Leveraging HubSpot's free tools
Growth, especially for a startup has to be as effective and affordable as possible. Honeycommb has taken this so seriously that its growth department encompasses the entire sales and marketing staff, making this one of their larger efforts. Part of this growth naturally translated into bringing in new leads, serving them and nurturing them.
Due to the nature of their business, they knew from the very beginning that the sales cycle was going to be lengthy. The first interaction Honeycommb had with HubSpot was through the CRM tool. Sean Duhame and Ryan Fung, Co-Founders, were looking for a low-cost set of tools that could help the company track their leads, so they turned to HubSpot to help them effectively manage their leads. Since then, the company has started HubSpot’s Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and Service Hub.
Stacey Politis, the Growth Marketing Specialist at Honeycommb has been working closely with HubSpot, taking advantage of its tools, both free and paid. She shares that “As a startup, HubSpot’s free tools have really helped us understand the goals that we are trying to reach and figure out the direction in which we want to go, rather than investing all our dollars from the get-go. It has helped us to adapt and strategize as we go. All the free tools that [HubSpot] offers have allowed us to trial things before we invest in them. We can upgrade where needed and downgrade where we are not able to leverage the tool.”
As the team started digging deep into all of HubSpot’s tools, the company began to shift in terms of organization and methodology, allowing the leadership to gain much more visibility into the everyday work of every department. Now the team uses a mix of free and paid tools where needed.
“I start the day checking the health of the business, everything about how the marketing numbers look like, the sales numbers, the product, and development because everything changes very quickly and we have to make sure everything is running ok. HubSpot helps with management and optimization of our business,” Sean says.
Full transparency, growth, and connectivity
HubSpot has helped tremendously with the sales and communication process with customers. The free chatbot tool is one that truly stands out from the rest as it not only helps them improve the customer experience but also subtracts information that drives the product. On one side, the team leverages HubSpot’s chatbot to create stronger relationships with clients through a one-on-one conversation. On the other, they are able to see what people are naturally looking for and what they are expecting; not only for sales but also for engineers. The teams agree that the chatbot widget is, by far, the most important free feature the company is using.
“The chatbot offers us a no-cost service that offers high insight because it’s the first impression for new leads. The frequent questions help us improve our services and processes and the chatbot gives us these nice insights.”
Having a centralized workflow meant simplifying a bit of everything on the team’s day-to-day activities. Tools such as the dashboard and the chatbot have provided extremely useful insights in regards to their operations and how customers interact with the company. With the custom reporting, they finally understand the best way to communicate with their clients in the different phases of the funnel.
Being able to see the funnel makes using HubSpot worthwhile because their customers range widely from schools, high schools, universities, professional networks, large sports brands among others. Their big goal is to lead people and draw the direction of the company taking into account the needs that customers have.
“HubSpot has really turned into our daily bible, database, center, everything that we do.”
Another extremely valuable asset for the team is that they can see the starting point for each customer and also see how happy they are with the Honeycommb services. From tracking all inbound leads and analyzing user behavior, to reviewing closed sales and where the funnel started for each person, now the company can manage all the data through an all-in-one software.
“[HubSpot] is this one source of truth that helps me understand what my business is doing and what to do to make it better. The fact that I’m not spending a ton of money on it is a beautiful thing” says Sean.
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