HubSpot

Just like with any CRM, you get your contact and pipeline management. You can store all your customer data and interactions in one place, which gives you and overview of your relationship with each person/deal. HubSpot even has an integration with the best email client, Superhuman Mail where you can manage your deals from within your inbox.

When deals get passed between team members, so it's always helpful when someone can jump into a deal and see a contact's full history of interactions so they can pick up where they left off.

For SMBs, this part of HubSpot works well and feels familiar. The challenge is that HubSpot layers a lot of additional fields, properties, and customization on top of it. Larger teams love this flexibility (they often hire a consultant to set it up, another $20-40K cost), but for smaller businesses, it can feel like more system than you actually need.

You have the option to build customizable deal pipelines where opportunities move from stage to stage as conversations progress. This works like every other modern CRM that includes a Kanban layout. It's helpful for visibility across teams and keeps opportunities moving forward while also seeing which ones have stalled.

A huge problem is that HubSpot becomes overwhelming fast. Once you stand up automation layers and place scoring rules on top of that, everything starts to feel like overkill. That's why the "average time to fully operationalize a HubSpot product is 6 weeks!"

Most SMB teams that we've worked with just want a simple place to track deals, and that's why tools like Copper or folk stand out to us, because new tools create friction for your team, and when adoption is easier, so is the day-to-day.

Teams usually start using HubSpot to take advantage of it's robust marketing automation.

It lets you create workflows that capture leads from your website, automatically send out follow-up emails, it scores those leads depending on certain behaviors, and then routes them to your sales team when they're ready.

For example, someone scrolling on your site might see a guide that they decide to download, on the backend you can set HubSpot up to send a nurture sequence over the next few weeks, track which emails they open, and then notify your team when that person starts showing real buying intent. It's great to not have to manually manage every touchpoint, but it can also get complicated quick.

And for businesses that rely heavily on inbound marketing (SaaS companies, agencies, SEO, lead generation, etc.) having a marketing automation feature within your CRM is vital for what you're trying to accomplish. So, in those situations larger teams can justify those cost because they're offsetting them by using automation to drive higher revenue, but for most SMBs, that's just not the case.

Teams smaller than 20-30 are going to feel like it's overkill. You're not building out full funnel strategies every day and the level of complexity it takes to run those campaigns is not within your teams bandwidth. Just because a company is well known doesn't mean its right for your needs, which from what we've seen with our clients is a CRM that's makes the day-to-day easier and as a whole is simple enough to implement.

HubSpot's workflow automation does a lot. You can tell they put so much into with actions like:

• Triggering actions when certain events happen
• Creating tasks when a deal moves stages
• Assigning leads to specific reps
• Updating properties based on activity

Larger companies with full teams dedicated to the technical aspect are going to geek out and create tons of customized, intricate automations, but for SMBs, that's just not the case. A small team that's already wearing multiple hats shouldn't have to open their CRM's workflow builder and feel more overwhelmed, but that's the reality of tools like HubSpot.

If you like modern tools with clean interfaces, HubSpot will disappoint. HubSpot just feels old school. The user experience is just not anything to rave about, there is no joy in using the tool.

Because of this, you may get some silent friction from team members when trying to get them to adopt it (e.g. your sales team will not love it, you may be chasing them asking them to enter in their notes. That's the reality with most CRMs though, but especially with HubSpot as it's a bit of a maze).

HubSpot has really been investing in AI features lately, but like so many other companies, it's bolted-on for the most part.

While we cover HubSpot's AI features below, keep in mind that if you're at a place where you're switching CRMs, there are AI-native alternatives that we recommend (make sure to read our Lightfield Review before signing up for HubSpot).

What's important to know is that the HubSpot connector is built mostly around reading and acting on CRM data (you can look up a contact or deal, search records by property, read what properties (fields) exist and how they're defined, update the values in those fields on a given record, etc). They built these features in order to stay modern for their existing customer base.

But for new users, an AI CRM should be able to act as a consultant and set itself up (e.g. create fields and automations that are helpful to reduce busy work). HubSpot cannot be configured through AI chat, and you'll still need to hire an actual consultant to get it working properly.

This is why for new teams considering a CRM, we highly recommend checking our Lightfield first as you're going to get set up way faster (we migrated 10+ years of data in a Sunday afternoon into Lightfield, it was incredible).

Within HubSpot, you're able to log conversations that you want to appear on a contact's timeline inside the CRM. You would think this is a great way to keep your team in the know with a clean record of every interaction with a prospect or customer.

However, a huge issue is that in HubSpot, the process is surprisingly fragile. For emails to log correctly, multiple things need to fall in place:

1. The message must be sent through the CRM or the HubSpot extension
2. Logging needs to be enabled in advance
3. The contact has to already exist in the system
4. The reply must come from the same connected inbox

So, for larger teams with dedicated CRM administrators, this isn't a huge deal. But for many SMB teams, this type of friction leads to inconsistent data fast. When your team has to increase their bandwidth just to log in the perfect manner, activity is going to stop getting captured. That's why we use simpler CRMs that make sure logging is automatic, so the team can turn that part of their brain off and focus on their real job.

Everyone knows how important it is to invest in media and content right now, and HubSpot is one of the most recognized CRMs because they take that seriously. They sponsor podcasts, run massive blogs, publish research reports, and have even gone as far as acquiring media brands.

They've managed to create one of the largest inbound marketing engines in the software industry, which is why they're usually the first CRM entrepreneurs find when researching tools.

Essentially, it's this situation where their visibility creates a misconception for SMBs. You start to think that because you've seen so much about HubSpot, it must be the right operational tool for your business. Don't let the FOMO deceive you, the content and media ecosystem is great and a helpful thought partner, but the platform as a whole is far more complex and expensive than what you actually need from a CRM.