Hubspot is the integrated online marketing suite for small and medium sized busiensses. There’s been a lot of buzz about its services and many new customers are using it.
We were invited to watch a demo with a client and took advantage of the opportunity to make our own critique of the Hubspot service.
Read our slides which show the Hubspot pitch, and give the Creative Agency Secrets commentary about the service and where the pitfalls could be for your business. Hubspot demo critique – download pdf
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Hi Rebecca,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts about HubSpot’s offering and demo online. Practicing transparency is wonderful.
I work at HubSpot and just wanted to suggest some alternative views around two of the cons you mentioned.
1) You mentioned that it is ‘cheaper’ to buy separate tools and put this type of solution together yourself. I’d LOVE to know which free tools combine to provide all of this (and without integration costs). When we look at the cost of CMS, blogging, SEO tools, Social Media Monitoring, Email, Prospect Finding, Lead Nurturing, Lead Intelligence and Closed Loop Marketing analytics – the pricetag we see is much greater than what HubSpot costs. Not to mention the time and money it would take to link these systems together – which is where HubSpot excels. There are some freeware tools, but they are usually not as feature rich – take Google Analytics for example – great and free – but it isn’t a tool that ties into your CRM to show you what actually closed and let you report on that easily.
2) You need to know marketing to use HubSpot. This sort of contradicts your point about our very valuable coaching and training. A lot of our coaching isn’t just about tools – it is about marketing best practices. HubSpot’s mission is to help small and medium businesses, that includes owners who are NOT professional marketers, to grow their businesses with inbound marketing. I’d suggest that 25-20% of our customers have very little to no marketing knowledge when they first become customers. In many cases, those customers experience inordinately great benefits because there is so much that can be improved.
There is definitely a great deal of truth in many of your points – and we are not for everyone – but hopefully we can help more SMBs (maybe even your clients) grow their businesses online.
Wishing you an excellent Thanksgiving holiday.
Kirsten @kirstenpetra