HubSpot is an all-in-one software platform that powers your inbound marketing, sales, and customer service efforts. It's designed for businesses that want to grow in smarter ways using a comprehensive set of tools that cover everything from marketing, sales, and service execution to tracking ROI and customer happiness. HubSpot was originally known for “inbound marketing,” a term coined years ago by HubSpot co- founder, Brian Halligan. Today, the inbound approach is being applied to more than just marketing. The inbound methodology can be applied to marketing, sales, and customer service to attract, engage, and delight prospects and customers at every stage their relationship with your business. Over the years, HubSpot has added tools within their platform to support this "flywheel" business model, leaving behind the older ideology of a more linear, "funnel-like" concept.
Support for Your Business Flywheel
Why should you think about your business as a flywheel instead of a funnel? With a funnel, you have to continually add energy at the top to maintain speed, but a flywheel stores rotational energy. Unlike the funnel, a flywheel will continue spinning unless some other force is applied to slow it down. Thinking in terms of a business, happy customers will continue to purchase from you and, better yet, tell friends, family, and strangers about your brand. Unhappy customers, or those who have an unpleasant experience with your sales team will slow your flywheel and business growth down. HubSpot's tools help you create, support, and measure your business flywheel.
Inbound Marketing Support Tools
Inbound marketing is about creating content that engages visitors through organic search and social media rather than trying to grab their attention with cold calling, radio, television, direct mail, and other forms of traditional advertising. Visitors find content they're interested in through search results and social media, and become leads through premium content offers, blog subscription, and other forms. Many of them continue to interact with your brand by reading more content, opting in to offers, and engaging with your social posts—and HubSpot tracks it all.
Some of HubSpot's Tools for Marketing Include:
- The built-in CRM ties marketing performance to your sales pipeline
- Native SEO (search engine optimization) tools monitor inbound links, competitor rank, and provide page optimization tips
- Tools for live chat, conversational bots,
- The content strategy tool helps you organize your content structure from pillar content pages to subtopic clusters. With this tool you can measure the success of specific topic clusters for driving visits, leads, and customers
- Tools for blogging provide comprehensive reporting on your blog's success and business impact. You can choose to expand the capabilities of your website with the HubSpot COS/CMS website and blogging platform, or by adding code to WordPress
- Social Media monitoring, publishing, and engagement tools feed into your contact database
- Facebook and Instagram lead ads allow you to create ads right from HubSpot as well as monitor performance
- Landing page creation and lead capturing tools including CTAs, forms, and pop-up "leadflows" are seamlessly integrated into the platform
- Advanced email marketing and contact list segmentation capabilities enable extensive personalization
- Extensive marketing automation capabilities will save hours of time while improving performance
- Predictive lead scoring combs through your contact data to determine how likely each lead is to become a customer
- Powerful reporting and tracking functions monitor the ROI of your marketing efforts
- Leverage contextual marketing with "smart content" areas that are personalized to each website visitor
- The ads add-on can automatically pull in the performance of your PPC and social ads
- Through HubSpot Connect, integrate dozens of services like Zapier, Eventbrite, Survey Monkey, Shopify, Zendesk, and Bigcommerce
Basically, HubSpot is an advanced platform with everything a marketer needs to attract visitors, convert leads, close customers and create brand ambassadors. Some of the tools described come in the free versions of HubSpot, while others are in the paid subscription options. If you'd like to know more about the free and/or paid tools you can 
.
INBOUND Sales SUPPORT TOOLS
HubSpot's built-in CRM has everything a sales team needs to log, organize, monitor, and manage contacts and companies in order to build strong relationships with prospects and customers. When used in conjunction with HubSpot's marketing tools, your sales intelligence becomes even more powerful. Let's say you have two leads that look equally hot on paper...what if one of them only opened the first marketing email the received, while the other is opening and clicking on most of them, sharing your blog posts on Facebook, and repeatedly visiting your services page? Which one would your sales team be more likely to pursue? Better yet, what if they could spend their time only pursuing amazing leads like that?
A Few of HubSpot's Tools for Sales Include:
- The built-in CRM includes tools for managing contacts, their companies, and the associations between them
- Automatically log contacts and their associated company using powerful email system integrations
- Automatic lead notification and tracking including email opens, email clicks, and even website visits and revisits
- Comprehensive contact timelines track all interactions, email replies, and even internal conversations with your team members
- Deals allow you to keep track of sales, forecast your revenue pipeline, and prioritize reach out efforts
- Time-saving tools like email templates, email sequences, shared documents, and saved snippets help sales teams work smarter instead of harder
HubSpot Partner Support
Full disclosure: as a Gold Tier HubSpot Partner Agency, we're pretty big fans of HubSpot's software, certifications, and inbound training. We use HubSpot for our own sales and marketing, and we love experimenting with new ways to use the world’s #1 inbound marketing software platform. In fact, we have been innovators in using HubSpot to find and evaluate the best possible job candidates.
As HubSpot partners, we are not only incredibly driven to get the results our clients want, but we're required to meet a Customer Happiness Index as well. In our experience, one of the best ways to keep clients happy is to consistently demonstrate the ROI of our efforts, and HubSpot's closed-loop tracking capabilities make it easy.
When you're choosing a HubSpot partner, it's extremely important to find a good fit. After all, you'll be working closely with that agency for a long time if all goes well. Why choose VIEO? We're grateful to our friend Sarah Posnak, a Principal Partner Strategist at HubSpot, for summing it up so well:
Aside from being my favorite personalities to work with, there is a fundamental reason VIEO is such a successful agency. Most agencies I speak with are really good at one thing, but lack in other very important areas. Some agencies have marketing down but lack in delivery and so on.
VIEO has it all. They are a fine tuned machine—they know how to market, how to listen to client needs and develop a customized inbound plan and time and time again, they deliver high quality services that transform the way their clients gain exposure, market themselves and generate new business opportunities that turn into paying customers.
One of the things that makes VIEO so unique is how much they care about their clients. Once they start to work with a client, they don’t move on to the next prospect. Instead, we strategize about how they can do an even better job for their existing customers. They are constantly reinventing the wheel internally to stay ahead of the curve and create long term value for their clients.
If I had my own business, the first thing I would do is hire VIEO as my marketing agency. They are the kind of agency that you can rely on for measurable ROI and the kind of people you want to grab a beer with after work—a lethal combination of great work and great people.
If we sound like the kind of people you'd like to work with, we'd love to chat!
As always, no strings attached—we're here to answer your questions and find out whether or not HubSpot is the right option for your company.
