HubSpot Vs. Less Annoying CRM 2023: Best CRM for SMBs?

HubSpot CRM offers fantastic pipeline management capabilities to scale your sales process, but don’t just take our word for it. 

Let’s walk you through our experience!

First, we navigated to our deals dashboard, where we could easily create pipelines and customize our dashboard. 

Here’s a look at the column customization options (which were extensive).

From there, we created a pipeline and added in our affiliate marketing deals.

With HubSpot, we could add unlimited deals to multiple pipelines (throughout our six months of testing). 

Here’s a look at our deal pipeline (for context).

We could easily drag and drop deals from each stage as needed. 

We also liked how readily available the following information was:

• Priority
• Amount
• Close date
• Activity

This gave us a bird’s eye view of our deals and helped us stay on top of our sales process. 

The bottom line: pipeline management with HubSpot is powerful, intuitive, and highly customizable. We can safely say that HubSpot provides some of the best pipeline management in the business!

Scheduling meetings with your entire team (with everyone on the same page) can be tricky. 

Just when you think you’ve locked down a date and time, someone throws a wrench in the plan. 

HubSpot’s meeting scheduling feature helps take the headache out of coordinating schedules.

We started testing this feature out (over six months) by scheduling all of our company meetings with HubSpot. 

It’s worth mentioning that HubSpot CRM has a shared calendar and scheduling options (for both internal and external meetings). 

When we sent out invites, we found the following features especially great:

• Meeting reminders
• Ability to create custom meeting links 
• Customized time slots per day (which we could set/exclude from our availability)

Here’s a quick snapshot of a company meeting we created (in less than 5 minutes).

Our takeaway: Scheduling meetings with many people can be a hassle. With HubSpot, it doesn’t have to be. HubSpot CRM made it easy for us to schedule, send invites, and keep track of meetings (all in one place). 

Managing customer tickets is crucial for any SMB (regardless of size or industry). 

It’s all about ensuring our customers are happy, and their issues are handled quickly and efficiently.

During our six-month testing phase, we took a deep dive into the ticket management capabilities offered by HubSpot.

Here’s what we loved:

• Easy-to-use interface: The dashboard was user-friendly, making ticket creation and tracking a breeze.
• Customizable ticket status: We could easily set and update ticket statuses, which streamlined our support process.
• Priority setting: The ability to set ticket priorities really came in handy for us. It made sure that we could quickly address any urgent matters that came up.
• Integrated communication: We could communicate with customers directly from the ticket (which significantly increased efficiency).

Here’s a quick look at our ticket dashboard (for context).

We especially liked the multichannel support capabilities offered by HubSpot. 

Essentially, customers could automatically create tickets from the following channels:

• Live chat 
• Chatbots
• Email 
• Phone

This meant we had all our customer communication in one place (making it easier for us to resolve issues quickly).

At the end of the day, managing your tickets is essential to keeping your customers happy. HubSpot CRM makes this process easy, efficient, and effective.

Have you ever felt like you could deliver a better product or service if you just knew what your customers were thinking?

Luckily, HubSpot has the answer! 

With HubSpot CRM, we could create and send customized customer feedback surveys to our clients.

Here are some survey types we were able to create (with just a click): 

• Customer support
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer loyalty
• Custom survey 

We especially liked the ability to embed these surveys into our website, emails, and chatbots. 

Plus, we could easily view the results in real-time on our dashboard (which saved us a ton of time and effort). 

Our two cents: This feature was handy for getting actionable insights into our customers. 

HubSpot makes it a breeze to gather data and use it to make data-driven decisions (based on customer feedback). 

In today’s fast-paced business world, connecting with your customers in real time is crucial for providing top-notch customer support.  

That’s where live chat comes in.

With HubSpot CRM, we could easily set up and customize our own live chat widget on our website (without any coding skills needed).

The whole process was highly beginner-friendly, with virtually no learning curve. 

Check out our customization screen, where we were able to get our Bonfire Chat up and running.

We were able to easily customize the following aspects of our live chat:

• Logo
• Color scheme
• Custom chat responses

From there, we were given a code to embed the widget on our site, and the rest was history!

We noticed a significant increase in customer engagement and satisfaction once we implemented live chat on our site. 

At the end of the day, HubSpot’s live chat is a great way to connect with customers, answer questions, and provide real time support. 

Trust us when we say your support team will thank you for this feature!

In today’s digital landscape, quickly creating and managing content is essential for any business. 

With its CMS Hub, HubSpot CRM provides a user-friendly and powerful platform for creating, editing, and publishing content.

With the drag-and-drop builder, we could easily create website pages, blog posts, and landing pages. 

Here are some of the features we loved while using the CMS Hub:

• Drag-and-drop builder: This made creating and editing pages super simple and intuitive.
• Mobile optimization: With the rise of mobile usage, optimizing our content for mobile devices was a game-changer.
• SEO suggestions: HubSpot’s built-in SEO suggestions helped us improve our content and increase organic traffic to our site.
• Integrations: The ability to easily integrate with other tools, like Google Analytics and social media platforms, helped us streamline our content management process.

HubSpot also provides many gorgeous templates (shown below) to help anyone create a gorgeous-looking web or blog page. 

The best part is that most of these are 100% free! That means you can create professional-looking content (without breaking the bank).

Take a look at our web page creation process (during our six months of testing).

With this editor, we were able to easily add and edit the following:

• Images
• Text
• Buttons
• Web forms
• Social links
• Video

There’s a ton of utility here, which is just the cherry on top of an already robust CRM software. 

Our one criticism of the feature would be that we wish it was more customizable. 

While some customization is available, we’ve used other platforms that deliver much more. 

No matter what your business is, email marketing is important. 

You need a platform that makes it easy to create and send professional-looking emails to your customers (without messing with code). 

HubSpot’s email marketing tools provide just that. 

With an intuitive drag-and-drop editor (shown below), we could easily create beautiful email campaigns in no time.

The editor also provided us with suggestions to improve our emails (to get the best results possible). 

Here’s a quick overview of what we particularly liked about this feature:

• Templates: HubSpot provides a variety of customizable email templates to choose from, making it effortless to create professional-looking emails.
• Personalization: The platform allows for personalization of emails, which can greatly improve customer engagement.
• A/B testing: We were able to test different elements of our email campaigns (like subject lines or images) to see what resonated best with our audience.
• Segmentation: With HubSpot’s CRM data, we could easily segment our email lists and send personalized content to specific groups of customers.

Here’s a look at some templates we could choose from (for free). 

With these email marketing tools, businesses can easily create and send effective email campaigns to engage with customers. 

If you’re looking to scale your business, automation is key.

HubSpot’s workflow automation feature allows SMBs to streamline their processes and save time by making repetitive tasks a thing of the past.

For example, they offer pre-made automation templates (pictured below) to help create powerful automation (with zero coding required).

Here are just a few of the things we loved about this feature:

• User-friendly interface: The workflow editor was a no-brainer to use and understand, even for those with limited technical knowledge.
• Customization options: With HubSpot’s automation tools, businesses can create personalized workflows that meet their needs.
• Time-saving: By automating certain tasks, businesses can save valuable time and focus on other important aspects of their business.

We created many different types of automation during our six months of testing. 

Here’s one example of a quick grammar automation we created (in less than 10 minutes). 

The final verdict: HubSpot left us feeling like tech wizards, able to automate repetitive tasks and improve efficiency within SBB (across the board).