Hubspot

General usage

Hubspot is another contender for the most versatile CRM around. It combines core sales CRM functionality with lots of marketing, content management, and customer service features. 

Its marketing hub offers lead generation, marketing automation and analytics features, while the sales CRM includes meeting and quote features. Tickets, customer feedback and knowledge bases are handled by its customer service hub. Hubspot also offers content management software with a drag and drop editor, ready-made page templates and SEO assistance. 

The magic happens when all four hubs are combined to give a unified view of the customer journey. This is achieved by linking the different hubs through operational features such as data cleaning, synchronisation, and programmable automation.

Its email tracking software is a good example of how Hubspot links the various touchpoints in the customer journey. Sales teams are immediately notified when a prospect becomes a lead by opening a sales email or clicking a link inside it. This means more time can be spent on serious leads than cold prospects.

From a scalability point of view, Hubspot’s free CRM option (available for up to 1M contacts) is perfect for a new marketplace startup. It offers all the necessary core features to run a young sales team: reporting dashboards, company insights, deal tracking, pipeline management, contact management, prospect tracking, call tracking, email tracking, email templates builder, meeting scheduler, live chat, and a sales quote system. 

Free marketing features include a form builder, ad management, lead generation,  landing page builder, email marketing, contact website activity, marketing report dashboard. Customer service teams have free access to help desk and ticketing systems, conversations inbox, live chat, chatbots, team email, tickets closed reports and time-to-close reports.

Business owners are not forgotten either. Data sync, productivity tools, a reporting dashboard, contact database management, customer profiling, task management and document tracking can be used to gain business insights for informed decision making.

Popularity

Hubspot has more than 120,000 customers in over 120 countries. It is rated the second-best CRM overall by G2 and TrustRadius.

Marketplace benefits

Its comprehensive bouquet of services has meant that some of our clients prefer to prospect, qualify and onboard sellers via Hubspot. This meant that we had to integrate bi-directional information flows between Hubspot and their marketplace platform. Thus the platform can send lead information to Hubspot where it gets qualified before sending onboarding information back to the marketplace if the seller was approved or signed up.