Is the Hubspot free version enough for a Searchfund?
September 02, 2021
by a searcher from INSEAD in Madrid, España
We have just started using Hubspot's free version for our recently launched SF. Is it complete enough or will we need to upgrade to the pro version at some point? Has anyone had any bad experience with it? Also, is there any other CRM you would recommend before it is too late to switch?
Thank you in advance!
from The University of Michigan in Rockford, MI, USA
> Email logging and tracking: you can track and log all emails. This is great for following up on who's opened your emails and when.
> Outlook Plug-In: I use Outlook as my mail client and Microsoft 365 for email hosting, and Hubspot has a free plug-in so that I can quickly decide what my default settings are for logging emails and tracking. I can also utilize many of Hubspots capabilities with the plug-in in my native email client rather than having to open Hubspot in my browser.
> Contact management (self-explanatory).
> Conversation notes: for many contacts I'll take notes in Hubspot so they save directly to the contact and I can review my last conversation with a contact easily and keep building on that.
> Phone App: I think Hubspot has a good free phone app to check in on all of the above when I'm not in front of a computer (which, sadly, is infrequently as of late).
> Email Templates: Hubspot lets you save up to 5 email templates at a time, and I use these for different outreach campaigns. You can select a template and then you can fill in whatever blanks you need (name, company, etc.) or even have Hubspot do it automatically for saved contacts.
> Meetings Scheduling: Hubspot generates a link that ties to my Outlook calendar that I share with people to schedule meetings. This functionality is OK -- frankly, Calendly or some other service might be better, but it gets the job done. The one thing they haven't made an update for is that it won't use my MS Teams link automatically, so after someone schedules a meeting I have to go in and manually update the meeting invite to include my Teams link and conference number. Small annoyance, and if I had more meetings I would probably use another service, but I like that I can seamlessly add this to an email with the plug-in.
I think where the free version falls short is if you were heavy on mass, direct outreach. I believe you get a limited number of marketing emails per month and they have a Hubspot watermark of sorts.
Hope this helps. My general feedback: if you pick a popular tool, you'll probably learn to use it just fine and it'll be the least of your concerns moving forward.
from Stanford University in Menlo Park, CA, USA
The best piece of advice I got when choosing CRMs was to use them the way they are meant to be used. Don't try to custom fit them into your process. For example, Salesforce has a delineation between Leads and Contacts/Accounts. Hubspot doesn't. In Salesforce, I tried to make an Accounts custom field for Leads that translated to an Account once Lead converted to Contact. It was a mess.
The second best advice was to put in the effort to put in clean data upfront and maintain it, it's worth the extra time. Otherwise, a few months later you get a total data dumpster and never really dig yourself out of it.
So basically, Hubspot good enough. Figure out it's functionalities and how you will use it (e.g., use the default fields and only create new fields if you really need them, all the potential business owners you reach out to should have an associated Company or Account entry, use Hubspot's bcc or Gmail integration to keep logging all emails) and put in the effort to clean up the data all the time (e.g., upload the correct phone number and address, correct the business name, e.g., is it Acme Co, ACME Co, or Acme Company, make sure a business owner is not tied to a similar sounding company, etc.)