An In-Depth HubSpot Review for 2024

There’s a lot of buzz around HubSpot’s release of Breeze AI: a suite of AI tools it promises will enhance the activity and productivity of sales, marketing, and customer services teams through smart AI automations and better leveraging of CRM data.

At the sales stage, Breeze’s Prospecting Agent automates the process of identifying high-potential leads, which it can then help research and create personalized emails for.

Its generative AI features can be used when creating marketing campaigns, offering support for writing SEO blog posts, podcast scripts, landing pages, and copy for social media among other formats. Whatever content it is, Breeze allegedly helps you source information from your CRM database, such as customer information or company details, to help personalize it for your audience.

Regarding customer service, Breeze can be left to create timely and informative responses to customer queries without the need for human intervention for every customer interaction.

I’m yet to put Breeze to the test myself, so all the above is based on HubSpot’s own press releases and third-party reviews. If it does what it says on the tin, Breeze will assist you at all points of the customer journey, from gaining a lead’s attention to maintaining their trust through professional communication.

HubSpot offers incredibly robust lead management features. For example, it’ll automatically move leads through your pipeline as your sales team engages with them.

This frees up your sales rep to focus on selling while managers can view live reports on their progress. The prospecting workspace feature is another excellent tool for helping reps:

• Stay organized
• Optimize their schedule, and
• Prioritize tasks

It makes it even easier for team leads and managers to schedule meetings, keep track of each sales rep, and see the progress of leads through the customer journey.

HubSpot’s deal pipelines make it easier to streamline managing your business deals. Although other CRM platforms also offer this feature, I found HubSpot’s ease of use really makes it stand out.

The platform makes it very straightforward to assign tasks, add deals, and track prospects all in one place. Plus, its simple drag-and-drop editor makes customizing the pipeline a whole lot simpler.

Beyond this, it’ll automatically update your contact and company records, so you can eliminate manual data entry and reduce the chances of errors in your CRM database.

However, as I mentioned earlier, unlike some competitors like Salesforce and Zoho CRM, for example, HubSpot limits the number of pipelines you can create, even on its top-tier plan.

Crafting the perfect sales email can be time-consuming, and doing multiple for different prospects can take up your entire week. For this, HubSpot offers pre-designed layouts and a user-friendly UI.

In fact, depending on your plan, HubSpot offers up to 5,000 email templates, hence why it’s known for being one of the best CRMs for email marketing. You can customize these templates, of course.

Simply add relevant sales documents, personalization tokens, or meeting links, for example. What’s more, you can also track your sales outreach using HubSpot’s email tracking tool.

It’ll notify you when prospects click on the link or open your email, so you can build a compelling CRM database of all your leads.

HubSpot’s AI-powered assistants work with existing customer support, marketing, and sales tools, making creating and sharing content within HubSpot’s ecosystem more plug-and-play than ever.

The generative content assistant also has internal uses. When creating performance reports, HubSpot’s AI content summarizer can reduce large data sets into readable and easily accessible descriptions, eliminating manual data collection and interpretation.

It’s not just text you can generate with HubSpot AI – you’re also getting a free AI website generator that lets you create a personalized website that represents your brand. That said, functions like AI lead scoring are missing.

Beyond this, HubSpot doesn’t offer AI buyer assistance and deal insights, either — which is available with Salesforce, for example, but again, this does come at a high price of $330/user/month.

Whether the functionality is enough is up to you to decide, but overall, I found HubSpot offered more than enough for most mid-sized businesses at a fraction of the cost of some rivals.

HubSpot offers customizable reports with detailed sales analytics for real-time updates on your team performance, pipeline, prospecting touches, deal status changes, and conversions, for example.

The custom report builder lets you report on any cross-object or single-object data within your CRM. Cross-object reporting allows you to build and run custom reports across various:

• Data sets
• Pipelines
• Events, and
• Funnels

Let’s say you want to view the number of leads generated, opportunities created, and tasks finished by one particular sales rep in a single report, you can do so through cross-object reporting.

I found the reporting feature is easy to use and will help you prioritize sales efforts with real-time deal data, extract insights quickly, and identify new opportunities with waterfall reporting.

In the most recent update in July 2024, HubSpot now enables you to set up a rolling availability for up to a year in advance. This enhancement allows your customers and prospects to easily schedule recurring appointments with you, extending beyond the previous maximum of 11 weeks.

Set a budget and see whether the plan includes everything you need within this range. This is important as some features may be reserved for higher-end plans.

Start by listing all the features your business will need and choose CRM software according to your industry. Look for common features like lead management, contact management, customer service management, and sales forecasting.

Scalability is important to consider. How much would it cost to scale with the CRM you’ve chosen? Does it include all the features you’d need at this point?

A user-friendly interface will reduce the training period and learning curve for your team. Ideally, pick software that can be set up within a few minutes and one that fits with your team’s technical expertise. Be sure to make use of any free versions to test this.

Check whether the CRM integrates with the tools your business uses. This will ensure consistency and efficiency. Also, make sure the integrations aren’t limited to higher-tier plans.

Consider the customer support hours, available channels, and responsiveness. Always choose a reputable provider to ensure minimal issues and prompt support.