HubSpot is an all-in-one software platform built to power your marketing, sales, and customer service. It's designed for businesses that want to grow in smarter ways using a comprehensive set of tools that can be used by your entire organization. HubSpot's Growth Platform powers 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:
- 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
- The content strategy tool adds power to your SEO efforts by helping 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.
- Blogging tools help you create SEO optimized blog posts and comprehensive reporting on your blog's success and business impact.
- You can power your website with HubSpot's CMS (like ours!), or if you prefer, expand the capabilities of your existing website by adding HubSpot's code to popular platforms like WordPress.
- Tools for creating Landing pages, forms, and pop-up forms allow you to capture more leads.
- The Call-to-Action (CTA) tool lets you quickly create CTAs to display in strategic positions through out your website and blog. HubSpot's Smart CTAs can dynamically change for different types of website visitors based on the rules you set.
- Advanced email marketing and contact list segmentation tools will enhance your marketing strategies with extensive personalization options.
- Marketing automation workflows will save hours of time on internal and external tasks and communications triggered by enrollment rules you set.
- Social Media tools help you schedule social media posts, monitor engagement, and measure the ROI from your social media efforts.
- Ads tools leverage data from your CRM and web analytics to inform your ad campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google. You'll now be able to track advertising ROI and specifically which ads are turning prospects into customers.
- Campaign Reporting allows you to group specific content pieces into a campaign and understand how each landing page, social post, blog post, email, and other sources are contributing to your goals.
- Predictive lead scoring combs through your contact data to determine how likely each lead is to become a customer.
- Powerful reporting and tracking dashboards monitor a multitude of metrics and help you measure the ROI of all your marketing efforts
- Leverage contextual marketing with "smart content" areas that are personalized to each website visitor
- Through HubSpot's Connect Partners, you can integrate HubSpot with hundreds of different apps and web services you use regularly like Gmail, Google Calendar, WordPress, Slack, Eventbrite, Shopify, WooCommerce, Stripe, Zoom, JoinMe, and much more!
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 automatically track interactions like website visits, email replies, chat sessions, and even internal conversations with your team members.
- Deals allow you to keep track of sales, forecast your revenue pipeline, and prioritize outreach efforts.
- Quotes lets you create and share professional proposals in only a few clicks.
- Live chat and conversational bots give you the power to answer prospect questions in real-time and increase your chances of closing a sale.
- Scheduling Meetings has never been easier with HubSpot's meetings tool. You can share a meeting link to let prospects or clients see when you're free, book a meeting, and get pre-programmed friendly reminders so they're more likely to attend.
- Time-saving tools like email templates, email sequences, and saved snippets will help your sales team work smarter instead of harder.
- Using Documents, you can build a library of sales assets to easily share with prospects. This tool also has analytics so that you can get insights into when and where document viewers were most engaged.
Customer Service TOOLS
Imagine having all of your customer-facing teams using the same platform as your sales and marketing team? HubSpot’s customer service software gives you tools to connect with customers and provide them with the type of customer service experience that will create brand advocates. Like the other Hubs, the Service Hub is built around HubSpot's CRM which includes tools for managing contacts, their companies, and the associations between them.
A Few of HubSpot's Tools for Service Include:
- The Knowledge base allows you to document your most frequently asked support questions within help articles so customers and team members can can quickly and easily find the answers they need.
- Ticketing allows you to log customer issues as tickets in a central location. Tickets can be assigned to team members, organized, prioritized, tracked, and reported on.
- Customer Service Automation automates ticket routing, escalation, and task creation which leaves your company more time to effectively solve problems and turn customers into brand advocates.
- Customer Feedback tools like NPS Surveys, Customer Experience Surveys, and Support Surveys help you easily survey your customers about their experience and leverage the feedback to improve and grow your business.
- Service Reports capture data from surveys, ticket resolution timing, and other Service Hub tools to help you monitor and improve your service delivery.
- The Team Inbox lets you connect team-wide email addresses (like support@ or info@ emails) to a central Conversations inbox. Your service or support team can then turn incoming emails into support tickets, or send them straight into a shared inbox.
- Live chat and conversational bots give you the power to answer common customer service questions in real-time, route questions to the right person or knowledge base article.
- Calling allows you to customers through VOIP from inside HubSpot and record and auto-log calls on contact records for future reference
HubSpot Partner Support
Full disclosure: as a Gold Tier HubSpot Partner Agency, we're pretty big fans of HubSpot's software, certifications, and training resources. We use HubSpot everyday for ourselves and our clients, and have been since 2013. We love experimenting with new ways to leverage this powerful growth platform. In fact, we've 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 using HubSpot 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.
