There’s a dangerous thought floating around about HubSpot. It goes something like this; HubSpot is an "all-in-one marketing software" that can solve any marketing or sales problem and catapult your business to new growth easily. While this statement holds true for most businesses that invest in HubSpot… it simply isn’t true when applied across the board. HubSpot isn’t always for everybody.
HubSpot is a suite of software that integrates your marketing, sales, service and content management system (CMS) in one platform. This means that you can manage your SEO, email, website content, sales process (customer relationship management), analytics, lead generation and customer success from the same place. The benefit of this is that it helps to align your marketing and sales teams, motivate for automation in most business processes and allows for easy access to all business data at any given time.
While this sounds spectacular and does suit many businesses, there are some big reasons not to choose HubSpot. These reasons range from buying into the HubSpot methodology, to your personal view of marketing and sales and to what platforms you’re currently using. If you’re looking to identify if HubSpot is right for your business, below we expand on the top five reasons why it may not be.
5 Reasons not to choose HubSpot
1. You’re only looking for new software
While HubSpot is an impressive suite of powerful software, it only works to its full potential when you buy into the full HubSpot methodology of inbound marketing. The cost of HubSpot may not make sense if your business doesn’t transform itself to embody this methodology, as the power of the tools will not be able to be fully realised.
The idea is that when you invest into HubSpot, you’re not just buying software but a methodology. That’s what really makes HubSpot powerful, because it’s methodology is what turns digital marketing on its head and powers its tools.
But perhaps you are quite happy with the methodology that you currently employ. Perhaps you don’t believe you have an issue understanding your customers, or you don’t think you need to, and the extra effort to wrap your business around a new methodology makes little sense. Then HubSpot isn’t for you.
2. You love using spreadsheets
If your business processes are set up mostly offline or if you mostly work online via spreadsheets or Excel, then HubSpot might not be for you. While the learning curve on HubSpot is better than most similar tools, it is not an ideal system to a business that doesn’t want to digitise and automate the majority of the sales and marketing processes.
HubSpot takes away the need to work within spreadsheets or offline on hardcopy by digitizing your entire business process in every department.
3. You’re not concerned about aligning marketing and sales
As we’ve mentioned, HubSpot’s methodology is about aligning your entire business. The core of the methodology of inbound marketing is ensuring that marketing and sales support one another in achieving similar goals. HubSpot has designed its platform to not only function best when marketing and sales are aligned, but also to aid you in aligning these two teams.
But if you’re not concerned about your marketing and sales teams aligning, then HubSpot again doesn’t make a lot of sense for your business. Without this aspect, you are limiting the power of HubSpot to save your employees time and effort. For example, HubSpot’s CRM is diluted when your marketing and sales cannot agree what a marketing or sales qualified lead is, and your automated lead nurture process is meaningless if marketing and sales are fighting over which leads should be at which stage when.
If you prefer that your team works independently of one another, likely in separate platforms and tools, then HubSpot is not the answer for you.
4. You can demonstrate your marketing ROI easily
As a marketing professional in your company, proving the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing activities is stressful. This is an enormous pain point for most marketing professionals, because most platforms don’t easily offer you automated solutions to see marketing ROI in digestible mediums.
If you can already demonstrate your marketing ROI, or there’s no pressure on you to do so, HubSpot might not be the obvious choice. It’s not a reason alone that will make the choice for you, but it’s a big selling point of HubSpot.
By pulling your marketing data into comprehensive and easy-to-understand reporting dashboards (which are fully customizable), HubSpot enables you to measure the ROI of your marketing activity (company wide or for a specific lead) at any given moment.
HubSpot’s report dashboard for marketing offers a quick view of the performance of each marketing medium, leads won, revenue earned from leads closed and their cost of acquisition, site visits, and so much more, enabling marketing professionals to analyse and prove their ROI to senior management.
5. Management already has easy access to all data
One of the best features of HubSpot is it’s user-friendly reporting and analytics dashboards. With such easy access to summarized dashboards of marketing and sales activity, management saves time by having to scroll through expansive or complex reports. But if your senior management already has easy and quick access to company-wide analytics and performance metrics, or if they don’t feel that they need access to these features, then another software may suit you better than HubSpot.
Many businesses are happy navigating between multiple platforms to find a simple report on last month’s sales, or to understand the ROI of marketing in the current year. HubSpot centralises everything and makes it easy to find any data at a click or two of your mouse, removing the need for multiple platforms.
Conclusion
HubSpot is immensely powerful and the perfect answer for most businesses, but if you are not willing to partner with HubSpot’s methodology and transform your business to naturally incorporate its tools… then it likely isn’t the right software choice for you. HubSpot has proven the power of its methodology and software suite over and again, but using it to successfully attract more visitors, convert more leads and close more customers is dependent on you buying into the entire concept.
