Before You Buy HubSpot

Thinking about buying HubSpot for your organization? There are a few things you should consider before you sign that contract.

First of all, let me say that HubSpot is an awesome tool, and it can make communication with your prospects and customers along the purchasing process so much more efficient and successful. However, too many organizations buy HubSpot (and other tools like Salesforce) without really understanding how to get the most out of their purchase, and how much effort they’ll need to put in to make the tool worth using.

Any sales or marketing tool purchase should be driven by your strategy. Never buy a tool and then try to back into how it can serve you.

Forget specific tools for a moment and ask yourself:

  • What exactly do you need to accomplish?
  • What is your existing sales process like and how do you hope to improve or supplement it?
  • Is what you are selling complex and/or expensive?
  • Does your strategy call for content marketing or lead nurturing to help close the sale?
  • Do you know who your audiences are and what they care about?
  • What tools do you already have and can they do the job you need? What is missing?
  • Do you have a plan for producing content?
  • Do you have prospect lists or customer lists that you can market to?
  • How do you plan to use lead scoring in your campaign?
  • How will you measure the success of your campaign?

If your strategy does indeed call for a tool like HubSpot, make sure you compare similar products to see if there’s something that’s an even better fit. Again, HubSpot is a solid tool, but it’s a big investment with a yearly contract, so you want to be sure you are choosing the right solution.

HubSpot Doesn’t Make Content, HubSpot Distributes Content

To make good use of HubSpot, you are going to need content. Lots of content. Lots of good content. Are you up to the challenge? If you’ve decided to buy HubSpot, don’t sign that check until you have a library of content in the works, and a map of content promotion campaigns for your audiences. Content production is hard and it can bottleneck your campaigns and stall launch dates. If you buy HubSpot but your content isn’t ready for launch for another 6 months, you’re wasting your money.

Before you buy HubSpot, it’s a good idea to figure out:

  • What are your campaign goals?
  • What content pieces will you need?
  • Who will produce content?
  • If someone in-house is going to produce content, do they really have time?
  • How long will content production take realistically?
  • Include the review and editing process in your estimate.
  • What will content production cost?
  • Do you need to design landing pages or update your website to meet the needs of your campaign?

A tool like HubSpot, when properly taken advantage of, can help your sales team automate parts of the sales process while educating your customers. Understand the power of the tool and use it to advance your strategy. Otherwise, you could end up using it as little more than a very expensive, sporadically used email newsletter platform.

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