HubSpot Vs. Insightly 2024: Best for Your SMB?

When I look for great pipeline management, I look for three things above all else. 

These include:

• Customizable sales pipelines 
• Easy-to-use interface
• Affordable pricing

HubSpot Sales Hub excels in all three categories, making it one of the best tools in the game for managing your sales pipeline.  

Let’s break it down. 

My team and I tested this feature (over six months) by adding our affiliate marketing deals to HubSpot CRM. 

We could fully customize our dashboard to fit our specific needs (which was awesome).

Here’s how it looked from our perspective. 

Once everything was fully customized, we could easily add our deals with a click. 

From there, we could track each deal across our pipeline at a glance. 

Here’s our dashboard view (to give you some context). 

We especially loved the drag-and-drop interface, which allowed our team to quickly move deals between stages as needed. 

The bottom line: If you want to empower your sales team to succeed and close more deals, we recommend trying HubSpot!

Getting your entire team together for a meeting is a struggle, even for the best of us. 

Imagine having a way to quickly get everyone on the same page (and in the same place) at a set time and place. 

Well, you don’t have to imagine it with HubSpot’s intuitive meeting scheduling tool. 

With HubSpot, you can easily accomplish the following:

• Find the best meeting times for everyone (with the click of a button).
• Schedule meetings with internal and external teams
• Schedule meetings by sharing a link or embedding the scheduler on your website
• Sync your calendar to automatically update availability 

We were able to handle our scheduling like a boss with HubSpot, setting up all kinds of meetings (with zero hiccups). 

Here’s an example that we whipped up in under 5 minutes. 

We sent the link and confirmed the time—the rest was history!

HubSpot took a frustrating time suck and streamlined it for us, earning major points in this category.

Managing your customer support tickets can be tricky. 

As your business scales, so do your customer inquiries.  

This could be a challenge for any SMB without the right tools in place. 

Fortunately, HubSpot CRM offers an excellent ticketing feature that makes organizing and managing support requests a breeze. 

With this feature, you can:

• Collect tickets from various channels (email, chat, social media)
• Track and manage all of your tickets in one place
• Assign tickets to specific team members 
• Set auto-responses and custom ticket statuses

Here’s a quick look at our ticket dashboard during our six months of testing (to show you how awesome it looked).

We were impressed by how efficient and organized HubSpot’s ticket management was, allowing us to quickly resolve customer inquiries (without any confusion or overlap).

Plus, we could fully customize our ticket board (shown below).

This is perfect for niche SMBs with a specific communication process in place.

Our takeaway: Don’t let your customer tickets fall through the cracks as you grow your business. Let HubSpot do the heavy lifting while you nurture your relationships and focus on growth.

Don’t sleep on customer feedback surveys. 

They’re a great way to gauge overall satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.

Fortunately, HubSpot makes it easy to create and send custom surveys to your customers (without breaking a sweat). 

We were able to create the following different types of surveys throughout our testing period:

• Customer support
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Custom surveys 

Here’s a snapshot of how it looked from our perspective. 

The whole creation process took less than 10 minutes to create a survey, saving us hours of time and effort trying to figure out customer preferences. 

Our two cents: HubSpot made sure that we had everything we needed to build surveys that would give us actionable insights into how we could improve our customer relationships.

Connecting with your customers in real time is crucial for establishing and building relationships in today’s digital landscape. 

With HubSpot’s live chat feature, you can chat with visitors on your website, answer their questions, and offer support on the spot. 

Here are some of the most notable features of this tool:

• Fully customizable chat widget
• Chatbot integration for automated responses
• Canned responses for frequently asked questions 
• We gave this feature a thorough test (over six months) by using it on our website to assist visitors with any questions they had about our products and services. 

We could fully customize the chat widget’s look and feel, making it seamlessly blend in with our website design. 

Here’s how it looked during the customization process.

Plus, the chatbot integration feature was a game-changer for quickly providing answers to common questions. 

Our verdict: HubSpot’s live chat feature is a must-have for any SMB looking to improve their customer experience and boost conversions on their website.

In addition to being a powerful CRM, HubSpot also offers a variety of content management features (especially useful for small businesses looking to build their online presence). 

These include the following:

• Web page creation
• Blog creation
• Ad management
• Landing page design 
• Web forms 
• SEO optimization tools 

We put these features to the test by creating various web pages, blog posts, and landing pages for Small Business Bonfire. 

The fantastic themes and templates (shown below) made it easy for even non-tech-savvy team members to create professional and visually appealing content.

Most of these are available 100%, leaving no barrier to entry for startups and SMBs on a budget. 

We especially loved the drag-and-drop editor, which allowed us to easily add the following to each page:

• Text
• Images
• Video
• Social links
• Buttons

Here’s how it looked (about halfway through our web page creation process).

Our final thoughts: HubSpot CRM can manage all your content creation needs, making it a one-stop shop for SMBs looking to boost their online presence and attract new customers. 

Email marketing is a fantastic way to nurture leads, promote your products and services, and keep in touch with customers. 

HubSpot’s email marketing capabilities(courtesy of HubSpot Marketing Hub) make it easy for SMBs to do the following:

• Create and send personalized emails
• Segment their audience
• Track the success of their campaigns

Let’s break it down.

For starters, HubSpot offers some gorgeous email templates to start with (pictured below).

These templates essentially allow beginners to create powerful email campaigns (with no coding knowledge).

Plus, the email editor makes personalization easy, with simple drag-and-drop features for adding dynamic content and custom fields. 

Here’s our first draft of an email campaign to introduce our SBB newsletter. 

HubSpot’s intuitive interface made us feel like tech wizards while we navigated the email creation and customization process. 

Once we finished, we could send emails directly from HubSpot and track our campaign’s success using in-depth analytics.

The nuts and bolts: If you’re serious about scaling your marketing efforts, we recommend HubSpot for some serious return on investment (ROI).

If you’re not using automation, you’re going to have a hard time scaling your business. 

Setting up automation can seem daunting and confusing, but HubSpot CRM makes it easy with its visual workflow builder.

You can automate everything from lead nurturing to internal communication (and everything in between). 

Here’s a look at a simple automation my team and I created in minutes. 

The purpose of the automation was simple—create a sequence to automatically capitalize the first letter of the first and last name of each of our contacts.

The whole process took less than 5 minutes and saved our team a ton of time in the process. 

The best part: We could easily create and customize these workflows using HubSpot’s pre-made automation templates (shown below).

Within HubSpot, we were able to create the following types of marketing & sales automation:

• Email campaigns
• Lead generation & nurturing
• Automating lead management features
• Notifications for better task management
• Sales follow-ups 
• Grammar and spelling checks 

These endless possibilities make the CRM platform a top choice for SMBs looking to streamline their processes and save precious time.