A few folks have recently asked what we like most about HubSpot. What are their best features?
It’s a tough question to answer since we use so much of the tool for ourselves and many clients.
When we first signed on as a HubSpot Partner Agency, I would have told you about all the tools on the marketing side, but in our second year, I learned to value the HubSpot CRM truly.
As the Growth Stack has evolved, it’s tough to limit your favorite to just one, two or even three features.
With that in Mind, I will name the top five best features in the HubSpot Growth Stack.
So everyone has the same context, the Growth Stack includes the free CRM, the marketing hub, the sales hub and the customer hub.
1. A Seamless Experience
So first and foremost, the platform is seamless. I can move between sales and marketing in one click. The database of contacts is shared between marketing and sales.
Any leads I generate on the sales side are automatically imported for us on the sales side and in the CRM.
Also, I can access all of my tools, resources, and customer support from within my one portal.
The platform is designed to save you time all around. It’s the best tool for marketers and sales folks in my opinion.
2. Automation
Automation is what makes the software powerful. You’ll notice I did not say marketing automation. HubSpot's automation is so much more.
The automation can be set up from the marketing side or the sales side. We’ve used automation to enhance our project management, client onboarding, and training new team members.
Automation saves us hours of time every week. We are constantly looking for ways to increase automation throughout our business using HubSpot.
3. Content Strategy
With Keywords becoming less relevant this tools is incredible. Google has made several updates to make search better for their users; as a result, they’ve increasingly made SEO more difficult for marketers and businesses.
The content strategy tool will allow you to plan your content based on data strategically. You can see what your site currently ranks for around a topic and how relevant your planned content is to your site.
You’ll also know how many monthly searches are done for that topic. This system is designed around topic clusters and pillar pages.
If you want to increase your search rank, this is the perfect tool to help you do it.
4. Competitor Tool
Not that we live or die by this tool, but it’s a great resource to measure how well you are doing with your marketing.
This tool allows you to view your marketing grade based on many contributing factors. Things like your traffic rank, number of backlinks, your mozRank, if you have a blog, if you’re tracking site analytics, having an RSS feed, and utilizing marketing automation.
It looks at several other things to create your marketing grade, such as social posts, mobile friendliness, the frequency of blog posts, and lead generation.
With all of these numbers, you can get an excellent idea where you stand against your competitors.
So, a little bit of spying, but well worth knowing if you are ahead, behind or on par with specific competitors.
5. Sales Sequences
If you’ve spent a little time with me, you’ll learn I’m very time conscious. I hate wasting time. I’m not rushing people out of meetings, I think people are the best place to invest your time, but I hate wasting time.
So, it's no surprise that I love anything that helps me get time back. Sequences are another great tool in HubSpot Sales that allows you to get some time back.
It’s so easy to spend hours getting that email just right, and then trying to follow up on emails particularly with prospecting.
Sequences allow you to create email templates and then order them in, you guessed it, a series, to send to a contact.
So you can create an introduction email template, two or three follow up emails, and a sorry we couldn’t connect email that automatically sends out.
What makes this so cool is that it will automatically send out each email until the recipient responds allowing you to take over engagement from there.
So if they respond to the third email; it will not send the fourth and fifth email. It will let you respond instead.
There’s no limit on how many people you can enroll in a sequence. This allows you to save countless hours while also making easy to measure which emails are most effective.
But wait, there’s more!
I could honestly talk about HubSpot for hours, and I have many times over. We reap so many benefits from using HubSpot's software.
I’d be in error if I didn’t mention that they have the best customer support I’ve ever experienced, outside of this one waitress we had at a Cracker Barrel years ago. I’ve never seen my dad give someone a tip that big before or after.
HubSpot is hands down our best partner. The software has so much more to give than what we’ve laid out in these five features, but you will not find a better partner than HubSpot.
My favorite features can change day to day depending on which client we are working with and the goals we are helping them achieve.
There are tools like the contact history that allows me to see a leads entire history of engagement with a site. Then you have the notification tools that enable me to see what leads are doing in real time.
Then on the sales side, I can see how many emails each team members has sent, the number of deals we’ve created, revenue forecasting, and even what stage of the sales process each lead is in along with the value of the lead.
As I stated in the beginning, choosing the best feature in HubSpot is kind of like picking your favorite child. Each one is different, but you love them all the same.
