To build an inbound marketing machine, you need to attract, capture, track and close qualified leads as they move from awareness to purchase. The fact that HubSpot lets you do all that in one product is a big plus.
But, as we surveyed HubSpot customers and partners, we discovered users have fallen in love with individual features too.
To help you sort through the list, we divided the love-list up into HubSpot’s four main products: CMS, Marketing, CRM and Sales. Feel free to skip ahead by clicking one of these bookmarklets:
Joseph Jerome
Founder, BrandBuilder Solutions
Favorite Feature: Content Optimization System (COS) Templates
“HubSpot COS templates are easy to deploy and you can download them from their marketplace. Templates accelerate the time to launch for Marketers and also leverage best practices. And templates aren’t just limited to websites. HubSpot also has templates for emails, landing pages blog designs and even email templates for their sales tool.
We call it a “template mindset”. Because templates mean focus. The tools marketers have are complex, but the digital environment allows us to validate and deploy best practices at scale. With templates, marketers don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Templates bake those best practices into them.
We think of templates as the new “Open Source” for Marketers and we’re expecting templates to do for Marketers what open source has done for application development. Those with a template mindset have huge competitive advantage.”
Romy Fuchs
Senior Digital Marketing Manager, NetPress GmbH
Favorite Feature: CMS
“The HubSpot CMS makes it easy for us to execute marketing activities. You can easily:
All in all a feature which helps us become faster with our marketing.”
Manuel Algaba Cortes
Kekrika
Favorite Feature: Blog and CRM integration
“The ability to automatically update the CRM with the contact activity is my favorite:
It’s a basic feature that allows marketers to measure content success and gives salespeople some context to make a call. So both teams can be aligned.”
Matt May
Donovandigitalsolutions.com
Favorite Feature: Design Manager
The Design Manager is a great feature that Hubspot offers because it provides a “Block Building” template structure that allows for easy web design and editing. This feature also offers Global Groups so that you can create a feature for your website and implement it across multiple pages with the click of a button. Design manager greatly increases the speed at which you can build, edit and expand your website.
Gala
Amara Marketing
Favorite Feature: Blog Editing
HubSpot has a very intuitive system that allows us to save time editing the blog posts. It’s an easy tool to have your blog ready in no time.
Lists
Corey Quinn
CMO, Scorpion
Favorite Feature: List Building Tool
“With over 90k unique contacts, being able to sort and segment them in an easy and meaningful way is critical for us. The list tool does just that.”
Sam Zastrow
Digital Marketing Manager, Madison Marketing Group
Favorite Feature: Lists
“We love the lists tool! It allows for quick contact sorting and other custom views in seconds. We can use exporting to share findings with others and use our marketing data in other tools.”
Patrick Whatman
Mention
Favorite Feature: Lists
I’m obsessed with making lists! Probably a little too much.
Basically, any time I have a question about our leads – how many came from page X? How many downloaded 2 ebooks and attended a webinar? I race into lists and start building.
The only downside is that we have more than 500 lists now, and I can’t remember what half of them are!
Erin Carpenter
Hidden Peak Interactive
Favorite Feature: Lists
The lists tool is an oldie, but goodie. The lists tool offers tremendous power along the lines of marketing segmentation, performance analysis, and administrative support.
In a world of marketing (and sales) that demands increased personalization, the lists tool allows us to slice and dice micro-segments of our database so that we can be hyper-personalized in our communications.
Not only that, the performance pieces allows us to measure the performance of that micro-segment. For example, we’re able to observe the growth or decline of a very specific targeted segment.
From an administrative perspective, we’ve created smart lists that help us manage certain areas that need to be updated on a regular basis. Since the tool is dynamic, any time a contact meets specific criteria, it will be added to the list for us to manage. This is a better solution than combing through thousands of contacts regularly and making manual changes.
Neil Eneix
Founder, Fannit.com
Favorite Feature: Social Monitoring Tool
“I love how it helps you prospect around specific themes (conferences, keywords, etc.) and target those prospects with contextually relevant messaging/conversations/offers.”
Lisa Hirst Carnes
ArcStone
Favorite Feature: Social Media Inbox Streams
I really like Hubspot’s Social Media Inbox Streams for several different reasons. Obviously, they are helpful to see how your brand is performing on social media but so much more including:
You can easily track mentions, and other interactions too. We look at high performing social media posts and ask:
Heather Hurczyn
710 Studios
Favorite Feature: Social Media Marketing
“I don’t think the Social Media Management tool gets enough praise. I’ve used numerous social media management tools to schedule, organize and analyze posts for my customers that are not on HubSpot. I have not found one option that is as easy to use and saves me so much time when I’m scheduling posts for our customers.
The ability to duplicate the same post with a click of a button, select your website posts/pages from a dropdown menu, have an unlimited number of accounts and having this feature bundled with your CMS, Email Marketing and Reporting tools, is extremely convenient. The only piece that I’m hoping will be coming soon is to be able to schedule to Instagram.”
Lynne McNamee
Lone Armadillo Marketing Agency
Favorite Feature: Personas
“This is more than just one feature, per se. Rather, it’s the ability to really use the concept of personas to achieve business results. HubSpot brings together so many tools, and by being fully integrated, both captures data and allows for the dynamic use of that data.
For example, if your company did home improvement and you had, say, one persona for ‘a tree fell on my house and I need help right away’ (timing as the key motivator) and another persona for ‘I want to build an addition on my house’ (quality and range of options as key motivators) – HubSpot allows you to log which pages a web visitor viewed, which content they downloaded, and to assign recommendations for more of the same content (dynamically on website pages or via recommended new content to download) or to modify their persona by new downloads, form completions or pages visited.”
Jordan Jez
Hatch
Favorite Feature: Personas
“As we launch our own product, Hatch, this tool has become so important for us in our marketing strategy. Understanding your target customer and sketching out how to reach them is made a little easier with the Personas tool.”
Tor Magnus Kolflaath
Inbound Group
Favorite Feature: Personalization and smart content
“With HubSpot you can deliver content (on a website, landing page and more) tailored to where a prospect is in the buying process, who the prospect is and where he/she is. Personalized marketing makes marketing more relevant and delivers better results.”
Emily Tang
Revenue Architects
Favorite Feature: Smart features
HubSpot’s Smart features are impressive because they allow users to easily and unobtrusively personalize marketing communications. Examples of these are the Smart CTA and email features which can provide content tailored to the behavior or journey stage of the lead in question. HubSpot’s Smart features are simple, effective tools for adding a personalized touch to your inbound marketing.
Kelly Browning
WebStrategies
Favorite Feature: Smart Content
Personalization and user experience are critical to connecting with people online, and building in smart content allows HubSpot users to offer the content most relevant to their audience. The ability to show different content depending on where someone is in the buying process plays an important role in moving them down the sales funnel more effectively. Using smart content for personalization of things like name, location and previous purchases can dramatically improve engagement.
We are using smart content in concert with segmented lists of leads in targeted vertical markets. This allows us to build in targeted messages that will resonate with those industries into areas of our website that are heavily trafficked but wouldn’t otherwise speak specifically to those audiences.
Kayli Kunkel
Growth Strategist, Ironpaper
Favorite Feature: Smart Content
“Smart content is a dynamic and easy way to engage your audiences. In an era where personalization means everything to buyers, we marketers need to craft meaningful experiences. Smart content makes segmentation so easy. And this feature has tons of applications, too:
Gemma Bataller Herrera
MarketiNet
Favorite Feature: Smart Content
“With smart content, we manage personalized content to gain new leads and get loyalty from the current clients. It’s amazing how you can personalize almost everything with this feature, landings, email, website content and even CTA’s.
Leads appreciate the personalized content and it shows because they keep coming back to our website.”
Lisa Smith
InVerve Marketing
Favorite Feature: The Campaigns Tool
“We love the holistic view of every piece of a campaign in this tool. Campaigns enables us to set high-level goals across platforms and mediums, rather than just assessing each email blast or individual social posts in a vacuum. Campaigns breaks down the silos, and makes reporting to clients on engagement and results super easy.”
Lauren Taylor
DiscoverTec
Favorite Feature: Campaigns
HubSpot’s “Campaigns” feature is where it’s at for us! As marketers, we are juggling so much at once – clients, emails, social media posts, blogs, landing pages, forms, leads, analytics – you get the idea. Keeping everything organized and sorted into separate campaigns helps us visualize the end goal and see how all of these tactics work together as a whole.
HubSpot’s holistic and automated approach makes our lives and our jobs much easier – and much more effective. We love how HubSpot’s campaigns feature displays all of our tactics and allows us to visualize the workflow and spot gaps in our strategy. All of the analytics associated with a specific campaign are right there for us to measure the effectiveness of our approach and how we can improve in the future.
Andrew Sober
The Market Element
Favorite Feature: HubSpot/Salesforce Integration
The HubSpot/Salesforce integration is the key to a symbiotic Marketing and Sales relationship. Its out of the box functionality establishes the foundation for advanced customization to the specific needs and existing processes of any organization. I love the feature because it eliminates the need for custom development work and enables Marketing and Sales professionals to create a system that successfully manages prospects from anonymous website visitors all the way to delighted customers.
When implemented correctly, the HubSpot/Salesforce integration is a seamless, organized, and essential tool for any organization seeking process, accountability, and measurable results in their Marketing and Sales efforts.
Heather Sloan
Inbound Insurance Marketing
Favorite Feature: The Sources Report
“Seeing a snapshot of traffic sources (direct, organic, referral, social, email, other) at any given time is invaluable – particularly when you can also see the percentage of visitors from each source who convert on forms and who become customers. This extended information makes it easy to compare the value of the traffic from each source.
It’s also helpful to compare the data from month-to-month to quickly identify trends. On a related note, I also like the ability to set up a campaign tracking code and then to see the traffic from that campaign separately in the sources report.”
Bill Peatman
Senior Content Strategist, Alaniz Marketing
Favorite Feature: Analytics
“I like HubSpot’s analytics–the ability to see beyond clicks on pages to see things like contact visits, inbound links and keyword rankings. These are great enhancements to Google Analytics. What would be REALLY great is to be able to see all analytics from Google, HubSpot, Moz and others all in one place without switching between platforms.”
Jerry Crockford
Crockford Carlisle
Favorite Feature: Automation / Analytics
Yes, I know I picked two features, not just one, but they are closely intertwined. We are really big on making decisions based on data. Yes, there is of course art and gut-feel, but many times that can lead you down a garden path.
We really get great value from the data we can get from automated emails, so we know what’s working, what isn’t, and where we can improve things to give our clients an even better ROI.
The key is not to ‘set and forget’ though. Our data analysts have an ongoing process of reviewing CTA’s, Landing Pages, emails and all other assets to make sure that an opportunity isn’t overlooked.
Carrie Gallagher
Lovable Marketing
Favorite Feature: Custom Reports Using Smart Lists
Smart Lists in HubSpot aren’t just smart – they’re genius, and come in handy throughout the platform! Easy for any user to learn, and available for every subscription level, one of my favorite things to do with Smart Lists is to create custom reports.
Recently, one of my clients needed to report on offline event leads being worked by specific members of the sales team. Working in tandem with data from Eventbrite and Salesforce integrations, I was able to generate a simple report that illustrated the event’s leads by lifecycle stage and the revenue generated (as a marketer, you know how important it is to justify costly events!), and then save it to their main Sales Dashboard. The best part: because the reports are based on “Smart” lists, they’re always updating in real-time.
Brenda Stoltz
Ariad Partners LLC
Favorite Feature: Dashboards
In one glance I can see how we’re tracking towards marketing and sales goals. Whether that’s traffic, leads, sales rep activities, or pipeline goals, it’s a daily reminder that keeps us on track and meeting our targets.
Jennifer Lux
SmartBug Media
Favorite Feature: Traffic Analytics
Seeing entrances, average time on page, bounce rate, and exits on the page level gives you a great sense of content quality and how it’s resonating with your visitors. You can take what is performing well and use that data to improve what is not from a UX, content and design perspective.
Rachel Cahill
Big Rock
Favorite Feature: Analytics tool
As a performance-driven company, the greatest thing about the Analytics tool is the visibility it offers. For us, increased visibility essentially means more data that we can use to inform our decisions. The more strategic we can be for our clients, the better.
The Analytics tool grants us the luxury of real-time decision making and affords us with a complete awareness of how our clients’ channels and campaigns are performing, allowing us to fine-tune down to a granular level. Being able to work on a granular level is the bedrock of our iterative approach to digital marketing, so we use this tool a lot to make real-time tweaks to campaigns.
Another crucial reason why we love this tool is that it allows us to comprehensively justify each and every one of the strategic decisions that we make for our clients. Going far beyond an overview, we can show them conversion rate breakdowns per channel, or per landing page, and even show them how people are arriving at their site. This kind of info is vital to our performance-driven approach and underscores the process of constant, always-on optimization that we offer to our clients.
Dustin Brackett
HIVE Digital Strategy
Favorite Feature: Analytics and reporting
“It’s so hard to pick a single feature that I like best about HubSpot because they’re all important and useful, but I think if I had to pick one it would be the analytics and reporting features. Being able to quickly see what’s working, what’s not working, and adjust our strategy accordingly has resulted in a lot of success for our clients as well as HIVE.
When we review analytics through HubSpot, we include simple data such as visits to our website, but also more advanced metrics like sources, which source has been the most successful in closing new customers, which campaigns are resulting in new customers, and even using data to determine where competitors are performing better and/or worse than us. There is so much data available through HubSpot that can be utilized to make smarter marketing decisions that result in revenue. It really arms you with all the information you need to convert more leads and close more customers.”
Recommended Dashboard: Monthly Marketing Performance
Kathleen Booth
CEO, Quintain Marketing
Favorite Feature: Workflows
“On the surface, workflows seem pretty simple. Most people use them to send a series of timed emails. But with some of the new functionality that HubSpot has added, the possibilities for what you can do with workflows are almost endless.
For example, we’ve used workflows (combined with HubSpot’s forms and smart content) to build interactive assessments on our clients’ websites. The visitors fills out a form and based on their responses, we send them a customized email response with their assessment results. The worfklow also includes follow on content offers, and notifies the sales team about new lead conversions along with the assessment results, which generally are a good indicator that the lead is qualified.
Another great thing about workflows is that they have so many applications beyond marketing. Here at Quintain, we’ve used them to manage our hiring and employee onboarding process, to notify accounting when customers need to be billed and more. The possibilities really are endless!”
Søren Vasø Hansen
Form Agenda
Favorite Feature: Workflows
I really dig Workflows, because it’s what drives HubSpot. The marketing automation engine is what it’s all about. Without it, it’s not scalable or even great – it takes all those small tasks of your hand and delivers great experiences, if setup properly.
That sweet combination of:
That’s pure magic in the marketing world and something I’m never going back on.
Brittany Anderson
Flashpoint.Marketing
Favorite Feature: Workflows
Hubspot’s integrative workflow feature is the vessel of marketing automation. This smart function tracks your website visitor’s actions and triggers highly-targeted, timely follow-up emails to keep your company top of mind. You can set an email workflow to trigger for virtually any action, whether it’s a form submission, a change in contact status, or a click on a call-to-action (CTA) button. It’s integrated with all of HubSpot’s CTAs, forms, landing pages, lists, and emails so you have complete visibility for further optimization.
At any point in time, you can go back to the workflow and see quick statistics on which touch points had the highest conversion rates, versus which ones could use improvement. From there, you can tweak and update content in the lower-performing email series to increase the quality and quantity of leads as they make their way to the end of the funnel.
If you need a specific form filled out from clients (say, a registration form) you can create a workflow to automatically send an email out every few hours, days, weeks or even months until they click the CTA and fill out a form. This definitely helps save time in the long run and allows us to focus on more pressing tasks.
Camille Winer
Yodelpop, Inc.
Favorite Feature: Workflows
It’s hard to pick just one feature, but one of the amazing things about HubSpot is that you can get creative with using the tools together. By using the combination of smart lists, Events and Workflows you can gain in-depth intelligence on contacts, get custom metrics and get very specific with contact segmentation. Plus, you get jobs done that would otherwise be very time consuming by putting Workflows to work to automate tasks!
Jasna Suhadolc
VirtuaPR
Favorite Feature: Workflows
Even though they can be a bit intimidating in the beginning, especially with several possible flows, they are a great way to nurture the leads and keep them pushing to the decision phase (BOFU).
There are so many possibilities how to use them and send emails based on triggers such as viewed pages, opened emails, clicks on a specific link in an email, and more. Workflows help marketers be more productive!
Natasha Cartwright
Inbound Marketing Manager, ClickThrough Marketing
Favorite Feature: Workflow Tool
When marketers think of a ‘Workflow’ tool, they’ll automatically presume that it is just email automation. Yes, HubSpot’s automation and segmentation functionality is extensive, but its Workflow tool goes much further than this. HubSpot’s Workflow tool allows marketers and salespeople to work together and automate tasks such as passing over leads, creating custom alerts and triggering a task. This functionality allows you to automate those mundane admin tasks that no marketer or salesperson really has time for.
Gabby Shultis
Inbound Marketing Coordinator, Nectafy
Favorite Feature: Workflows
“I love how the options are practically endless in terms of what you can automate within a HubSpot workflow. Whether utilizing workflows for internal purposes, or externally to nurture our company’s leads and MQLs, I can trust that HubSpot is constantly working in the background and moving things along. This in turn allows me to devote my time and energy to the other areas of our day-to-day operations that require my direct attention, making HubSpot workflows a win-win in my book!
For example, one of our clients, a university, not only wants their admissions department to be notified when a prospective student fills out a certain form on their website or joins a particular HubSpot list, but they want to send over an email containing specific information on the student that will be of value to admissions. So in this particular situation, when a prospect fills out the form on one of the university’s PPC landing pages requesting more info on their part-time MBA program, that prospect joins a part-time MBA list in HubSpot, which is the starting criteria for the workflow.”
Rob Ellis
Manager, Lollipop Local
Favorite Feature: Workflows
“We use workflows for a variety of things, even some they were never intended for. They aren’t just about sending emails to your leads.
For example, just recently we’ve used them to:
The versatility of this tool, especially if you can think outside the box, makes workflows one of the most powerful tools in HubSpot.”
Rikki Lear
Director, Digital 22
Favorite Feature: Workflow Visual Editor
“We create some pretty complex workflows for clients. The original editor was solid and usable but when things got ‘big’, it got difficult to visualize and sense check. Now we can visually see the workflows in their entirety it’s so much simpler to understand and quicker to deploy. Plus, it has vastly reduced the learning curve for new starters and clients – as most people are visual learners.”
Christopher Antonopoulos
Measured Results Marketing
Favorite Feature: Workflows
“We appreciate how we can visually build out simple to extremely complex workflows with ease. This Hubspot feature has helped us automate a variety of processes for our clients that aid in moving leads through the sales funnel and ultimately result in an increased ROI.
From persona-targeted workflows to event-based workflows to automating administrative tasks, and everything in between, this feature continuously provides a great deal of value to organizational marketing efforts.”
Claire Dibben
Noisy Little Monkey
Favorite Feature: Workflows Tool
“The HubSpot workflows tool is fantastic; it enables you to automate tons of marketing actions without lifting a finger. We use it to segment our database and to send targeted comms but the possibilities of what it can do are really endless.”
Jordan Behan
Narrate Creative
Favorite Feature: Workflows
“The best part about marketing automation is the ability to move contacts from one list to another, based on their actions. With workflows, you can let a subscriber go on a voyage of discovery, and change their status or move them onto new lists based on how they engage with your content.”
Paul Schmidt
Senior Consultant, SmartBug Media
Favorite Feature: Event-Based Nurturing Workflows
“I love event-based nurturing workflows because it allows me to follow up with my re-engaged contacts if they come back to my site in 30+ days after becoming a lead. In longer sales cycles, people may be researching solutions for many months. These workflows allow me to automatically enroll a prospect in a lead nurturing workflow to send them educational content if the lead happens to re-engage with any of my marketing activities.”
Julie Clarke-Bush
HighViz Marketing
Favorite Feature: Contacts
“All of my contacts are in one place. Here I can see all of their activity including web pages they visited, emails they open and interactions I’ve had via personal email. Any datati collected here can be used in a report to help me and my clients improve marketing efforts.”
Alessandro Frison
Mayking Srl
Favorite Feature: Contact Timeline
“It has all contact interaction in one place. It is very useful to see all page view history of contact and user engagement.”
Mark Lennon
EspressoB2B Marketing
Favorite Feature: Contact Timeline
“When you view a contact in HubSpot, you can see all activity that contact has had with your company. What’s cool about this timeline is that it starts tracking the contact’s movements on your website before it even knows who the contact is. The user might visit your website multiple times over the course of days, weeks or months.
When the contact eventually completes a form on your website and provides their email address, all of their activity that was being logged while they were anonymously visiting your website gets associated with their email address. You get a complete history.”
Mostafa Hassan
nexa
Favorite Feature: Contact Timeline
It is really interesting to see the user journey before a submission. We can prove/showcase that we are adding value.
Guillaume Vigneron
La Super Agence
Favorite Feature: The lead page in “Contacts”
The principle of the timeline is useful for prospecting. Knowing exactly how the prospect has interacted with our content is extremely valuable.
Tom Jenkins
CloudTask
Favorite Feature: The Contact and Company View
For me the best feature in HubSpot is arguably the most simple. I love that I can see every interaction and piece of information I have on a prospect in one simple and clear view. What they have downloaded, their job title, how many employees the company has… Really anything in existence that I can get my hands on.
From here it’s so easy to understand where a prospect is on their buying journey, what the next step is, what I need to deliver them, and more. The sales cycle becomes that much more simple.
Louise Armstrong
Senior Digital Strategist, Bonafide
Favorite Feature: HubSpot Marketing Free
“I’ve found some great success for my clients using the Lead Flows feature in HubSpot Marketing Free (which was previously called Leadin). This pop up generator allows us to map some of the great downloadable content we’ve already created for our clients to various blog posts and pages on their sites. We’ve seen some impressive conversion rates for eBooks that have been dormant for a while using Marketing Free. I’m excited to see how the tool grows and how it can continue to boost conversions and provide a great experience for the users who land on my client’s sites.”
Recommended Dashboard: Marketing Free Essentials
Chuck Bankoff
Kreative Webworks
Favorite Feature: The “Ranking Opportunities” feature in the Keyword Reports
“SEO is a large part of our Inbound Marketing strategy, so I like the “Ranking Opportunities” feature in the Keyword Reports. It alerts me to search phrases that I am on the verge of elevating to the first page of Google search results. Alongside it is the approximate number of monthly searches for that phrase. This allows me to target the low hanging fruit where I can quickly impact my client’s rankings for a phrase that is meaningful to their business.”
Jessica Ting
InStreamOne
Favorite Feature: Email Marketing Integration
“Being able to get specific insights on the click-through rates for CTA buttons, the time spent viewing the email, and the percentage of people who are opening the email with mobile versus computer results in actionable insights that my team can use for our entire email marketing strategy.
Because the email marketing tool works with contacts in our CRM system, I appreciate that email responses are stored in the HubSpot system, so when sales reps need to reach out to a contact, they can get a better picture of the contact’s previous interactions with the company.”
Vera Fischer
97 Degrees West
Favorite Feature: Email Marketing Tools
“Hubspot’s email marketing tools are simple to use while being comprehensive in terms of email optimization, creating templates and getting analytics in real time. This feature allows for smarter email marketing as you collect data on response, open and click rates.”
Roger Bretau
Gotoclient
Favorite Feature: The templates we have available in the Partners Resource Center
“We love the creative inspiration for content creation. For example, there are templates for creating eBooks, campaign kits, project planning templates and other useful elements.”
Nicole Pereira
Co-Founder, Cheif Martech Officer
Favorite Feature: Lead Flows
“This free feature of HubSpot is the easiest way to start generating leads off your website. It is a must have. It acts as a CTA, form, and delivery system all in one that replaces the need to make landing pages and all the subsequent parts needed to make that page effective.”
James Alexander-Dann
We Accelerate Growth
Favorite Feature: Progressive Profiling
With HubSpot’s queued form questions, you can progressively profile your prospects by collecting useful information like company information, pain points, goals etc…in a frictionless way.
This allows you to tailor and personalize marketing nurture and sales calls to each prospect and to identify and fast-track high-value opportunities.
Pete Jakob
Purple Salix
Favorite Feature: Automatic Categorization of Domains
“From nothing more than an email domain I can determine the location and background information about a client that helps me determine whether they are a potential client. This can then be integrated with other platforms via tools such as Zapier.”
Julie Ewald
Impressa Solutions
Favorite Feature: HubSpot Academy
“For HubSpot customers and partners, the HubSpot Academy resources certainly are helpful for getting up to speed on the software and how to use it. However, the general education around sales and marketing, including current best practices, has been an incredibly valuable resource for my team in their continuing education and has helped our strengthen our client’s and our marketing efforts. And this is all at no additional expense to us, which means lower training costs. The best part about these is that most of their certifications are available to all — customer or not!”
John Hogg
Enlighten IC
Favorite Feature: CRM
The CRM tool is a huge bonus. Being able to read all of a contact’s interactions with you in one simple place before interacting with them is great. Adding notes, saving files and emailing them from within the CRM keeps everything together. If you have a few different people working on the same prospect/ client, you can all update the CRM as you go and keep everyone fully informed on where the contact is in the funnel.
Michael Favia
Founder, Favish
Favorite Feature: Email Tracking
“It’s well thought out and minimalistic. It gets out of the way so I can work effectively. You can tell someone built the system from a human centered design approach. Sane defaults permeate the system and simplify the interface while still allowing you to clutter it up yourself if you really need to. As a developer I also appreciate the socket based live updates and the work that went into making it a stateful application.”
Kamil Rextin
Demand Generation, CrowdRiff
Favorite Feature: Automatic Association of Contacts and Companies
“Imagine you have an account in Salesforce from Acme Co and it has a contact with the email sophia@acme.co who is currently in the Opportunity status.
You run some Facebook ads and you get another lead from company Acme Co with the email kamil@acme.co. In the perfect world, you want to avoid communicating with kamil@acme.co with messages meant for a prospect because someone from your team is already chatting with acme.co about signing a deal. Ideally you want kamil@acme.co to be routed to the company acme.co and not sit as a lonely lead in your database and end up getting pulled into marketing comms
With the Hubspot trigger, any new lead that is created from an existing account will match the lifecycle stage of the existing contacts within that account. What that means is, kamil@acme.co will not have the status ‘MQL/Lead’ which means open season for marketing, typically nurture emails or such. Instead kamil@acme.co will have the lead status ‘Opportunity’ because someone from that company already has that status.”
Jason Diller
SVP, The DSM Group
Favorite Feature: Pipeline Management
“We get about 50 new internship candidates daily. We’re able to enhance the ongoing relationships we have with these future leaders in the marketing industry, even if we don’t end up interviewing them. 99% of applicants don’t make it to a first interview with The DSM Group, but we’re able to add value to the relationship, which is awesome. We think HR is all about helping others, not hiring people. If we were using “just” HR software, that would be so much harder.”
Will Walker
Inbound Marketing Specialist, Marsden Marketing
Favorite Feature: Pipeline Management
“When used in conjunction with the Marketing and Sales tools, the HubSpot CRM provides comprehensive, actionable information for sales reps. The features of the CRM are tremendous assets in engaging and guiding leads through the marketing and sales funnels.
The contact and company records help salespeople engage meaningfully with leads based on leads’ interaction with marketing activities. Sales tools help streamline the follow-up process. The pipeline management features help executives and managers easily monitor milestones and funnel effectiveness.
For those who want an intuitive and not overly complex CRM, the HubSpot CRM is the perfect fit.”
Recommended Dashboard: Pipeline Performance (Marketing + CRM)
Documents
Raul Gonzalez
hiperestrategia.com
Favorite Feature: Documents. It’s from Hubspot Sales and they work together.
Hubspot has a unique tool for salespeople. It allows you to upload your documents before sending them, which helps you in these ways:
Steve James
Partner, Stream Creative
Favorite Feature: Hubspot Sales Gmail/Outlook Extension
“The amount of time it saves in our CRM/sales activity is truly amazing. We could never go back to a CRM that would not have a feature like this. The integration allows our sales team with up to date information about our prospects, next steps and deal information that is captured in email correspondence.”
Greg Linnemanstons
President, Weidert Group
Favorite Feature: In-Browser Notifications
“I’m very involved in agency business development, and notifications keep me close to what’s happening, and put the contact in context that makes connecting simpler than ever. I would be lost and sad without it!”
Chris Handy
CEO, Thinkhandy
Favorite Feature: Lead Status
“You’ve likely been using HubSpot for a while and have generated a few leads; or maybe you are using the CRM and are adding them from offline sources. The good news is that “Lead Status” is available to you.
Let’s make it clear: Lead Status is NOT Lifecycle stage.
Lifecycle Stage has a finite and fixed number of states (subscriber, lead, MQL, etc…). This is a finite and fixed number of states that a contact can be in that represent where they are in a perfect inbound marketing/sales funnel.
OK Chris, I got it. Now what are Lead Statuses?
Lead Status is a lead management tool. It does allow you to customize the “stages” and can be used for any purpose. In my experience, the Lead Status is the status for indicating what’s next for the sales rep for this contact, rather than who the contact is, or what the contact has done on the website.
It can be a very powerful tool for both reps, and for marketers who need to segment their lists. When coordination between sales and marketing is difficult, marketers can remove some barriers by allowing their reps to indicate what is next for the contact, and even which contacts are a bad fit.”
Henry Hernandez
Texas Digital
Favorite Feature: Hubspot Deals – Centralized Database of Client Communication
We love the deals section of our Hubspot Marketing platform for our agency as it allows us to create and keep a centralized database of client communication, notes, meetings, calls, and where our clients or potential clients are at in the sales process. We love the ability to easily see if we are maintaining our touch points on a weekly basis as well as asking ourselves critical questions and ensuring we are delivering on what our clients value, our KPI’s to reach their value, and what the vision is for each campaign and contact.
Timothy Lorang
Tim Lorang Consulting
Favorite Feature: Deals in the Sales tools
My background is in marketing and web design. Because of that, sales, and bringing on new clients, is not one of my strong points.
Deals helps me organize and track sales prospects from the first contact, proposal through booking a new client. Every email, document and correspondence associated with that deal is logged and displayed in one place. All my prospects are displayed in one graphic, the Deals Pipeline, so I can get an accurate overview of pending sales.
Every company and individual associated with the deal is also tracked in the CRM, so I have all our correspondence in one place. It has helped this “non-salesmen” keep track his sales.
Adrian Doggrell
Business Development, Revenue River
Favorite Feature: Sequences
“By building out specific email templates for different situations, you can drastically cut down on the time it takes you to send highly personalized content. The less effort you spend retyping the same emails, the more you could spend pursuing another opportunity. I have specific templates built out for responding to leads that reach out on a bottom of the funnel form. I have others for prospects that haven’t yet requested a call. Pre-building email templates like this makes you more effective and takes less time.”
Shoshi Weinstein
Bold Digital Architects
Favorite Feature: Sales Sequences
As a Business Development Manager, it’s important to me that no lead is left behind. With HubSpot Sequences, I can create a series of personalized emails based off of templates I’ve already made. Once a contact responds to an email in the sequence, they’ll be automatically unsubscribed to the rest of the series.
I love not having to constantly set up reminders to myself to send out emails that are so similar to one another, a big time saver! Sequences offer the delicate balance of automation and personalization to wow prospects at how consistent and personal I can be in my outreach and follow up efforts. If you’re someone in sales or business development looking to add unique value to your emails, but also want a way to set it and forget it, Sequences is about to become your new best friend.
Kelly Donahue-Piro
Agency Performance Partners
Favorite Feature: Sequences
They automate so much of the sales process.
Rob Felber
Felber Public Relations & Marketing
Favorite Feature: Automated email sequences for sales & customer service
Targeting prospects with just the right content, at the right time in their buying cycle, is critical. Automated email sequences from HubSpot create engagement while allowing salespeople to see and target just those prospects that are more fully engaged and ready to speak with the salesperson.
Salvador Galindo
Amara, ingeniería de marketing
Favorite Feature: Meeting Scheduling Software
It’s a great way to save time. Just as you were playing a game!
Todd Laire
Laire Group Marketing
Favorite Feature: All the Sales tools. Reporting / Analytics
“I love being able to, in real time:
I also love the Reporting tools so I can see where our website visitors are coming from and spending time on our website.”
Recommended Dashboard: Sales Rep Performance
Elyse Flynn Meyer
President, Prism Global Marketing
Favorite Feature: Hubspot Connect Program
“At Prism Global Marketing, one of our favorite HubSpot “features” is HubSpot Connect, HubSpot’s partnership program for other software companies. HubSpot developers have launched a large number of APIs that allow these third party software companies to integrate with HubSpot’s different software products. These APIs and the HubSpot Connect integrations greatly extend the capabilities of HubSpot and usability for our clients.
Our average client uses 5 other products integrated with HubSpot, and we’ve developed expertise in leveraging HubSpot’s integrations with Databox, SurveyMonkey, Seventh Sense, GoToWebinar, SnapEngage, Wistia, App Data Room, HelloSign, and ReadyTalk. As an example, we use Databox to automate our monthly executive reports as it pulls 130+ metrics from HubSpot.
HubSpot has gradually invested more software and business development resources into their Connect partnerships, and it’s really helped us continue to drive and measure results for our clients.”
Kara Weber
Invoq Marketing
Favorite Feature: The Cohesiveness of HubSpot
There are an abundant amount of tools available to marketers today and sometimes it becomes difficult to figure out what tools to use, and if they can work together. This is where HubSpot comes in! Our favorite feature of HubSpot is that it’s a one-stop marketing and sales shop to help you execute Inbound Marketing from start to finish!
The cohesiveness of HubSpot and its features creates a meaningful connection between marketing and sales. It truly helps when you have all your tools in one place! But, like everything else in life, HubSpot has some shortcomings. That’s why they’ve decided to fill those gaps by partnering with other experts. For this reason, HubSpot has worked with other leaders to develop integrations with numerous applications—including Eventbrite, SurveyMonkey, GoToWebinar, Databox, Wistia—to support marketing effort, lead generation, and overall productivity. Impressive!
Julie Howlett
Craft Impact
Favorite Feature: How intuitive the software tools are!
The tools are built similarly to one another and they’re all so intuitive. This is super helpful when HubSpot adds more functionality such as the Sales CRM unveiled a couple of years ago – it fits right in with my existing HubSpot knowledge base.
Kenny Lange
The PHNX21creative Agency
Favorite Feature: Centralized Key Tools
I love this feature because it allows myself and the team to stay locked in and focused at work. With the organization of the marketing and sales tabs, the stress of having to piece together necessary features with different tools is eliminated. As a result, we work more efficient, productive, and calm while avoiding the pitfalls of data silos.
Raul Tiru
GlobalOwls
Favorite Feature: HubSpot integrations
We love it that HubSpot can be integrated with many other tools and platforms and that you have a one-stop-tool to control a lot of your marketing and sales efforts.
Tim Jones
Eternal Works
Favorite Feature: Closed-loop reporting
I can view sales data (activity, contacts created, deals closed), marketing data (traffic, leads, and customers), and analytics (sessions, bounce rate, traffic source) all within one tool and within seconds. This is a tool that completely aligns sales and marketing because the tool is the same for both.
This means that there’s no data loss. Sales and marketing can align their goals with complete transparency on a closed loop. Marketing and sales know every lead that comes in and every deal created, won and lost.
HubSpot is an amazing company and an even more impressive tool. As these quotes show, it’s not just an all-in-one platform that can more easily help you grow your business — it’s also a group of best-of-breed tools. Achieving one of these distinctions is hard, but achieving both puts HubSpot in rarified territory. In fact, I don’t know another software company that could rightfully claim to have a tightly integrated, out-of-the-box set of world-class tools.
Our CEO here at Databox spent nine years there driving sales. He told me the product wasn’t always awesome. But, as I heard from more and more users, I became convinced it certainly is now.
As Databox’s marketing manager, I’m beyond excited to start using it ourselves. We’ve used the CRM and HubSpot Sales product for almost a year. As of this week, we’re new HubSpot Marketing customers too!
But, we’re not just customers. With more than 900 mutual customers using Databox’s HubSpot Marketing or HubSpot CRM reports, we’re now also a HubSpot Premier Connect partner, alongside software heavyweights like Zendesk, Gotowebinar, Eventbrite and just a handful of others.
Are you using HubSpot? What’s your favorite feature?
About the author
Thank you!
Metrics & Chill Podcast | May 14
Case Study | May 13
Marketing | May 12