need and only pay for those parts. Many of our clients are on a personalised smorgasbord of different levels that suit their individual needs, meaning they get all the benefits of clever functionality without any wasted spend.
Compared to an average off-the-shelf CRM, HubSpot is at the upper end of the price range. But that’s a bit like saying a Ferrari is more expensive than a Renault Clio, or questioning why I’m getting my hair balayaged at the salon for £120 when I can pay £8 for a box dye from Boots and give it my best shot. In short, you get what you pay for, and the money that you will make from the extra capabilities HubSpot gives you will almost certainly more than comfortably pay back your expenditure.
If you’re looking for numbers, check out this ROI Calculator from HubSpot which estimates how much more you could be making, and see if it covers the cost for the packages you need.
Top tip: If you want to make money go a little further, audit all your current tech spends. Blissfully studies recently found that even medium sized companies are still paying for dozens of ‘zombie’ accounts on tech stacks, where someone has left but their account hasn’t been cancelled. Having an audit to see what you are and aren’t using any more could help free up some spare cash, especially if quite a few of the different subscriptions you have at the moment could be covered by HubSpot functionality. Which brings me to my next point...
I’m not exaggerating when I say you can probably cancel at least 50-60% of the current technology that you use and pay for because HubSpot probably does it better. One of the best things about the platform is its seamless integration of everything a marketing/sales/customer service (delete as appropriate) team needs, all in one place with one easy-to-use interface.
Don’t believe me? Read this: HubSpot works as an email marketing platform, responsive website host and editor, SEO software, social media marketing scheduler, fully-centralised CRM, sales manager (alerts, activities, tasks and playbooks), customer service ticketing system, extensive marketing automation system, customisable and automated chat bot provider, cloud file storage, and in-built visual reporting system on all of the above.
That sentence was far too long and that’s because HubSpot literally has everything you need in one place. Think about how much time your team could save by having everything on one platform and being able to automatically report on it all...
An example of all the brilliant things HubSpot can do for your business!
By having centralised information on contacts which is fed into and used by marketing, sales and even customer service, you can provide a highly personalised experience for your prospects, which helps close deals. You can also start seeing what actually works and what doesn’t, and using your data to fill your gaps and double down on your weaknesses. If you’ve read the marketing classic Made to Stick, you’ll know that so much of good marketing is just knowing who's really buying and what they want. Centralised data makes that easy.
HubSpot champions the Inbound methodology, which is marketing that revolves around using prospect information to contextualise and personalise conversations, which leads to higher conversions. These principles are fundamental to how the platform works, making it easily the best all-in-one tool for inbound marketers.
An example of how the Inbound methodology can work in attracting new visitors to your products and services
As you'll already know, email segmentation is pretty much foundational when it comes to best-in-class email marketing. HubSpot allows you to segment your data with ease. You can create active lists and segment your contacts based on certain contact properties or website activity. You can then use these lists to create smart content in your email marketing, calls-to-action or even leverage those lists for lead scoring within sales. Pretty clever, right?
Or perhaps you're keen to focus on the other buzzword of the moment, account based marketing (ABM)? This is a helpful framework specifically for B2B businesses working with a couple of high-price prospects and focuses on targeting accounts through excessive personalisation. Which makes sense - personalised content performs 178% better than un-personalised content. HubSpot makes that easy too, with ABM specific tools like: account level targeting, ABM dashboards, company scoring and LinkedIn Sales Navigator integrations.
And, when the next big thing in digital marketing comes along, you can bet that HubSpot will be on it in no time. As a Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner, Noisy Little Monkey is first to know about all the new features HubSpot are developing to cater to the latest trends in the digital marketing industry. Let’s just say, we get a lot of emails!
If you Google ‘why CRM implementation fails’, the snippet focuses entirely on ‘Lack of user adoption’. People generally hate change. If the CRM you choose is in any way difficult, fiddly or complicated to use, chances are people in your company will struggle to adopt it.
HubSpot is aware of this, so they’ve put considerable effort into making their UX super smooth and have lots of functionality in place to help people learn quickly.* When you first open a HubSpot account, every section has an interactive walkthrough option which helps you understand where features are and what they do. Chat support is always available, there are thousands upon thousands of community-created how-tos, and there’s HubSpot Academy: a giant suite of easy-to-digest explainer videos on how to do pretty much anything in HubSpot. Oh, and did I mention Noisy Little Monkey runs the Bristol HubSpot User Group? These community-led events are another way that HubSpot brings users together to learn, get inspired and share knowledge about the tool.
What if your boss doesn’t believe all these claims you’re making about HubSpot's ease of use? Speak to us and we’ll get you set up with a free account - that way you can easily demonstrate how simple the user interface is.
Of course, if you’ve got worries about how easily people will take to your new CRM, you could always get an agency to help you implement HubSpot, or run interactive training sessions with the relevant teams, showing how HubSpot will help their specific roles and answer any questions they have. You can see how our team helped Kyero do that by watching the video below.
*My favourite fact about this is how they did user research: HubSpot got a user tester really, really drunk and then listened to them shout about what was frustrating. It led to a whole bunch of UX changes and is one of the key reasons the platform is so easy to use.
HubSpot is the CRM Sovereign of integration. It integrates with pretty much everything - Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive, WordPress, Wistia, Airtable… you name it, they’ve got it. That means you can seamlessly integrate HubSpot with whatever software you can’t part with, meaning you get all the benefits without losing out on that necessary element of functionality.
This can also be a great way to make HubSpot work if convincing Sales to get off their current platform isn’t happening.
Seriously though... If you use HubSpot’s Workflows tool, HubSpot quickly becomes your very own automated marketer, sending out lead-nurturing emails and warming up prospects while you sleep.
If you get Playbooks, HubSpot basically becomes an online sales coach, unifying sales strategy and allowing for easy input of prospect information and sales analytics.
The real kicker though is that HubSpot is a centralised CRM used by all departments, which gives you the ability to track your leads’ journey from start to finish and do some proper closed-loop reporting. That's the difference between knowing what is actually working, and fumbling around in the dark in the hope that following everyday best practices will yield great results. Instead of going to 8am webinars and finding out what might work, HubSpot can show you what’s actually working for your organisation at the click of a button.
Sounds good, right? HubSpot’s single source of truth also means a single source of reporting, so you can finally show that it’s sales not calling the leads, not you failing to deliver them. All of the data is there, easily readable and accessible, and it’s super easy to set up alerts and custom reports.
What sets HubSpot apart from other CRMs is the level of customisation and reporting possible. HubSpot has a reports library, which includes tonnes of pre-programmed graphs that show any and all things you might need to report to your boss on - which get automatically created for you when you select them. We like these ones for marketers.
Don’t see something you need? Just hit the support chat, tell them what graph you want, and they literally make it for you there and then and add it to your dashboard. The first time I did this I was amazed. It felt like having an extremely proficient intern always ready to run your numbers. You can find out more about HubSpot's reporting functionality here.
An example of what HubSpot's reporting dashboard can look like
Ok, joking, joking. Seriously though, regardless of which agency you choose, I’d strongly encourage you to get some HubSpot onboarding support. There’s no point having a powerful tool like HubSpot but missing out on, and still paying for, some amazing functionality you don’t know exists.
Think of a well set-up HubSpot like a magic mirror - you just tell us what your problem is, and we’ll magic up a way to solve it. Poor conversion? We can set up automated gated content with responsive landing pages and automated follow-ups. Sales complaining about cold leads? We’ll create a personalised lead-nurturing email workflow for that.
HubSpot really is a magic tool if you know how to use it right, and you’re willing to take the time to work out what your problems are. It’s hard to know what you need to implement if you don’t know what’s possible. But if you combine agency knowhow with HubSpot technology, you give yourself an exceptionally powerful tool that can solve almost any marketing problem... and then automatically create a report to show how you’ve solved that problem, which you can email straight to your boss with the subject line, “So that raise we spoke about…”.
Hopefully, some of these answers will be helpful in convincing your boss and stakeholders of how much ROI you could get from HubSpot. If you have other objections that aren’t listed here please let us know, we’d love to hear them.
If your boss still isn’t convinced, we’re happy to get on the phone and try and convince them ourselves. Just get in touch and we’ll book a meeting.
Saving clients from bad marketing and design is Andy's MO. He writes helpful blog content on all sorts of marketing topics so that you get the advice you need to take your job by storm.
