HubSpot CRM Software Review

HubSpot Overview

HubSpot offers a robust CRM tool that organizes all sales tasks into one clean interface. The application handles contacts, appointments, and pending/signed contracts. It syncs with Outlook, Gmail, Zendesk, Pandadoc, and other products and records every interaction with existing and prospective customers. Users can chat or make phone calls directly from the app to their contacts. The application handles email marketing campaigns and can stage email deliveries on a personalized basis. All interactions on email, social media, chat, and phone are logged and documented.

The HubSpot CRM offers the usual contact management, sorting, and searching capabilities. Contracts, forms, and other documents can be developed within the system and deployed as needed. The CRM includes live chat and chatbot functionality and can help develop landing pages. Recently, HubSpot added a new email tool that can sequence, schedule, and track email communications from within the CRM.

HubSpot's Business Model

HubSpot makes its basic CRM tool available without charge. Customers who want more than that can elect to purchase premium hubs that work with the CRM. These include apps for marketing, sales, and services. These apps and the basic CRM tool function together under the philosophy of "inbound marketing," which involves inviting queries from prospective customers by enhanced social media posts, blogs, SEO placement, and other techniques. The premium apps help customers to manage referrals and channel how sales and marketing personnel engage with existing and prospective clients. They also help generate leads by delivering specifically optimized web-based content to the most receptive audiences.

HubSpot offers four paid versions of its premium apps--Starter, Basic, Professional and Enterprise. These vary in price from $50 a month to over $2,400 a month, depending on number of users, amount of content, number of leads/contacts, and other factors. 

HubSpot Summed Up

HubSpot's free CRM is a very enticing product. It offers the kind of functionality that other CRM software companies charge for. Perhaps because Hubspot has been in business longer than many of its competitors, its products are unusually sophisticated and comprehensive. The company is clearly betting that users will be so pleased with its free services that they will start to spend for more premium features as they scale up. Given both the quantity and quality of its CRM, this is probably a safe bet for Hubspot to make.