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CRM Platform

Your go-to place for CRM Platform resources

What is HubSpot CRM Platform?

Why a CRM Platform?

HubSpot started as inbound marketing software, but over the years continued to add new product lines (hubs). With the introduction of Sales Hub, we became a Growth Platform. But as we've released new hubs, the market hasn't been able to articulate the full value of what we offer.

Misaligned Market Perception

One major pain point over the last couple of years for HubSpot and our Partners has been that a lot of prospects and customers still think of HubSpot only as inbound marketing software. Others in the market don't understand the powerful features we've added. Now that HubSpot has solidified our product offering, it's time to educate the market on what HubSpot really is.

Massive Total Addressable Market

The CRM Platform market alone is estimated to reach $30 billion dollars in 2021. Over the next three years, it's estimated to reach $104 billion dollars! Add on top of that the total addressable market for our individual hubs, which adds up to an estimated $19 billion dollars, and we have a massive opportunity.

HubSpot is Built Differently

HubSpot is fundamentally built with the customer experience in mind. Where other CRM platforms are cobbled together through acquisition, HubSpot is carefully crafted in-house using a collection of proven tools, components, and systems that seamlessly work together as the building blocks of the HubSpot user experience.

HubSpot's CRM Platform

Software that promises a single source of truth for front office go-to-market teams to deepen their relationships with customers and provide a best-in-class experience. Whether you sign up for a free account, purchase a single product, or go all-in with the full suite, you still get access to HubSpot's CRM Platform.

“Having our entire portfolio of products natively built on the same foundation is huge. Not just for customers, where marketing, sales, service, ops, etc., all work in harmony with a common UX and a common underlying data model, but also for app partners — building an app or integration to HubSpot automatically works across our entire product line. This is a powerful selling proposition to developers. And it is not the case with the franken-platforms that have acquired marketing, sales, service, and ops offerings from totally different tech stacks. They're still stitching them together”

Scott Brinker

VP of Platform

HubSpot

Individual Hubs with CRM Platform Benefits

Whether you purchase Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub, or Operations Hub you’re still getting access to HubSpot, the CRM platform. The fact that each of these products is built as part of the platform is one of our strongest differentiators and should come across in the way you market or sell standalone Hubs. Let’s take a look.

Marketers can keep data at the center of everything they do because Marketing Hub is built as part of the CRM platform.

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Features that make it possible: 

  • Smart lists automatically update as contacts meet the specified criteria, so you can be sure that your segmentation and targeting is always up-to-date. 
  • Multi-touch attribution reporting shows you how all of your marketing and sales activities are driving revenue to the business. 
  • Set up workflows to automatically update specific contact properties and handoff warm leads to sales effortlessly. 
  • With conversations, you can create a conversational marketing strategy that spans live chat, Facebook Messenger, and email. 
  • Create landing pages and email templates that match the look and feel of your brand to create a consistent web experience for customers, regardless of where they are in their journey.

Sales teams can eliminate friction and achieve unparalleled cross-functional alignment because Sales Hub is part of the CRM platform.Screen Shot 2021-01-05 at 9.40.26 AM

Features that make it possible: 

  • A unified contact timeline keeps contact details front and center.
  • Forecasting lets you get an accurate read on how likely you are to hit your revenue goals, and where you might be falling short. 
  • HubSpot integrates with your inbox so interactions are automatically saved and stored.
  • Workflows can be used to automatically assign leads and tasks and update deal information as things progress. 
  • With meetings and email marketing, your marketing team can send emails on behalf of reps and book more meetings without the back and forth.
  • Use documents to manage a library of approved sales enablement assets
  • Draft prefered email templates and sequences to align sales reps to your marketing efforts. 
  • Create beautiful looking proposals with the quotes feature.

Service teams can show the value of their work and prove an actual return on investment because Service Hub is part of the CRM platform.

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Features that make it possible:

  • A unified contact timeline keeps contact details front and center.
  • Reporting helps service teams show the impact of their work. 
  • Workflows allow for seamless ticket assignment and task creation. 
  • A universal inbox makes it easy to handoff conversations to sales or to a teammate.
  • Create a beautiful looking knowledge base that’s easy to build and maintain.

Marketers can use data to grow their business through their website because CMS Hub is part of the CRM Platform.

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Features that make it possible: 

  • Smart content provides specific website experiences based on device, location, or CRM data, so you can provide both anonymous visitors & returning customers with helpful, relevant content.
  • Run A/B tests to optimize any piece of content, and leverage contact attribution reporting to see which pieces of content are having the most impact on your business.
  • Smart lists automatically update as your customers sign up for membership driven content — ensuring a seamless experience for customers as they engage with your site. 
  • Create conversational bots that assist your website visitors at every stage of their customer journey.
  • Your developer can create a flexible theme that enables your marketer to take ownership of the website, updating content or the look and feel of the entire website whenever they see fit.

Key Resources

Here are some of the best resources for selling the CRM Platform

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Pains & Gains

HubSpot's CRM Platform is built differently. Learn about the pains of legacy CRM Platforms and the gains with HubSpot's CRM Platform.

Pain of Legacy CRM Platforms

Some CRM platforms, like Salesforce, grew by acquisition which means they have thousands and thousands of features and tools. While these features and tools are united under a single brand, the underlying infrastructure is completely disparate — leaving your data, channels, and teams feeling disjointed. This adds friction that slows your team down and disrupts your ability to create exceptional customer experiences.

Gain from HubSpot's Platform

Because HubSpot is built from the ground up, all of our hubs, tools, and integrations connect seamlessly.

With natively built marketing, sales, and customer service tools and a thriving ecosystem of integrations, HubSpot works to align your data, channels, and teams around a single source-of-truth. Every interaction is seamlessly synced to the contact’s timeline so your whole team has a clear understanding of the person, not just the persona. This level of alignment and data allows your team to create a more personalized and remarkable customer experience — helping your business grow better.

Pain of Legacy CRM Platforms

A scaling company needs a CRM platform that can support lots of users, lots of data, and lots of process, without slowing you down.

While a legacy CRM platform like Salesforce might seem like a safe bet, it’s actually forcing you to trade short-term gain for long-term pain. A complex Salesforce implementation can take several months — even longer to get your team fully up and running. Fully understanding the data and manipulating reports requires a special set of skills. And as soon as your strategy shifts, you’re once again at the mercy of the technical masterminds who set things up. 

Gain from HubSpot's Platform

HubSpot is built so you can customize it to meet your business needs without adding unnecessary complexity. Hubs can be purchased together or separately as part of the platform, and with features like custom objects, hierarchical teams, and advanced permissions, it’s flexible enough to architect your business on HubSpot exactly as it appears in the real world... without months of custom dev work.

Pain of Legacy CRM Platforms

What good is a CRM platform if it’s too difficult to use? Legacy CRM systems that have grown through acquisition often feature a fragmented user interface that’s confusing to navigate and difficult to use. It can take months, even years, to get your team onboarded and trained to use the software. Even then, no one likes using it. 

When your team doesn't like it, they don’t use it. When they don’t use it, you miss out on the insights you need to grow better. 

Gain from HubSpot's Platform

Because HubSpot’s CRM platform has been carefully crafted in-house, it’s able to combine powerful features and uncompromising ease-of-use to create software that’s loved by end-users and admins alike. Our obsession with UX drives us to think about every detail of our software. Every day, you use consumer-grade software that’s powerful and intuitive. Why shouldn’t your CRM platform be the same? 

Achieve adoption like you’ve never seen, and come away with richer insights to inform your overall business strategy. After all, a CRM platform is only as good as the data that goes into it. 

Competitive Intel

Below you'll find links to some comparison pages, so you can choose the right solution for your client.

Comparison Resources:

[Comparison] Salesforce and HubSpot

[Slide deck] Salesforce vs HubSpot

[Comparison] Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot

[Comparison] Zoho and HubSpot

[Comparison] HubSpot vs Other CRMs

[One-pager] Microsoft Dynamics and HubSpot

[3rd Party] Microsoft Dynamics Trust Radius comparison

[Partner Case Study] TSL Marketing - Salesforce to Sales Hub Enterprise

[Partner Comparison] Six & Flow - HubSpot vs Salesforce

[Partner Comparison] TSL Marketing - HubSpot vs Salesforce

[Partner Comparison] Imagine Business Development - 3 Reasons Mid-Market Companies are Leaving Salesforce for HubSpot

Differentiator

Looking at the CRM platform landscape, the majority of competitors have been established by way of acquisition — cobbling together disparate systems, aligning under a unified logo, and promising the consolidation of front-office tools. But because these franken-systems feature stitched-together point solutions, they can end up feeling clunky, frustrating, and overpowering to the end-user.

HubSpot's CRM Platform is Differentiated by:

  • Total Cost of Ownership
  • Adoption
  • Time to Value
  • Ease of Use
  • Scale