Does anyone have experience using Hubspot?

October 12, 2025

by an investor from Harvard University - Harvard Business School in Chicago, IL, USA

Does anyone have experience using Hubspot for their targeting efforts? Recognizing Hubspot was not created for searchers and investment firms, are there any templates in Hubspot that have appropriate deal process dropdowns, etc, that can be used to get up and running quickly? Any thoughts are appreciated.

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Reply by a searcher
from IESE Business School in São Paulo, Brasilien

After 2 weeks using it, we switched to google sheets. The time we invested learning how to do things using the current functions of Hubspot, which apparently can do a lot, was not worth it as creating a new column, formula or drop menu in google sheets. After###-###-#### lines and columns until "FZ" we now have issues with speed.

Reply by a professional
from University of California, Hastings College of Law in Petaluma, California, United States

We’ve seen a lot of Search CEOs and investment firms using HubSpot as a lightweight CRM to manage deal flow, but you’re right, it’s not designed out of the box for ETA-style sourcing and diligence. (I wouldn't recommend Salesforce and have been asked about Salesforce for deal flow). A few best practices we’ve seen work well: -Start with the Sales Hub pipeline view, then repurpose stages to reflect your deal lifecycle (e.g., Intro → NDA → IOI → LOI → Diligence → Close). -Use custom properties for deal size, seller type, EBITDA, industry, and deal source. -Build lists by seller segment or geography for targeted outreach, and integrate with Apollo or Clay for enrichment (if you want to go this far). If you want to get up and running quickly, I’d recommend connecting with Robin Leathers, one of our vetted GTM and RevOps operators on Five Experts (she also does Customer Success). You can book hourly time with her here: https://fiveexperts.com/robin-leathers Setting up HubSpot for sourcing and investor workflows is actually a smart move to stay organized using templates for deal pipelines, reporting, and automation that mirror what PE firms use but scaled to the ETA model. Happy to make an introduction to one of our Experts or after some more insight we can easily give you a scope to get set up does this path. Feel free to reach out to me directly, redacted or our team at redacted

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