Hubspot Offering More New Features. Should You Use Them?

HubSpot is known as an "inbound marketing" software application that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.

But even though HubSpot began as a marketing automation tool, it now offers an all-in-one service that allows companies to automate their sales, marketing, customer service and operational processes.

According to a recent report by BetterCloud, companies with less than 50 employees use an average of 16 different SaaS applications, while organizations with 100 to 500 employees use 47 different applications. This trend only increases as companies grow in size. Organizations with more than 1,000 employees use an average of 177 SaaS applications within their tech stack.

My clients often ask me if they should consider using these new HubSport features to consolidate their many SaaS applications into one. Here are the pros and cons of switching to HubSpot as a full-service tech stack that serves every team.

The pros of going full-stack on HubSpot

Here’s what companies that use HubSpot as a full-stack solution like:

• Multiple software applications as one tool
• Real-time insights into the performance and operations of a company across multiple departments
• Transparency among various teams that reduce miscommunication and departmental silos

The cons of going full-stack on HubSpot

Here’s what companies that use HubSpot as a full-stack solution don’t like:

• Capital expense of the initial migration and consolidation of their data
• A one-size-fits all approach that needs to be customized to address unique needs
• Time-consuming training for each department to "buy-in" to and adopt the new software

Here’s how the pros and cons break out by department

Sales

Pros: I tell my clients it is critical that companies provide their salespeople with a powerful and easy-to-use sales tool that will enable them to stay organized and close more deals. The HubSpot sales hub offers a variety of tools to streamline your sales process, including the ability to:

• Organize company and contact data
• Log sales calls and outcomes
• Automatically schedule meetings
• Send, log and track email correspondence
• Track sales opportunities
• Forecast prospective revenue
• Gain insights into the efficiency of your sales team

Cons: While the benefits of using the sales hub can result in higher sales, greater efficiency and shorter sales cycles, there are some downsides as well. Although all of the HubSpot sales tools are good in their own right, several features may not be as robust as going with a dedicated service that specializes in that specific feature, such as:

• Outbound call tracking
• Outbound email automation
• Analytics and reporting

The lack of specific sales features may prompt companies to find other software alternatives that integrate with HubSpot such as JustCall, AirCall or other 3rd party applications in order to gain expanded sales functionality that can’t be found within HubSpot.    

Marketing

Pros: The HubSpot marketing hub has served as the foundation of the platform since its inception, therefore its core functionality is very robust and sophisticated. Savvy companies can harness the power of the marketing hub in order to:

• Collect and nurture leads
• Automate email marketing campaigns
• Develop high converting landing pages
• Create sales funnels and conversion paths
• Manage organic social media campaigns
• Launch and track paid ad campaigns
• Report on the effectiveness of your marketing efforts

Cons: Although the marketing hub has an abundance of tools to assist you in executing your digital marketing strategy, no software program is perfect. There are several compromises that you will have to accept with the marketing hub, including:

• Paying for marketing contacts
• Limited email and landing page templates
• Limited workflow templates

The complexity of the HubSpot marketing hub will also require a certified specialist in order to consistently keep your marketing initiatives organized and optimized. This means that companies must dedicate resources towards keeping their internal marketing team trained or opt to hire an outside firm to manage the execution of their marketing initiatives.

Customer service

Pros: Companies can leverage the HubSpot service hub to track and manage their entire customer service process from start-to-finish, including the ability to:

• Track incoming service tickets
• Create a knowledge base for customer onboarding and training
• Use customer feedback surveys to improve service fulfillment

Cons: While the tools within the service hub can help companies deliver a world-class experience, there are several limitations within this tool stack due to its infancy, including:

• Less robust feature set than dedicated options such as Zendesk or Freshdesk
• Limited customer portal functionality  
• Limited survey functionality

Depending on your specific customer service needs, you may need to compensate for some of the limitations of the service hub features, especially as they pertain to creating and maintaining a customer portal.

Operations

Pros: HubSpot's operations hub provides companies with a systematic approach to managing internal operations with increased efficiency.

Companies can leverage the operations hub in order to manage and optimize their current processes:

• Effectively sync data between multiple applications
• Automate data quality and formatting
• Programmable process and workflow automation

Cons: Although the future prospects of the operations hub are promising, the toolset is still relatively new and has several limitations. Many of the options available to companies around workflow automation will require a specialist who is comfortable creating custom code in Node.js or Python.

IT / Web Development Team

Pros: HubSpot features a full-fledged content management system within its CMS Hub. This feature set enables companies to create dynamic websites that are secure and powerful, yet flexible enough for a non-technical person to use.

Companies that choose to build their website within the HubSpot CMS will have access to many of the features that are common within other popular content management systems, including:

• Drag-and-drop Editor
• Website themes & templates
• Traffic & conversion analytics
• Dynamic content & promotional offers
• Seamless lead tracking and attribution

Cons: Although the HubSpot CMS offers many of the features you would expect from a top tier CMS, it requires a very specialized skill set. Developers who specialize in the HubSpot CMS are not in abundance, as opposed to more popular CMS frameworks, such as WordPress. As a result it can be harder to find experienced talent and often at a higher price tag than other developer counterparts.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that yes, I recommend using HubSpot’s new stack of software options. Overall, many of my clients opt for the benefits and efficiencies gained by centralizing their business data in one location. This one-location benefit outweighs any negatives caused by a lack of features.

The platform is also rapidly evolving and adding or improving features. Many of the negatives may become positives in the near future.

I counsel most of my clients to move their business operations to one unified HubSpot growth stack, while helping them weigh the cons and frustrations of migrating away from a unified system.