The Ultimate Guide to HubSpot

Are you a B2B company that wants to get more out of their marketing and sales teams, ultimately supercharging your entire business?

Well, you’re in the right place because today we’re going to take a deep dive into our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software of choice here at Hivehouse Digital — HubSpot.

Table of Contents Click on any chapter below to scroll directly to it

06: Optimize Your HUBSPOT

What is HubSpot?

Are you living under a rock?

Just kidding. But seriously, if you’re a marketing or sales professional you should know about HubSpot. HubSpot is a comprehensive CRM platform. As we said in a previous blog, if you’re unfamiliar with the idea of a CRM imagine a digital Rolodex, that also gives you an incredibly powerful toolbox to market, sell, and gather relevant information about your leads and customers.

And of course, as the name suggests, HubSpot consists of different hubs. Each hub is built to support a separate function of your business.

Marketing Hub Manage, design, and build your emails, landing pages, social media, campaigns, and other content here.

Sales Hub Prospect, create deals, forecast performance, and create and access playbooks for sales teams.

Commerce Hub Invoices, payment links, quotes, and everything else to get your business paid quickly.

Content Hub Create blogs, website and landing pages, customer forms, podcasts, and more.

Service Hub As in customer service, such as live chatting, creating service tickets, making calls, and more.

Operations Hub Helps you merge data, sync contacts between different apps, and report on the combined data.

Why HubSpot?

As we mentioned in our Why HubSpot is the Best CRM for B2B Businesses blog, there are a few primary reasons to use HubSpot over the many other CRMs out there. Below are the TL;DR reasons.

It’s easy to use. If you’ve been in marketing long enough, you’ve probably used some janky software. HubSpot, however, is incredibly smooth and intuitive. It’s easy to dip your toes into creating emails, landing pages, setting up contacts, etc. Plus, HubSpot has an insane amount of user resources, including HubSpot Academy.

Flexible pricing. HubSpot offers different packages based on the size of your organization, data, and which various hubs you need. Effectively, your HubSpot pricing can be customized to exactly what you need.

HubSpot understands marketers and customers. In the B2B world, transactions can take a looong time. HubSpot is built to track your prospects through the entire buyer’s journey. This allows your team to meet your prospects at every step, improving your chances of converting them into happy customers.

Innovative ways to make your job easier.
Whether it’s workflows that automate tasks or incorporating AI to create images or copy, HubSpot is always on the cutting edge of features to make working easier.

The Hubs

Let’s dive deeper into each HubSpot Hub, as they make the magic of HubSpot possible.

Marketing Hub

Much like a real-life marketing department, the Marketing Hub can help you create the following marketing assets.

Campaigns - Organize all of your marketing efforts into a single measurable, trackable place.

Email - HubSpot’s email marketing tool is incredibly robust yet intuitive. You can quickly begin building drag-and-drop emails, segmenting subscriber lists, scheduling, and A/B testing. The list goes on.

Social - With so many different platforms, working in social can feel like herding cats. With HubSpot’s social, you’ll have a convenient cat-io to manage and create all of your social media.

Ads - Similarly, Ads gives you a command center for all of your digital advertising efforts.

Forms - Create data-capturing forms, customize them to your heart’s desire, and manage them all in one place.

CTAs - Create advanced call-to-actions like slide-ins, pop-ups, and other ways to grab your website visitor’s attention.

SMS - If you send SMS messages to your customers or leads, you can manage them in HubSpot, and tie them into your marketing efforts.

Reasons We Love Marketing Hub

Supercharged email marketing We’ve used plenty of email marketing tools and it’s difficult to imagine using something besides HubSpot. It lets you quickly design emails, measure the results, and find ways to optimize.

Everything in its right place Working in marketing means endless content, data, and the pressure to prove ROI. HubSpot organizes everything so well, that you actually feel like you can stay on top of your marketing efforts. Dashboards give you the exact data you want to see and campaigns allow you to create strategic marketing efforts.

Sales Hub

The Sales Hub gives your sales team the tools needed to nurture leads, close deals, and measure performance, so they focus on building relationships with their prospects.

Deals - Deals let you organize associated contacts, companies, and relevant activities into one place to keep tabs on your sales pipeline.

Playbooks - Standardize how your sales team interacts with prospects.

Contacts - While contacts are used throughout HubSpot, your sales team can email, call, text, schedule meetings, and more all directly in HubSpot.

Quotes - Send real, usable quotes to your prospects through HubSpot.

Reasons We Love Sales Hub

Plays well with others Oftentimes, sales departments can feel like a silo. With Sales Hub, communication between sales and other departments has never been easier. Plus, for sales management, you’ll be able to easily track activities, assign tasks, and standardize the sales process.

Automation Sales tasks can be repetitive. Automate them with workflows, sequences, and AI-powered tools.

Commerce Hub

Commerce Hub is built to help businesses get paid, make payments more easily, and support everything around transactions.

Invoices - Send invoices directly from HubSpot, which helps integrate data into the other features of HubSpot.

Payment Links - Sell from pretty much anywhere on the internet with a simple link.

Quotes - Presentation is key and with HubSpot’s Quotes your branded quotes template will make your services or products an easy sell.

Subscriptions - Manage recurring payments through HubSpot.

B2B Checkout - Great checkout experiences don’t have to just be for B2C businesses. B2B Checkout allows you to create a list of line items in a tidy and easy-to-use checkout experience.

Reasons We Love Commerce Hub

Makes B2B Feel Like B2C It’s so easy to buy something off Amazon on a whim, but in the B2B world transactions often take months. With the Commerce Hub, B2B transactions will be a breeze.

Content Hub

Between sales and marketing, there’s a ton of content to be managed and organized. Content Hub can help you create and keep track of all of it.

Website Pages - Tools for building and managing website pages with responsive design options.

Landing Pages - Users can create custom landing pages with drag-and-drop editors, templates, and A/B testing capabilities.

Blogs - A comprehensive blog editor with SEO recommendations, draft saving, and easy-to-use formatting tools. Plus, AI tools that can help you generate blogs.

Podcasts - Create and distribute podcasts from HubSpot.

SEO - Let HubSpot scan your website and make SEO recommendations.

Reasons We Love Content Hub

Intuitive Landing Pages Landing pages are an essential part of digital marketing and HubSpot’s Landing Pages tool is nearly as intuitive and powerful as their email marketing.

Easy User Experience No coding experience? No problem. With drag and drop tools, you can design your blogs, website pages, and landing pages with ease.

Service Hub

The marketing hub lets you find leads, the sales hub turns them into customers, and the service hub gives you the tools to keep them happy.

Tickets - Customers can submit inquiries so you can resolve their issues.

AI Chatbot - Let AI answer your customer’s common questions.

Help Desk Workspace - Manage your customer service operations all in one place.

Knowledge Base - Centralize your important resources and articles for your customers.

Reasons We Love Service Hub

It’s Delightful The final phase of inbound methodology is the delight stage. Delivering an efficient and optimized customer service experience makes it easy to keep customers happy.

Buttoned-Up Customer Service Rather than using internal tools to talk with your customers, Service Hub lends communications efforts a more professional feel.

Operations Hub

Operations Hub is designed to make data management easier and more accessible for everyone in your business.

Data Sync - Keep your other business tools’ data in lockstep with HubSpot. Data Sync offers integrations for 90+ apps like MailChimp or Outlook.

Programmable Automation - Execute code directly within HubSpot workflows.

Data Quality Automation - Set your HubSpot up to clean its own data.

Datasets - Create templates for your data, so it’s organized and uniform across your organization.

Reasons We Love Operations Hub

Makes Data-Driven Business Accessible Reusable datasets to create easy reports, self-cleaning data, and data from popular apps make it super easy to incorporate important metrics into decision-making across your entire business.

HubSpot Pricing

You’re probably thinking, okay all of these features sound great but how much does all of this cost? HubSpot pricing is extremely flexible, you can even build your own bundle. Which makes it a bit complicated to break down — it really depends on which features you want to take advantage of. Below is a high-level overview of current HubSpot pricing.

First up is the Customer Platform which bundles features together from multiple HubSpot Hubs.

Starter Customer Platform — Starts at $15/mo/seat

Marketing Hub Starter (1,000 contacts)
Sales Hub Starter
Service Hub Starter
Content Hub Starter
Operations Hub Starter
Commerce Hub

Professional Customer Platform — Starts at $1,170/mo

Marketing Hub Professional (2,000 contacts)
Sales Hub Professional (5 paid users)
Service Hub Professional (5 paid users)
Content Hub Professional
Operations Hub Professional
Commerce Hub

Enterprise Customer Platform — Starts at $4,300/mo

Marketing Hub Enterprise (10,000 contacts)
Sales Hub Enterprise (7 paid users)
Service Hub Enterprise (7 paid users)
Content Hub Enterprise
Operations Hub Enterprise
Commerce Hub

Next up, we have the individual Sales and Marketing Hub pricing.

Marketing Hub Starter (1,000 Contacts) — Starts at $15/mo/seat

Email Marketing
Forms
Live Chat

Marketing Hub Professional (2,000 Contacts) — Starts at $800/mo

Starter Features Plus Teams
Custom Report
Campaign Reporting
Dynamic Personalization
Omni-channel Marketing Automation
Social Media

Marketing Hub Enterprise (10,000 Contacts) — Starts at $3,600/mo

Professional Features Plus Organize Teams
Custom Events
Multi-touch Revenue Attribution
Custom Objects
Limit Access to Content and Data
Customer Journey Analytics

Sales Hub Starter (2 Paid Users) — Starts at $15/mo/seat

Multiple currencies
Conversation routing
HubSpot-provided phone numbers
Simple automation
E-signature
Goals

Sales Hub Professional — Starts at $90/mo/seat

Starter features plus Sequences
Call transcription
Coaching playlists
Forecasting
ABM tools and automation
Playbooks
Prospecting Workspace

Sales Hub Enterprise —Starts at $150/mo/seat

Professional features plus custom objects
Predictive lead scoring
Recurring revenue tracking
Advanced permissions
Lead Form Routing
Conversation intelligence

Remember, HubSpot’s pricing and packages are easily customizable to what your business needs.

If you’re unsure if HubSpot is right for you, try our HubSpot ROI calculator to get an estimate of your investment. Plus, a free version exists if you just want to poke around.

HubSpot Partner

So, how do we know so much about HubSpot? We’ve got a ton of experience. For over a decade, we’ve been growing our business and helping businesses grow with the help of HubSpot. In 2015, we even became a HubSpot Platinum Partner Agency — meaning we were recognized as one of the top fifty HubSpot-certified inbound marketing agencies in the world.

As a HubSpot Partner agency, we’re able to tap into the power of HubSpot and access all of the resources available from HubSpot. Ready to level up your business with the power of HubSpot?

Optimize Your HubSpot

Optimize Your Marketing and Sales with HubSpot + Hivehouse Digital We can help! We offer HubSpot Onboarding and Support services that can be as simple as helping you set up your first HubSpot account or as complex as creating automations, workflows, and managing your sales and marketing. And if you already use HubSpot, we offer HubSpot audits so you can get the most out of your CRM!

To get started working with a HubSpot Platinum Partner, learn more about what we bring to the HubSpot table!

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Chris Beecher Owner