What do you like best about the product?

As a marketing executive, I find that my favourite feature is the social media manager. You can register a Facebook, a LinkedIn and a Twitter account then schedule posts for each. The best part is the calendar view where you have a centralised dashboard with all your posts for the month. You're able to move them around, edit them, and clone in case you want to re-promote a piece of content. It takes a lot of the hassle of scheduling and optimising social media posts.

What do you dislike about the product?

The social media dashboard has a limited functionality when it comes to interacting with Twitter followers and it's not always clear how to edit the lists you're monitoring.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

The most pressing problem we're addressing using this product is monitoring and analysing our subscribers list. Thanks to HubSpot landing pages, we are able to populate our mailing list and track which part of the funnel each lead belongs to. This allows us to tailor the content of the newsletter which is sent off with the help of an automated workflow. Overall, HubSpot simply makes our processes faster and smoother.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Make sure to use the HubSpot academy tutorials. There are invaluable strategies and recommendations in the videos.

What do you like best about the product?

The interface is easy to use, technical support is great, specially through chat - they are always so patient and supportive. So many different tools that we are able to use under the same roof. I love it!

What do you dislike about the product?

I've had some issues with billing and the fact that my company hasn't signed up for a local account manager, sometime is painful. The issue takes more time to be solved, but in the end everything is great again.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Great tracking of website and email activities, deals, and all the history of the contact in the same place and easy to find.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Amazing tool that you can connect with your Marketing platform and see all the analytics and results under the same roof! Awesome support from the team and so easy to use.

What do you like best about the product?

I love that I can keep track of contacting clients. I do love how easy it is to use. I like how I can change the list of details I need for each client (the bio, name, number, etc).

What do you dislike about the product?

I wish I could keep track of Social Media messages I have with my clients. I wish it could integrate with work emails more smoothly. Unfortunately it automatically logs emails that are not potential clients and they are just advertisements. This makes us have to go through our inbox and delete everything. Also there is a problem with the scheduled emails software end in which I contacted the HubSpot team about. Once you schedule an email (is in my the Free Plan) you cant delete it or edit it, even though you click delete. You would have to delete the whole contact that you are scheduling the email for. That is very disappointing.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

I am using it to keep log of all clients, and this has allowed me to keep track of everything in a more organized way!

Recommendations to others considering the product:

I recommend that they test it out first before implementation.

What do you like best about the product?

HubSpot is first and foremost an inbound, lead-driven marketing automation system, and that's what it does best. Running email campaigns, automating first touches and demo reach-outs, and using task lists to jump around the CRM and complete work efficiently are what it does with ease. There are also many integrations like ZoomInfo and PandaDoc that hook in with just a few clicks, which is fantastic.

Many of the things that work well in HubSpot are not unique to HubSpot and are a given in almost any CRM.

What do you dislike about the product?

Using HubSpot for sales and as a client and prospect data warehouse is a constant fight with the system. It is not intuitive and lacks an incredible amount of features. Features I never even considered being an option in a CRM until using HubSpot. I could write a novel about the amount of problems and frustrations I have had with HubSpot, but I will just list my current ones below:

View Customization:
You cannot standardize the view people have. For instance, we don't use the Service hub or Products module but I can't turn off or reorganize how it will appear on people's screens. You have no idea how many times I've gotten questions about what the Products or Service module is for or how to hide them.

Pipeline Management:
- If you create a Deal that is not in the first stage and skip to the third sales stage where you normally have required fields, it will not ask you for the fields you set as a requirement. This results in many records not having complete information until it is moved into the next stage. If a deal is created in the Closed Won stage, we may not notice it is missing information until a very critical point in implementation.

Data Field Management:
- You cannot carry over data from parent or child companies into fields to have information roll-up or down for quick reference.
-Access to calculated fields requires you spend at their top tier for Sales, when in other CRMs it is usually a basic feature.
-The Products module is essentially useless process-wise. While it does have interesting customization options, when a salesperson is creating a Deal it does not give a pop-up for you to customize the product's terms, pricing, discounts, etc. even though the menu itself exists. This creates a lot of extra steps that confuse users and results in incomplete data. We have opted to use our own set of custom fields instead of their entire pricing module because of how inconvenient and unintuitive it is for users who are not as tech-savvy.

Reporting:
-Nonexistent accountability for users. You cannot report on fields that have been edited, you can't see salesperson activity out past a few days because of the limited scope of the activity reporting, you can't click on an individual user to see what they have done in the system or if they have even logged in at all.
-Making more than 2 dashboards costs $200/month.
-Report customization is very wonky... you must first find a report you want yours to look like and then customize it. There are several times where I have tried to recreate a pre-built report using the standard report building tool and it was not possible. I had to clone the existing report and edit it from there instead.
-Lots of bugs. There was a week where adding a specific field to a report would give me an error and close out the entire reporting tool. Another time the colors in the legend didn't match the colors in the report which confused our executives. No matter what I did I could not fix how the graph was displayed until a patch came out a month later.
-To make up for the many shortcomings of HubSpot reporting, we bought a connector from Bayard Bradford so we could pull HubSpot data into Microsoft Power BI (like Tableau). This enabled us to report on a multitude of things (tasks, activities, email content) that aren't even accessible in HubSpots standard interface, but was yet another unexpected cost when purchasing HubSpot.

Import tool:
-You cannot import parent-child relationships, which are extremely important in the industries we target. This results in us having to MANUALLY associate thousands of records.
-Import errors: If there is an import that fails or partially fails, you can't revert the entire import and start from scratch. It imports the things that work and skips what doesn't. The error file it spits out is hard to interpret and act upon.

Salesforce Import Service:
-We purchased a migration service to import Salesforce data over to HubSpot. Not only was the import a mess, it created duplicate user profiles that even I as a super admin could not delete. I had to contact support who had to make a custom tool (this took weeks) to remove the duplicate accounts so reporting and assigning accounts would work correctly.

HubSpot is extremely barebones when it comes to sales and I would not recommend it to anyone for sales purposes. I plan on switching away from HubSpot as soon as budget allows. If you just need the marketing portion, then it may be for you, but steer clear of using HubSpot for any sales functions or as a prospect or client database, especially if your target vertical has a lot of parent/child hierarchies to keep track of.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

On the bright side, HubSpot has enough functionality to be passable. You can track pipeline, manage marketing campaigns, send emails, and track things, however in a limited way. The user interface is pretty easy for users to learn and understand and the email app is nice if you turn off auto-logging.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you only need marketing automation, HubSpot is a great tool for email campaigns, templates, and automating first touches. Otherwise, I would bite the bullet and find more money in your budget for Salesforce, or go to Zoho or SugarCRM which are not as pretty but are infinitely more functional and organized.

What do you like best about the product?

I love the fact that everything is so perfectly integrated and connected - the whole ecosystem speaks to each other.

What do you dislike about the product?

I'm not a big fan of the template marketplace (lack of options), and the email and landing page builder's drag & drop functionality at the moment seems to be restrictive. They could definitely improve on those.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Centralized data lets our marketing and sales team coordinate campaigns and nurture leads more effectively.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

This is a really great solution for SMBs and enterprises and positions you for growth. One must absolutely utilize the workflow automation tools as it is one of the best features they have. Saves you a lot of time.

What do you like best about the product?

Hubspot does it all for us. It captures and organizes leads. It easily allows us to update forms. We retarget users with newsletter and social content. Tracking is easily implemented with just a "click" on owned pages. Lead scoring helps rate MQLs and SQLs. You can easily hand off ownership of contacts between core teams. I wish my client had more use for these features, because they really would impact banker relations.

What do you dislike about the product?

It can be glitchy and not save data at times. Confusing updates to form categories. It's especially problematic when we send a test to clients and see that edits didn't save, makes us look bad. Additionally, we wish there was more ability to connect on site metrics for sites NOT hosted with Hubspot. AKA, using GA data and Hubspot data better connected. Also, we need better API access for connectors like Origami Logic for reporting.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Lead Generation. Ease of connecting lead lists with newsletter distribution. In the future, we'd like to integrate paid campaigns into the system to better ensure our core audiences are targeted in all mediums. We will be able to do even more in the future now that we've built our "use case".

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Start with your business objectives first. What's your goal? Then, work with your Hubspot rep to better understand how Hubspot can fill those needs. Additionally, I'd highly recommend fully integrating your site to hubspot versus just using lead capture widget. You'll be limited in capabilities unless you use the full suite.

What do you like best about the product?

HubSpot is a user-friendly, one-stop-shop for inbound marketing. It has everything I need to efficiently keep track of our contact base, know where our clients ("deals") are in our sales pipeline, design and send emails, and much more. The best part about HubSpot is that it is constantly improving its functionality for an even better user experience. The customer support is also A+, and I can constantly keep learning and improving my marketing practices by taking HubSpot Academy courses. I can't hype HubSpot up enough.

What do you dislike about the product?

My least favorite part about HubSpot is its analytics and reports. I find the reports/analytics tools section of HubSpot difficult to navigate and limited in its data collection. I wish there was a course within HubSpot Academy to learn more about how to most effectively use its reports and analytics features. This is really the only downside I can see when using HubSpot.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

HubSpot allows my business to efficiently keep track of our contact base, easily know where clients are in the sales process by looking at the "Deals" pipelines, identify areas for improvement in our sales process by analyzing the "Deals" pipelines, and easily distribute information to current and potential clients via newsletters/other mass emails.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

HubSpot is an amazing marketing tool. Between the amount of tools that HubSpot offers, the amazing customer support, and the constantly evolving platform, I can honstly say that I would recommend it to anyone.

What do you like best about the product?

HubSpot does a tremendous job compiling every useful tool for your marketing into one place. It's the hub for everything we do from website additions/changes to email marketing and blogging. I love how user-friendly it is and it's the little details that make a huge difference.

What do you dislike about the product?

At times in the design manager, it can be difficult to make the changes I want to. I'm sure most things can be contributed to my lack of web development knowledge. But I think the "ease of use" for website building is exaggerated slightly.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our company has never had an active marketing plan. With HubSpot, we've been able to create an actionable plan by combining blogging, email marketing, sales funnels, and more. It's been tremendous in gaining viable results.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Before committing, decide if it actually makes sense for your company. When you first unlock the portal, you can feel overwhelmed with all the features. But HubSpot does a good job during the onboarding process to get you acquainted with everything.

What do you like best about the product?

I love that everything I used to have a separate program for is contained under one roof. Being able to use and view analytics for all my marketing tools in one place has been fantastic and very useful. Everything just works, and works well. The Hubspot team is uber supportive and I feel like I've found a solution that will support and grow with our company.
I was against Hubspot at first because I believed there were similar programs out there for much cheaper, but after using it I'm convinced this was the best solution.

What do you dislike about the product?

The only thing I can think of is that there isn't internal ad support and tracking for LinkedIn anymore! I know it used to be a feature and I hope they bring it back as LinkedIn is important for our B2B advertising strategy.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

-"One pane of glass" for our marketing efforts, a comprehensive suite of tools
-Ongoing marketing and sales training with their lessons and knowledge hub
-Access to modern marketing/sales tools and strategy
-Robust analytics that make it easy to track our progress

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Once you decide you need more than Hubspot's free features, the investment is quite steep. It can be prohibitively expensive for some companies, especially smaller ones without much of a budget. There are tons of free or cheap tools that can do what Hubspot's can. However, doing that in the past we got tired of piecing together different tools and having disparate analytics that took a lot of time to gather insights from. The value that we get from having all our tools and data in one place makes the price worth it, along with their awesome support and training + modern interface.

What do you like best about the product?

Hubspot is a great all-in-one tool. By having all your data in one place it's easy to get full picture of your marketing efforts, and how that impacts sales.

What do you dislike about the product?

The support isn't great. Often their support staff isn't able to answer more complex questions, and response times can be slow which is difficult when you're working on tight deadlines. I also think their website builder is overly complicated. I'm also on day 2 of a Hubspot outage, where our entire sales and marketing teams are rendered useless. We're unable to create quotes, CRM data tracking isn't working properly, we can't use any of the marketing tools, and it's the end of the month and end of the quarter. Communication from Hubspot on when the outage will end has been non-existant, further adding to the stress and uncertainty.

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have insight into our entire marketing stack now, and have attribution to what's working and what's not. I

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Be ready to go all in. We've begun unlocking a lot more value now that both Sales and Marketing are in Hubspot. And now Service is starting too.