During the 2014 annual HubSpot Conference known as “Inbound,” co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah announced several new products features. Of those announced, I will focus on the one that has the most potential to be disruptive within the marketing automation market.HubSpot Roots
HubSpot was founded on the basis of inbound marketing, which is essentially reaching people when and where they want to be reached via online channels. As the market has matured, HubSpot has quickly added marketing automation to its platform along with a content management tool called the COS or Content Optimization System. Both of these core functionscontinue to be developed with new features being added on a regular basis. Prior to the launch of HubSpot CRM, HubSpot coined their product as an All-in-One Marketing Platform, which is a fair assessment of what HubSpot delivers.
HubSpot CRM for Sales
Enter the HubSpot CRM Sales Platform. Before we go too deep, let me be clear that HubSpot CRM is not a replacement or even a remote competitor to established CRM products such as Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, Oracle CRM or MS Dynamics. There are certainly some areas of overlap among HubSpot CRM and CRM competitors; however, HubSpot CRM serves a different purpose with extreme focus on a few key sales functions. See the video below for a quick tour (4:38) of the application.
- By adding the sales or CRM features to the “All-in-One Marketing Platform,” marketing and sales teams can work even closer together to close deals. HubSpot will continue integration with third-party CRM systems; yet for organizations that desire a simple and clean interface that focuses more on the sales team than it does on the director of sales, this may be an excellent option.
- Further, for those companies who do not have a Customer Relationship Mangement system or do not feel the investment is in their best interest, HubSpot offers a compelling product that provides industry-leading marketing automation features combined with a functional sales solution that will address the needs of many sales teams.
- Priced to sell, HubSpot CRM is offered as a freemium product with several premium features that can be added for a small fee.
- HubSpot CRM also works will with SideKick, which is the rebranded version of the email tracking tool, Signals. In combination, SideKick and HubSpot CRM provide tracking and insights into key sales and marketing activities, which help increase sales team productivity and sales intelligence.
Key features of HubSpot CRM include
- Companies
- Contacts
- Deals
- Task
- Automatic integration in to the marketing platform
- Provides visibility into all customer and prospect touches tracked in HubSpot
- Integrated VOIP click-to-dial feature with a call recording option
- Sidekick integration
So What?
HubSpot CRM is a great add-on to an already powerful markeitng tool. Given its price-point, it is a great value for organizations who are not sure where to start in CRM and equally provides powerful tools to those who need a system to manage key interactions within the sales process in a very simplistic fashion.
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