HubSpot's transition to a seat-based pricing model, effective March 5, 2024, introduced a new structure where costs are directly tied to the number of user seats. When this model was introduced, HubSpot's announcement included the following text about what would happen to pricing for existing customers:
I'm not sure about you, but many of my clients are saying it's difficult to keep up with the hundreds of Hubspot updates that have been announced over the last few weeks and also at Inbound 2024 this year.
As a senior marketing and marketing operations professional, I've navigated the complex landscape of data-driven campaigns and analytical reviews. In the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is essential. Recently, I completed a project that has significantly improved my approach to tasks. Let me share my story with you.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) sometimes struggle to keep up with the many moving parts of customer relationship management, such as maintaining a client database, developing marketing strategies, and handling customer service inquiries.
Growing a company, increasing marketing efforts, and improving the customer experience are all things that might be challenging. HubSpot is a robust platform that can meet the majority of your marketing and sales requirements. Since there are numerous methods to customize your HubSpot portal to the specific demands of your organization, automating routine, time-consuming procedures are becoming increasingly important.
Every good quest starts with a strong desire or need. My partner who is a consultant had a great wish to purchase software to backup his client's Google workspace environment. It was an unnecessarily inefficient, tiresome, and expensive process for both parties. (I would love to hear your thoughts on how you would optimize the below customer journey. As it was not a terribly bad experience but just a complete waste of everyone's time and resources. ) I have documented below the entire process step-by-step. It is a great exercise for any organization to reflect on the journey a customer goes through and how the experience ways up. I would recommend if possible someone to do a ' mystery shop' on your behalf. It's amazing what insights you can get from reviewing a sales process.
Recently, I conducted some research on the demo experience for one of my clients. They were looking for a "mystery shop" for their demo process from a marketing point of view. So I thought it would be interesting to do this with a number of other Saas organizations to see what the market is like and how the competition stacked up. I chose some well-known Saas brands including, Salesforce, PandaDoc & Hubspot. You can also find a list of other popular CRM tools here for more examples, many of which have demo flows."
The results were very surprising. In the end, none of them provided, in my opinion, a world-class customer experience, however, I got a lot ideas and insights from the process so I thought I would share my learnings with you here on the blog.
Last year we looked at the possibility to integrate Microsoft Teams meetings with the Hubspot meeting scheduling tool. At that time, it was possible to automatically have a meeting that was booked through the Hubspot automatic meetings scheduler sent to your Microsoft Office365 Calendar, but it was not possible to automatically include a link to a Microsoft Teams meeting.
We have been keeping an eye on this feature ever since we first wrote about it because we have heard that many people are looking for this integration. Spoiler alert, there is still no native integration that allows us to use the Hubspot meeting scheduler tool to send out invitations with automatically generated Meeting links for Microsoft links. But we expect that this will become available very soon because Hubspot has confirmed that they have been working on a solution for some time. So, let’s explore where things stand one year on.
We regularly get questions from our clients about web development, website migrations and website redesigns. It is a very important - and often very scary part of their marketing activities. The main cause of all the fear around these projects are:
It is often difficult to understand where to start when you are a faced with a web design or redesign project. There are many different approaches that you can use and a huge amount of options, possibilities and the complexities that arise when you think about redesigning and implementing your business website. It is tricky to translate design choices that make good marketing sense to the right technical implementations. We often get questions about how to use Growth Driven Design to drive better value, so we decided to write a bit of an introduction to explain what Growth Driven Design is and how it compares to traditional web design methods.
Traditional web design projects are typically time-consuming, costly, and are often delivered long after the estimated deadlines. With a conventional design strategy, the website will typically receive major updates after at least one to two years. These methods are clearly outdated since the business will not fully maximize the lead generation and performance of their website.
Growth driven design is a web design methodology that was developed to make the process of redesigning a website more clear, more affordable and to drive a higher quality result. It's been gaining popularity over the years and fits well with other modern digital marketing principles such as Inbound Marketing.
Hubspot CRM is often feels deceptively simple but is getting more powerful every year. It is the datastore that has powered the entire suite of HubSpot's extensive product range for many years. It holds and segments information for all parts of the buyers journey from visitors, interactions to customers and companies. It can power Inbound and ABM strategies and can exchange data with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and many other platforms and tools through its extensive API and integrations marketplace. In short, it is very much at the core of Hubspots functionality. Without Hubspot CRM, none of its other products would be of much use. During Inbound 2020 Hubspot also announced a lot of new features for Hubspot CRM. One of them is the ability to create custom objects. This brings Hubspot CRM on the same level as many other paid CRM platforms in terms of customization possibilities making Hubspot more useful as a full end to end platform and making it easier to use it to replace other CRM products such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This brings new opportunities to organizations that use Hubspot and a third party CRM system. Removing an additional CRM product from your product stack means a reduction in budget and and less integration headaches. The extra functionality in CRM can of course bring extra complexity and this makes it even more important that you manage your Hubspot CRM processes, data and segmentation correctly.
Note we wrote an update about Hubspot meetings and it's integration with Teams meetings in September 2021. Click here to read our latest update about this topic.
It's September 2020 and most of you are probably scheduling virtual meetings with your clients, contractors, consultants, friends and possibly even family members like never before. Since COVID started hitting our lives globally about 6 months ago many organisations are scrambling to figure out how we can transition many of their interactions with their prospects and clients to online meetings and collaboration. At About Inbound we consider it important to constantly test and try new business apps so that we can provide the best advice possible to our customers about what software in conjunction with Hubspot might best fit their needs. As Microsoft has recently been making huge progress in their Teams and Teams Meetings functionality we decided it was time to test if it was possible to integrate Teams Meetings directly with Hubspot meetings to replace our link to Skype. In short, the answer is no. Right now it is not possible but it might be in the future. While looking into this, my IT consultant past kicked in and I decided to snoop around and see why not and if there were any workarounds and what would work best. These types of challenges are great reasons for me to dig around and learn about what is happening with the different Marketing tech and IT tools. After some research and testing I've put together a post around Hubspot meetings and Office 365 Teams meetings. I will discuss their uses and why integrating them or using Hubspot meetings with another online meetings tool would be super powerful.
