When you have the right tools on your side, you can do anything. This is also true for the ever-evolving marketing and sales industry. A tool is valuable when it makes our lives easier. HubSpot helps us stay organized and efficient—all while lowering costs. In even simpler terms, every Batman needs their Robin, and HubSpot is ours (and our clients’).
Let’s learn about how to get started with HubSpot. We’ll walk you through what makes this robust tool so great, and how you can set up your account to take your marketing and sales efforts further than ever.
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What Is HubSpot?
On their website, they state: “HubSpot offers a complete CRM platform with all the tools and integrations you need to grow better.” Simply, it’s an all-in-one marketing and sales platform.
With its abundance of features and continued support, HubSpot has arguably become the most powerful client relationship management (CRM) tool on the market.
We’ve had so much success with this software that we became a HubSpot Platinum Partner. We knew we had to encourage our clients to utilize its power for their strategies and growth as well.
Plenty of our clients now use HubSpot for both sales and marketing. Many of its features follow standard sales and marketing stages, so it’s intuitive to use. And the HubSpot team really goes above and beyond to make every part of their CRM customizable to your needs. You can adjust things like views, properties, dashboards per team in the business, specific account users, and more.
That all sounds nice, but how do you get an account? First, you should understand the different types of accounts to make sure you’re creating the right one for your team.
What Are the Different Types of HubSpot Accounts?
One of our favorite things about HubSpot is the free version available for everyone to try out. Even this complimentary version comes with great options to store all your contacts—no matter how big your database is—as well as a sales pipeline where you can create deals, associate them with contacts, add value per deal, track its sales path, and create your own meeting link.
These are just a few of the capabilities we find most helpful. You might like others even better.
Here is a list of all their features:
These many features when you’re just starting with HubSpot might seem a little overwhelming, but once you play around with them (best to do that with an expert’s help, so you can flatten your learning curve) and become a more experienced user, you’ll see why people quickly switch to paid accounts. Once you do, you’ll unlock handy automated features that are adjustable for just about any situation you might face in your marketing or sales process.
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Marketing Hub or Sales Hub?
We’d say both! You might not have a large team that needs all those features, though, which is fine. If you’re going to pick one over another, here’s an overview of each to help you decide:
Sales Hub
Sales Hub eliminates friction by bringing all your tools and data together. HubSpot has virtually endless intergeneration options to align with your needs and track every bit of information required by your sales team.
HubSpot built its platform knowing how heavily people would rely on it, so it can handle an incredible amount of storage, processing, users, and more. There are four different packages for Sales Hub:
One of the most popular paid features provided at the Professional level—especially for me, as a Sales Coordinator and Consultant—is sequences. Getting this feature means you never have to remember to follow up. It saves all of your templates as well, so your sales team will save a significant amount of time they’d otherwise spend on repetitive tasks.
HubSpot helps eliminate redundancies so employees can focus on value-added sales work.
Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub has the same program levels—only the pricing is a bit different, as seen in the chart below.
My favorite paid feature in this hub is how easily you can integrate HubSpot with other platforms you’re using. For example, with Zoom for Webinars, you can track numbers to the smallest conversion detail. You cannot optimize and improve your marketing performance without true, detailed analytics, and this tool makes it easier for you to get all key metrics in one place.
Setting Up Your Account
When you get started with HubSpot, you can choose to begin with either a Marketing or Sales Hub account. Based on the activities you want to perform and track, you should choose what makes the most sense. Sales, for instance, will focus more on tracking sales conversions and conversations, while marketing is all about lead capture and funnel optimizations.
Pro tip: make sure you’re using Google Chrome when you get started with HubSpot. If you’re in another browser, you may not be able to complete your account setup.
Fill out your information, including first and last name and email address. After that, you’ll receive a confirmation email to activate your account. Once you click on the link in the email address, you’ll be able to set up a password, which you should make strong, secure, and memorable for your users.
HubSpot will ask you for your company domain and how many people you expect will use it. Those are fairly quick details to share, so you should be up and running in a short amount of time.
HubSpot Academy
Everyone with an account will have access to the platform’s vast knowledge base—trust us, regardless of your industry, it’s extremely valuable to have your team members check out these courses. You can’t get certifications without a paid account, but the modules are incredibly valuable.
Sometimes we feel like our customer service team could use a few more sales skills, or we need marketers to better understand sales processes. HubSpot Academy will solve all of this and more. It’ll help your people brush up and polish their skill sets, but it will also strengthen their teamwork by understanding the rest of the business clockwork.
You’ve Got a HubSpot Account—Now What?
HubSpot Marketing and Sales Hub are both powerful tools. Our agency has both types of accounts, and we leverage them every day in our sales and marketing efforts. As a HubSpot Platinum Partner, we truly practice what we preach. That is how we can attest to the performance of the software. We like to test things out rather extensively before we ever suggest them to a client.
The most common situation we come across with our clients is that they’re not leveraging HubSpot to its fullest potential. They often don’t have a dedicated, expert position in-house to make sure the team is taking full advantage of it, and in that case, they’re wasting sales.
We’ve guided countless clients through the setup and optimization of their HubSpot account —ensuring everything is tailored to their specific needs and integrating it smoothly into their systems.
If you’d like to bring on seasoned users to see what this brilliant piece of technology has to offer, we encourage you to reach out.
What if, After Some Market Research, You’re Still Not Sure?
We are proud HubSpot Platinum Partners. We genuinely enjoy working with this software and getting people started with HubSpot. Even if you’re not ready to make the jump, or you’ve tested it out and feel it doesn’t suit you, keep in mind: in most cases, it’s just a sign that the software isn’t optimized for your needs.
Now, while uncommon, it is always possible that HubSpot really isn’t for you. Even in these cases, we still want to talk to you! We love chatting with like-minded marketing and sales professionals and would be honored to partner with you—whether you use Marketo, Salesforce, or any other tool. We have supported many companies that happily use these, and we’ve still been able to get them better numbers, faster.
Want to know more? Get in touch! Schedule a CRM assessment and hear what we are all about.
