Over the summer, VA Partners decided to pursue becoming a Hubspot Solutions Provider. We have completed most of the paperwork and are waiting on the official badge. We have been working with Hubspot CRM and Marketing Solutions for over 5 years. Here are a few of the milestones that led us to consider being a Hubspot Solutions Partner.
Moving on from Salesforce
When we started the business in 2006 we were a Salesforce recommender. We used the Professional version and recommended the Group version to our customers. Over the years Salesforce became less of a SaaS provider and more of a traditional software provider. You needed to pay for a year in advance and you could not reduce your number of users. Eventually the group addition changed, and it became less of a fit for our clients. There were lots of connections, but you needed the Professional package or higher. We started looking for new solutions and at the time Hubspot CRM was an excellent option. We still like Salesforce a lot for larger companies that have larger sales teams, but it was not the best fit on the market for our clients.
Hubspot CRM is a great fit for our clients
We have many customers that are using excel/sheets and email to manage their customers and prospects. We found that Hubspot was a great fit for them as it was easy to use, powerful, and has a free version. The set-up and onboarding for smaller customers are easy to use. We also have several customers that were using a different CRM, but not really using it effectively. It is easy to get them to see the value of Hubspot and make the switch. We made the switch ourselves from a Professional Salesforce account to a free Hubspot CRM 2 years ago.
Hubspot Marketing
We used a product called Lead-in that was eventually bought by Hubspot. Lead-in helped provide some extra stats on form submissions. We use Hubspot forms plugin for WordPress to get information into the Hubspot CRM. The Marketing starter is an excellent next step with the email capabilities being powerful and practical. We also made the transition this summer from Mailchimp to Husbpot marketing. The cost was about the same and we were able to have better integrated data in our CRM.
Education
Being a Hubspot Solutions Provider opens a significant amount of free training for our team. This will make us even better with our clients and help them find more leads and convert more prospects to customers.
Our experiences
We have had many Hubspot experiences over the last 5 years including:
• Implementing approximately 20 new Hubspot CRM accounts. All would have included customization, importing data, set-up, and training. Many of the implementations included transitioning from another CRM to Hubspot. The implementations would also involve email integration and template set-up.
• We recently worked with a fast-growing biotech company that needed a Hubspot strategy. Working with the team, we added properties to help with reporting, updating internal processes, providing training for the existing team members, and onboarding new reps.
• We helped a nonprofit transition from Constant Contact to Hubspot. This was 10,000+ contacts and involved a significant amount of customization. The result was a much higher deliverability rate, over double the traffic from the newsletter, and having consolidated data in one area.
• VA Partners provides training for many entrepreneurs and sales reps. We often use Hubspot as our example for training exercises. With one University we created a case study and had the students demo Hubspot live as they would in their future sales jobs.
If you have some questions on the right CRM or marketing automation solution for your business please reach out. I am happy to provide some free feedback and if you need help with implementation, we can work on that with you.
