If you’ve spent anytime at all in the marketing world or perhaps doing some marketing for your organization, chances are you’ve heard the name HubSpot bandied about. But what is HubSpot exactly? A CRM? An academy? A blog? Yes to all three and more.

At MPWRSource, it is no secret that we love HubSpot. We use HubSpot to help MPWRSource grow, are a certified HubSpot Solutions Partner, and are eager to share the wealth of knowledge we have about it’s orange powered CRM and various Hubs.

In this post, we will go over what exactly HubSpot is, what you can learn from it, and how each hub can effectively help your business grow.

What is HubSpot?

HubSpot is a cloud-based CRM designed to help align sales and marketing teams, foster sales enablement, boost ROI and optimize your inbound marketing strategy to generate more, qualified leads. Simply put, HubSpot is a software platform designed to help your company market and sell more effectively. Its Growth Stack is uniquely designed to put everything you need at your fingertips and to streamline the process of taking a prospect through their sales journey.

HubSpot began as a tool merely for those interested in inbound marketing way back in 2005. In all truth, it could be said that HubSpot had a hand in coining the term Inbound Marketing and continues to be at the forefront of marketing trends today.

HubSpot works by housing all of a company’s marketing and sales efforts on one cloud-based software. From blogging to social media to email marketing to contacts to deals, everything can be accessed from within HubSpot’s robust software platform. This way, when a lead is ready to convert, they can be seamlessly passed along from marketing to sales in an experience that helps organizations turn warm leads into happy customers.

HubSpot’s tools not only allow you to host website and landing pages, create blogs and automated email sequences, and manage interactions between your leads and customers, but also gives you all the data you would ever want so that you can continually improve upon the way you engage with your leads and customers, thus having an ever-evolving pleasant customer experience.

The Hubs of HubSpot

HubSpot’s effective software tools are geared to help you and your organization on every part of the buyer’s journey. HubSpot has broken its tools down into separate “Hubs”—which can each be purchased separately (but we would be remiss if we did not mention that the strong CRM is our favorite price: FREE!!!)—but when each Hub is combined, the Hubs work together to give its user a full suite of tools that span across marketing, sales, and customer support teams.

The Hubs:

• CRM
• CMS Hub
• Marketing Hub
• Sales Hub
• Service Hub

HubSpot CRM

• Email design and automation tools
• Blog creation tools
• Social Media organization and scheduling tools
• Calls-To-Action
• Mobile Optimization
• Landing Pages
• Integration with Canva from within the Social Media scheduler
• Customizable Reporting Dashboards

Sales Hub

The HubSpot Sales Hub helps your sales and relationship management team manage, communicate with, and track your leads. With data from your marketing team via the website and email campaigns, for example, your sales team can see where prospects are in their sales journey so that they can best meet their needs. It gives sales teams the tools they need to provide excellent service and close deals the minute a lead is ready to convert. Sales Hub lets your sales team see what leads are visiting your site, on what pages, and how often. The software also offers instant alerts whenever a prospect opens an email, and sales team members can even automate personalized workflows that offer quality information exactly when a lead is ready for it. And because Sales Hub syncs up with the HubSpot CRM, your sales team can easily see which deals are won, lost, or still in progress.

Service Hub

The HubSpot Service Hub is designed to support customer service teams. Its suite of tools make it easier for your customer service teams to identify issues that clients may be experiencing, and empowers the to resolve them quickly in order to leaves you with happy customers. It is designed to help you listen to customers, communicate with them, exceed their expectations, and turn them into evangelists for your services.

As you can see, HubSpot has a lot to offer in its various Hubs. Please note that each Hub has a few different subscription levels to choose from, and some features may not be available at all subscription levels.

But What Does it All Mean?

Let’s look at a real world example of how HubSpot can help your business nurture strangers into customers into evangelists for your organization.

1. Prospect Penny Googles a question that you’ve written a blog post about and stumbles upon your site. (CMS Hub and Marketing Hub)
2. Penny is impressed. You are an amazing writer and she likes what you have to say. She signs up for your blog. (Marketing Hub)
3. HubSpot tracks all of Penny’s activity on your website and gathers data so you know what she is interested in. (CRM & CMS Hub)
4. With Penny’s information now, HubSpot send her an automated email with answers to the questions that she was having and she is impressed with how well you anticipate her needs. (Marketing Hub)
5. HubSpot alerts your Sales Team and gives them her information as a potential lead. (CRM)
6. Your sales team reaches out to Penny with a personalized phone call or email to follow up. (Sales Hub)
7. Penny schedules a meeting with your sales team to learn more about your company and its products and/or services. (Sales Hub)
8. Penny makes a purchase or signs a contract. (Sales Hub)
9. Penny has questions about her purchase and how exactly it all works. (Service Hub)
10. She chats with your support team. (Service Hub)
11. She has a great experience with your company and tells her colleagues and friends and shares with them a blog post that helped her.

This is just one example of how HubSpot can help your business grow and implement Inbound Marketing best practices. Rather than merely utilizing traditional sales techniques to pursue your target market, HubSpot helps you drive sales by really putting the customer and her pain points at the center of all it does.

By keeping all of your prospect and customer information in one place, rather than scattered across various spreadsheets or platforms, your team is better able to identify pain points and provide targeted solutions that bring peace of mind. And you will be able to track your success with actual data gathered in real time, so that your efforts are tracked. Everything within HubSpot is measurable and HubSpot makes it easy to gather and analyze the information that matters to you most.

MPWRSource Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Tiffany Joy Greene, M.B.A., says, “Data is needed to run a successful, evolving, and thriving business, and HubSpot serves as a single source of truth. Businesses rely on an entire stack of tools they use to sell, market, communicate, and manage, but with HubSpot we can use one CRM platform that houses all of the tools, including Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, and Service Hub. Everything communicates seamlessly together, allowing us to to make HubSpot our home for data organization, management, and accessibility.”