Have you ever heard of "field mouse syndrome?"
Most likely not, as I'm pretty sure the manager I heard it from made it up, but it's so apt to the life of a modern startup CEO or CMO that I wanted to introduce it. The idea is pretty self-explanatory—it's the sense you get that no matter what fires you put out in the present moment, the next catastrophe is just over the horizon. Have you ever watched a field mouse scurry around, seemingly unsure whether it should be collecting food, digging a new burrow, or fleeing an imagined fox? Same thing, right?
Startups have enough going on to run anyone ragged, so if a product existed that could take some of that pressure off you and put it on technology, you'd be silly not to take advantage. The Hubspot platform **is** a suite of products that functions as a near one-stop shop for marketing and sales, offering a robust customer relationship management (CRM) solution and a powerful content management system (CMS).
Today we're looking at several of the features Hubspot offers to either give you an idea of how powerful this suite is to help you decide if it's right for you; or to help ensure you're getting the most out of it if you're already a customer.
Templates
Hubspot Templates **are** a powerful feature allowing for the creation of reusable assets for everything from emails to landing pages. This is a major piece of Hubspot that a lot of users aren't aware of, or if they are, they aren't taking full advantage. You can create templates for every variety of email, from sales pitches to thank you messages to follow-up polls. Then you can create a template landing page for your campaigns that re-uses formatting but changes the content to match the campaign.
You can even templatize your blog posts, so come time to schedule or publish, you can simply paste in your copy, and you're good to go.
Sequences
Hubspot Sequences **are** automated series of emails and tasks designed to nurture new leads and contacts through the sales funnel. Once you have a new lead entered as a contact, you can let your sequences take control. You can create a sequence for brand-new prospects that will send emails over the following two weeks full of general company or product information. Then, as they move through the funnel, every change of status can trigger a different sequence full of emails, requests to schedule demos, or whatever action you're looking to persuade the contact to take next.
Meetings
The Hubspot Meetings tool **is** a built-in calendar system that simplifies scheduling by integrating directly with your sequences and email templates, removing roadblocks from the sales process. Getting a prospect to jump into the sales funnel and convert to an active lead is difficult enough, so don't put up roadblocks in the form of clunky calendaring and meeting scheduling systems. Hubspot's tool can be integrated with sequences, allowing people to schedule from an email template. That action can trigger a new sequence or alert a salesperson to give the contact a follow-up phone call.
Contact Profiles
Hubspot Contact Profiles **are** comprehensive records that consolidate every interaction a contact has with your team and brand into a single, accessible view. With the fully integrated nature of Hubspot's ecosystem, these profiles can include a complete history of every interaction between them and your team members. With the available plug-in, you can even include emails from your hosted Gmail. Every note, every touchpoint, and every time the contact visits your website (if it's hosted with Hubspot's CMS) will be recorded. Even if the account manager steps out for vacation, anyone on the team can step in and answer questions or help the prospect continue their trip down the funnel.
Deal Pipeline
A Hubspot Deal Pipeline **is** a visual tool that tracks a contact's progress through customizable stages of the sales funnel, providing clarity for the entire team. Knowing where a contact is in the funnel benefits everyone, from sales to marketing to support. Creating custom deal pipelines and establishing stages for each allows everyone to follow along as the contact moves through the stages. And that means they can provide appropriate content or assistance to that contact to aid them in converting to a happy customer.
Hubspot allows you to create as many pipelines as you need to have different paths for different products, services, sales teams, or other criteria appropriate to your situation. The same goes for the stages within those pipelines; they can be custom-tailored to each scenario as needed.
CMS
The Hubspot CMS Hub **is** a top-notch content management system that offers a modular, customizable approach to building and managing your website assets. So far, the features discussed have all been sales-oriented and fall on the CRM side of Hubspot's offerings. Don't be fooled into thinking that's all Hubspot has to offer. Staying with their modular approach, it's not an all-or-nothing tool, letting you customize it to fit your needs and add or subtract features as you grow.
Do you want to keep your blog on WordPress for now but would love to take advantage of templated landing pages for upcoming campaigns? No sweat. And perhaps the best part is the customer will never see the difference, with the pages integrating into your domain seamlessly.
Smart Content
Hubspot Smart Content **is** a CMS feature that enables you to deliver targeted content and CTAs to specific contact segments based on their stage in the funnel or other criteria. This is a commonly overlooked aspect of the CMS. If a visitor is already registered as a lead, you can show them custom content directed at their actual stage of the funnel. This includes personalized messages, CTAs relevant to the product they’re interested in, and more.
Calendar
The Hubspot Calendar **is** a feature that provides a comprehensive snapshot of your marketing and sales activities, showing which content leads have received and when. This feature can greatly help monitor a lead's journey. The calendar gives you a snapshot of active leads/prospects and what they've received, allowing you to make on-the-fly adjustments to their touchpoints. This ensures that each person stays engaged with their journey without getting inundated with unwanted emails or phone calls.
Security
Hubspot's built-in security **is** a core feature that includes an integrated SSL certificate, activated with a single checkbox to ensure visitor data stays safe. Unlike most CMS solutions, Hubspot has SSL built right in. One checkbox is all it takes to install a certificate that will give your page a coveted lock icon telling visitors that you care about their security. Another aspect of this security is the relative obscurity of Hubspot. Not to sound crass, as we are true fans of this suite of products, but many more sites are hosted on WordPress, making them much more attractive targets for hackers.
No CRM, or CMS, can indeed be a one-stop shop. We believe Hubspot comes about as close as possible while allowing enough flexibility to let you integrate the pieces you need into your existing infrastructure.
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