HubSpot CRM at A Glance
HubSpot CRM enables sales and marketing teams to manage contacts, track deals, view sales pipeline in real time, identify high-quality leads to go after and automate email marketing. In this review, we’ll be focusing on the Sales Hub™ products.
Pricing
Besides the Free plan, HubSpot CRM has three paid tiers: Starter, Professional and Enterprise.
Free Plan
Each Free plan includes one deal pipeline, one team or department with unlimited users and up to one million contacts, companies, deals or task details. The downside is that it has only online support; there is no phone option. But HubSpot more than makes up for it by including these features per user per month:
- Calling (maximum 15 minutes): Short calls can be made directly from the browser and you also have the option to record them, which facilitates automatic call tracking and CRM recordkeeping.
- Five templates: These templates help your team get up to speed with communications. You can also customize them to drive engagement for your campaigns.
- Notifications (maximum 200): Real-time notifications enable your sales teams to be on top of assigned leads, form submissions, deal mentions and more. These notifications can be customized for web, desktop and mobile apps.
- Five snippets: Snippets are reusable text blurbs that can come in handy for real-time chatting as well as quick email responses.
- Five documents: Ability to upload, share and track up to five documents saves valuable time for your team.
- One booking page: The booking page can be integrated with Google or Outlook calendar, which you can share with others to schedule a meeting.
All HubSpot CRM plans integrate with 500+ business apps including Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Gmail, Outlook, Zapier, Salesforce, and more.
Once you are comfortable using the free platform, you can opt for paid add-on features as required. However, keep an eye out for how much you are paying for the add-on features so that you smoothly graduate to the other paid tiers when costs start adding up.
Sales Hub™ Starter
The Sales Hub™ Starter plan includes everything in the free plan with eight hours per month of calling and up to 5,000 templates, snippets and documents. There are unlimited email open and click notifications, plus two deal pipelines under one team account. The new features that are available in this plan are:
- Prospect: Prospect tool reveals which companies are visiting your website and the pages they’re engaging with the most.
- Messages: With messages, you can chat with visitors in real time as they browse your site.
- Sequences: Sequences automate follow-up emails for leads, freeing up valuable time for your sales team.
Sales Hub™ Professional Plan
The Professional plan includes everything that the Sales Hub™ Starter plan has and increases call time to 16 hours per user per month. Additional features include:
- Up to 15 deal pipelines
- Up to 10 teams
- Up to 300 automated workflows
- Customized report builder
- Smart send times
- Salesforce integration
Smart send times is a really neat addition to your stable of CRM tools. HubSpot CRM analyzes sales activities using smart notifications and recommends what leads and activities to monitor. This makes it easier for sales reps to identify the leads that are ripe for conversion.
Sales Hub™ Enterprise
Sales Hub™ Enterprise includes everything in the Professional package, plus a range of other features:
- Create custom objects
- Quote approvals
- Sales forecasting
- Sales analytics
- Predictive lead scoring
- Call transcription and recording
- Sales playbooks
- Single sign-on (SSO)
- E-signature
HubSpot CRM Intuitive Dashboard
HubSpot CRM has a clean and simple visual dashboard that offers a real-time view of the entire sales funnel. You can customize the dashboard to add to the default modules or remove those that you do not want. In addition to this, the dashboard has an active area right in the middle where you do the actual work. This area can also be customized using the top navigation ribbon.
Other Benefits
If you integrate your email with your HubSpot CRM account, it enables you to get lots of CRM-related work done from your inbox. Whenever you open an email, a CRM window pops into the inbox, showing contextual information from the software. You can choose to attach emails to a CRM record and track clicks and open rates. Conversely, you can send emails directly from the software record.
Within your email, you can use templates, sequences, documents and embed your calendar.
Fine Print
HubSpot CRM is only one tool available from HubSpot, an established leader in digital marketing automation tools. A variety of HubSpot tools from the Marketing Hub™, Sales Hub™ and Service Hub™ are included in the free version of HubSpot CRM.
Whether you add a contact, lead, company or website to HubSpot CRM, it is called a contact; it doesn’t differentiate between leads and contacts. If any of these contacts have multiple email addresses, you will have to manually add them. You cannot use the import feature.
Featured Partners
1
monday sales CRM
Free; $9 per user per month for basic features
14 days
Yes
2
Salesforce
$25 per month per user for basic features
30 days
Yes
3
HubSpot
Free; $15 per user per month (billed annually)
14 days
Yes
4
Pipedrive
$14 per user per month (billed annually)
14 days
Yes
5
Creatio
$25 per user per month
14 days
Yes
How HubSpot CRM Stacks Up
| HubSpot CRM | Zoho CRM | Bitrix24 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Forever Plan Available | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| No. of Contacts for Free Plan | 1,000,000 | 5,000 | Unlimited |
| Support for International Currencies | For all paid plans | For all paid plans | For all plans including Free |
| Analytics Tools | Not available for Free and Sales Hub™ Starter plans | For all paid plans | For all paid plans |
| Learn More | |||
| Read Reviews | — |
Is HubSpot CRM Right for You or Your Business?
If you are planning to start with customer relationship management for the first time, HubSpot CRM is an excellent choice as it is easy to set up and use. Created specifically for small and mid-sized businesses, its tools are designed to solve their unique challenges like small team sizes and limited resources.
The HubSpot Free plan likely has enough tools to get you started. As you get more comfortable and proficient in using CRM, you can add tools as you need them or move to other paid tiers as required.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is a CRM?
CRM is an acronym for customer relationship management. It is software that helps businesses organize, manage and nurture relationships with their customers as well as prospects.
Does my business need a CRM?
If you sell a product or provide a service, you have clients that you need to interact with regularly. You may need a CRM to help you organize those interactions and nurture relationships to help your business grow. CRMs also help in managing leads for business growth.
Is HubSpot the best CRM?
HubSpot is great for teams new to CRM, especially if they want to take advantage of the platform’s email marketing functionality. But if you’re in the market for a customer relationship management system, you should also consider HubSpot’s competitors before making a decision. You can check out our guide to the best marketing CRMs available today.
What should I look for in CRM software?
You should evaluate CRM software on several parameters: pricing, business fit, sales process tools, custom reports, integrations, ease of use, team communication tools and multiplatform access. The best CRM software for you will rate highly on the factors that are most important to your business.
Can small businesses use CRM?
Absolutely. There are many types of CRM for different teams or needs, even though it’s traditionally used by sales teams. Look for the best marketing CRM software, which should include tools to automate marketing campaigns, or real estate CRM, which focuses on communication tools, such as click-to-call and text messaging within the app.
